Digital Marketing Full Course 2024 | Digital Marketing Tutorial For Beginners | Simplilearn

hi guys welcome to part one of the digital marketing full course video by simply learn in this video we'll be covering everything you need to know about digital marketing we'll do this with the help of our instructor Rob Sanders so let's start with an introduction to digital marketing a digital marketing course video and some of the best digital marketing tools we'll also have a look at what is SEO an SEO tutorial seven tips and tricks for SEO how to perform keyword research how to rank number one on Google and Google tag manager craving a career

upgrade subscribe like and comment below dive into the link in the description to FasTrack your Ambitions whether you're making a switch or aiming higher simply learn has your back greetings everyone this is Rob Sanders and today we're going to talk about what is digital marketing so thanks for joining us here simply learn and let's get started let's start talking about why digital marketing is important so let's start there on the why so if we're just a fly on thewall and we're in an office environment we're looking at two friends having a conversation about digital marketing

so really if we're listening in everybody every marketer is using digital marketing for his or her business now digital marketing's become more popular than traditional marketing that's not a surprise so in response hey over the past few decades digital marketing has evolved at a rapid Pace these days a lot of people spend most of their time on the internet so what happens in the internet every 60 seconds well a lot happens every 60 seconds so according to Social Media today I mean there's a lot of snaps there's a lot of clicks there's a lot of

texts there's a lot of videos watched there's a lot of pictures being taken there's a lot of voice activated activity going on a lot of tweets emails swipes there's a lot going on here in 60 seconds so there's a lot of activity on the internet a lot and so the one gentleman says hey can you also mention a few differences between digital and traditional marketing systems and then the expert responds of course I can certainly clarify a few differences between digital and traditional and so he goes on to say what the differences are between traditional

and digital and let's look at that okay so on traditional marketing we're talking about print radio billboard newspaper TV anything that's not on your mobile or laptop so we know traditional marketing reaches limited with digital marketing reaches maximum and what we mean by that is hey when you print something you're printing it for x amount of people if you're trying to promote an event and you basically create 1 th000 Flyers okay you figure it's going to a th000 people maybe they'll share it so you're looking about 2,000 people maybe just to be generous well digital

marketing we're promoting an event we can promote it to a whole lot of people depending on the platform so 2000 is nothing when you're targeting an audience on Facebook or Google search traditional marketing non versatile and with digital marketing very versatile so again going back to our flyer print an 8 1/2 by 11 okay that's it you know with with digital marketing you're running display banners get 468 by 60 200x 200 250 by 250 300X 300 I mean the list goes on on the types of different display sizes not to mention text ads not to

mention video or multimedia uh so there's a lot you can do to get your message out there okay with traditional it's always delayed communication okay so meaning if you're trying to get that TV spot there might not be a spot open until 1: in the morning okay well with digital marketing there is no hours okay you can certainly get your point out there and have people see it instantaneously so with traditional marketing there's a lack of real-time results I mean this seems like it's obvious but you you know digital marketing that's one of the biggest

benefits instant realtime results instant okay nowadays go to analytics you can look at real time reporting okay so we could see real time results okay traditional marketing can be very costly I mean if you're not only doing postcards and printing postcards but you have to mail those postcards so there's postage fees where with digital marketing it's very very very cost efficient I mean meaning you could pick and choose CH who you want to Target when you want to Target where you want to Target what you want to Target and if you're doing search you can

put your bidding in place you can put your hours in place you can really control how much you actually spend so that to me is one of the biggest advantages to digital marketing not only do you get real- time results but you can control costs and then obviously optimize based on the amount of cost you're spending based on those real-time results with traditional marketing it's difficult to reach a target audience you know with digital marketing it's easy to reach a target audience I mean you know I don't want to bash traditional marketing too much I

mean if you're going to put a TV ad in place you know you're going to do it on a TV show that tends to gear more towards your target audience but that doesn't guarantee anything here we can simply go to Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn and just pick and choose specifically who we want to Target when we want to Target them so it just becomes a lot easier to reach targeted audience on a digital marketing platform and then with traditional marketing poor campaign measurement with digital you have easy to measure and optimize campaigns and what

we really mean by that is because you get instant time results because you can control cost because you can reach your target audience more easily all those are result of okay you can measure and optimize based on what our audience is seeing and how much they're spending to see it we can quickly make adjustments in order to optimize the campaign for better performance so that's generally that means that's a culmination of pretty much everything that we've listed as a benefit for digital marketing okay so now why digital marketing's been answered with all the benefits that

it carries let's talk about the what is digital marketing so you know that you know you want to do digital marketing so how do we go about that what what is it exactly well let's just Define it digital marketing is just the act of promoting a company's product or an individual's product or service with the help of a device or technology and so obviously when we talk about device we're talking about maybe a laptop we're talking about a mobile device and when we talk about technology it could be an app it could be you know

a cloud-based platform okay it could be a piece of software okay so a lot going on on the digital side in terms of variations and what you can do but that's in a nutshell what digital marketing is you're really just using technology to promote your product or service so we know because of the benefits in digital marketing you can promote your campaign on different platforms okay so all those benefits we mentioned about instant realtime results cost efficiency optimizing campaigns you could do that on search you could do it on social via email on mobile apps

Etc so that's what we mean by with the help of digital devices and Technology well these digital devices and Technology come in the form of search engines and emails and mobile apps Etc so when we want to go and promote our product or service using a campaign we have different options so there are different types of digital marketing channels that we can choose from and let's just go through that list of digital marketing channels and the first one is what I consider the king of them all and that's SEO so SEO stands for search engine

optimization there's search engine marketing there's email marketing affiliate marketing social content mobile and then we can get into subsets of each of these digital marketing channels but really we'll start with SEO because that's the king and to me that's basically increasing the quality and quantity of relevant organic traffic on the search engines including including Google so depending on where you're located in the US market Google tends has a large market share so you want your pages on your website to be found and clicked on organically and so that means if somebody types in a keyword

you want that relevant page to show up first on Google so somebody can click on that link okay and we know that milons of people specifically in the US but worldwide you search on a daily basis so if you're ranking for those relevant keywords you can imagine how much traffic you can get okay so that's SEO okay and here's an example so you type in online shopping well you can see the first listing here is a paid search ad and we're going to get to that in a minute the second organically is Amazon okay so

online shopping you think maybe Walmart you think maybe Alibaba or you're thinking probably Amazon okay so no surprise Amazon's ranking for the keyword online shopping and so if somebody clicked on their listing that's traffic for Amazon let's move on to search engine marketing you know known as sem or pay per click or cost per click or PPC or CPC or sponsored search or Google ads I mean there's a lot of different names synonymous with sem so search engine marketing is really just using paid ads on search engines just as we saw at the previous example

if you want to be found for keyword you don't have to worry about organic if you're willing to pay for it you just bid on that keyword and voila you have the opportunity to appear number one in the search results at the top of the page for that keyword now when somebody clicks on it you have to pay Google if it's Google you're advertising on but that's the beauty of search engine marketing you can bid on keywords and appear at the top of the search results for that keyword example here if we go back to

online shopping well my us.com is bidding on that keyword online shopping so they're actually appearing above Amazon's organic listing but that's what they want to do they want to be found for that keyword so if they're not ranking for it organically well they're bidding on it and if somebody happen to clicked on that listing then my us.com is going to pay Google some something depending on what the cost per click is and so that could be anywhere from one penny to $100 it depends depends on the keyword depends on who else is bidding on the

keyword depends on the location depends on the time of day depends on quality score there a lot of factors involved and regarding what you pay however the benefit of sem is visibility and getting traffic to your website for keywords you're not found for so that's why sem such a popular choice for a lot of companies okay let's talk about digital marketing that's a traditional type of digital marketing channel it's been around a long time you know we all send emails on a daily basis and we probably all receive emails on a daily basis just is

an effective way to capture leads and convert them to customers because with email you can personalize your emails and you can send your emails to a segmented audience okay so if you have emails from females who are 35 years of age to 44 that live in say this southern part of the United States you can segment that send them an email and cater that email directly to that audience and of course you can put some nice call to action in there you can design it really snazzy and you can track it just like you can

any other digital marketing channel so email is a very effective way to really reach a Target on because everybody for the most part has a functioning email account so basically here's an example of an email that could go out if you're selling a product and the product's promotion is about to end well you know get that email out to your target audience let them know hey you have until tonight to purchase product and if you purchase it you're going to get 30% off and you can put the coupon code right in there with a nice

call to action and you can measure how many people click on on that email go to that web page and purchase the product using that coupon code so that's an example of email marketing okay we have affiliate marketing so affiliate marketing is an effective way for digital marketers to basically create a sales force of people so basically what you're doing is you're getting Merchants to promote your products and services and you using usually a third-party broker like Commission Junction or cj.com as an example to introduce you the the person selling the product the merchant with

the affiliate so that affiliate could likely be a merchant him or himself and they can basically be a good partner of yours by publishing your product or service on their website so that they can sell in order to get commissions so it's all based on a commission so you basically are going to use a third- party affiliate like CJ get all these Affiliates to work for you they're going to promote your product or service if they do sell your product or service you're going to pay them a commission that's more or less how it works

with affiliate marketing and you know with affiliate marketing to me it's a good way to you know really promote your product or service and you can pick and choose the Affiliates or the Publishers of whom you want to work with so here's an example of affiliate marketing at work okay you basic basically see a banner basically you could see earn up to 12% advertising fees with a trusted e-commerce leader okay so if somebody clicked on that purchased for example or joined you could pay out that commission okay let's turn our attention to social media marketing

so social media marketing you know I wouldn't say it's fairly new I mean if I think about it we're in 2019 and I remember talking about Facebook back in 2006 so you're talking about 13 14 15 years of social media it's definitely evolved over the years and but the concept Remains the Same it involves creating different types of content depending on the platform okay so you could be on Pinterest or Instagram and be dealing with photos or you could be on Twitter tweeting out certain characters up to a limit okay so it really depends on

the social media platform uh that really drives the type of content you're going to promote but we know social media can be effective because because people use social media I mean Facebook is one of the more popular platforms and if you want to get your product or service out there you could certainly pay to have an ad on Facebook or you could just post your content organically okay that's the beauty of social most of your Social platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter and Facebook and Pinterest and Instagram they all have a paid form of advertising that

you can use to promote your product or service or you can go to the organ organic route and you know post content organically in hopes of driving traffic back to your website so with social you do have two options here but social is interesting because there are a lot of different social media platforms out there it really depends on your product or service okay so an example of social media marketing especially on Facebook with Facebook you got mobile and desktop and you obviously have the opportunity to post something organically and have that liked or commented

on or shared or you can post an ad and get that liked commented or shared or clicked and have people go back to your website and fulfill the goal of what you want them to do so moving on to content marketing so content marketing is really an effective way of really Distributing valuable content online and when we talk about content marketing you know talking about different types of assets so it could be simply text in the form of a blog post or it could be a video or it could be an an infographic or it

could be an image okay there are lots of ways to create content these days especially in digital marketing and the great thing about content marketing is you're writing content for a targeted audience so if you're trying to Target an audience on say Instagram then you know who who your audience is and you know what the type of content you're going to post on there so it could be in the form of a video or infographic or just a graphic and so that's the beauty of content marketing really putting yourself out there um and depending on

the platform putting yourself out there with various types of content so for example we look at YouTube you could see this video here about digital marketing certified associate well hey you don't need to always write the content you can produce the content in the form of a video and post it on YouTube this is a form of content marketing so that's content marketing and then let's talk about mobile marketing so content marketing again different types but if we go now to mobile marketing you can kind of segue from content to mobile because the only difference

here is with mobile it's strictly on mobile phone it's not desktop so mobile marketing is really a strategy on its own that helps you the company promoting your product or service to reach your target audience through a mobile device and that includes tablets and how you could do that is via messaging you could do it via email or you could be do it via an app okay so you have different ways of getting your content out there to people okay so as an example you can use basically SMS or instant messaging via mobile devices to

promote your product or service here's another example of a mobile marketing via app install and so you can even compound that by running a say Google ad as an example and running your Google ad on say just mobile you could do a bit adjustment just for mobile and the goal could be app installs okay so and you can even do a mobile or app extension so there's lots of ways to really promote your app or your product or your service Via mobile marketing okay let's talk about the customer life cycle so we know why we

want to do digital marketing we want to know we want we know what the digital marketing channels are because we just talked about them from SEO to social to affiliate to mobile to content to sem okay you have a lot of different digital marketing channels at your disposal so now how do we go ahead and approach our customers so that's what we're going to talk about first so we're going to talk about different stages of the customer life cycle okay and the first one is the awareness stage so we need to get our customers aware

of what we're selling or what we're promoting okay so the awareness stage is really what product does your brand offer that's a question we want to get out there and we want to answer okay what does a customer need your product or excuse me why does a customer need your product that's a question we want to answer with digital marketing okay what solution does your product provide okay that's an answer to a question we want to make sure people understand so these are questions that we want to be able to answer in the form of

digital marketing whether that be mobile or content okay so getting our information out there that answers these essential questions and if we could do that then somebody's going to become aware of our product or service okay so what product is brand offer why does a customer need it and what solution does it provide okay those are some key questions that people tend to ask themselves when they look at a brand okay and when they look at a product hey do I really need this is it going to help me in my life okay and who

who is selling this I mean who was this brand I mean that's those are just things that run through people's mind intuitively that with the right messaging the right channel the right type of asset the right targeted audience you can quickly make somebody aware of your Brand's product or service in this stage it's help potential customers discover your brand with the help of these different marketing channels so in the awareness stage you know content is key so it's to me if we have a website we need a Blog because if somebody does come to our

blog from say organic search SEO then we can write about that product or service via blog and and talk to our customer Custer talk directly to our targeted audience through that blog and if we're not ranking organically we can use paid search to promote it because paid search on Google for example basically we can be right at the top of those search results and so somebody can actually see it when they do a search because we know millions of people you search on a daily basis you could do social media marketing okay so you can

publish that product or service on Facebook while you're building your community and you use affiliate marketing to help get the word out by using cj.com as an example build up a Salesforce of people these Publishers that are going to put your product or service out there so to me in the awareness stage these are the the digital marketing channels you could focus on now I will say one thing about display ads display is part of search engine marketing you could use display because you can reach a large number of people so even though it's list

here low priority in the awareness stage display ADS mean that if you're go on Google's Display Network you could pick and choose your sites your demographics keywords topics an audience you can focus on all those different demographics to really attract a large number of people so low priority but it's probably also good to focus on in the awareness stage so content marketing you must create a high quality content that people searching for without content it's hard to get found and so to me this is you know where the blog comes in SEO take that content

get it optimized okay ASM if we're not ranking organically we can make sure we're the top of the paid search results or the the search results for particular keyword we want to be found for and then social media marketing using different channels depending on the channel we're selling you know training like simply learn does you know LinkedIn is a good platform for us okay and then affiliate you know basically building up a nice network of Publishers to get the word out so these are all good channels that we can focus in on so traffic sources

may include paid unpaid social referral display email or direct so they they they could come in the awareness stage from all different types of channels even though you're focused on content I mean you could still get traffic from mobile or email so now that we got the word out via all these different marketing channels there's that consideration stage so you know people are aware of us now they're considering us and that's kind of the next stage in the process okay so a few essential questions to address on the consideration stage hey what features make your

product valuable to others and how will I increase customer engagement towards my product so those are answers to questions you want to ask okay what features make your your product valuable you want to basically separate yourself from the competition basically that's what you're trying to answer okay so if you're promoting your product or service on paid search and other people are bidding on the same keyword how are you going to stand out and then how will I increase customer engagement towards my product so for example if you're on Facebook okay and you're trying to get

people over to your site to purchase your product then how you going to improve that engagement you got to create something really snazzy or really it's going to be attention grabbing or something that's going to get them to become aware of it that's going to separate your post from all the other posts that are in somebody's Facebook Newsfeed okay so you really have to work hard to really convince somebody to get their consideration towards your product or service so in this stage your customer considers your product so help them understand how your product is valuable

okay to me email works really good here because if you have a targeted audience this gives you the opportunity to really answer this questions in that particular Channel email you could support that with a promotion and display I think display is a good option here too because even though you know people are trying to become aware you know you can really hone in and really get them to take that next step okay with display you can even do remarketing so if somebody's been to your site because they're aware of your product they're curious you can

cookie them and remarket to them via display so display to me is a good a good channel to use here okay so you have email mobile display you know semm these are all you know good channels to use on the consideration stage especially on search because somebody's looking for something and they're aware of your brand then you have the good opportunity to get them to click on your ad especially if you're offering a promotion and get them to convert the goal here is to increase our engagement so people are aware we're moving them further along

the funnel with email marketing we have the opportunity to promote the product by sending an email directly to our audience so with this stage plan your campaigns around welcom emails newsletters we can talk about product descriptions add ratings and reviews in the email you know we really just want to encourage people to purchase the product that's we're trying to sway them over so email is a good source to allow us to do that so with mobile marketing we can promote the products by sending relevant messages to our target audience display again retargeting because we can

retarget an audience that has been to our website already did some research about our brand our product or service and now we're going to reach back out to them to sway them so remember we want to encourage customers to buy a product by creating detailed articles about the product that always helps and that's content okay we want to opt for a customer testimonial okay that helps sway people and add some guest blogging okay we can have ambassadors blog on our behalf or we can go out and blog on somebody else's site okay so blogging works

both ways it's ways of of showing yourself and telling people hey we know you're looking for this product here's why you want to choose us okay moving on from the consideration to the purchase stage so they're aware of you they're considering you and now we're on to the purchase stage so the questions we want to really make sure we address here are how are my prices compared to my competitors and is my brand more credible than others okay so they're considering you but that price point and it may not even be the price it could

be the shipping for example the price could be good but the shipping cost could be high so you really want to do some due diligence and research on what your competitors are doing credibility that goes back to the consideration stage and testimonials you want to make sure you have reviews and testimonials to really Elevate what you're trying to tell customers and that that is hey I have a good brand I have a good product I have a good service come buy my stuff come buy my product and service but you really need to support that

claim you just can't go out and say it and so supporting that comes in the form of what other people say and that could be reviews that could be comments on a social media platform it could be you know stars on say Yelp or Google my business you know make sure you do you due diligence and make sure you get people to you know review you or provide testimonials because people are going to do their due diligence before they purchase especially if it's on Google my business or Yelp or Trip Advisor or whatever it is

you're trying to sell they're going to be able to see those reviews and so do your due diligence to get the reviews and if it is a negative review hey that's okay you can't please everyone you're going to get them that's the world we live in just make sure you show your upper hand and respond even to the negative as well as the positive reviews that you get that actually bodess well to some people because hey it shows that I made a mistake and you're willing to correct it and so people actually see that that

could be the Tipping Point to getting them to purchase say look hey this brand really cares because they're really responding to people they're not ignoring negativity okay just the small things that can get people to change their mind now with the purchase stage according to e consultancy 83% of the online audience require encouragement to complete a purchase encouragement what does that mean well could mean providing a promo giving them that extra incentive you know if you don't offer promo consider it especially on the email and the example we looked at earlier sending out an email

means that if the promo is going to end at midnight send that email out and tell people they have until midnight and if they purchase today you'll leave it increase it to 20% and email is a good channel for that mobile can reach a lot of people through sms okay social media reaching people instantaneously and then you know with the purchase stage it gives Pro Prospects an offer to help them make that purchase so you have plenty of channels to choose from in fact most of these channels the only one really that doesn't fit the

instantaneous mode is SEO but you can really focus on affiliate even though that's a little priority here you can really you know coordinate with your Publishers who especially those Publishers that have proven their worth and have sold your products in the past you know get them to help promote it and incentivize their audience so let's move on from the purchase to the P post purchase stage so this is after somebody purchases okay so some essential questions we want to be able to address here so what additional product could my customer buy now that they're my

customer what else could I sell them what you know without being too pushy could if they buy a coat will a hat work or a pair of gloves or you know a blouse you know you want to be able to you not push a product on a customer but think about how you can complement that purchasers that purchasers or customer's product and then how to improve the customer buying experience so again this goes back to you know what we just said about reviews get somebody to offer a review and if they don't give you a

full compliment of five stars they only give you three in a half stars then you know what that's great feedback because then you can learn from that and then the other question is will the customer refers to others and if so why so that's definitely something you want to be able to address in the post purchase stage so let's take a look here so with post purchasing stage you know to me emails at the top of this list because if somebody purchases something you can send a nice thank you email because if they purchase they're

giving you their email in return because you're likely going to be sending them the receipt via email so email to me is a nice Channel sending a nice message even you know social media you know you can thank your community for supporting you on this recent campaign that you ran you know even throw in an extra five or 10% on a future purchase as a thank you and that's easily done on social media you know you could even post a blog you know promoting you know the success of a product and then offering a promotion

okay so there's a lot of things you could be doing here on the post purchasing stage so to me even looking at content again you could even you know put a survey together you could even put a survey together for your Affiliates okay you could even post a poll on Facebook so it's just working in with these different channels to get some feedback about your product and service so with email mobile you can engage customers with followup emails or customer care content you know with mobile if you have somebody's mobile number hey text them a

simple thank you goes a long way you know you could say hey look if you're satisfied let us know give us a call you can even in the E mobile text message you can put a link to a survey send emails to active subscribers give rewards for customer feedback so if somebody does provide feedback give them an extra 10% off you know you want to be able to reward loyalty loyalty comes in the form of a partnership if you're giving somebody discounts and you have a good product or service then they're going to recognize that

they're going to say hey look I really like this product and they're giving me 10% I'm going to go ahead and purchase from these guys again so give those discounts to those active customers or on the affiliate now or give referral opportunities to your customers so if it's an affiliate publisher hey if they're getting people to your site you know reward them or if it's an email and you put a for to a friend get an extra 10% off it doesn't hurt because you're incentivizing people to help you sell your product so with social display

and content use those banner ads or use that content that you display on social or the blog you're going to write to give customers advice in order to maximize the value of the purchase so again you can use these platforms to also enhance uh what they purchased so hey you just purchased this product thank you very much did you know you could do this this and this with it and so that's the idea of a post-p purchase stage is to maximize these channels to be able to answer those essential questions about what else could they

purchase you know do they like how do I be get these people to become loyal customers okay so with the first purchase stage if a customer has bought a pair of sports shoes for example running shoes you can recommend cross product sale a cross sale it could be a pair of shorts or a water bottle or an accessory with an exclusive discount so that's another example what you can do on the postp purchase stage so in today's world everywhere you go it's all about digital so today lecture is going to be about all the different

marketing channels available piece them together kind of put together a little digital marketing course for you so first off before we get started we're going to talk about what is digital marketing and really digital marketing covers a lot of areas it's very Broad and really what it refers to is just marketing that a company does a person does an individual a group an organization and they do it in the form of an electronic device or with the aid of the internet that's really what digital marketing is it's just having something digitally not something tangible like

a billboard or newspaper or TV and with that there are lots of places where you can apply digital marketing and and so electronic devices we think of mobile devices and so you could certainly use mobile as a form of digital marketing or to help you with your marketing efforts digitally okay you can create apps you can run advertising on mobile you can communicate with different people your target audience via different devices like WhatsApp and messaging okay uh there's also search engines search engines is where a lot of people get their information from at least start

to do their research to get information you got social media lots of different social media platforms all the way from you know tweeting to blogging to social sharing to social content okay so a lot of of platforms under the bucket social media you also have traditional forms of digital marketing like email you can use different email platforms to send out emails so lots of different ways to communicate your product your service your message to a large number of people that are really targeted to your efforts how is digital marketing useful well we know it provides

different metrics why do we know it provides different metrics because it's all digital okay so anytime you send out an email or post something on Facebook you're going to get data back when you get data back you could take that data to determine how well that post or that email performed and if it didn't perform up to expectation you can make changes to improve performance that's called optimization okay so that's the great thing about digital marketing it's useful in that we get data in some cases instantaneously and we're able to make changes in order to

optimize that campaign we can also you know provide personalized user experience so meaning if we know who our targeted audience is on say Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook we can really cater our messaging to that group probably most importantly is that digital marketing compared to traditional forms of marketing allow us to really reach a global audience very easily very easily at a very low cost that's the key so if I want to Target people in India or or Nepal or Pakistan I can certainly do that and I can do that with the snap of a

campaign and I can get data back and based on the data I can tailor that experience even better really just allows us to really hone in on a particular audience anywhere in the world very quickly so these are just three of the main reasons why digital marketing is useful some other experiences or uses for digital marketing again it provides a coste effective alternative to traditional marketing so you know for those that are familiar with purchasing advertising on say TV or radio you have to pick a spot you have to pick a program and then pick

a time slot associated with that program so somebody's watching a program and and that program tends to draw in a specific target audience then you want to show your ad around the time when that program is slotted to air on TV uh because you know you're likely going to reach your audience however to purchase that time slot could be competitive and could be very costly where there are forms of of advertising and paying for advertising digitally and those forms are cost per click or cost per impression and so using a cost per click or cost

impression model allows you to really go head-to-head in kind of an auction style format where you could control how much you pay and potentially get that Prime spot in front of your target audience so it really does become cost effective and it allows you to make small Investments to get a really substantial return on Ri so let's just say your cost per click is only 10 cents but you're selling a product for $10 well all you need is one click and one sale to generate a very substantial return on investment and so knowing that you

get metrics back on a campaign you could slowly or quickly optimize that campaign towards a very positive Roi then another use for digital marketing it just enables targeting users based on their actions and preferences so again we can really hone in on who we want to Target it really depends on the platform but if you take Google ads for example and you want to Target the Display Network well we know we have demographics we know we have topics we know we have interest we know we have retarget audiences in segment audiences we have age we

have gender so you have a lot of options available to choose from to really hone in on who you want to Target and and we talk about remarketing is another form of digital marketing so you can set up a remarketing campaign so if somebody comes to your website and does not purchase the product or service that you're offering you could take action on that behavior so I can retarget a group of people who didn't purchase that's retargeting or you can do it via remarketing and basically that's the beauty of digital marketing allows you to really

Target users based on on their actions some other uses for digital marketing it helps build brand awareness and reputation of your business so when we say brand awareness if you're just launching a company and nobody knows who you are if we use Google ads as our preferred method of digital marketing and establishing campaigns we can choose that Display Network that Display Network on Google ads reaches a large amount of people so you can really get your name out there and really Target your tended audience and allow that targeted in tended audience to really understand who

you are because they're going to see your ad in the form of a banner or in the form of a video or in the form of text and so that's the beauty of digital marketing you can really reach a lot of people and a lot of people who might be interested in your product or service and then digital marketing provides a platform for you to be interactive with your audience helping you stay relevant and competitive and the best example I can give here is YouTube and so YouTube's a really it's a search engine for videos

but it's a video sharing platform and so if I upload a video then I can entice people to comment on that video or like the video or share the video and I can really interact with that Audience by responding to their comments or you know putting together a playlist or giving them more videos okay so I can read really interact with my audience and I could do that on multiple platforms not just YouTube and video I can blog and and interact based on somebody's comments I can have a website and have live chat and interact

with my audience so there's lots of different ways to interact with an audience and that's what digital marketing provides so I already mentioned a few examples based on the uses of digital marketing I mentioned Google's Display Network I mentioned YouTube and blogging and social media platforms like Facebook well there are lots of different types of digital marketing channels out there and we're going to talk about a few of them today we're going to start with search engine optimization and so search engine optimization as you probably know from the name involves search engine and it involves

really making your site relevant in the eyes of that search engine so if you're in the United States you know that Google has a large market share meaning a lot of people use Google on a daily basis so we want to make sure we do everything we can to optimize our site in order to make our site relevant for those coveted keywords now why do we want to make ourselves relevant for those coveted keywords that we want to be found for on search well because a lot of people use search and when a lot of

people use search and you're found for those keyword queries then it's going to increase the flow of organic traffic to your website so the high higher you rank in theory the more traffic you're going to get and so when we talked about optimization okay how do we optimize our site in order to be relevant in the eyes of Google well it really comes down to a two-pronged approach you have onpage SEO you have off-page SEO onpage has everything to do with your website in order to make it relevant off-page has everything to do with your

website but not on your website it means that how can we become relevant by linking to other websites for example how can we become relevant by getting our content on other platforms so we become relevant in the eyes of Google so that's off-page SEO so SEO is always going to be two-prong what you do on your website and what you do off the website to make sure your website your domain whatever that domain is.com or.org is relevant in the eyes of Google and so let's take a look at on page SEO first so like I

mentioned it involves optimizing your website and when we say optimizing your website there's a lot of things you can do on your website to make it relevant in the eyes of Google and we can look at the content okay we can look at the source code and so there are a lot of different components to be looked at here so you have the header tag you have the meta description you have the alt tag you have how fast your page loads you have internal linking you have a sit map you have a lots of different

things going on here and so for me one of the first things you should do when you create a page on your website is to make sure the title tag is unique and includes those keyword so if we look here at this example the title tag is important because that's what shows up in search results here you can see the title tag on Google is up to 65 characters so you always want to include that key word in the title tag then you have your URL and then you have what you call a meta description

so that's underneath the URL underneath the title tag and again this is in search results so organic search results somebody types in a keyword you want to be found and you want your title tag to stick out and you want your meta description to specifically describe what it is you're offering okay so again if somebody's looking for stock imagery then you want to make sure that you know that person who's looking for stock imagery can come to your website and they can in this case search for millions of royalty free stock images photos videos and

music and so you want your description to really get that person to click on your listing an organic search that's the whole point so that's the point of a title tag and a meta description is you really want to be found for what somebody's searching for and you want to be able to show them that you have what they're looking for you have something here underneath your organic search results called site links and site links are just other or links to pages on your website and so unfortunately this is not necessarily in your control this

is in the control of Google so if Google wants to offer up site links underneath your title tag and meta description they will add them and it's based really on the amount of content you have and that goes with site search so you can see also there's site search there underneath the meta description all of that is contingent upon your website do you have a lot of content and if you have a lot of relevant content then Google will naturally add in site links underneath your organic listing to links to other pages on your site

so that's onpage SEO and now we're going to look at off-page SEO okay so off-page SEO involves using promotional methods Beyond just optim in your site for example optimizing your title tag and meta description might not be enough to get you to rank for that coveted keyword query so we need to do some link building we need to get our name out there on other websites okay so we need to be able to establish some external links or back links from high quality relevant sites to our site and it may not just necessarily have to

be a link CU Google recognizes link l backlinks so just having a reference on a high quality site may be good enough to get you in the eyes of Google to become more relevant okay so that's off-page SEO in definition so really what we want to do is we want to establish a way to get links from other websites to our own or references on other websites to our website we want to build those links to help us gain in ranking so there's lots of ways to do that you have social media again you have

social content sites like Reddit medium Kora you have blogging okay there's lots of ways to establish yourself out there on the internet you just need to make sure their quality sit and you need to make sure they're relevant and so when you do get a link on an external site pointing back to yours you want to make sure it's a follow so you want to make sure that Google knowes to follow that link from that site to yours so if you're out there establishing content on a third party website or another website and they're going

to link back to you just make sure that it's a follow do follow not a no follow okay and I'm going to show you an example of what that looks like here so if you're not sure what the difference is here I'm on backlinko docomo follow versus a do follow is simply in the H rep so so in the href if you don't have anything in there other than the link then the search engines are going to follow that link from that external site to yours and if you have a no follow in that link

then the search engines are going to ignore the link so you're not going to pick up the back link or external link to your site and that's simply that site just adding the re equals no follow okay so if you see that in the link pointing to your site from that external site then that means you're not going to get credit for that backlink so you always want to shoot for a do follow link because that means you're going to get credit for the backlink okay so again do follow links allows search Eng and crawlers

to follow the link and if they can follow it you're going to get what they call link juice and that's going to establish some reputation to your domain a no follow link basically doesn't allow the search engines to follow that link so it doesn't pass on the link juice now again search engines like Google are smart enough to pick up the association between a website that talks about your website and your website so meaning if you don't have a link and you don't have a if you have a no follow link on that site don't

fret because you know Google has come a long way they're not necessarily focused on on links though it does help so for example if you are on a very prominent site and there's no link then you still may get credit because Google does recognize linkless backlinks and that's what they call a linkless backlink is just having a reference on that site but you always want to try and get that follow not the do not follow okay so here you can see an example of off-page SEO okay like Trip Advisor would be a good example a

link that redirects from Trip Advisor to you know the OA magazine as an example so the opra magazine is going to get a a back link from Trip Advisor to the site so if Google crawls Trip Advisor then they're going to be able to see this link and if it's a follow link they're going to give the oer magazine that domain credit from Trip Advisor so for SEO because there's a two-pronged approach involved you have on page and off page there a lot of tools here a lot of tools so let's take a look at

some of these tools we're going to look at Google Keyword Planner we're going to look at M HRS look at some tools that will help you with both on page and off-page SEO so let's start with Google's Keyword Planner so why are we using Google's Keyword Planner because we want to find keywords okay so we can't do onpage SEO we can't optimize our title tag and metag description without a good keyword that we want to be found for so what we want to do is we want to go into Google ads now that's a payperclick

platform okay so if you want to be found via paid search you're going to use Google ads but for an organic search perspective we can use Google's Keyword Planner so we need a Google ads account if we have a Google ads account then all we need to do is go to tools then we need to go to Keyword Planner and the Keyword Planner is a good tool because it allows us to find those coveted keywords so we can discover new keywords and that's exactly what we're going to do so for example we're going to find

you know use the keyword mail delivery if we have a a business that delivers meils to people what keywords do we want to optimize for so we're going to be in Google ads we're going to go go to tools we're going to go to Keyword Planner we're going to discover new keywords and we're simply just going to type in a keyword so we're going to click get results and Google's Keyword Planner is basically going to give us some information so the key word we chose was mail delivery and they're telling us that on average over

the last 12 months there's 22,200 search queries on average over the last 12 months okay so I could see if I click hover over the graph here I'm going to be able to see the average over 12 months okay so here I could see the average over 12 months from July to June 2019 so here what do I want to do I want to look for Trends because you here I can see the averages go up and down a little bit but 22,200 is the average over 12 months and then Google's Keyword Planner also tells

me how competitive that keyword is so if it's highly competitive but it's got a lot of search volume it could be a keyword I may want to cover it but the beauty of the Keyword Planner is that they also give you other keywords to look at okay so mail delivery service is 49,500 okay so here you got some other ones best food delivery service 99,900 again some of these are very competitive but some of them aren't and so you want to be able to do your due diligence do some analysis and figure out what keywords

work best for you that aren't going to be competitive but at the same time give you some search volume so if you do rank for that keyword you should expect x amount of clicks on that keyword based on the volume so that's Google's Keyword Planner alternatively you can use a tool like moz.com so if I log into Moz they have a tool called keyword Explorer and so here I can just type in that same keyword mail delivery targeting the United States in English and Moz is going to give me some information on the keyword so

here they're going to give me a range in terms of the monthly volume and they're going to give me a difficulty score so they're going to tell me how difficult this keyword is so out of a score of 100 it's 53 and they're going to tell me what my expected click the rate could be if I'm ranking for that keyword more importantly they're going to give me some other keyword suggestions just like Google's Keyword Planner so here I can see prepared mail delivery mail delivery service mail delivery companies so there are a lot of different

suggestions of keywords that I can choose from and if we scroll down we could see basically some Mansions we could see the analysis who's ranking for these keywords so we can really get some insight as to who's ranking how much volume how difficult it is what my estimates could be if I'm ranking Etc so a lot of information built into mz's keyword Explorer tool so maz's keyword Explorer tool could be a good option for you if you don't have access to Google ads and Google's Keyword Planner so if you're working on SEO for a website

and you're curious is about what the off-page SEO situation looks like well you can use a tool like HRS it's a free tool you can go here if you're working on a specific domain and you're focused on off page you could simply type in that domain here here and then you can check the back links for that domain okay so I'm going to go ahead and type in my my domain and now I'm going to get a sense of what my backlink profile is for my domain so here I can see the number of back

links the total back links and notice 85% of them are due follow links so Google is able to recognize those links and then I can see referring domains so I have 124 different domain pointing to my website and so here I can get a snapshot of the top 100 backlinks pointing to my website and so this just gives me a snapshot of what's going on with my off-page SEO performance again it's a free tool it's good to use because it gives you an idea of what your off-page SEO situation looks like okay another tool you

could use is pingdom okay you can set up a free trial here it's good for 14 days and it allows you to you know look at page speed it allows you to monitor the site itself in terms of you know visitors maintenance Etc so you can use pingdom as well uh however it's only a 14-day free trial but it does give you some good insights into SEO now page low time is one of those on page SEO factors and so if you're doing on page SEO for domain you certainly want to go into Google analytics

and you want to measure the page load performance of the pages on your website and so here if I go to Google analytics and then I go to behavior and I go to site speed and I go to speed suggestions here I could see the pages how many pages I've received over a period of time and then the average page load time now if you see the average page low time is slow and in my opinion anything over 2 to 3 seconds is going to be slow you need to be able to take action and

so the great thing about Google analytics the page low time reporting is it actually gives you some suggestions so page speed suggestions so all you need to do is click on the link here in this case this particular link or URL on my website has seven suggestions if I click on that then page speed insides is going to open up and what's going to happen is Google analytics SL pagee insights is going to analyze this page and give me some feedback on how the page is performing not only on desktop but on mobile as well

and so here I can see if I analyze this page I can see some of the opportunities to improve the page load time on desktop and again on mobile here so here you could see a lot of the opportunities and a lot of the issues I have that I can address now if you're going to manage SEO for a website then you're going to need an SEO platform so again m is a good example because we showed you the keyword Explorer but they also have many other tools available built right into the platform for example

rankings okay you can get crawl information so when the Bots crawl the side what kind of errors are coming up here I can get some page optimization so I can choose a keyword and I could choose a page and Moz is going to be able to give me feedback to see what more I could do to improve my on page SEO performance okay we mentioned keyword explore in terms of looking for keywords okay you also have something called link Explorer as well so if I go back and choose link Explorer from my list here then

I'm going to go to a link Explorer and I can type in any domain again just like on the H reps except mods goes a little bit deeper here okay so they're telling me how many linking domains and what my keywords are ranking okay and then I have some other reports that I can leverage for off-page SEO I can look at spam scores for certain websites that are linking to me because you can disavow yourself from being associated with those sites here here you got a link intersect tool so you can compare one domain against

another to what links are pointing to that other website so a lot of different reports and tools available to you for off page SEO under moz's link Explorer so Moz has a lot of different tools available and again my recommendation if you don't use Moz there's sem rush there's bright Edge there's a lot of SEO platforms out there to use but if you're to focus on SEO you are going to need an SEO platform now if you have any more questions on SEO you feel free to go to Simply learns YouTube account you'll be able

to find a video there for SEO tutorial for beginners you know take a look at the video it goes really in depth about everything we just covered about onpage and off-page SEO so take a look at the video and if you have any comments about everything we covered with se50 free to comment underneath this video here and we'll be sure to respond accordingly uh especially if you have any tips and tricks that you do for SEO so let's move from search engine optimization to content marketing and so content marketing is a form of marketing that

involves simulating interest in a Brand's products or Services by creating and sharing online material so when we talk about online material that can come in many forms or assets say some examples are blogs videos infographics case studies white papers ebooks all of this is content generated it's just in different forms and so you want to be able to take any one of these forms of content and be able to distribute that in some form or fashion okay so for example blog can be part of your website a video could be something you upload to Youtube

an infographic could be something you actually share on LinkedIn so all these other assets could be integrated throughout they could be shared or used on your website okay for people to grab and share and use and comment on okay so that's what content marketing is you need to be able to push out content so that people have a better understanding of your product or service the process of content marketing is you really want to decide what goal you want to achieve with your cont content marketing campaign you want to Define your buyer personas to determine

the audience best suited for your content okay so what are you creating who is it for and then you want to run content audience to determine the best type of content that can be used and when we talk about content audits we're talking about you know content that's already been posted are people sharing it are people downloading or people viewing it and so you want to be able to understand over time what people are reacting to so that you can reuse or continue to use that content that seems to resonate with your target audience so

you want to choose an appropriate content management system so if it's a Blog you want to use WordPress maybe so you want to start brainstorming for ideas for new content ideas so in my opinion maybe put together a Content calendar and jot some ideas on that content calendar then you want to settle on a particular type of content you want to create and then you want to be able to publish and manage your content so some to popular tools use for Content marketing you you have buffer you have Buzz Sumo follower Wong cotu so let's

go ahead and take a look at an example of a Content marketing management system and we're going to use WordPress and so if we go into WordPress here on the back end we're logging a log in and so the reason why we use WordPress is because we post blogs so in WordPress if I go to post here I'm going to be able to see all the different post that have been posted over a period of time and the great thing about WordPress is you can optimize it for SEO so if I go in here and

look at this recent blog post that has been posted I can go ahead and edit it and when I edit it okay I'm going to be able to look at this blog post in a visual format and and I can also look at it in HTML form so notice I the great thing about WordPress is I can use imagery I can insert videos I can insert infographics I can attach a white paper case study to it and then again we have something called y SEO plugin so we've installed a plugin here so that'll help us

with optimizing that particular blog post for that particular keyword we're trying to Target and so here you can see our Focus keyword is remarketing and retargeting okay so we have that in the title tag okay we also want to make sure it's in the meta description and so here we have an internal link we have it in the introduction okay we have it you know spread throughout the content so Yos does a good job of allowing us to make sure we're integrating that keyword into our blog post but the key to blog posting is we

want to again follow the process we want to be able to choose content for our intended audience and in this case with a blog post we can write up to you know 500 to 3,000 keywords and the whole point is we're trying to introduce our audience to a particular topic that resonates with our product or service and so that's the great thing about blogging that's the great thing about WordPress is that you know very easy to use uh you can integrate it with SEO you obviously have commenting you have different plugins that you can add

in there uh very easy to edit and so there a lot you can do here with WordPress and blogging so another example of content marketing is video so with video you have the ability to upload this video to popular video sites like YouTube or video and you can optimize that particular video with title tags and and hashtags and descriptions and you could see the interaction here so you can see how many views how many likes shares the ability to share the ability of people for saving it and there's just a lot of interactivity when you

have video you can also use video as I mentioned on your blogging platform if it's WordPress you can also use video in social media platforms like Twitter link in and Facebook so video is a very popular form of content marketing lots of good video tools out there to create a video a high quality video is what you want to put your product and service in the best Forefront okay so that people can react they can share they can comment they can follow they can like okay so that's what you want to do is think about

video because video is very versatile and Powerful in terms of getting your message out there so let's move from content marketing to social media marketing and social media marketing really involves creating content if it's that blog if it's that video that you created for Content marketing and really using different platforms to increase your visibility whether that be traffic whether it be engagement whether it be brand awareness or any other marketing goals that you have that's what social media is good for because social media will take that content take what you're trying to get out there

and really allow you to hone your marketing goals against that okay so if it's Facebook and you got some videos that you want to post up there okay what's your goal is your goal to then post a video to get traffic to your website or to build brand awareness or to just get people to react by sharing or liking and so that's what social media is good for it's really good for taking content and really Distributing it to your target audience okay so uh sharing content allows you to you know generate user generated content or

it allows you to create interactive content and again you can use infographics or you can apply content with imagery or post videos or do things that are interactive like polling and contest so a lot of flexibility in terms of the content that you could share on social media and so you want to establish a process for social media marketing so this is the digital marketing course of it so you want to be able to have a process and you want to be able to set up goals that you want to achieve with your social media

campaign because just posting content for Content sake is really not going to generate anything for you so you want to set up those goals ahead of time then you want to understand what content would be best suited for your target audience so if our goal is to generate brand awareness then maybe an infographic is what we want to do okay maybe that's the best choice of asset for our target audience based on the platform with social media we also want to research what the competition is and find out what works for them so it's very

easy to do on social so if you already have a competitor on Facebook you can always go to your competitor's website and you can always see you know what they're posting and what kind of reaction engagement they're getting for a particular post so it doesn't help before you go live to do some due diligence about your competition you can also conduct a social media audit and again what we mean by audit just like on the content side we want to be able to see what's worked and what's not worked in the past and with digital

marketing recall you can get instant metrics back so if you posted something last year and you're thinking about posting it again you probably want to do an audit to see oh over the past year what posts have worked and have not worked for you then you want to pick and choose the social media channels or platforms and to find a strategy for each of them because if you have a video then the video may work on say YouTube or Instagram but they not necessarily work for LinkedIn and Twitter and so you want to be able

to pick and choose the asset the strategy and align it with the appropriate platform then you want to take big inspiration from case studies and other famous Brands so again continue to learn I mean that's the beauty of social media marketing most big companies medium-sized companies even smaller companies that have performed well are out on social media so take a look at some other companies that inspire you or some other companies in your industry or even again your competitors and see what they're doing and what they're posting and what kind of Engagement they're getting so

you should always you know be able to seek out what others are doing on social and to me this is important create a social media content calendar and this isn't necessarily the very end of the process this goes back to the beginning of the process so when you're establishing goals and you're establishing what kind of type of content you want to use that should all be part of a social media content calendar and I'm going to show you an example one here shortly and then again you want to be able to test evaluate and adjust

your strategy because again you're getting metrics and if you post a video on Facebook and it's taking off then meaning in terms of likes and shares you probably want to consider maybe doing another one that complements that so here's a broad example of a Content calendar again it's in a spreadsheet Again by no means do one size fits all but just to give you an idea if we're blogging what we want to do is we want to pick our Target on audience maybe that be country or particular demographic and you want to come up with

some topics ahead of time here and you want to maybe put the status up there of you know it's just a draft or an idea or when it actually does go live you want to turn it on live you want to pick your date add some comments okay create your content and you know what's good about a Content calendar you can also work in SEO so you can assign keywords and then you could add those keywords theas for ranking uh you can create your title and meta description then you can carry that content forward and

choose a particular social media platform to post to so that's the beauty of a social or excuse me a Content calendar is it allows you to think about things up front and then prepare the content accordingly so you can optimize it for organic search and post it on social media for off-page SEO and for social media marketing and and so you just want to get organized ahead of time using a spreadsheet in this case Google Sheets to lay out the topics ahead of time so you can write the content for your intended audience that to

me is the way to go now remember there's lots of different forms of content that you can use with social media marketing here we have video so you can see this video could be posted on YouTube or LinkedIn or wherever and the whole point is you want to be able to measure engagement here you can see this is just an image it's just a file and this has been posted on Facebook so here we can see how many likes and comments and then shares and so you want to be able to leverage different forms and

different assets across social media to see actually what works and what doesn't work and again look at what other companies have done whether they be competitors or not see what type of assets they're posting and what's working for them now when it comes to social Med media marketing there are lots of tools available okay you got buffer Hoots s sprinkler post planner later Sprout social I mean the list of social media marketing tools is endless and just like SEO you will need a platform to work with so with SEO we showed you Moz as the

SEO platform with social we're going to show you sprout social because with Sprout social if you have a Content calendar if you have a lot of different assets you want to be able to organize those assets and content across multiple channels and the great thing about using a social media calendar is yes you can publish and organize your post accordingly you also have most social media platform tools have listening so you can listen in on keywords and audiences different brands and industries and conversations that are being had about a specific topic okay and again most

social media platforms if not all have reporting and so this is important because you can actually see you know what how your post or different assets are performing in terms of Engagement and so to me that's important if you're going to focus on social media as a platform as as a channel you want to have a social media platform tool that will help you organize your content publish it accordingly listen in in and get that report to help you figure out what's engaging and what's not engaging again so that you can you know react to

the content that you're using and sharing so that's Sprout social as an example but you will need a social media platform now the other benefit to social media is in some cases you could actually pay to have your post out there and so for example on Facebook we could set up a paid camp campaign to Target our intended audience and so with Facebook Facebook owns Instagram so you have the ability to really put your content out in front of your target audience on Facebook and Instagram and so what you need to do is go to

Facebook ads manager and simply just create an account or campaign um you want to be able to create a campaign and by creating a campaign that means you're going to have to go through a particular process here so if we first we want to do is choose our objective okay so you always want to have an objective for your campaign so is it going to be brand awareness is it going to be to drive you know traffic is it going to be to drive conversions so you want to choose a goal or objective if you're

advertising really on any platform then you want to be able to choose your audience so who are we trying to Target so with Facebook you know you can Target any specific age gender demographic based on interest and behavior so you can choose specific placements and you can assign a budget okay and then on the ad side you have different types of ads that you can use you can do single image or video you can do a carousel okay meaning you can rotate different images as a collage or different videos as a collage and again you

can choose exactly where you want want your ad to be shown for example desktop or mobile Newsfeed Facebook and stream video you got Instagram feed you got even messenger so you have a lot of options available to you on where your ad or video is going to be shown and then you can support that with a headline description and you can send that traffic back to your website you can even test call to action buttons okay so you can pend your add with a call to action button and so you can do a lot here

this is just Facebook you can really do a lot of specific targeting now with Facebook advertising it's a cost per click model so anytime somebody does click on that ad you're going to pay but it allows you to really get your content out there in front of your intended audience if you're not doing it organically meaning you're not posting on Facebook on a regular basis or maybe you want to supplement those organic post then doing this is a good way to really get your brand out there if it's awareness if to drive traffic or to

convert Facebook is a good option LinkedIn Twitter all these social media platforms offer that up that option up to do paid advertising now if you want more information about social media we have a great video on YouTube already how to start social media marketing it really goes into the details about organic social and what I just covered with paage social specifically on Facebook so take a look at that video and again if I missed anything on the social media side feel free to comment or add in your best practice whether that be part of the

process or a different platform that you use for social media okay let's switch to our next digital marketing channel in search engine marketing so search engine marketing is an advertising model that is good for driving traffic to your site because you're paying each time someone clicks on your advertisement now how is that an equal trade well because you can advertise on channels like or search engines like Google or Bing or adroll which has a a big Network that includes Google you can actually pay your way to the top of search engine rankings and so if

you're at the top for paid search and and somebody searches something like uh shoes or something to that effect your ad can appear at the very top even above local search even above organic search and so the visibility is there it's a good way for you to then get that traffic that uh that you you covet for certain keywords and because you're getting traffic or the potential to get traffic you're going to pay each time somebody clicks on these ads so you have multiple choices on the type of asset you want to use including text

image video Etc so there's more to it than just Google Bing ad roll I mean you have LinkedIn you have Twitter you have Facebook you have lots of different ways to advertise and get your ad in a more prominent position you just have to pay for it and I just showed you that under social media marketing Facebook you can create an ad have your R targeting your audience and in return you're going to pay Facebook works the same way for most of these networks okay so when you actually set up a campaign like anything you

do when you set up a campaign you want to determine the goal you want to achieve for the campaign you want to do that upfront especially when you're talking about paying per click if you're paying per click then you definitely want to make sure you determine what your goals are so you can measure them accordingly then you want to choose in in this case a relevant list of keywords you could do it for your brand meaning you could choose your own brand keywords you could choose keywords related to what your brand is trying to offer

whether that be a service or product and once you choose a relevant list of keywords you can finalize those keywords and then bid on them so once you start bidding on them then what you're going to do is align those keywords with a headline so it's all done within the framework of any platform you're advertising on really the key here that I want to really emphasize is when you establish a campaign or set up a campaign you need to establish what the goal is because when you actually choose your keywords and write your ads and

launch the campaign and start paying Google or Bing or whomever it is you're advertising with you want to be able to measure those goals so that's really the important part here because regardless of where you advertise you're going to be able to monitor campaign results and so with Google you can even import conversions into the campaign so for example if I go to Google ads for example if I go to tools okay you can see I'm running campaigns what am I trying to accomplish with these campaigns well in this case I'm trying to get donations

people click on donations so I can go to tools click conversions and then I can see what conversions are added to my account and that way I can measure my campaigns against these conversions okay if I don't see a conversion here I can certainly create one or import it from in this case Google analytics so that's the important thing you want to be able to measure your campaigns with your conversions and then just as important you want to be able to optimize your campaign because if it's not performing if you're running a campaign you're running

up cost and you're not getting conversions you're probably not going to be continuing to run those camp campaigns so you want to optimize your campaign and retarget potential customers so retargeting is always a good option retargeting is targeting someone who that went to your website and basically acted in a certain way meaning they went to a certain page or abandoned a card or actually purchased or downloaded something okay you define what action you want that audience to take in order to retarget to them okay so the whole point is you can configure your retargeting campaign

based on certain behavior on your website and the whole point there ret targeting is you're pulling people back to your website so in addition to optimizing you know search campaigns you can one of the benefits of search engine marketings you can run retargeting campaigns so here's an example of an ad okay so here you could see it's a good ad in the sense that it's using everything available to it so for example here I could see three headlines so Google in this example allows you to add in three headlines so here you can see simply

learn official site get certified get ahead then you can see simply learn.com so they're taking advantage of three headlines and then here you can see two description lines and so each description line you're going to have up to 90 characters and so you want to be able to take advantage of what Google gives you the more information you can add the better well here you can see some other types of ads here you can see a banner ad for slack okay here you can see betterment.com running an ad okay so this looks like an ad

that is on YouTube so because you could see after a few seconds you can skip the ad okay so here's a video ad here's an image ad here's a text ad so depending on what platform you advertise on you have an an option on what type of asset you want to use you know the one thing I like about Facebook is they offer up multitude of options in terms of assets so you can run a single image ad you can run a carousel meaning you got a multiple images you can run a video you can

run a combination video image you can obviously run text okay with a thumbnail so you have a lot of options in terms of the type of AD you can run so before we move into our next Channel let me just show you an example of you know how an ad actually looks on a particular website so here you can see I'm on but feed news.com okay here you can see Volkswagen Golf is running an advertisement in Spanish on this particular site so they're either using Google or some other platform and having that platform if it's

Google post their ad on this particular site so here you can see it's a banner ad and if we're in Google ads and you're setting up a text ad let me just run through you what that text ad looks like remember you want to always take advantage of what's offered to you because especially text ads you have very few characters and with very few characters it's hard to get your message across so with Google you have your final URL which is where people are going to go to after they click on your ad but you

have one not one not two but three headlines that you can take advantage of so we're talking about help end child hunger help today you know you can always add in visit our website for more info I mean you want to take advantage of what's available to you now again here you can see in this example I have only allotted 30 characters and so if you go over then your ads not going to get approved so you really have to be cognizant of the character counts and getting your point across because writing text ads is

not the easiest thing to do when you're limited to characters now with Google you have what they call display path so after the domain you can add in a couple of keywords in there and then you have description line one and description line too so again take advantage of what's available if you're not sure what copied right grab some from the website and paste it in there you want your ads to be healthy and to have as much information as possible and then the one thing I will say about Google ads is they also have

extensions so extensions are exactly that they're extensions to to your text ad so here you can see I have four extensions these are actually site links so Google ads offers up something called add extensions so it could be call outs site links could be location extensions app extensions they have a number of different extensions that they can append to your ad so take advantage of that as well remember the whole point of ads is to make a compelling case for your product or service so that somebody can click on the ad and go to your

website and then perform the action you want them to perform now if you have any more questions about Google ads feel free to check out our indepth video about Google ads it covers everything a toz on Google ads you know we also have videos on our simply learn YouTube playlist for Facebook uh Twitter social media marketing so if you're curious to know a little bit more about SE marketing you know check out any one of these videos that we have listed on our YouTube channel okay so let's move over to affiliate marketing now and so

with affiliate marketing really it's interesting and unique and that affiliate marketing involves paying out commissions and who are you paying commissions to well you're paying commissions to website owners or Publishers or people who have websites with lots of content or people who have websites that attract a lot of users and so the whole point is you you want to be able to find those websites to advertise your product or service okay these people who are selling your product or service on your behalf are going to get commissioned or incentivized based on whatever action you put

out there so it could be registrations just getting your Affiliates to help you with getting people registered or signing up for your email or you know for a lot of you conversions you're trying to sell a product so you want help in selling that product or it could be subscriptions okay signing up to something okay so you determine what it is you want to incentivize your Affiliates for you also determine how much you're going to incentivize them and that's the great thing about affiliate marketing it's it's no different than having a sales team um to

support you what are the stats for affiliate marketing well you need to find a platform there are lots of different affiliate platforms out there you know Commission Junction or cj.com comes to mind because these platforms are going to help you find these Affiliates or Partners okay so they're the broker and all this and so once you set up your platform you're going to establish rules guidelines post images and Banners and assets for those Affiliates to use on their websites and more importantly again you're going to establish the commission so the commission doesn't have to be

the same for all Affiliates it could simply be you know you know your top Affiliates get a higher commission as opposed to just some other Affiliates who get a starting commission you establish everything on the platform the affiliate platform that you choose now Affiliates apply to advertise on your behalf so they're going to say hey I'm interested in selling your product or service so you're going to use that platform if it's Commission Junction to approve or disapprove the Affiliates request to advertise on your behalf and really what you want to try and do is leverage

the platform as best as you can a lot of these Affiliates are out to make money and some of them are really good you need to be able to choose the affiliate that is going to represent your brand product or service the best so it's simple customer clicks on an ad or link okay on that affiliate website and they go to your website and they perform an action so that could be a purchase a registration a subscription a download an email sign up you determine that and the great thing is these affiliate networks the CJs

commission Junctions of the world will record everything they're Tracking not only traffic from the affiliate website to your website but they're also tracking the conversions the transaction is validated and credited to the affiliate by the broker and then the affiliate is paid his or her commission so that's how it works so the more the affiliate sells or converts on your behalf the more they're going to make and that's the beauty of the affiliate Network so here's an example of affiliate marketing okay here you could see uh an advertisement here okay so you could see profit

from our experience earn up to 12% advertising fees with a trusted e-commerce list leader so somebody clicks on that link joins and then this person is going to get a commission based on somebody joining for free again mentioned Commission Junction there are also some other affiliate marketing tools out there uh ma Amazon Associates Awin trade doubler Max Bounty I mean there's there's there's a lot out there cj.com is the one I've used in the past but you know give some of these other platforms a chance okay it doesn't hurt to even be on multiple platforms

you have nothing to lose okay when you're on a platform basically the platform again is acting as the middle person they're introducing you to affiliate and so every time you actually pay an affiliate a commission they're going to get their cut of it so they're going to get a small percentage as well so just keep that in mind but you know give it a try try one or two of these Affiliates if you find you're getting quality Affiliates that are selling your product or service great if you don't then you know feel free to change

you know affiliate networks it's that simple but the key here is find the Affiliates you think are going to best represent your brand product or service because because those Affiliates are likely going to be the ones to convert for you and if you're small business starting out and you need some help affiliate marketing is the way to go okay let's move over to Native advertising okay so native advertising so native advertisement means that your ad is showing up next to content that basically naturally fits so these are advertisements that are featured on a platform alongside

the content okay that isn't paid for okay so for example here you can see a paid post okay this is by Spotify okay this paid post okay was on BuzzFeed this particular post was probably on a news article related to music because they're talking about you bands that probably wouldn't exist without Le Zeppelin okay so for Spotify you using native advertising allows them to put their ad next to content related to their ad here you can see another BuzzFeed article okay 11 great Amazon deals that will be music to your ears if you're audio file

here you could see an advertisement next to the article so you could see the ad about Le Zeppelin and here you can see the actual article is about music so the whole point about Native advertising is making sure there's a connection between the ad and the article so Spotify is advertising okay their product and service on an article on BuzzFeed which happens to be about music so a good example we used BuzzFeed just a second ago so if we go to BuzzFeed here you can see I'm in TV and movies and here you could see

got an ad here if we scroll down uh keep scrolling down we can see another ad here for HBO and so this ad makes sense because it's placed on TVs and movies so people who go and read the content are going to see an ad related to that content so that's generally what Native advertising is you need to be able to be able to place the ad on the right pages okay so you're going to need an ad Network for that so we talked about paid search advertising we talked about Google ads so Google ads

has the ability to place your ad natively on particular pages that are relevant to that ad so that's really what Native advertising is all about making sure that your ad is placed next to content that's naturally relevant so if you need more information about affiliate marketing feel free to visit simply learn's YouTube channel we have a nice uh indepth video about affiliate marketing so you get more information about the platforms how it works and all the tips and best practices about how to run a successful affiliate marketing campaign so let's turn our attention to email

marketing now so email marketing very traditional form of digital marketing it's been around the longest it's kind of the grandfather of all digital marketing channels so email marketing really is used to personalize emails in order to convert that recipient or that perspective user into a customer and so like all the other digital marketing channels we want to follow some type of flow or process or methodology and the first step in email marketing is you have to identify your target audience okay when you identify your target audience you're going to create a segment okay so in

other words you don't want to send one email to everyone because not everyone is going to be interested in that email so in order to get somebody interested you need to be able to send an email tailored to that audience okay so that audience can respond and react accordingly so once you target that audience and create segments email segments you're going to create the campaign and set up an appropriate call to action one note here is when you create the campaign and set up that appropriate call to action that call to action is going to

be align with your goal so what is the goal of the email campaign is it simply to get people to click on something and purchase or is it simply to get people to click on something and sign up or watch something or submit some information or download or whatever the case you need to establish that up front just like you would with a search engine marketing campaign or any other type of campaign you want to run so there are lots of tools out there just like with affiliate marketing you want to choose an appropriate email

marketing tool there are plenty to be Had Each work in a very similar nature some offer different pricing models meaning you know you can send an email to ex recipients for flat fee or or you pay a small amount per email address each one is slightly different in terms of how they price but in terms of the features they all work in a very similar fashion and we're going to show you an example of one here shortly so when you choose that email marketing tool you're going to test your emails before you send them out

and then when you test your emails you're going to use that email marketing tool to actually send the campaign after it's been tested okay so you want to send the campaign you can immediately send them out or you can schedule them now a best practice with an email is when you actually send one out you're sending an email out to your targeted audience you want to create probably two emails per segmented audience why because you want to add an attractive subject line and copy to the email but if you send two emails to the same

target audience then you want to test the subject lines you want to be able to see what subject lines going to T somebody to open the email okay that's the beauty of email marketing is you can do that okay so you can set up your a design based on your target audience but it's always the subject line that people see first so you want to write an attractive subject line and copy that's going to entice somebody to open the email so wantet send two emails to each target audience that way you can see what email

subject line works best so that's the whole idea about perform pering AB test to test out different ideas it doesn't necessarily have to be a subject line it can be the same subject line two emails but the difference being the body of the email it's totally up to you but the idea here is to always split out your emails per target audience and just like any other channel whether it the affiliate or search engine marketing organic search you want to analyze performance and in the case of emails it's always about open rate how many people

are opening then how many people are clicking and then how many people are actually responding are they converting or downloading or whatever it is you want them to do you need to be able to monitor the behavior because for example if your open rates don't work or they're low then you know something's wrong with your subject line so you want to be able to make an adjustment so here's an example of an email from Airbnb it's a simple email okay they're just simply trying to get somebody to click on that call to action to take

the survey okay that's really all it's about here with this particular email so who's their target audience well their target audience could be somebody who's already stayed at a Airbnb property or it could be somebody who used the app probably Airbnb has already targeted this audience and they're sending this survey to a particular audience so that they can get the best results okay so that's a good example of a targeted email with a good call to action that's getting somebody to take the survey so they're probably measuring many people opened it how many people clicked

on the CTA the call to action and then how many people actually filled out the survey so you need to follow each step and track each step accordingly okay so again some popular tools used in email marketing let's take a look at MailChimp here uh but I will mention like maretto is a good marketing automation tool now owned by Adobe maretto allows you to send those drip campaigns so if somebody doesn't purchase right away you can send up follow-up emails like say one day out or seven days out or 14 days out so HubSpot Works

in a very similar fashion you want to be able to methodically plan out your emails that's the point I'm trying to make here so let's take a look at MailChimp so if we go over into MailChimp very easy interface okay okay here we go under audience we can actually see who our audience is and we can break out our audience into different groups you can have a simple test list you can have people who purchase people who subscribe to something okay so you can break out your audience into different groups okay when it comes to

campaigns you can see campaigns that are already been built or you can create your own campaign okay so in the case of mail champ we can actually see what campaigns have been dropped or sent out already and then we could see the opens the clicks and then the conversions so MailChimp has some nice reporting so you want to be able to measure the reports or how well the campaign performed so here we can see specifically how many people open clicked how many people bounced or email addresses bounc and how many people unsubscribed from the list

and here we can see you know the top links that have been clicked okay the subscribers with the most opens did anybody perform any social media activity okay what locations open the email okay so you can actually see a lot of good information here right in MailChimp and you want to be able to react to the emails you sent out so if an email is not performing okay you want to learn from that so you don't make the same mistake again great thing I like about MailChimp too they have a lot of nice templates to

use so if you're trying to create a template here here you got some templates that you can leverage so that's MailChimp kind of in a nutshell MailChimp you can pay up front buy credits and with those credits you could send out emails to a number of people okay so that's how MailChimp Works they do have a free trial so you can set up an account using the free trial now if you need any more information about MailChimp or email marketing in general take a look at the email marketing webinar we have set up on our

simply learn YouTube account now let's finish up with online PR or press releases so we talked about SEO and social and search and affiliate and email marketing and and content native advertising let's talk about online PR here because with online PR it really does involve working with digital Publications or blogs or other content related websites for example content related websites ites could be newspaper digital newspaper sites like the New York Times okay the whole point of online PR is you want to try and get some publicity on those on those websites publicity means awareness for

the brand it means traffic to the website and eventually some loyalty future customers and conversion channels that can be used to maximize your online PR efforts for example you can connect with reporters on social media to develop a relationship so you can just follow some reporters see if they're covering specific uh Industries or verticals and if they are similar to what you're offering then it's probably a good idea to reach out to them you can use engaging user reviews to help humanize your brand or you can respond to comments that help generate productive conversations so

those are all certain things you can do to generate awareness and Buzz for your brand so really the one thing I want to point out about online PR is basically you can also hire a PR firm and they can do some of the heavy lifting for you or like I said you can reach out to different reporters or different influencers even to help push your product or brand now if you're trying to go at it alone on the online PR what you could do if you don't reach out to reporters or influen ERS or you're

active in trying to build your brand through a conversation you can always use a thirdparty service like pr.com so pr.com allows you to you know basically create your own profile you know submit content to your own profile or even submit press releases if you submit press releases then other news agencies are going to Pi pick up on those press releases so it's a good way to get your press releases out there likes of yahoooo and Google might pick up those press releases and give you some you know much needed visibility you can also use other

tools like you know PR newswire for example so Works in a very similar way again it's a press release distribution Network so you can go ahead and sign up for an account get that press release out there and they do the distribution for you or you can also use aggregation sites so there are lots of different aggregate sites out there and so what aggregate websites do is they help disseminate and distribute your content so here you could see some of the new aggregator websites of 2019 you got feedle Panda Tech Mimi Metacritic escience news the

morning news so you have a lot of options available to get your content out there okay so what these sites do is basically pick up articles that fit their website fit their theme fit their target audience so you do have options in the form of third party tools as well okay so if you don't hire a PR firm which could be expensive you can certainly go at it alone by signing up for any one of these particular products or services today we're going to talk about digital marketing tools so fast in your seat belts and

let's get started so what we're going to do is we're going to take a look at some of the best digital marketing tools for not only 2019 but ones that have performed well in the past that are popular and ones that we foresee as being the go-to tools for the future so past present and future digital marketing tools is the way to look at this uh with a good focus on a lot of different marketing channels here so we're going to focus first on SEO talk about some of the tools related to on page and

off page we're going to switch over over to paid search talk a little bit about paid search tools we're going to talk about email marketing and some of the email marketing platforms and the tools within those platforms the center of it all is web analytics so Google analytics is the tool we'll be taking a closer look at in today's webinar and all that it has to offer affiliate marketing we'll talk about some of the tools available to you in for affiliate marketing we'd be remiss if we didn't talk about social media and all that it

has to offer and all the metrics and tools available all the platforms available so we'll hone in on a couple of examples there and then we'll also talk about some competition tools available for you so there's a whole Suite of tools the one caveat being hey if you have your favorite tool continue using it in fact if there's a tool that we didn't mention in today's webinar feel free to mention it in the comments box below this video we'd love to hear what you're using to manage your particular digital marketing channel okay and so the

goal for today's webinar is hey we hope you get something out of this in terms of using new tools there's some tools that I use some tools that my colleagues use everybody uses different tools so it'll be good to kind of see what else is out there so if you have something to share share it by all means what we're trying to do is share what we think are you know best practices and some of the most popular or most used tools out there in the industry so that's what we're going to do the goal

is to get you to better understand some of the tools we're using a little bit more detail and what we're going to do is start out with search engine optimization okay so search engine optimization or organic search we have a mixture of paid and free so there's a lot of different platforms but if you're focusing on on SEO you certainly need to use an SEO platform so there's sem Rush okay you also have Google search console which is free so if you don't have a SEO platform you definitely need to be using Google search console

and so we'll take a closer look at that there's Google Keyword Planner which is actually situated under Google ads and so if you're running Google campaigns on Google search Network or even the Display Network you have access to a great tool called Keyword Planner and if you know anything about SEO you'll know that using Google's Keyword Planner is a good tool so we'll take a look at that MZ is a premium tool meaning they have a free trial that you can sign up for to test drive it but it's another SEO platform and it does

cost money got a great tool in screaming frog that's a paid version again not too expensive we'll talk a little bit more about that and then we have you know tool in HRS that help us with all aspects of SEO primarily focusing on off page so these are just some examples that we're going to hone in on but this is just a small subset of what really is available out there in the market so let's go ahead and dive a little bit deeper and understand why we use some of these tools well the first reason

when we talk about SEO is to find relevant keywords not only do we want to find relevant keyword we want to find relevant keywords with high volume and low competition okay we wouldn't want to find non-relevant keywords with high competition low volume that wouldn't make sense so we need a tool to kind of help us put it all together and so the tool of choice for us is Google's Keyword Planner and Google's Keyword Planner helps us hone in on keywords we may be interested in optimizing for because not only one are they relevant but two

they're going to have high volume and low competition so let's take a look at an example in Google's Keyword Planner so here I am I'm in Google's Keyword Planner and as I mentioned before Google's Keyword Planner is situated under Google ads okay so you have to have a Google ads account to use Google's Keyword Planner and so when you're in Google ads you simply go to tools and then under Tools you're going to select Keyword Planner so what we want to do is look for keywords we're focusing on organic search not necessarily paid search so

organic search we want to hone in on some keywords so let's just use one of the examples that Google's given us here mail delivery so we're going to just type in mail delivery and get some results so notice I can enter a domain as a filter and so in other words hey I could say look hone in on keywords related to this website if I wanted to but I'm asking Google hey just give me something closely related to mail delivery cuz that's my business so I'm going to click click get results notice I can add

another key to if I wanted to but I'm just going to stick with one keyword but there are certainly other keywords that I can certainly hone in on if mail delivery is my business and so let's just tone in on that one keyword mail delivery we want to be found organically for that keyword so what Google Keyword Planner does is not only give us the key keyword and other keywords relevant to that but it gives us the average monthly search volumes and this is an average over the course of the last 12 months and notice

here I get a column for competition so I'm able to see whether that's a very competitive keyword or not and then just to give you an extra Edge when you're choosing keywords you can get a sense of what the keyword May cost if you wanted to bid on that for paid search so for mail delivery I can see it's anywhere between $746 and at the top of the page high range $16.61 so that should alert me to the fact that hey if I'm going to try and optimize for this keyword I know it's competitive because

not only Google is telling me it's competitive by telling me high competition but I know that the cost per click seems a little bit high and what is a little bit High well you know I can see some other keywords here that you know a dollar to $3 okay I could see some other ones that are even lower than the $7 they're suggesting so that's a indication that the keyword is highly competitive so the idea here using Google's Keyword Planner is one we want to get an idea of what other keywords are out there that

are relevant so it helps stimulate some ideas for relevancy two we can get an average monthly search volume so we want to know on average over the past 12 months how many search queries I can expect from this keyword and then three I can get a sense of the competition how competitive is this keyword so if I try to optimize for this keyword and I want to rank for it organically is it competitive if it's competitive then it's probably going to take me a bit longer to be found for this keyword on page one of

Google so that's the whole idea behind Google's Keyword Planner and note that you could change some of the settings here so if you want to choose a different language okay you can hone in on a longer or shorter period of time you can even choose a specific location so I chose Texas I can certainly choose the entire United States to get a sense of what the volume would be for the total us so you have settings that you can change and manipulate to get you the data you need to choose keywords so that's the whole

idea behind Google's Keyword Planner to find relevant key wordss high volume low competition now alternatively I can certainly use another tool to find keywords so I have a Moz account so I logged into MZ and MZ has a tool called keyword Explorer so if I use that same keyword I used in Google's Keyword Planner mail delivery I'm going to ask MZ to give me some data on that keyword so this is for the entire United States and again I can change that if I wanted to okay okay so I can hone in on a specific

country or different country so what Ma is telling me hey for this keyword in the entire United States I'm looking at anywhere from 115,000 to 30,000 on monthly volume now what MZ does is they give you a difficulty score so a difficulty score is a score between 1 and 100 and so I can see this is pretty much right down the middle in terms of difficulty Okay so if it's zero it's an easy keyword if it's if it's 100 it's very difficult and then that means you have a lot of competitors who are optimizing for

this keyword that are ranking for this keyword and so Moz gives us the volume they give us the competition and they just like Google's Keyword Planner gives us some other keywords that we can potentially hone in on so here I could see keyboard delivery plans delivery services Etc so I can see a lot more suggestions than what's listed here so Moz delivers a bunch of other analysis uh related to the keyword you know they also give you some good keyword suggestions so Moz is a good alternative tool and we'll be coming back to Moz related

to SEO for some other of its features but for now if you don't want to necessarily use Google's Keyword Planner because maybe you're not running Google ads you can always use Moz now remember Moz has basically a freemium version meaning you can can sign up for a free account and you could sign up for a free account as a test trial and you could test it for a period of days and leverage its tools during that free trial to get a better sense of how these tools work so we want to be able to use

mods we want to be able to use Google's Keyword Planner not only to search for all those relevant keywords available to you but we want to be able to choose keywords with high volume and low difficulty low competition we also want to select primary and second keywords wisely so remember when you optimize you're optimizing a page for more than one keyword so you want to be able to have a nice portfolio of diverse relevant keywords with high search volume and low difficulty and then you want to be able to identify those keywords that your competitors

are ranking for so MZ gives you that information and so we want to be able to leverage the tools available to us to choose the right keywords so if you need any more information on this we got a nice webinar on keyword research for SEO so take a look at that video on YouTube uh to get more specific details about using SEO tools for keyword research and all about keyword research in general for SEO so let's talk about some other reasons under SEO why would would use some of these tools available to us well we

want to be able to understand the search Eng engines and how they crawl and index our site okay we also want to check the correct format of the site map and we want to monitor backlinks okay we also want to analyze linking to our web page okay which ones are good which ones are not good okay we also want to perform some competitor analysis so these are some of the reasons why other than keyword research why would would use some of these SEO tools so we have tools available to us and Majestic HRS again M

let's take a look at Google search console and I want to hone in on Google search console because it is free and it's a must if you're going to work on SEO you need to be working in Google search console and so the whole key behind Google search console is you have a website and you need to get that site verified once it's verified once Google can recognize that you are are associated with this website then you're going to be able to see some important information so here I'm looking at a website and what am

I looking at I'm looking at something called coverage under index so what does coverage mean well going back to what we just said we want to be able to understand how Google's crawling and indexing our pages and so what Google does is through this platform search console is they're letting us know once they go to our website and start crawling it and they pull these Pages back to their server they're letting us know if we actually have any issues so here I could see I have some issues with 112 pages and some of those issues

are listed down here so there could be a crawl issue a 44 you know redirect okay so you could see there's some five unique issues across 112 pages so here I can see submitted URL marked no index there's a hundred of those pages we have some redirect errors there's seven pages that you know fall victim to this error and so we can really hone in on what the eror is and address the error okay so if Google's telling us hey this is an issue and you want that page indexed by Google then we should probably

address the error and so that's the great thing here about going into Google search console is you can under index go to coverage and get a sense of what Google's indexing and what they're not indexing so these are the errors I can see they've certainly were able to crawl an index 9,115 Pages uh they were able to crawl okay and they excluded 54,000 plus pages and then we also have some pages with some warnings so this is kind of an overview of what Google Sees when they crawl our site so when they say crawl they're

coming to our site they're following links on the site and every link they follow they're either going to index that page or they're going to report to you an error or an issue that they found if we want these Pages index we need to address the issues the errors and so that's the beauty of this report here is Google is telling us firsthand what the issues are so we also want to take a look at the sitemap so you have an opportunity to submit a sitemap and a sitemap is just a formatted file that includes

all your website URLs and so you're going to have this file sitting in your root directory and you're probably going to call it or should call it sitemap.xml XML being the format so once you have this file you're just going to let Google know that that file exists so you're going to enter in the sitemap URL so if it's in the root directory all you're going to do is type in sitemap.xml and click submit so once you've done it just like this site is done what Google's going to do is say hey look we see

you've submitted this and we last read it a couple days ago and we could see that we discovered 1,419 URLs so I can go back under coverage and I can see some of the issues that they found but if I go back under sitemaps I can see that these are the URLs they discovered via the sit map and so the whole point of a Sit map is we want to be able to get and push the URLs to Google not have Google come to our site and discover them so this is a quicker faster more

efficient way to communicate with Google all the URLs that you have on your site that you want Google to index and so that's the beauty of search console now while we're in search console we might as well take a look at some of the other features it has and so one of the most important features under search console is this mobile usability report so Google is a staunch believer in mobile first so nowadays most people start and finish a lot of their searches a lot of their behavior on mobile so they begin it on mobile

and they may end it on mobile so if they don't end it on mobile then you know perhaps they'll go into a store or perhaps they'll go via desktop but Google is a staunch believer and definitely a lot what's going on today starts with mobile so they want you to understand how your site fars Via Mobile and when I say fairs Via Mobile is it mobile friendly is it responsive is it loading quick enough you know is it formatted to Google standards and so if there are any issues Google's going to let you know what

those issues are so here I could see Google's recognized 206 pages with four different issues okay so here I can see what those issues issues are just like the coverage issues we can see specifically what they are and so here I can see for 206 Pages text too small to read click elements too close together the viewport not set to device wi and then content wider than the screen so there's 10 pages that fit under this error and if I actually click on it the error I can see what those 10 pages are and so

when we're done we can actually when we address the issues we can actually have Google validate whether the fix has been made so you can definitely use this as a means of communicating directly with Google telling Google look I see what the issues are I'm going to fix them and then I want you to validate them okay so this is important because if you can communicate with Google and let them know hey we do recognize the errors we are fixing the errors please validate them you know it's going to draw Google's attention Google's going to

validate them and get these Pages index quicker um so if you ignore the issues and the errors especially for mobile then you stand the chance of your pages not getting index so the mobile usability report to me is an important report because we want to better understand whether Google's picking up issues on mobile and if they are we want to address them get Google valid them so Google can index them quicker now there's another report that is of interest to you or may be of interest to you in Google search console and that's the links

report so the links report in Google search conso shows us what pages have the most links okay so here we can see the homepage say 26,000 plus links if we hone in on interior Pages we can see the links to those pages okay so we can get a sense of what are the topped link pages from external links meaning links on other websites pointing to these pages I can also see internal links so Google's recognized links from within my website from one page to another so external links internal links both factors for SEO when ranking

so then I can see top linking sites what sites are linking to my site and then I can see top linking text so Google search console is giving me kind of an overview of what my linking structure looks like okay so externally I want links from other websites pointing to various pages on my site and I certainly want my pages linking to one another on my site and so I'd be able to better understand what that structure looks like using Google search consoles links report okay there's one more report that I think's of interest in

Google search console and that's the performance report so the performance report is a report that actually you can link up with Google analytics so you could see the same report and analytics if you're able to link up Google search console with with analytics and you should be able to do that all you need to do is make sure you use the same email address that you use for analytics and search console so it needs to be the same email address you could certainly link up the two and have this data imported into Google analytics so

what is this data that we're talking about well it's called performance so what we can actually see is the queries the actual queries people are typing in to Google so when they're typing them in to Google we can actually see how many Impressions the keyword queries received and how many clicks the keyword queries received and then I can see click the rate and average position okay so here I can see for this particular keyword on the first line I could see over the course of the last 3 months it received 29,029 Impressions so what does

that mean that means this keyword was used at Le were typed in as a query at least that many times and that's how many times my listing appeared in the Google search results Pages based on this particular query and so as a result of somebody typing in this query 29,000 plus times this site received 120,000 plus clicks so to get a sense of the click theid all you would need to do and Google can obviously do this for you is you would simply just divide the the [Music] 2092979267 so over half of the clicks occur

when this listing appears for this keyword okay so we can get a sense of the click the r for each one okay and you can simply just use the filtering here now we can also see average position okay so we could see a little bit more than that too we can go from queries to Pages we can go from pages to countries so we get a sense of how many Impressions and clicks I'm receiving by country and importantly we can see by device so here I can see a majority of the people who conduct a

search related to my website primarily do it on desktop now I mentioned the beauty of the Google search console performance report is that you can link it up to Google analytics and when you do that all you need to do then is go to acquisition Google search console and then from there you could choose landing pages countries devices or queries so I could see the same data that I see in search console but this time I'm looking at it in Google analytics and so here I can see what my search queries are my clicks my

Impressions my click the rate buy search query and then the average position so that's the the great thing about that performance report is that when I link up Google search console with analytics I'm able to see that data in analytics so that's an added bonus so to speak now let's talk about some other reasons why we are going to use these SEO tools available to us and so we already listed a number of different reasons ranging from sit maps to keyword research but we also want to hone in on you know what domains are driving

links to our site so I showed you an example in search console we also want to hey maybe identify and disavow poor backlinks so search console is a great tool for that because if we don't want to be associated with the particular website we can certainly disavow that link we could track a number of follow and no follow links okay we could track our website's rankings we can measure clickthrough rates and Impressions just as we did with search console we could track keyword ranking for desktop mobile cross locations just as we just did with the

search console performance report we can identify top performing gaining and losing keywords again the performance report so we could certainly look at the Google search console report but if you have a platform like MZ you can certainly also look at a lot of that data available so for example rankings so if you have a Moz account we can certainly go into rankings okay and we can see for the keywords that we've chosen that we want to optimize for we can certainly see where they rank the great thing about MZ is it's a great tool not

only for rankings and onpage optimization but for off-page optimization as well so if I go ahead and take a look at a domain for example I'm just going to type in this domain I'm going to be able to get what they call a domain Authority so a score out of one and 100 I'm able to see how authoritative my domain is and how authoritative a domain is is based on the quality of links pointing to it so Moz gives me some good insights as to how many linking domains how many inbound links I have ranking

keywords and it goes into detail as well so here if I click on the linking domains I'm going to be act able to see the actual domains pointing to my site as an external link and not only can I see the domains I can actually see the domain authority of those domains so if there's a domain for example that doesn't have a good domain Authority and the site appears a bit scammy per se then we can disavow that so I can certainly look at all the domains that are linking to me and then I can

highlight the ones that have poor domain Authority what Moz even takes it a step further they also give me a Spam score so Moz is able to measure how spammy a website is so if I have a combination of say a low domain Authority and a high spam score then I probably want to disavow myself from that site and so I can use this report here you could see here as I keep going down for example I can see this particular website has a domain authority of 26 and it has a spam score of 16%

so not a good combination this should alert me to the fact that hey this particular site because it has so many links pointing to me or it has at least one link pointing to me that I probably want to disavow myself because it's probably hurting my own domain Authority so that's the great thing about this linking domains report is I'm able to hone in on not only who's link linking to me meaning domain but how many linking domains does that domain have what's the spam score of that domain what's the domain authority of that domain

and then I can get into a little bit more detail and I actually see you know all the links pointing to that domain so it really goes into detail about backlinks domain Authority spam Etc everything you need to use in order to measure off-page SEO so that's the great thing about m is they have not only on on page SEO tools but off-page SEO tools and Moz is a premium so to speak so here you can see if you just go to mod.com free-- tools you'll be able to use some of these tools available to

you not just for SEO but also for local SEO as well so here you like some of these tools you can start your free 30-day trial so I use and lean on Mo a lot for all that it has to offer from choosing keyword to rankings report to checking issues on my website to even checking who's linking to me so this fits in the mold with everything I need to do for SEO so in addition to that keyword research video you could certainly lean on some other webinars that we've done in the past on SEO

so we've done a webinar on SEO tools and we've also done a webinar on SEO tips and tricks so if you want any more information about the tools we covered or SEO in general take a look at those two videos and check them out and that should kind of complement what we talked about with using some of the tools Google's Keyword Planner uh MZ and Google search console okay let's switch over to email marketing tools and so with email marketing tools we have a lot available to us in the form of reporting in the form

of platform forms in the form of you know tools that really help us go from A to Z on our email choosing you know what email to send out to creating a list to measuring how the email campaign went and so we could start with MailChimp because mail Champs a premium version whenever we say premium meaning they have a free trial available then you're expected to upgrade but you know MailChimp to me is a tool I use I like the interface very easy for beginners so we're going to take a look at MailChimp but there

are certainly many others available you know Mar is a good tool you know Mar is a good tool because if you have a business and you're trying to funnel people through your pipeline so to speak meaning they they sign up as a lead and you want to nurture that lead from the beginning to the end meaning at the end they're actually going to turn around and purchase well Marcato is a good tool for you to use because you can then set up DP campaigns or also known as email campaigns you know so that you're talking

and communicating with that particular Prospect through every point in the funnel so that's the great thing about maretto it has drip campaigns available along with some other features there's HubSpot is a very powerful tool it does a lot from creating landing pages to AB testing to social to you know email so this is another premium tool that you could use you have another premium and send in blue email platform and then you also have convert kit another email platform there's more Dimension that we can't even fit on this screen now if you have a favorite

email marketing tool that you use Constant Contact vertical response there plenty out there Emma you know feel free to to note that in the comment section below this video I'm curious as to how many people actually use you know different tools because there are so literally so many email marketing tools out there why because email marketing has been around probably the longest amongst all the other digital marketing channels and a lot of people use email on a on a daily basis so it's no wonder why there's just so many tools available and so with these

tools you could certainly send bulk emails now in the case of marato you could send emails to a segmented audience and so that's a actually what you want to do as a strategy is always send emails to a segmented audience you know you want to use a tool where you're going to be able to create campaigns then send those campaigns to again segmented contacts and then be able to design your email around that particular audience so you know you have a good tool when you can do that when you can really segment for your audience

okay you want to be able to use an tool that's going to be able to segment your users you know use transactional emails meaning hey look if somebody go ahead went ahead and purchased can you follow up with an email and creating workflows just like I mentioned with maretto you want a workflow set up where a if somebody does this you're sending email B Etc so you want a email marketing tool that's flexible enough to handle what your business strategy and goals are okay so you want to be able to also use a tool that

you know has various email templates available okay you don't want to be stuck with just a vanilla template again you want to be able to customize an email for your audience you want to be able to manage your list appropriately meaning if you have 10,000 users or emails in a list you want to be able to manage them accordingly you know break them up or or have sublist so to speak and then most importantly you want to make sure you have a platform that not only does its tracking on its own but will give you

some detailed insight meaning you know what percentage of users opened your email what percentage of of recipients clicked on your email what links they click on you know which which emails bounce so you want some detailed insights right in the platform that you're using it just makes it more simpler and easier and more effective to manage you certainly want to create the smart automated campaigns meaning you don't even have to send out the email and then you want to be able to have some flexibility to set up email deliver based on a specific time and

day so these tools also allow you to you sigment contacts based on geolocation you want to be able to use a tool that allows for multivariant testing again you want to analyze performance and optimize campaigns you want to trigger automatic responses somebody purchases something are you using a tool that will automatically send that email out so these are all the reasons why you would use an email marketing tool so let's dive in and take a look at an example and we're going to use MailChimp as our example today so let's dive in and take a

look at MailChimp so with MailChimp once you log in you know you're going to be able to see some historical campaigns that you sent out or you're going to be able to create your own campaign and so this is kind of under campaigns you can kind of see an overview of the ones you've sent out or if they're in draft mode you'll be able to see they're in draft mode so you can go ahead and edit them so here we have one that was set up on August 26th and it's still in draft mode so

we can go ahead and edit that so if we just click edit you know we have the flexibility to you know pick and choose who we're sending this to who it's from what the subject line is and then we can certainly design the email so if we click design email again this is important because with email marketing you want to be able to cater your email to your your intended audience so if you're selling men's shoes your audience should be men okay so you don't want men to receive an email about women's shoes it sounds

like it's common sense but the point being you want to be able to use an email platform that's going to be able to allow you to put two and two together the message and the design with the intended audience and so here you can see MailChimp allows us to do that okay you can see some of the layouts here okay you also have themes that you could choose from okay you could search for different themes or you can even just code your own so you can just paste your code in or you can import it

so MailChimp allows that flexibility you're not stuck with one of their templates and so if we go back to the dashboard the one thing I like about MailChimp though is the reporting okay so yes it is easy to choose a template and map that template to your audience but I really like the reports that they have to offer so you know here you could see there's some list that we've sent to and we choose one of our audience list then we can see some really detailed reporting here and so here I could see this email

that was sent out in June I could see it was sent to 95,000 plus subscribers okay of the subscribers that saw 2,000 plus open it and 157 clicks so I can view this report in more detail just by clicking on view report so again we want an email platform that's going to be able to give us some detailed information about how that email campaign performed and so I can get down really to the nitty-gritty I can actually see you know on the content what was clicked and what wasn't clicked so here I sent two different

subject lines so I'm able to compare the two against one another okay so I can really go into detail about one of them here so if I click view report I can specifically see what the average for this list is so here I'm able to compare against the list average and it's 16% I only had an open rate of 2.5% so the industry average is 18% and so here I'm able to see the list average for the click rate and the industry average for the click rate as well so then I can see some specifics

about it how many people unsubscribed then I could see a graph I could see the top links that were clicked okay the top subscribers with the most opens I can link social to it if I want to and then I can see geographic information so the point being is MailChimp really goes into some nice detail here about the email campaigns and how they performed so the great thing is too with the mailchip you can link it with Google analytics you can link it with e-commerce okay okay so if you have an email and you're you're

selling products and somebody purchased that product MailChimp is able to integrate in with your shopping Commerce platform for example woo Commerce so if somebody did purchase you can send out that thank you email MailChimp even goes a step further and if somebody did click on a link go to your shopping cart add something to the shopping cart and then abandon the C you know mailchip allows you the opportunity to retarget them via email so MailChimp is flexible and that's what you want in a email marketing platform you want something that's flexible that you can cater

to your audience you can manage your audience list and you can get detailed reporting on your different campaigns for that audience so that's MailChimp in summary and so most email platforms do a lot of the similar features or have some of the similar features but that's what you ideally want to look for in an email marketing platform so here's a tool that doesn't get talked about enough when it comes to email marketing and that's Google's your ra Builder and the reason why we're going to talk about this tool today is because most people in the

US use Google analytics as their web Analytics tool and the one thing about Google analytics is it allows you to track different campaigns so if you're doing pay-per-click campaigns outside of Google you can certainly track the performance right in Google analytics and email is no different so if you're using Google analytics and you're sending out an email let's just say on mailchip or any other email marketing platform you want to be able to append your links with what we call UTM tracking so for example if I have a URL that says visit Florida and I'm

going to send out an email I have up to five parameters that I can use okay so here's my email or URL that I'm using in the email so I have up to five parameters that I can use to track this particular email so let's go through some of those parameters so the first one is campaign source so what's the source of the campaign well we could certainly identify MailChimp if we're using mail champ as the source now the the thing about the URL Builder you always want to use lower k case because Google analytics

is case sensitive so as a rule of thumb just stick with a lower case so our source is going to be MailChimp cuz that's the platform we're using if you're using you know Constant Contact or vertical response or you know some of these other one convert kit then go ahead and put in that platform as the source now for the medium which is the means in which we're driving traffic to the site let's go ahead and put in email because that's what we're using a drive traffic to this particular page now what's the campaign name

well we're in summer so we're going to call this the summer promo so the summer promo here is visit Florida beaches okay so we're going to send this email out to the masses and particularly not only the masses but the masses in the north because we're going to say hey look come to Florida for the summer come visit our beaches that's the point of the campaign so that's what we're going to use for the campaign name is whatever the campaign is it's a summer promo now notice I got an asteris next to these particular parameters

so Google's asking us hey these are mandatory so go ahead and put something in there now for campaign term and campaign content we could certainly leave them blank because they're not mandatory but since we're talking about email I would certainly recommend that you use the campaign content parameter and why do I say that because if we're sending an email out to say you have 10,000 recipients I want to be able to split out the email into two segments one segment that's going to get subject line one and one segment that's going to get subject line

two so in this case I'm going to put whatever subject line one is in the campaign content field so now I have four parameters and once I've entered in my variables in those parameter Fields I now have a revised or pended your URL so my original URL was visit florida.com USFA bees. HTML my original URL I've now appended that with some UTM parameters and now I see my original URL appended with the UTM parameters based on those variables so I can copy it just by clicking the copy URL I can go to my browser I

can paste that URL in there and I want to check to see if it works so here I could see this particular page loaded Florida beaches with my UTM parameters appended to the URL so that's for the first subject line that's for the audience that's going to get the first subject line I want to do another one for the second subject line so now I'm going to change my campaign content parameter to subject Line2 I'm going to copy that URL I'm going to check it okay so I can see that the page loads with those

UTM parameters and so now what I'm going to do I'm going to use the first URL and the second URL in my email okay so any link that I have in this case I'm using subject line two so for the email with the second subject line going to that segmented audience this is the link I'm going to use in the email so if you have one or two or three links in the email this is the URL you're going to use because when somebody clicks on that link you're going to be able to see that

that click in Google analytics so if I jump over to Google analytics after I sent out my email I'm going to go to acquisition I'm going to go to campaigns I'm going to go to all campaigns now based on the variables I put into my parameters meaning Source medium campaign name content or term that's what I'm going to look for in Google analytics so we could start with source and medium so if I click on source and medium as my primary Dimension here I can see MailChimp and the actual date was used as part of

the variable for for source and then I what can I see the medium being email so now I can see for this email that was sent out in mail champ in May I could see how many users how many sessions and more importantly how many conversions so we could certainly hone in on that particular email if we wanted to if we choose some of the other parameters available to us so here I could see the campaign name okay so I can see exactly what campaign what source what email drove in traffic and conversions and if

I'm doing subject line testing I can choose content as my parameter so here here I'm going to change it to content and now I can see the subject lines in this case if I go back to my source medium I'm going to be able to see what subject lines from my emails generated the most traffic and not only the most traffic but also conversions so that's the whole point behind using the URL Builder again you're taking a URL that you're going to use an email and then you're going to pan that URL with different parameters

campaign Source campaign medium campaign name and then optionally campaign content or campaign term okay once you've entered variables into those parameters you're going to get an appended URL which you can then use in your email so when the email gets sent you're going to go back over to Google analytics and you're going to look at the results of that campaign of that source of that medium of that content IE subject line and so that's why the URL build is so important because MailChimp gives us some good insight as to how the email performed in terms

of open and click rates but what we really want to see is how that campaign performed once it drove traffic to my website so that's the whole idea behind the URL Builder you're using Google analytics you'll be able to use the URL Builder with whatever email platform you're using so let's move on to web analytics tools and this is an important section because web analytics TOS kind of the central focal point of all digital marketing and it starts really with Google analytics Google analytics is a premium meaning that they have a free version that you

can use there is also a paid version of Google analytics but given the Advent of Google popularity especially in the United States a majority of users are using the free version of Google analytics so it's a very popular tool especially for marketers but there are also other tools available so it's not just Google so we have Adobe analytics which is also fremium you have kiss metrics you have spring metric you have YouTube analytics which is part of Google but YouTube has its own separate anal analytics insights so a lot of these as you can see

are free to use they're available no reason why you should not be using uh an Analytics tool to measure your marketing campaigns or website behavior and why would we want to use these tools again well again we want to really measure Behavior we want to measure what's going on with our website so we want to be able to identify the location of where our website visitors are coming from from and a lot of these analytics tools use IP address to identify the location of a website visitor so if you're trying to Target a specific country

then you want to be able to see that the visitors to your website are coming from that specific country or location we also want to measure the engagement of our website Behavior so we get traffic to the website what are they doing how long are they staying what pages are they visiting so this is the overall nature of really why we want to use web an Linux to to measure how successful our website is at treating our website visitors with the same courtesy you would if you had a brick and mortar store somebody comes into

your store you want them to find what they're looking for quickly you want them to be happy with their experience you certainly want them to pay for the products very quickly and easily and efficiently and you want them to come back and that's no different than a website so we want our website to perform in a manner that's going to suit our audience and that's why we want to track engagement so why else well we want to really look at who's coming are they returning visitors or new visitors you know ideally you want a nice

mix between 50% new and 50% returning because you know returning visitors are loyal there's some loyalty to that they already know your brand they're coming back to your website new visitors are curious and you want want new visitors cuz that means more traffic so you want a nice balance between that analytics tools will help you measure that you want to be able to measure organic traffic whether you like it or not whether you know it or not but Google and other search engines or index in your pages and your pages are being found via the

search engines and so you want to be able to measure how much traffic you're actually generating from those search engines we talked about this with email marketing UTM tracking so if you set up email campaigns or non gooogle campaigns you want to use UTM tracking and Google analytics and other analytics tools but specifically Google analytics will help you see the results of your campaigns if they're tracked with UTM tracking so that's another good reason why to use a a web Analytics tool probably most importantly amongst all these bullet points is our goals our website conversions

we want to be able to see how much traffic is coming to our website and not only the engagement of the traffic but how much of that traffic is actually doing what we want them to do I.E are they converting and we want to optimize our sites and channels performance so the whole idea of collecting all this information is that you can turn around and improve performance so if your bounce rate is high well how do you lower bounce rate well we need to do something about that and analytics tools will help help us identify

what's not working from our site perspective and from a channel perspective and we can take action to improve performance so that's the whole idea behind optimizing our sit's performance so let's jump into Google analytics and let's take a look at everything we just talked about in those bullet points so about improving website performance measuring engagement looking at our goals and conversions measuring campaigns with UTM tracking all all those good things that we can get in a good Analytics tool so Adobe mix panel spring metrics you know they all work in a similar fashion in that

they're really measuring website behavior and so if we're in Google analytics really what we're doing is we're measuring the performance of our website broken down into four components audience acquisition behavior and conversions so what do we want to do well we want to look into each one of these sections so let's start with audience and so audience in Google analytics tells us who is coming to our website now they're not going to specifically tell us hey Rob Sanders came to your website but they are going to say that somebody from San Francisco California came to

the website and these are the pages they looked at and this is the language and they came from this device and they're a returning user so they're painting a picture for you okay so they're not giving you a list of names that would not be legal but they are providing you with a good picture of who is coming and when I say picture we have to paint that picture and so if we look at say demographics for example and I got a demographics overview here's a picture I'm painting well I can see that 25 to

34 year old are the majority of the age group that is coming to my website okay I can see on the gender side of it I can see that 63% of my traffic and again this is year to date that I'm looking at is coming to my website so 2/3 of my traffic is female 1/3 male and they're between the ages of 25 and 34 so I'm painting a picture about you know gender and age coming to my website well I can also look at Geo so where specifically might these people be coming from so

if I go to under go I'm going to be able to see a breakdown of country or I can even hone it down to city or specific location and here I can see United States is the primary driver but not by much so we have 16 almost 177% from the US and then 16% from Argentina 133% from Mexico 10% from India so we have a nice mix of traffic from different locations in the world coming to our website so that's Gio but more importantly let's take a look at mobile so if we go to mobile

overview how are people coming to our website are they on a desktop or laptop are they using their mobile device are they using a tablet and so Google analytics breaks it down very nice for you and so we could see percentages and actual numbers by device category and so in this case I can see year to date I can see 62% % are coming from desktop 35% are coming from mobile and so that's important because most people start their Journey from mobile and that is growing and that's going to continue to grow so you want

to keep an eye on mobile so to me this is one of the more important reports under audience because people who come from Mobile have a different not only experience because the website should be responsive to the mobile device but their mindset is going to be different they're actively looking for something they're probably going to either then follow up on their desktop or follow up in person at your store or they're probably looking for directions or they may just call you so the experience is a lot different on mobile so we want to hone in

on the growth of mobile okay so to me this is one of the more important reports in Google analytics especially under audience so let's move on to acquisition so acquisition reporting tells us how the traffic was driven to the website so if audience tells us who is coming to the website acquisition tells us how that traffic got to the website and so really what you want to do is get a sense of what channels what marketing channels are driving traffic so remember we talked about organic search well those search engines are indexing your pages well

how much of that traffic from the search engines is actually coming to your site and I'm a Believer in if organic search is the primary driver of traffic then you have a pretty healthy website because that means the search engines are indexing your pages people are searching for something related to your business you're being found you're getting clicked and that represents a majority of the traffic so that's always a good thing so here we could see it broken down by Channel if I go to all traffic channels report I can see in my Dimension that

organic search represents 72% of my traffic and this is year to date then I can see paid search then I can see direct which means Somebody went directly to the site I can see referral email social then I can see more paid search broken out so these are the different marketing channels now analytics allows you to look at a specific source and medium so the source would be the actual website or search engine in the medium would differentiate how that traffic actually got to the site so if we're talking about a search engine did they

come to the site via paid search or did they come to the site via organic search and so all we need to do is change our primary Dimension from default Channel grouping to source of medium and we can see specifically the breakout of the different sources and mediums driving traffic to the site so here I can see Google organic at 71% and then Google CPC or C per click at 15 16% of our traffic so then I can look down I could see email in here being organic I could see some referring sites I could

see some social in terms of mobile Facebook okay so we could see a mix of the different sources of mediums driving traffic to the site okay so you don't always have to look at Channel per se you can look at it via source and medium and if you're running Google ads under acquisition analytics has a whole section of Google ads reporting so if you're running campaigns on Google ads remember we looked at the Keyword Planner in Google ads so if you're running campaigns on Google ads you can certainly see the performance of those campaigns just

by clicking on campaigns we can also see campaigns other campaigns that we're running so remember the UTM tracking that we set up for email well we want to be able to track the performance of email and any other non gooogle campaign with UTM tracking so when we do that we'll be able to go to campaigns all campaigns and we'll be able to see the campaign performance if we look at source and medium we'll be able to see what campaigns drove traffic to the website so here I can see vertical response email as a driver of

traffic so that's the campaign reporting and then also if you have search console so we looked at search console earlier when we talked about SEO tools well remember I said you can link up search console with Google analytics well here's search console and we could see queries devices landing pages countries so all the performance metrics that we could see in search console because we have it linked up with analytics we could see it right here so this gives us a nice snapshot of what keywords are driving traffic to the site organically I could see The

Impressions I could see the clicks then I can see the click theay and then the average position so in theory the higher something ranks the more traffic you're going to get so that's the idea behind it we want to make sure that we're ranking for our coveted keywords and if we are we want to be able to measure how many times our listing was seen and how many times it was clicked so that's the great thing about you know Google they have a family of products and those products tend to talk to one another in

the form of Google search console and Google ads you can connect them directly to Google analytics so let's move from acquisition to behavior so here in Behavior we have a number of different reports so Behavior tells us once the traffic actually arrived at the website how are they behaving and so really what I would do is from there go to site content all pages and so this gives us an idea of how many pages were actually viewed so site content all pages tells us what page and how many times it was viewed during a period

of time and again we're looking at year-to dat so I can see engagement related metrics associated with a page so this particular page here on line one I could see how many pag P Unique page use which is equal to sessions so I can have a session come to the website and look at a page multiple times in that session I could see the average time the person has spent on a page and I can also see the balance rate so a balance rate indicates that they arrived on the page and didn't go any further

they left the website from that page that they arrived on and so I can also see percentage of exits meaning what page did people exit the site from so these are all engagement related metrics so here is where I want to react and optimize my website performance so I if I see a page not performing well meaning it has a high balce rate or maybe low time on page then I'm probably going to optimize it meaning test it or change it to improve performance so these are all pages but I could certainly look at landing

pages okay so landing pages tells us the behavior of the page when somebody landed on it so a landing page means that somebody came from organic search or Page search or another Channel landed on this page so here I could see this particular page on line one had 4,970 sessions okay and I can also see the performance of that page so measuring engagements against pages is definitely important because page isn't performing in terms of bounce rate or time on page then we want to be able to make changes to that page to improve performance okay

there are some other great reports under Behavior so we want to go to sight speed we want to look at how fast or how slow our Pages load so this is important from an SEO perspective because if a page isn't loading very fast then chances of it getting ranked in Google are not very good so Google's organic sech search basically takes page load time seriously so if a page doesn't load very fast then we need to be able to fix it so we can go to page timings I can get a good sense of the

average page low time of a particular page and what Google does here is under speed suggestions they actually will give me some ideas and speed suggestions on how to address a page that's loading very slow and so when we load up the speed suest suggestion report what Google does is say hey we know that this page is loading very slow the average page load time is 15 seconds here's some suggestions we're going to give you seven suggestions so if you click on that what's actually going to happen is you're going to go to another tool

called page speed insights and Page speed insights is analyzing the page as you could see here and when it's done analyzing the page it's going to give you some feedback on how to improve page load performance not only for desktop but for mobile so here I can see if I scroll down this is desktop and these are some of the opportunities that I can address when trying to improve the page load time of that particular page so here I could see there's some server response time issues image sizes probably need to be resized I can

remove unused CSS okay so there are a lot of different things I can do to improve the page lad time on this particular page okay this is for desktop I can also see mobile so mobile a lot of the same issues so if we address these these opportunities then we could see a lift in page low time when you see a lift in page low time we're going to probably see a lift in organic rankings or even user engagement because if a page takes a long time to load a user is probably not going to

stay on that page very long so to me sight speed is an important report under Behavior now one more report here that I want to point out under behavior is events and to me events are important so if you're trying to measure engagement on your website you need to make sure you have event tracking set up and when we talk about event tracking we're talking about measuring things that analytics doesn't measure by default so if you have a button on your website if you have a PDF download if you have a submit button on a

form submission if you have a subscribe button if you have a video if you have an external link anything that is going to trigger engagement on your website you need to measure with event tracking and event tracking is simply set up by breaking out the event into a category an action and a label and so here we could see for our particular website we have Cate C is already set up for event tracking so here for example I can see on line six video I can see how many people actually watched our video okay so

here's the action video Start okay so over this period of time I could see I had 49 unique events 50 total so that's how many people actually watched the video and you can always revert to label and that'll tell you what page people watched in this case the video so event tracking is important because we want to be able to measure engagement so if you go to events under behavior and you don't see any events listed you probably need to get that set up and that is set up through Google tag manager so what you

want to do is you want to be able to set up your events through Google tag manager which is another Google platform but you certainly want to do that so that's where you set up your events when you set up your events for your website with a category and action and label you'll be able to measure those events in analytics under Behavior under events and the important thing here is you'll be able to measure engagement so I'll be able to see how many people came to the site and how many people clicked on a button

downloaded a PDF uh submitted a form uh played a video did whatever we wanted them to do so events are important so let's move from Behavior to conversions and this is important because we want to be able to measure conversions on a website so analytics has four types of conversions so if I go to admin down at the bottom and then I go to goals I could see that I have four different types of goals that I can use now right now I have event related goals setup for the website for this particular website so

we just talked about event tracking so if you're measuring a button click on your website you can certainly turn that into a goal and so all you need to do is tell analytics hey this is the particular category this is the particular action so for example if I click on this particular goal and take a look at it I can see that we have a category set up that anything that resembles donate now okay or donate go ahead and fire this event as a conversion okay so event is one type of goal another type of

goal is destination so if somebody goes to a specific page like a confirmation page we can turn that into a goal so here I could see if somebody goes to donation dasc confirmation then analytics is going to fire that goal as a conversion and we're going to see a conversion against a different metric or different dimension like Channel or audience okay so destination is the second type of goal the third type of goal is duration so how long did somebody stay on my website so in this example if they stayed at least 1 minute and

30 seconds or more then analytics is going to count that as a goal conversion okay so duration is the third type and then the fourth type is pages per session okay so if I look at this example here if a user came to my website and looked at more than three pages in that particular session then analytics is going to fire a goal conversion so four types of goals you don't have to set up all four different types my recommendation is at least to have one goal set up if you're not sure what goal to

set up then at least set up a duration or pages per session okay so at least you can measure how long somebody stays on your website or how many pages they went to okay so when you actually do have these goals set up you can go back into conversions we can go back into goals we can go back into overview and we can measure our goal completions over this period of time so here I can see 313 goal completions total with a goal conversion rate of 1.88% and then I can see it broken down by

go type so remember the only goals I have available and set up are event related goals so 69 newsletter signups 156 donate click buttons I have 32 contact form submissions 37 email click completions and then 11 phone number click completions so I can measure engagement as a goal and so goals generally are important to the business so you want to make sure that if you have a goal for your website then you want to be able to set that up as a goal in Google analytics so that way when you're looking at example channels if

I go back to my channels report I can then measure Channel by goal conversion so these are all goals but if I want to look at for example how many people from organic search clicked on the Donate Now button I could see that I could see year-to dat 10,880 seven users which meant 11,000 sessions 76 clicked on that donate Now button and that's comes out to 65% conversion rate okay so that's important so you want to be able to measure any Dimension whether that be Channel Source medium keyword campaign mobile device could be demographic uh

gender or age you want to be able to measure any dimension against the goals you have set up so you can measure performance and that also includes Pages or landing pages as well so that's a quick overview of what you can expect to see in Google analytics again audience acquisition behavior and conversions there a lot of data in Google analytics but you want to be able to take advantage of the data in order to improve website performance now let's jump over to YouTube analytics because if you have videos on YouTube if you have a channel

set up some playlist you'll be able to get some really good insights as to how your videos performing and so here I could see I'm in YouTube all I did was I went to my account then I went to the beta the studio version of YouTube and then from there I went to analytics so my account YouTube Studio analytics and analytics here is going to give me all sorts of information about my videos okay so here I can see over the last 28 days my videos produced over 8,600 views my watch time in minutes totaled

over 177,000 and I've netted 48 subscribers and this is an overall okay so I can actually see when I publish videos and I can see the date they were published and here I'm looking at you know total views over this particular date range I can also see specifics on a particular video so I could see the top video in terms of minutes here I could see this particular video had 602 minutes over the last 28 days so here I could see views on a particular video so this is just an overview I could certainly look

at some other information if I click on reach viewers I can see the total impression so how many times my video was viewed or how many people looked at it okay and then the click theough rate so here I can see the different traffic sources so 29% came externally okay here I can see 25% came within YouTube itself I could see how many times a video was viewed and played via playlist via suggested videos so I could see different ways in which the traffic found my video and actually watched it here I can see externally

how people were able to find my videos and I could see 46% found it via Google search see some lots of information here uh about sources of traffic how the traffic got to these videos so I could see then once the traffic found my videos how many times they actually saw it and viewed it and then watched it so that's how many times I was able to reach viewers via different sources and then their reaction to that how many times they saw it and watched it here I can click on interest viewers so again I

can see the top videos in terms of watch time I could see the top playlist so here I could see my partner playlist with the top playlist so I can see some interest here in terms of average view duration and then here we have build an audience so we can look at specific audiences if we have them built in YouTube to see how many people actually watch my videos so here I can see 88% of the people who watched my videos over the last 28 days were not even subscribed so that tells me a lot

of people are finding my videos spending some time watching them but they're not subscribe so we're trying to get them to subscribe to our channel so they can watch more so a lot of information here in YouTube itself about how our videos performed again this is good Insight because ideally what you want to do is you really want to take a look at a specific video see how it's performing so if I just click on one particular video I can actually see the audience retention over the course of the video itself I could see the

ways in which people found the video okay again externally or via YouTube search I could see how many people liked it or disliked it I could see all sorts of information on a particular video itself or an overview of my channel so that's all available to you in YouTube analytics under YouTube studio so take advantage that so if you're publishing videos on a regular basis you want to cone in on how your videos are performing so if you have any additional questions about YouTube analytics or YouTube in general take a look at our video that

we created earlier this year about how to create a YouTube channel we go into some indepth insights into YouTube itself especially YouTube analytics so take a look at that video and if you have any other insights about YouTube analytics or analytics in general go ahead and put a comment below this video so let's turn our attention to competitor spine tools very important to keep tabs on what the competition's doing and there are a lot of tools out there so when it comes to social we can use a premium tool like Sprout social to listen in

on our comp comp itors we can use another freemium tool social blade there's a popular tool out there called spyfu that's freemium as well MZ we looked at Moz earlier for keyword organic Moz is a great tool for also leveraging our competitors in terms of backlinks and Buzz Sumo so that's another freemium tool get there are lots of tools out there these are just examples of some of the tools that we use here at simply learn I use personally and profession to get a sense of what our competition's doing so why would we want to

use a competitor spy tool well it may sound like a very straightforward question but there are lots of reasons why and so let's look at some of these reasons and the first reasons we really want to identify you know our competitor's backlinks and monitor changes in their ranking so the reason why we have this is the top bullet point is because SEO organic search is a long-term strategy on page off page website very technical and creative there's a lot going on with SEO a lot going on and sometimes it takes a long time to rank

for something and a lot of SEO does depend on relevancy relevancy being how many quality back links are linked to you so it's always good to leverage what your competitors are doing so you can see how you stack up and so that's why this is up there as number one we want to be able to really take a look at what our competitors are doing another example would be hey how much uh traffic a competitor is gaining on certain keywords this could go either way for paid search organic search what are competitors bidding on are

they really getting traffic from those keywords so there are tools out there that help us leverage what our competition's doing okay we can also identify our competitors top performing content for Relevant topics okay we can determine what our competitor's website refer PE traffic is okay we can pull our competitor's data and compare it with our own campaigns so lots of tools out there to help you do this and we may want to track the total amount of clicks a competitor receives and how much they pay for each keyword so let's go and take a look

at a few examples how we can leverage all these bullet points that we just discussed and so we're going to start out with Sprout social and Sprout social is a tool I use it's a social media platform there's a lot of things you can do with Sprout social definitely generate reports for your social media platforms you could set up post that get published at a certain time and day but there's also one particular tool in here called listening and so what we could do is we just put in for example RV rentals in Twitter so

what we're doing is we're actually listening to see who else is tweeting about RV rentals so we could do this for Twitter we could do it Facebook some other social media platforms the whole idea here on Sprout social is to get a sense of what our competitors are doing so we could have easily put in a brand name we're just going General here because we want to rank for the keyword RV rentals and so here we could take a look at you know what some of these particular brands are doing like go RV rentals Cruise

America RV we could see just scroll down and we can get a sense of in particular what people are tweeting about what other companies are tweeting when it comes to this particular keyword RV rentals now if I want to hone in on a particular competitor I could just really refine my search for that competitor's brand name so RV share so here I can take a look at you know what they're doing when they're posting TW or tweeting how long ago the time of day get an idea of what they're actually saying what campaigns they're promoting

okay I can get a sense of everything about this tweet and so here I can scroll down and I can see what's been shared by other people for this particular brand and I can see a lot of people are as an example retweeting this particular giveaway and so to me it just gives me a sense in this particular example on Twitter as to what are competitors doing okay let's turn our attention to SEO so remember at first bullet point we want to get a sense of what our competitors are doing doing when it comes to

backlinks and so Moz has a great tool called link Explorer and Link Explorer there allows us to actually compare link profiles so for my domain I can go ahead and put my competitor's domains in there and definitely get a sense of you know how many links my competitors have external in internal I can get a sense of the domain Authority I can get a sense of page Authority linking domains so I can really do a a comparison across my domain and my competitor's domains to get a snapshot of how I compare against my competitors so

this gives me an overview of everything I need to know organically now Moz also has another great tool under link Explorer called link intersect and I like link intersect I use it a lot because if our competitors really have a number of external links and domains pointing to their site and they have a better domain Authority and Page Authority then you know I want to be able to you know see what they're doing where they're linking who's linking to them I want to get be able to get a snapshot of why is their domain so

much better than ours in terms of authority and so the link intersect actually allows me to do that so I can go ahead and put my competitor's domains in there and then I can find Opportunities and so you just click on opportunities and you could see where my site intersects with their site and if it doesn't actually intersect then I have an opportunity to actually try and get a link on that particular site so that's what the link intersect report does it allows me to see where my links intersect with my competitors and if it

doesn't intersect then I have an opportunity to generate a back link so that's ideally what the L link intersect tool is in mod it allows me to really get a sense of you know where I'm linking and where my competitor is linking now what we can also do is also take advantage of another report under moz's link Explorer and the discovered and lost report so we could put in our domain or we can put even our competitor's domain in there and we can get a sense of what domains were found and linked to them so

really within mods we can get a good snapshot of what web sites are linking to our competitors we get a good snapshot of the overall links to our competitor sites and specifically what sites so the whole idea is if it's good for our competitors meaning they're linking from a site that has good domain Authority and low spam score then it's probably a site I want to be able to tackle as well okay so you have discovered and lost okay you have comparing link profiles and you have link intersect so those are three good reports you

can leverage right in mz's link Explorer tool now there's one more report we can leverage in MZ and that's the inbound links report and so we can go ahead and type in our competitor's domain here and again we can get a snapshot of what their domain Authority is Page Authority for the homepage but really this is what we're after linking domain so this particular domain has over 9,000 linking domains so what we can do is actually go through and see BAS based on domain Authority I could sort by domain Authority where these pages are being

linked from and so here I can see reddit reddit reddit so a lot of Reddit here which is a good site for backlinking New York Times so you know there's a lot of different uh sites here Washington Post so I can get a good snapshot of my competitor by seeing every link that's pointing to them now of course I don't want to go through 9,000 links I can really just tone in on a specific link Source or link type or link state so I can really filter it if I wanted to I can export the

report and do some further analysis but really the whole idea here as I can see what URL is linking to this particular competitor site what the anchor text is what the page and domain Authority is so this gives me a really really good Insight on all the backlinking that my competitor has and again if I'm trying to catch my competitor it's probably not a bad idea to look at what they're doing and even copy what they're doing in terms of backlinking so if we're not on Reddit then we probably need to be on Reddit because

if that's where our competitor is and they're getting good link juice from Reddit which has a domain authority of 90 then hey if it's good for the goose it's good for the gander so they say so inbound links is just another good report you can leverage in MZ under the link Explorer reporting tool now if I want to get a good snapshot as to what my competitor is doing on search exactly well look no further than spy Fu so spyfu is a another tool that you can leverage from a PPC SEO perspective you know from

an SEO perspective you got some backlinking data as well just like you did in Moz from a PPC perspective you can get some good keyword insights and so here I just went ahead and typed in the domain and what this is going to do is just give me an overall snapshot for my competitor's domain so here I could see you know how many organic keywords they're found for the estimated monthly SEO clicks they're getting based on the volume of those keywords okay I can see here the keywords their top competitors also rank for the rank

history 12 years so this particular domain's been around a long time okay so that's on the organic side I can flip over to the paid side and I can see that there are doing paid search I could see 5,000 plus keywords they're bidding on he based on that what they're actually paying and then I could see you know some of the other competitors listed here from a paid perspective and an organic perspective I could see the shared keyword overlap and now again you can pay for this cuz it's premium and get some really good insights

as to how your domain compares to your competitors so I'm using the free version and here the free version spy fu is just giving me some overall data on the specific domain I entered in and so I entered in my competitors you can certainly enter in your own domain to get a sense of organic keywords and paid keywords so you can see top keywords top paid keywords okay this is Google ads okay so this is what recommendations as to what to purchase okay here you can see some even some Google ads history I could see

exactly what ad copy my competitor actually wrote and for what keyword and then I can see some organic ranking history here as I keep scrolling down this overview report so I can see for RV rent where they rank and then I can see inbound links just like I did in mods spy fu is providing me with some insight as to hey what links are pointing to them and what the domain strength is and how many clicks they expect to receive so this is all free data take or leave it but it's all free data available

to you under spy so spyfu gives you kind of an overview for free some really in-depth analysis if you actually pay for it and it just really hones in on what your competitors are bidding for paid wise and what they're ranking for organic wise and so spy fu is a really good tool to leverage if you just want to get a snapshot of how your competitor uh overlaps with you so let's turn our attention to Google Analytics because in Google analytics under audience I can go to benchmarking and basically the benchmarking reports allows me to

see what the industry as a whole is doing compared to my own website now the cavat here on this particular report is that it's all Anonymous data so I can't exactly see what competitor is doing what in this report but if I hone in on my industry in this case Auto and vehicles and I hone in on a specific country or adjust the size of the daily sessions that I get then I can see hey analytics in this case in this example is sharing 8,863 web properties okay so they're sharing the data for over 8,000

web properties and I can compare those web properties against my own so we're all in the same industry it gives me a sense here as to how I stack up against the industry as a whole in this case as it pertains to channels so you can see here red not good green is good so in the industry we're not doing as good as others in the same industry who are receiving the same amount of sessions now we could certainly adjust and we can adjust our local and if we do that Google's going to be able

to adjust how many web properties are actually contributing to the report and so so when analytics makes that adjustment we're going to be able to see in this case just New Zealand so we're going to adjust for New Zealand and we're going to go with 4,999 and so we could see there are about you know 300 something web properties contributing 47 web properties now contributing to this report so if we're focused on the New Zealand region and this is the amount of traffic we get we're now comparing us against 47 other Anonymous web properties so

now if I go back to the report after I've honed in I'm looking at channels and I could see how many sessions we're getting by channels and how I compare against the competition I can also measure up against percentage of new sessions new users pages per session average session duration bounce rate but that's just channels I can also do location and devices so the whole idea behind this report is yes you're not honing in on a particular particular competitor but you're honing in on your industry so you're getting a good idea as to how you

comper against your industry just by making some adjustments in the benchmarking report you obviously want to make sure you're looking at the same industry adjust for your country or region adjust for the site size meaning how many sessions you actually get on a daily basis and then analytics will do the rest they'll compare you against those in your industry and so I find this to be good tool because it allows me to stack up our site against those in the industry and obviously if we're not driving as many sessions especially say from organic then we

have our work cut out for us okay so that's the whole idea behind the benchmarking report now if you want to get some good insight as to what the competitors are doing and you don't want to use a tool well look no further you can always go to google.com Okay so this is how we used to do it back in the day before all these tools became available you just typed in a keyword and we're going to type in RV rentals and now we're going to be able to see who's bidding on that keyword so

we could see we have a number of different uh companies bidding on the keyword we're interested in okay here I can see some featured Snippets okay and then I can see some organic search results okay if I scroll down I'll be able to see some other companies bidding on that sinky word meaning they're paying for RV rentals so if I clicked on somebody's link here they're actually going to pay Google for the click and so this just gives me a good sense of you know how many people are actually trying to rank for this keyword

or trying to be found for this keyword so that's all I did I just did a search now from an organic perspective if you really want to hone in on your competition you can always do the syntax all and title colon and then hit enter so now I could see I have have 163,000 results and what does that tell me that tells me that I have 163,000 websites with RV rentals in the title tag so if you're trying to optimize for the keyword RV rentals as an example then you know that you have 163,000 different

listings ahead of you that you need to jump over in order to rank for the keyword RV rentals so using the All entitle syntax and the keyword right after that actually just gives you a more accurate picture of how many sites are actually ahead of you for particular keyword so that's the whole idea so if I get rid of the syntax and you can see for RV rentals I have 132 million but that's not really accurate because not all these listings have the keyword RV rentals in the title Tag and Title tag if you're working

on organic search is one of the key important factors for ranking so you need to have that keyword in the title tag so that's the whole idea behind using the All and title syntax it gives us a good idea as to what our competition's doing and how many sites we have to jump over to get to number one on Google Now if you're running Google ads just as we did with RV rentals we went up there and we saw we typed that in as a query and we saw how many advertisers there were for RV

rentals now if we are running our own campaigns Google ads actually has a good report that I really like it's called auction insights and so you can get to auction insights just by clicking on campaigns and then from campaigns click on auction insights and what auction insights allows us to see is what competitors or domains are bidding on the same keywords we are and so what Google does here is it allows us to actually see where we stack up against our competition for all the keywords we're bidding on and so here I'm looking at year

to date and here we can see us and I can see our competitors okay so I can see impression share so for if we're talking about one key word every key word has 100% impression share how much of that impression share are you getting and when we say impression share meaning eyeballs when we talk about eyeballs are we getting a majority of the eyeballs or are competitors getting majority of the eyeballs so we can see our average position I can see how often I overlap with my competitors okay I can see how often I'm above

a particular competitor I could see what percentage I'm at the top of the page versus my competitors the absolute top of page rate and then I can see how often I outrank my competitors and vice versa how often my competitors outrank me so I can see all this good insight as to what competitors are bidding on the same keywords I am okay so this is if you're running Google ads okay so if you're running Google ads okay you can just click on the auction insights report you can find that the top navigation just by clicking

on campaigns and by doing so you'll be able to gain some insights as to where you stack up from a paid search perspective against your competitors so let's turn our attention to paid marketing tools so if you're doing some advertising on Google B LinkedIn you probably want to work within those platforms as the tool of choice so you know if you're doing PID search on say Google search.com or display you could be doing display advertising on you know a network like ad roll or Google or you could be doing social media paid ads say on

Facebook so whatever it is you're doing you probably want to work within that platform itself to get the ideal data that you need okay so here are some of the tools some of the places you can go of course if you work in Google ads you also have Google ads editor that you can leverage okay and I'll show you that in a couple minutes you have Google ads Keyword Planner of course both of these are paid if you're running campaigns okay so Bing if you're running campaigns on Bing okay you get all this good data

that you can digest through some reporting okay you also have some third party tools out there that you also have to pay for in word stream Okay so word streams a thirdparty tool that you can leverage Bing and Google are actual advertising Network so you would advertise on the platform itself and get all the data you need right in the platform and leverage a lot of the tools that they have available in the platform as I mentioned you could also use Google ads editor uh so Bing also has their own editor as well so and

as well as Facebook so you can use an editor type version and I'll sh that here in a couple minutes but let's talk about why we want to use the tools in the platform itself well we want to be able to monitor how our ads performing so which ad receives the most traffic as an example we want to identify keywords that are performing for us okay so are keywords converting not converting are they cost us a lot of money and not netting a high enough return for us so we want to keep an eye on

that okay so we want to monitor our cost okay across different locations and devices not only cost but we want to also monitor how our ads are performing across different locations and devices keywords across different locations and devices so we want to be able to measure by device okay so we also want to analyze competitor's data and as we showed you in the competitor section Google as an example has auction insights reporting analytics has benchmarking so Google itself does provide some information in the case of auction insights as to how uh your competitors are performing

against you on Google search so that's on the paid search side then you have display okay so display advertisements okay you're across a different network so they're different types of networks out there for example ad roll okay you have ctio SRA is another paid vers version of or paid tool you can use in wide orbit so these are some of the paid marketing tools you can leverage of course I like to stay if I'm advertising on Google I like to stay uh in Google ads and measure my display performance that way but if you're on

ad roll for example then you want to leverage ad rolls reporting platform and some of the tools they have to offer so if we look at display why do we want to leverage some of these tools well just like search for example where we want to look at keyword and AD performance same kind of concept here we want to be able to monitor whether we have the right keywords and right customer engagement so when when it comes to display we want to be able to make sure we're choosing the right audience of course that means

looking at not only audience insights but our Target insights as well are we reaching the Right audience when it comes to display and Google has a good breakdown that I'm going to be able to show you here in a couple minutes okay so we want to improve our campaigns by monitoring our competitor's display ads as well so there are tools available that'll help you do that and that's on the display side and if we look at Social okay why what tools can we use on social well you got Facebook ads manager okay you got ad

espresso qu tweey you got all these cool paid search tools again I usually stick with where I'm advertising so so if I'm advertising on LinkedIn or Twitter I'm going to leverage that platform but just know that there are other tools available for you so with social like display it's all about targeting our audience so for these some of the tools like on Facebook we can review and relaunch or ad campaigns based on target audience we can measure conversions and gain insights in this example about Facebook users how are our users interacting with our ads and

then we want to Target People based on their activities such as purchase intent device usage travel pre preferences Etc so social allows us to do that and then with Facebook as an example we can monitor any AB test we run for example if we're running call to action test we can measure the results of that right in Facebook and I'm going to show you an example of that here shortly so let's jump right into Google ads and look at some tools available to us from the search side of the house so if we're running search

campaigns right in Google ads we could see campaign data we could see keyword data we could see ad data so for example if I want to see what ads are performing I'm just going to click on my ads and extensions okay and here are my ads and now I could see what ads are performing in terms of clicks click through rates Etc and so that way I can go ahead and pause it ads activate ads so that's right here in the Google ads uh platform itself now if I want to look at specific keywords I

can do that so I can see what keywords are driving traffic and clicks here I can just sort by clicks and now I could see not only what keywords are driving clicks I could see what the click the rate is I can see the Impressions how many people actually viewed my ad after click typing in a keyword query that I'm bidding on I could see how much I've paid by keyword and more importantly I want to be able to see conversions or conversion rate and then with Google ads you have quality score so we want

to be able to measure quality score so this is a Google ads keyword reporting and so the great thing about the keyword reporting is that there's some other features available to me here so here I can add negative keywords okay okay just by clicking on negative keywords I can also see a Search terms report and so when it comes to search terms I can actually see what specific keywords people typed in and based on the keyword that somebody typed in as a query I can see what match type triggered that particular ad and so if

I see a keyword query that I don't particularly care to be shown for or want my ad shown for then I can go ahead just select it and I can add it as a negative keyword okay so that tool is available to you right in Google ads okay and then you have the auction insights so we' reviewed the auction insights when we're looking at competitive analysis and so here if we look at the auction insights we'll be able to adjust our date range and we'll be able to see basically you know who else is bidding

on the keywords and what the impression share is what their average position is what their overlap rate is position above right top of page absolute top of page right now ranking share so once we have Google has data then they'll be able to share that information with you okay so that's just keywords but there's a cool tool that I really like and I leverage it for SEO and paperclick and that's Google's Keyword Planner so if you click on tools and then you click on Keyword Planner we'll be able to Leverage The Keyword Planner and the

whole idea behind the Keyword Planner is do we want to discover new keywords or for the keywords we have selected we can get volume and forecast on that so here let's type in a keyword mail delivery and if I click get started okay so Google's going to give me some other keyword ideas and they're going to give me what the average monthly searches are for that keyword they're going to let me know the competition they're going to give me a range in terms of how much I can expect to pay for that keyword so if

I happen to click on that keyword I can add it to a plan and then once I've added to a plan then I can go ahead and look at that plan and measure what kind of volume I'm going to get and how much I can expect to pay so now once I've added my keyword to that plan I can go ahead and see how many clicks and Impressions and costs and click the rate and average cost per click I can expect to spend so and this is based on a maximum CPC of $2 so I

can go ahead and adjust my plan accordingly if I want to in order to see basically how much I can expect to spend so that's the whole idea behind the Keyword Planner in terms of choosing new keywords and once you choose keywords you're interested in bidding on you can actually do a forecast to see exactly how much you can expect to spend how many clicks how many Impressions you can expect to get and if you have have conversions set up how many conversions you can expect to receive so that's all part of Google's keyword plan

that's viewing forecast as well as choosing keywords so there are so many different tools and features within Google ads we need a whole whole segment just on this so really I'm just going to highlight some of the more important tools and features so I mentioned the Keyword Planner I mentioned the campaigns keywords and ads reports another thing I would look at in Google ads again we mentioned this as one of our key to finding why would we use it bullet point and that's because of devices so we mentioned devices why would we use Google ads

reporting tool because we want to look at devices and we want to be able to see what devices are driving traffic from what campaign and then the cool thing about Google ads is right in Google ads platform you can go ahead and do a bit adjustment so if I increase my bid adjustment for example on mobile phones then my particular ad in this particular campaign is going to show more than on computer so I can always decrease it for example do a bit adjustment on computer and that means I'm going to show my ads less

so I can go ahead and do bid adjustments based on device that's the cool thing of working right in Google ads platform is you can make adjustments right here in the platform form based on devices well you also have locations too so we mentioned that as one of the reasons why we want to use some of these tools and if I see a particular location I'm not interested in advertising well I can always select it and I can always just pause it or remove it so or I can change the bid adjustment on a location

as well so I can make a lot of different changes right in the Google ads platform for those season in search advertising paid search advertising especially on Google ads you can always use Google ads editor all you need to do is just do a search for Google ads editor you can download it so basically what Google ads editor is it's a it's a tool it's the software that you work your C with your campaigns on locally so you're making changes to your campaigns on your computer and basically when you're done making changes you can always

upload them to Google ads to the account on Google ads in the cloud so to speak so that's the whole idea behind Google ads editor it's a great tool for you to use if you want to make household changes really quick for example I'm looking at an account with a bunch of campaigns so now if I click on one of those campaigns I could see the ad groups here okay so for example I just want to turn off all these ad groups I can just highlight them all and just click status enabled to pause and

I can rever back if I want to okay so you can make household changes so here I could see the campaign the add group level if I choose an add group then I can see some keyword and again I can make changes at nauseum here I can copy I can paste I can delete okay so I can make a lot of changes really quick right in Google ads editor and that's the whole point of editor is to go ahead and work locally while somebody else is working working locally on the same account you could both

be working simultaneously and being more efficient on getting things done in the campaign now if you are working with somebody else on the campaign you want to make sure that you get recent changes so if I say get recent changes to all campaigns what Google editor is going to do is contact Google ads in the cloud and download all those changes so here I can see the changes being downloaded in editor from Google ads and when it's done it's going to highlight all the changes that have been made and so once I'm done reviewing those

changes I can go ahead and click done and now I know I have the recent latest changes in editor so now I can go ahead and continue to make some changes and when I'm done making changes I can go ahead and post them so that's the beauty of Google ads editor Bing has a version Facebook has a version it allows you to again go at the keyword level the add group level okay you can look at ads itself and make changes to the ads okay you could do a lot of different things right an editor

in fact you could do pretty much most of what you can do in Google ads you can do in Google ads editor and so that's Google ads Editor to me I would recommend it if you're experienced with Google ads again it's software you have to download it you're going to use it on your computer as software but when you make changes all you need to do is post those changes or get recent changes that have been made on Google ads and so that's Google editor ads editor in summary now let's go back into Google ads

and talk about display advertising because display is a different network but the platform is still the same and some of the same tools are available from the search Network as well as for the Display Network writing Google ads so if I want to take a look at a campaign and AD group on the Display Network I can just click on that ad group and can look at the ads that are running for that particular ad group on the Display Network so here the difference being on the display network is you can use image ads on

the search Network you can only use text ads so here I can look at image ads and I can see how they're performing in fact you could even go a step further and use responsive display ads so Google has responsive display ads meaning it's going to respond to to what's performing best okay and so now I could see clicks Impressions click theate Etc right on on my ads and extensions report in Google ads platform now this happens to be retargeting campaign so if we click on audiences we'll be able to see what audiences we're targeting

here okay so when this report loads when you run retargeting campaigns you're targeting a specific audience and so we want to be able to see okay of the audiences we have set up what audience is performing best okay so here I can see a Breakout by audience again I could see the same metrics I could see on the search side I could see clicks Impressions click the rate more importantly I want to be able to measure conversions okay so that's the whole idea when you're in these platforms and you're paying for ads is you want

to be able to measure against conversions and you can also measure against cost per conversion conversion rate okay so those are some key metrics to measure up against whether it's audience keyword add whatever the dimension is so here on the Display Network we can get a sense of demographics okay so unlike the search Network the Display Network allows us to see demographic data and so now I could see an age breakout or an age range breakout that Google provides us and I can see again based on on the age range breakout which age range has

the most clicks Impressions Etc including conversions so you also have the opportunity on the Display Network to add keywords you have the opportunity to add topics and you have the opportunity to see placements or run placements so here if I click on where ADS have shown I can actually see where my ads have shown up for this display campaign and Google ads allows you ability to go ahead and you can exclude it from the a group or exclude a specific placement from a campaign so you could take action on a specific placement and I can

see the type of placement whether it's a mobile app whether it's a site I can go ahead and see exactly where that placement was so that's the placements report you have demographics you have audiences you have keywords you have all these different reports available to you on the Google ads platform so before we jump over to social media paid search advertising I just want to remind you we do have you know a nice tutorial on Google ads okay so take a look at the Google ads tutorial we have set up on YouTube okay if you

search for Google ads tutorial 2019 this is a good uh tutorial on everything related to Google ads so check out this video because in today's webinar we're just mentioning tools across the board and if you are advertising on Google ads as most people do then you you could see just how powerful it is and all the different features that are available so take a look at the video it's a nice complimentary video to this one this digital marketing tools and this will give you a nice in deeper insight into everything that's available on Google ads

and if you have any tools or features on Google ads whether it's the search Network or whether that's the Display Network then feel free to comment below this video happy to hear your comments about what tools and reports and features you specifically use in Google ads so let's move into uh Facebook ads manager and show you how the platform looks when you're running ads on Facebook so we can look at all the different tools and reports available here so here we could see if we're in the Facebook ads manager we could see our campaigns we

can see our adsets and we can see our ads so just like on Google ads you have less side navigation so we can drill down so if we want to see ad sets for example we could just click on ad sets that are showing up in this particular account and here we can see we have two ad sets that are live so if I click on one of these ad sets I'll be able to see an actual ad that's running here and so for the actual ad that's running I can then see the results of

that ad and how it's performing for example you know how many clicks it's received what the reach is what the impressions are so Impressions similar to Google ads how many people are actually looking at the app and then I can see the cost per click here at $1 as an example and so now I can go in and I can go ahead and look at the ad performance and go ahead and change out that ad if it's not performing to my expectation so if I click on more tools and then creatives I can just simply

click on creatives and then I can actually see the creatives I actually have running for that campaign I selected so now I can see all the creatives that are running and I can see the results of those creatives so Facebook ads manager also has uh different reporting so if I click on the reports pull down menu you could see here I could see some stand reports by ad add set age and gender and then I can see all reports here listed out by placement by placement and device time of day country Etc so if we

just look at age and gender we'll be able to get a breakout age and gender here so you can see by campaign I'm looking at all campaigns here and I'm looking at just age and gender I can certainly deselect one of these and I can look at a specific time range so now I could see who's looking at my ad specifically so here I could see 35 to 44 female I can see the reach Impressions and how often they're actually seeing my ad now this is key for Facebook because if somebody's seing your ad a

lot they're probably going to tune out to it so that's what makes the frequency metric so important on Facebook because then we can go ahead and you know turn off off that particular age and gender if we needed to and we could see how much we spent so this just gives you some idea of the type of reporting that's available in Facebook ads manager now the great thing about Facebook uh reporting an ads manager is you know I can group or ungroup uh my Dimensions if I needed to I could change the view and arrange

columns and can get rid of columns just as you would in Google ads reporting very similar stature here so I have a lot of flexibility here on how I review the reports you know you got different metrics that you can pick and choose as well okay and you got lots of different flexibility when you're looking at the reports on how your campaigns are performing now here I can pick and choose I can choose campaign adset ads objective again I can choose different demographics so I have a lot of options available to me in terms of

how I want to you know view the performance of my campaign view the performance of my adset or my ad now remember if you're in Facebook you can always go in and edit the campaign you can edit the adet remember in the adset that's where a lot of your decisions are going to be made including how you want to drive the traffic okay what your budget is okay you can basically choose your audience here so you're going to be able to choose what type of campaign it's going to be and based on that campaign you're

going to go ahead and choose the kind of audience you want to focus in on you're going to be able to choose the location the age range the gender so all of this is going to be set up in the ad set or the campaign or the ad if you go ahead and edit an ad remember you can do AB testing as well so you have a lot of different options and features available to you write an ads manager when you're managing your paid search campaigns on Facebook so if you want some more information about

all the different features and tools and Facebook ads manager check out the Facebook ads tutorial 2019 uh webinar that we did earlier this year in addition you can also look at another one that we did on Facebook called Facebook advertising tips and strategies so that should give you some sense of of everything related to Facebook ads and how to take advantage of the Facebook ads manager platform so if there's anything on social that we may have missed or that you use feel free to add a comment below the video we'd love to hear your feedback

okay let's talk about some affiliate marketing tools let's turn our attention affiliate marketing lot of filium marketing platforms out there the number one probably is Commission Junction also known as CJ they're an affiliate platform they have an fremium model meaning you can have a free trial but basically you're going to have to move on and pay for the platform likewise for house offers you have volume you really when it comes to affiliate marketing a lot of platforms out there click Inc A1 so a lot of these are Brokers per se and when I say Brokers

like for example with CJ you as a merchant or you as a publisher can get in touch with a merchant you as a merchant can get in touch with a publisher meaning CJ helps bridge the gap between you finding somebody to build your network with okay so that's what really affiliate marketing is and you need really need a platform to kind of put it all together and and a lot of lot of affiliate marketing platforms we're actually going to take a look at CJ and go through some of the features in the platform here here

shortly but let's just take a look at why we need these affiliate marketing tools well these affiliate marketing tools identify you know Affiliates influ employees other Advocates you want to partner with so again you could be on the merchant side you could be actually selling a product and you're going to want somebody to help you sell that product somebody with a website who's an influencer who drives a lot of traffic to their own site who you know does sell reputable brand Etc so you need somebody to help you introduce you to these sites okay so

CJ and some of these other marketing platforms affiliate marketing platforms do that okay so these tools are there to do the introductions the brokering the relationship so the other benefit here is you can contract with Affiliates and track the traffic and conversions well what do I mean by that well if you do use cj.com by no means my only endorsing that platform there are plenty others out there but whatever platform you use you're going to want to be able to set up terms and conditions with that particular affiliate so you could set up a terms

and conditions for say 10% off all sales as an example okay well you're going to need a platform that will help you broker that contract okay contract terms or program terms furthermore you're going to need a platform to help you track hey is this affiliate helping me drive traffic or is this affiliate driving traffic to my products and is this affiliate helping me sell so these platforms help you do just that okay so you can gain High website rankings with the help of your affiliate meaning that hey your affiliate can be promoting your product and

if they're promoting your product you have a chance to show up via paid search organic search off other websites so social so you have a lot of benefits to working with affiliate marketing in itself and the tools available will help you gain website rankings as one example we want to be able to track certain metrics okay so an affiliate Mark and you have earnings per click EPC as an example most platforms measure EPC from a 7day period to a 3month period okay you can also figure out what the actual cost per click is just like

you do on say Google search you can actually measure that in affiliate okay you want to eliminate fraudulent clicks Impressions and conversions so any affiliate platform worth its weight is going to help you understand you know how many Impressions and clicks and conversions you're getting and help you manage that in terms of fraudulent clicks or hey if you're getting a lot of Impressions and no clicks that's a problem too so these platforms are really built on helping you make man manage your relationship with the affiliate by offering up all sorts of reports and tools you

know the other big benefit here to affiliate marketing tool is hey we can influence our customers throughout their buying Journey so we could set up different promotions based on hey did somebody go to the website did somebody see our product did somebody click on our product did somebody go into the shopping cart with our product that somebody purchase our product so there's all sorts of steps in the funnel so to speak and hey you can work with an affiliate a publisher to influence your customers throughout that purchasing funnel throughout that Journey so let's go ahead

and log in here so when you log in like any other digital marketing tool any other platform you're going to have your own settings and whatnot so really the whole idea behind any affiliate marketing tool is really there to manage your Publishers who do you want as a publisher who do you want selling your product you obviously want somebody who's relevant somebody who's going to be able to sell the product somebody who has a targeted audience that's similar to yours okay so we go into cj.com we're going to log in and here you can see

a Publishers link so we're going to click on that Publishers link and remember when you sign up Publishers you have to have program terms and so if we click on Publishers program terms we're going to be able to see all the different program terms of available so here we could see the different program terms we have set up for certain Publishers so we just click on that we'll be able to see that's default program term so remember you could set up your own program term for any publisher so as a best practice if you have

Publishers who are actually performing well who are selling your products maybe you want to offer them a little bit more on the commission side maybe you want to sweeten the deal maybe you know these guys these Publishers get better program terms versus say other Publishers who don't and so here we can see the program terms basically you could see what the terms are the action and the different policies here so everything you need to do to manage that publisher in terms of payment is done under the program terms now if the program terms are met

the publisher actually sells your products CJ is the broker they're the ones who are going to initiate the payment based on on the program terms so be careful on the program terms you want to be able to set them appropriately CJ has templates CJ has some default program terms that you could use and offer up to different Publishers So based on the program terms that's how your Publishers are going to get paid and so here you can have as many different program terms as you want There's No Limit here you want to be able to

align and reward program terms again based on performance and so here we can see what Publishers are under what program terms so again if your publisher is performing well sweeten the deal offer them a better program terms and so you can align Publishers with different program terms and so that's the whole idea behind program terms is you want to be able to align Publishers with that so when you sign up a publisher they're going to get aligned with a program term meaning what are they going to get paid for selling your product now if we

want to manage by status instead of by program terms we could see all the different organizations we have in our Network these are our Publishers we're the affiliate we're the ones selling the product we want to know who's selling who's not selling and so we can look at all our Publishers by program terms or by status Okay so basically you could see here the term status whether it's active or not earnings basically what they've sold over the last basically 7 days or 3 months so you could look at basically how your Publishers are performing just

by clicking on manage by status here in cj.com so when you're looking at reports in cj.com or really any other affiliate program you might see the acronym E PC this stands for earnings per click actually it's a little misleading it's actually earnings per 100 clicks so basically CJ calculates you know how much your publisher is actually making per click you know just like paid search we're paying Google X amount per click it's the same thing here we can't or these Publishers can't make any money if they don't generate clicks so that's why you have an

EPC model or metric so to speak so you can measure earnings per click CJ does it over a 7day period and over a 3mon period so you could sort based on 7day or 3 month to see who's earning the most per click in terms of Publishers now you can select under Publishers groups now you can group your Publishers okay so if you have say a group of Publishers in a specific region like the United States or India or if you're just focused on the United States and see have Publishers in different states like Texas California

Missouri Arkansas well you can group those Publishers into different groups and you can look at your different group names here so here we could see Canada and so we have our Publishers grouped into a group called Canada why because they're based in Canada makes sense so you want to be able to organize your Publishers because the whole idea behind affiliate marketing CJ is you want to be able to get the best Publishers available for your network and so as you get more Publishers for your network you'll be able to basically start grouping them where it

makes sense now the example I gave you is by geography you could do by geography or you could do by publisher status meaning my best performing Publishers go into a group if they're in a group then they get aligned with certain program term so you could group your Publishers Any Way You Want by status meaning they're selling more these are best performing Publishers or by region or you know by promotion I mean how you group your Publishers is totally up to you however take advantage of the option to create publisher groups because the whole idea

again I'm going to repeat it is you want to get Publishers and you want to start building your base of Publishers because the more Publishers you have the more chance you are to sell your product remember if nobody clicks on your product then nobody's going to buy your product so if you have Publishers who are promoting your product for you then you have a good opportunity to sell it so the more Publishers you have on board the better the opportunity so now once you have Publishers you can start grouping these Publishers accordingly to whatever makes

sense it's a business decision just know the options of available in CJ to group Publishers let's turn our attention to social media marketing tools social media always a great topic to talk about so we're going to finish up all our digital marketing tools with social media we talked about SEO paid competition affiliate email you know web analytics it's just appropriate to finish up a social media because social media has so many tools available so many okay the first one I can think about here is hoot hoot site is a great social media marketing tool to

use okay it's a premium okay you can set up a free trial here you basically a base account and then uh you can use hoot Suite to do a lot of things anything from setting up landing pages to actually publishing content to listening who tweet to me is one of the most powerful social media marketing tools available you got buffer buffer is a paid version but you can actually set up a low cost or free account actually on Buffer and then move to a paid account okay you got tweet deck been around a long time

that is actually free and I would recommend tweet deck and we're going to take a look at that here in a couple minutes okay and then you got Sprout social Sprout social is another social marketing platform similar to hoot week do a lot of reporting a lot of publishing you can a lot of listening and so we're going to take a look at Sprout social today as well before we do that that let's go over why these tools are important to us from a social media perspective you're pumping out a lot of content so you

need to be able to smartly efficiently you know schedule and manage your post okay so you're not just working likely with just one platform like Facebook you're probably on a number of different platforms depending on your business depending on your bandwidth depending on what you're selling your products Etc your audience obviously has a lot to do with it you know it could be Instagram Pinterest you want to be able to consolidate all that and manage it in one place and that's what social media marketing tools do they allow you to manage everything in one place

so if you can manage everything in one place then these social media marketing platforms need to be able to make it easy for you to add and manage different accounts okay so a lot of them have the ability for you to add you know not just one Twitter account but multiple Twitter accounts and not just one social media platform but multiple social media platforms and a good social media marketing tool worth its weight will help you monitor the results so monitor social media posts that help Drive leads and sales in other words you're going to

have a lot of different metrics associated with each social media marketing platform okay which one is actually doing its job okay so you want to be able to easily manage these platforms applications and websites very efficiently okay so instead of having to log into each platform you just log into one place get a sense of what's been posted what the engagement is did they purchase Etc and what you want to do is be able to individually customize every social media post across different platforms so it just makes it a lot easier to do that in

these social media marketing tools okay you don't want to send out a blanket message across different platforms you want to be able to go ahead and customize a post depending on what that post is depending on what the product is what time of day what target market what target audience so customization is a lot easier using these social media marketing tools you want to be able to engage with brand Advocates so listening is a good thing with social media marketing tools using the listening functionality so you can actually see who is a brand Advocate who's

not a brand Advocate who's an influencer who's not an influencer and then of course you want to analyze the behavior of your audience and optimize individual post on Real Time data so if for example you post something using one of these social media marketing platforms and you see it go viral then you want to be able to react to that in real time so you're going to be able to see that in real time on these social media marketing tools these platforms like Sprout social and HootSuite and then you're going to be able to react

to that behavior and then of course monitoring website traffic and conversion rates that's key we always want to monitor conversions based on our kpis our business goals so there are also a few important digital marketing tools that can help you in different ways okay so without further Ado let's jump in and take a look at what's available in terms of social media marketing so just a quick reminder if you are running ads on Facebook or you're posting on Facebook as an example or any platform in general that platform is going to have its own metrics

if you will so for example Facebook has something called Facebook Insight so you'll be able to actually see you know what's been posted based on you know the last seven days in this example how many page views you're getting engagements recent post so just to let you know yes you can go into any one of these platforms on its own and look at metrics just like you can do if you're running Facebook ads and you can go right into Facebook ads manager and view data there okay so the whole point here though on using a

social media tool is that you can measure all that in one place so if we log into Sprout social I can set up these accounts right into Sprout social so I don't have to log in in Twitter individually or Facebook individually I can link them up all with Sprout social and then I can go to reports just like I can with Facebook insights and then once I'm in Facebook excuse me once I'm in Sprout social reporting then I can go ahead just like I can in Facebook insights except it's all right here for me I

can jump into you know Facebook and dig a little bit deeper as to what's going on with my account so I don't have to log into Facebook directly I can see you know the Impressions the engagement the clicks over a period of time I can see my audience growth I can see my publishing Behavior how often am I publishing I can see the top post individually I can see Impressions by day you know a lot of this same material same information is already in Facebook Insight so if it's available in Facebook insights you know you're

definitely going to have it available in a tool like Sprout social so you want to be able to just efficiently log in and jump from one platform to the other so here you know I can go to Instagram you know and look at Instagram data or I can look at Twitter information so you want to be able to efficiently jump from one platform to the other using in this example Sprout social now as I mentioned as part of one of the benefits of a social media tools that you can publish content you want to be

able to publish content because you want to be able to organize and schedule accordingly you don't want to be submitting and Publishing content right after one another okay you want to be a able to spread it out efficiently and effectively and so here we could see you know we could publish and schedule content accordingly so all we have to do is Click compose select a profile write whatever we need to do can schedule it for tomorrow at a specific time and there you go voila scheduled so this is on Twitter okay so you know we

could choose another platform here it's just that easy to schedule so you want to be able to schedule accordingly because because again when you schedule something then you want to be look at the behavior of it so it's just as simple as going from publishing to reporting and then based on once something got published you could see the reaction of it and react to it so another thing here that I like about is spot social huite a lot of these other platforms do it really well you got listening tools so you can listen in on

conversations that are being had for example uh mail delivery you know if we do mail delivery on Twitter search will be able to see what's been tweeted about mail deliveries you know if that's the business we're in we can refine our search and choose a specific location a radius to hone in if we're local okay so this is Sprout socials example of listening here let's take a look at another example I'm in later.com so later very similar to sprout social in that it does a lot of the same things you can actually schedule content on

a particular platform and one thing I like about later here you can actually see it visually you can see a calendar and what's been scheduled so I can see today I have scheduled something scheduled at 1:15 local time and again I have five profiles set up for this account so I can pick and choose the profile that I want to publish to so it just makes it that much easier and I can visually see it and that's important so here I can click on media library so the one thing about later is that you know

you have a library of images that potentially you can reuse so if I click on this image here okay I can get a sense of when it was used and I can view it on a calendar I can add a label for it so that's another benefit to later is that they have this media library here they have conversations so I can actually connect to a platform and listen in on conversations that are being had similar to The Listening tool in Sprout social and they have analytics so you can actually see right in later.com how

your particular social media platform is performing so I can see it here over seven days I can see the number of followers have increased I could see the growth rate I can see the number of Impressions that I've received okay so I want to be able to see how my particular platforms performing over a period of time so I can look at reach the laot profile views website clicks okay so I can get a lot of good insights here right in the analytics platform of later you can look at specific post performance so we posted

something I could see basically how many likes it received how many comments Impressions the reach and then if I want to do I can click on details and get more specific information on it engagement rate okay Discovery actions comments saves Etc so later.com goes into some nice detail about post performance they even have date on hashtags so if you use an hashtag you can actually see how many times the hashtag has been used or saved how many Impressions it's received okay so they really go into some nice detail here about how your post and how

your accounts are performing and here's a tool I really like I've been using for a long time and that's tweet deck so what tweet deck does is connect with your Twitter account so you can see in a different visual so to speak of how your Twitter account looks in terms of your feed here I can see this is my feed here okay I can see some notifications I can see specific messages then on this column I can see activity okay so I can add different columns here if I wanted to and basically by adding columns

you could see I can look for what's trending as an example so I'm going to add in a column that says trendy and so now I can go in and see okay these these are all the different things that are trending on Twitter uh so you can actually add a column and pay attention to something really specific okay so for example search okay so right now I have men's health but I could type in let's just say World Cup okay so I could see the you got the Cricket World Cup you got you know the

soccer football World Cup going on so you know we could pick a a particular topic to follow if we want to too so again here I'm following Men's Health so I can now see you know everything that's been posted on men's health now if I click on for example one of these hashtags here that's trending I can actually see who's tagging or using that hashtag Friday feeling in their tweets and so the whole idea behind you know tweet deck it it serves up a interesting overview so to speak of not only your account but you

know a specific topic IC or what's trending or you know other things that are being said so if you really want to pay attention to your brand or something really specific like you know your competitors or a specific product then you can just do a search on that and so that's the great thing about tweak deck it allows you to kind of just look and listen in on everything going on in Twitter now we do have a good video out here on YouTube how to start social media marketing so if you haven't had a chance

to look at it take a look it goes over some of these tools that we cover today like sproutsocial later.com you know Facebook insights so it does cover in more detail some of what we covered on these social media marketing tools so take a look at how to start social media marketing so we covered a lot of different marketing Tools digital marketing tools everything from SEO to email to social to paid to affiliate to competitor but there's also a few other digital marketing tools that you can use in different ways like video SEO for example

so vid IQ you know we want to use vid IQ to get a good sense of how particular video is performing so here if we go into YouTube you can see vid IQ is a browser extension or browser plug-in if you will so I can go and take a look at a specific a specific video and see how many hours it's been watched how many views minutes watched subscribers Etc you know the great thing here I can look at the entire entire account so I can get good insights into my video or my entire account

here just by adding in the vid IQ extension into my Chrome browser so vid IQ actually does give you some really really good insights into not only your account but the video and so recommend vid IQ because it's good for video SEO okay there's also related to content optimization so you know if you're doing SEO and you have a lot of content on your site well you know what we want to be able to use a tool maybe a third party tool to give some objective reasoning as to what more we can be doing so

you got tools like SEO site checkup or site analyzer these are PID tools but you know if you're really heavily invested in SEO then they may pay dividends for you you want to be able to make sure your cont content is fully optimized to the fullest according to you know Google's algorithms and so you maybe you know want to invest in that third party tool so these are good tools to use for Content optimization you know there's also other key Reddit but you know there's keyw planner uh in Google there's also uh word stream there's

a lot of different keyword tools out there so you may not have a Google ads platform and so if you don't have Google ads then you may not be able to gain ACC access to Google's Keyword Planner so having a thirdparty keyword tool will pay dividend as well because those dividends pay off in the form of not only payperclick but also SEO and if you're heavily invested in content heavily invested in Social then you may want to take a look at the keyword tool keyword it and it's primarily used for Reddit we talk about page

load time so we looked at that in Google analytics we know that it heavily impacts SEO so there are other tools available you you got a third party tool here that's free solar winds pingdom you actually have page speed insights by Google so these are free tools that you could take advantage of in determining how you can improve your page load time my favorite topic conversion rate optimization so you got a couple in here crazy egg and zaret okay so I'm going to show you another tool called hot jar so here if you L into

hot.com you can set up an account it's actually free and with a free account you can have hot jar measure the heat map not only the heat map but the click mapping the scrolling of a particular page and so here you could see we're looking at a particular page here so hot jar allows me to you know see on that page where people are clicking um I can also see where people are moving I can also see you know the scrolling of a particular page okay so you could see here on the page I could

see people are moving over here to the right that's where they're clicking Mo mostly if I switch over to move mode then I can see on that particular page where people are actually moving their Mouse and then I have my scroll analysis so I could see you know how far down people actually scroll on the page and so again with a paid account you can measure up to 10,000 pag with the free version you can measure up to 2,000 pag VI and so 2,000 pag VI allows you to get some insight as to what people

are clicking on or where they're moving or how they're scrolling on a particular page and so I definitely recommend hot jar they also do funneling they also do forms polls lots of other tools available in hot jar so hotjar.com is a tool I would recommend as well so one final tool and I'd be a remiss if I did didn't mention it and that's Google optimize so Google optimize is a Google platform that allows you to AB test and so AB testing means that you have an original page and you're changing one element on that page

to see which one performs better and so with Google optimize it's just very easy to set up to run and the whole point of Google optimize and AB testing is to improve website performance so here you can see I have an account set up optimize you can see we're running one test here and we're just testing one element versus the original so we move photos to the top of the page the original didn't have the photos to the top of the page and so we can go into reporting here Google optimize does all the heavy

lifting and so here you could see we can look at bounces or we can look at you know basically a measure the test up against a metric that's important to our business and again the whole point point is to improve website performance and so definitely take a look at Google optimize we'll have another webinar in the future on the topic but you know to me Google optimiz is free you can run up to five tests okay and if you can run up to five different tests then that means you have the ability to really improve

website performance okay so Google optimize is a tool that I would recommend today we're going to talk about why you would want to rank using SEO and SEO is search engine optimization also known as organic search you also may as hear us say organic listings but we're going to talk a little bit about why you would want to rank your website in organic search okay what is search engine optimization then we're going to follow that up with how does Google rank websites so why does it rank one website over another and how do we get

our website to rank number one then we're going to talk about the different types of SEO or search engine optimiz ation techniques so you can get your website ranked number one and then we're going to finish that off with the dos and don'ts of SEO so let's get right to it and talk about why SEO so we're going to use a basic example and let's just say you have a Blog you're a food blogger you're passionate about food and your Niche is ice cream and let's just say you have a lot of ice cream recipes

you want to get traffic to your blog you want people to read your blog and you're curious why am I not ranking for my blog blog why when people type in ice cream recipes and say Google my blog posts don't appear at the top of organic rankings and there's a number of reasons why you wouldn't be ranked for your blog post or your ice cream recipes and the main reason would be your competitors so there could be somebody else out there who is also passionate about ice cream and has been blogging a long longer than

you and they have more content and more blog post and more pages for Google to rank so that's usually the number one reason the other reason is improper usage of keywords and we're going to talk a little bit or actually a lot more about you know keyword usage in your content so what kind of keywords do you want to rank for that's really what we're talking about when we talk about usage of keywords what keywords do you want to rank for and how do we work those keywords into the content another reason is Port link

building practices and really that means are other blog posts or other websites linking to you also are you linking to other pages on your website and so it's all about link building and with link building it's internal linking so are we linking from one blog post to another and it's external linking our other websites of high quality linking to us and so that's what we talk about when we talk about link building and then another reason is web page load time so you could be running your blog post on say WordPress for example and your

blog post isn't loading fast enough well if you look at it this way think about it if you're Google would you really want to rank a website or blog post in this example number one on Google rankings if that particular page loaded very slow no you wouldn't because when somebody clicked on that link in organic search and went to your website they're going to have a bad experience because the page is going to load slow so Google doesn't want their users to have a bad experience you don't want your users to have a bad experience

and so that's why web page low time is a critical factor for ranking so we need to make sure that our web pages load fast and then your user experience is not good enough so Google again based on my example about the web page load time Google wants people to have a good experience when they go from their search engine to your website and there's a lot at play there specifically web page low time but also you know Google doesn't want any spam content Google doesn't want any popups or overbearing ads on the web page

they want people to are searching for something in particular let's just say ice cream recipes and they want to find a relevant website that has ice cream recipes they want to be able to click on that link and read some good content about ice cream recipes it's that simple and that's really what Google's trying to create in their environment and that's you as an end user as a website owner you want your users to have a good experience and then last but not least your website is de-indexed by mistake and really what we mean is

de-indexed is Google needs to be able to index all the pages on your website so if you have a Blog with a 100 recipes you want Google to have access to all 100 recipes so we're going to talk a little bit later about how to get your pages ranked or indexed on Google organic search so let's move on to what is SEO so sticking with our ice clean Blog theme really SEO search engine optimization really is the practice of increasing your pages that Google has indexed up the rankings so the end result is we want

all our pages to be ranked number one for particular keywords so if you want to be ranked for ice cream recipes well there's certain things you need to do so that's generally how it works we need to apply search engine optimization to increase a page for keyword we want to be found for so let me give you an example so let's just say there's 100 students that participated in an essay competition and so the competition in this particular case is evaluated on the basis of is the content relevant are they using suitable titles for their

essay do they have structure when they're participating in this essay or talking about the essay and do they have a suitable synopsis and is the content neat and readable these seem all logical for an essay competition well guess what they seem logical for SEO because that's exact exactly how SEO works it's exactly all those points I just m mentioned about structure logic readability organization title all those things are what's important in SEO and so we need relevant content we need titles for our Pages Google needs to be able to see structure we need to have

synopsis of what the page is about and that's called a metad description and then again the the content needs to be readable and that's important and so in order to be readable again we're going to talk more about sight speed because sight speed is important okay and when we talk about responsive design when I say responsive design that means your site your page needs a load both on desktop and also on mobile and so all these things are important just like an essay competition Google is the judge and they need to be able to determine

what page is best to rank number one number two number three Etc on Google Search and then link building remember mentioned link building a moment ago well link building internally and externally also plays a vital role and so we're going to talk about that a little bit later in the class when we talk about off-page SEO how does Google rank website and basically Google follows three basic steps to rank a website they need to crawl your website they need to take what they crawl back to their servers and when they take it back to their

servers your your web pages they need to you have them available for indexing so so when somebody actually types in a keyword into google.com it'll be available to be found on organic search so that's what indexing is all about and then Google's job when somebody does type in a search query is to basically rank th those pages that they've indexed from number one to Infinity depending on how many pages are relevant to that search query so really it's about crawling indexing and ranking so crawling is simply a process done by which Google has box and

what these Bots do is they go to your web server and they're going to crawl every page that they can find and how did they find these Pages well they basically follow links you might have heard the term spidering but that's what they call search engine spidering so basically what Google's doing is they're building a web so to speak all the links that they're following and so when they can follow all these links on your website they're going to be able to crawl them and when they crawl them basically they going to take that content

and store it on their servers so it's available in their index So based on this method Google finds out which websites have relevant content and which ones don't based on certain keywords that are typed into Google because if they can't crawl your website you're not going to be found and if you can't be found then you're not going to show up for Relevant keywords so we need to make sure your sit's available be crawled and we'll talk about that a little bit later okay but let's show you an example so let's just go to Google

search search and if I type in the keyword simply learn okay I could see I have 1,10,000 results okay and that's how many results are showing up for simply learn okay now they may not all be simply learn pages but nonetheless simply learned is rank number one here organically and there are 1,10,000 Pages related to the keyword simply learn now when it comes to organic search uh we don't want to get it confused with paid search so any time you see paid search you're going to see something that says add next to it okay so

we could see that there are paid ads here but when it comes to organic search those are generally below paid ads and so that's where Google counts the 1,10,000 results and so that's the whole idea behind crawling and indexing Google's able to crawl simply learns website and based on all the pages that they gather they're going to make those pages available in organic search so if you type in a keyword and your web page is not available for indexing then you're never going to show up for that keyword so that's why it's important to make

sure your website is available for crawling and indexing and so when a user types a query on search Google search the most relevant websites that are in Google's index are going to appear in the search results so in the example I gave uh with simply learn well simply learn is the brand name of the company simply learn so there's 's a lot of relevancy there so that's why you see simply learn show up here organically number one like we mentioned about what is SEO and Y SEO we talked about that user experience so there's a

lot of factors that go into ranking relevancy being one of them so in the simply learn example simply learn is relevant to a lot of the simply learn Pages because that's who they are simply learn however simply learn also needs to make sure that you know for their Pages the page load time is fast meaning these Pages load very fast for the end user and Google also takes into account other factors like how long someone is staying on a website or are they bouncing meaning are they going to one page that they land on and

then leaving the website okay and so the user experience is very very important there are other factors also like language and location and so for example location if you do a search say in India the results are going to be a little bit different than say the results in the United States why because Google is indexing as many web pages as they can find so if somebody's doing a search in India their results may be a little bit different than the results show up in the US because Google has different Bots and these Bots are

crawling different pages at different times and so Google's index is updating continuously but it's not real time syncing so if you do a search in index IND you may not see exactly the same thing because both search engines the Google in India and the Google in the US are may not be exactly synced up so an example would be you know if you're looking for Cafe so if you search a cafe and say San Francisco you're going to see different results now if you do a search for cafes in Mumbai you're going to see different

results there's going to be local search here at the top there may be some paid search but again you may see different results because one location but two Google search engines in India and United States google.com aren't exactly synced up exactly at the same exact time you do that search so location is important language is important and relevancy is important along with user experience so all those are important factors in how Google ranks websites okay so we're going to talk about the types of SEO now so if we want to rank for a particular keyword

on Google we're going to have to apply search engine optimization and so there's two strategies to search engine optimization onpage SEO and off-page SEO so first we're going to talk about onpage SEO so onpage SEO is nothing more than optimizing your own website and so when we say optimizing your own website there's certain elements on your website and on your web pages that we need to to take into account and so some of those elements are headers meta descriptions title tags linking so all of those elements are something we can control as an end user

who wants to rank our web page and our website on Google and before we do anything with our website the first thing we need to do is understand what keywords we want to rank for in order to understand what keywords we want to rank for we need to do keyword res research and if you do anything in SEO keyword research is the most important activity that's the most important thing you can do for SEO and why do I say it's the most important because you need to understand if you choose a keyword that you want

to rank for you need to understand how much traffic you're going to get from that keyword if you're ranked organically say number one on Google so how much traffic will you get if you're ranked number one on Google so you need to understand what the volume is and then number two we need to understand what the competition is for that keyword that you want to rank for so if you choose a keyword and there's not much competition for it then chances are you can rank for that keyword for a web page on your website quicker

than say a keyword that has a lot of competition so we need to understand those two basic factors volume and competition before we choose a key word and it's it's simply the practice of going through the motions of getting your volume and getting your compet competition data so you can choose the keyword you want and then once you choose the keyword you want then you can go and apply on page SEO you can change the title tag The Meta descriptions the headers all those elements can be changed but first you need to choose your keywords

and so again the primary components we're looking for are how much traffic you can get or the search volume how much competition there is for that keyword and of course relevancy okay you need to be able to choose keyword that's relevant to the web page you're trying to rank for and so let me show you example how to go through this so the first thing we want to do is we want to use a tool and the tool I would recommend is Google Keyword Planner and why do I choose Google Keyword Planner because if we're

trying to rank on google.com or Google search engine we want to be able to get the data right from the source so Google's going to be able to give us information about how much volume a keyword has and how much competition it has so let me show you an example so if I want to use Google's Keyword Planner and I want to rank for the keyword how to become a digital marketing specialist then I'm going to type that keyword into Google's Keyword Planner and what Google's going to do is they're going to give me some

Trends about how much volume this particular keyword gets over the course of a year and so for that particular keyword I can see that there are trends that that appear for both desktop and mobile so mobile is important because people start their search process a lot of times on their mobile device so we want to be able to get data from mobile as well as desktop and so we could see a trend here that for each particular month over the last 12 months we can see how much volume this particular keyword how to become a

digital marketing specialist gets per month and so on average on average over the the past 12 months I could see how to become a digital marketing specialist is averages 30 searches a month and this is on google.com and so Google gives us the volume what they also give us is the competition and so here I can see Google says for that particular keyword the competition is medium and so in the Google's Keyword Planner what they also do is give me other relevant keywords that I might think about optimizing for because you don't want to optimize

for just one keyword so how to become a digital marketing specialist they're going to also offer up other types of keywords that are relevant so just digital marketing specialist social media marketing specialist so for those keywords I can see the volume so for example digital marketing specialist I can see the average volume is 1,000 per month on average of the last 12 months I can also see the competition is medium but for some other keywords I can see the search volume being high like digital marketing course at 2,900 per month but also the competition is

high and so what I would recommend as a best practice is to collect all your relevant keywords okay and put all your relevant keywords in a spreadsheet and when you put all these relevant keywords in a spreadsheet you want to get the data on those keywords and the data I'm referring to is the volume and competition so in this case we have volume from Google planner Google's Keyword Planner and I have competition from Google's Keyword Planner and so if I go into AE spreadsheet and I put all that information in here I'm going to be

able to see the volume and competition and so that's important however one thing to note here is that Google's Keyword Planner if I go back just gives us low medium and high and if I want to compare numbers to numbers maybe I want to be able to get exactly the competition number for the the keyword how to become a digital marketing specialist what I can do is go into Google and I can type in that keyword so if I type in the keyword how to become a digital marketing specialist I can see there's 76 Million

results so I can see 76 Million results 76.1 actually and for the keyword how to become a digital marketing specialist now that's a whole lot of results for this particular keyword especially when the volume is only 30 uh per month on average and so what I want to do is get a a more clear picture of the competition and so what you could actually do is type in the syntax all in title and then colon and then your keyword how to become a digital marketing specialist and when I do that I get a different result

here I can see only 136 listings for how to become a digital marketing specialist but that's not just 136 that's 136 with that particular key word that we want to rank for in the title tag okay so the title tag is what you see when you type in a keyword or search query in Google search and the title tag is what you see at the top of every search result and so now I can see I typed in how to become a digital marketing specialist with the all entitle syntax and now I can see every

listing every one of these 136 results have that particular key word in it so I could see every one of them how to become a digital marketing specialist and why is that important because now that tells me I only need to climb over 136 listings to rank for that keyword how to become a digital marketing specialist and so the idea here is you want to get your volume from Google's Keyword Planner but you want to get your competition from Google search and again that's simply typing in the the syntax all in title and then your

keyword in this example how to become a digital marketing specialist once you get those two numbers you're going to plug them in to your spreadsheet and then once you do that for a number of different keyword queries and these keyword queries again have to be relevant once you do that then you can go in and pick the keywords you want to optimize for and that's important because again if you're not sure about a keyword then you want to do the keyword research so you can be sure of how much traffic you can get and how

much competition there is those are two important important factors in starting the process for onpage SEO okay you want to create content for say a keyword like digital marketing but digital marketing may seem a little bit broad so you want to probably stay away from broader keywords because broader keywords tend to have a lot of volume which is great but they may also tend to have a lot of competition but that's the whole point of doing the keyword research maybe it doesn't maybe there's more volume than competition that's what you need to find out when

you do the keyword research you need to find those keywords that are relevant to your content that have a lot of volume and low competition and then once we identify those keywords then we are free to go in and start optimizing our web pages for those keywords and the first place we want to start is the title tag so if you remember my example going back here to our search how to become a digital Market marketing specialist we saw that every one of these listings had that keyword in the title tag and the title tag

is important because that's what users who use Google search see first when they type in a query and get results so they're going to see the title tag so the title tag is the most important element for on page SEO it's the most important factor because that's what people see and so ideally when we choose our keyword we want to make sure that keyword is in the title tag because that's what shows up in gole go search and that's what makes that particular web page relevant for that keyword query so the idea behind a title

tag it's between 50 and 60 characters and so we want to make sure we stay within that limit no more than 60 characters because what happens if it's beyond that then Google will truncate the title tag so if I go back to my search you could see here on this particular title tag Google truncated it meaning they added the ellipses after the title tag because it exceeded the 60 character limit so you want to stay within those character counts and so the title tag is the first place you should start when optimizing your website because

when we have the right keyword in the title tag and somebody types in that keyword then chances are it's going to be relevant they're going to see it and they're going to click through to your website and that's the whole idea behind ranking we want to get clicks so that's how the title tag appears so when you optimize it you're going to update the title tag and this is how it shows up it's going to show up at the top of your listing okay and it's going to be bigger and Bolder than anything else Google

displays so the second thing you want to optimize is the meta description and The Meta description is simply just a brief description up to 155 I would say about 155 to 60 160 characters but probably no more than that and so the meta description is nothing more than a summary of the web page page itself so if I go back to my Google search results I see my title tag and I see the page that this particular listing belongs to and underneath that is where I can see my meta description so in this keyword query

how to become a digital marketing specialist I see the meta description an ultimate guide on how to build a career in digital marketing and the skills required to become a digital marketing specialist note that it's a well-written metadescription within 155 characters and it includes the keyword digital marketing specialist so we're trying to rank for how to become a digital marketing specialist and here you can see become a digital marketing specialist so there's a lot of relevancy between not only the title tag in the keyword but the metad description in the keyword so when you're optimizing

a keyword you want to start with the title tag but you also want to update the meta description because if you don't update the meta description and you leave The Meta description blank lank then you're leaving it to Google to add in copy that they deem relevant and so for onpage SEO we want to take control of the copy and we want to optimize it for the keywords we want to be found for so the metad description is a powerful tool at our disposal it gives us more characters to work with it gives us more

to talk about so for that particular page and so if the title tag is only 60 characters maximum it's not a lot of information to try and get to click so the meta description helps us in identifying what that page is about in order to get the click so the two working in tandem will hopefully increase your click the rates so when you're found organically we want to get the click and then the third element that's important is the URL and URL stands for uniform resource locator and why is the URL so important because that's

what people see so if I go back to my search result how to become a digital marketing specialist notice that the URL also includes how to become a digital marketing specialist article okay so it's very relevant the URL is very relevant one we can see it in the search results but two you know it's relevant to the keyword query and that's important for the end user and Google Google wants to know hey is this the page that's relevant to the user's query and if it is then this user is likely going to have a good

user experience after they click on the listing so the URL is an element that helps not only with the clickr rate but with ranking and having a poor URL structure doesn't help at all because not only does Google not recognize the URL as being relevant but the end user may not want to click on that page given the the way the URL looks so you want to try and avoid a poor URL structure so the rule of thumb is this if you don't understand what the URL is then Google is likely not going to understand

what the URL is and so we want to try and keep our URL structures clean and when I say clean ideally you want to make sure that whatever keyword you're trying to optimize that's the keyword that's included in the URL nothing included that is not understandable so again going back to our example how to become a digital marketing specialist it's very clean the title tag is the keyword The Meta description is cleanly written has the keyword and then the URL is the other element that the end user can see and that URL includes the keyword

in it so after we've done those three elements the title tag the metad description and the URL then we want to start optimizing the page itself so ideally when we say optimize the page itself the page remember needs to be structured and when we say structured it needs to be structured in terms of you know headers and subheaders and organized in a manner in which the end user can read the article read the content clearly and concisely without being confused and so that's the job of headers they add they add basically an organizational structure to

the content and with headers there's a hierarchy so you have anywhere from H1 which is the top of the hierarchy to an H6 and so you're free to use any one of those headers when building out a page in order to organize the content but ideally you probably want to stick with an H1 or an H2 because those are at the top of the hierarchy and what those do is they actually stress to Google that hey this header with this particular keyword in it is important so if you use an H6 with the keyword in

it it's telling Google hey this is an H6 but it's not as important so an H1 and an H2 tag show importance and so let's look at an example of what that is so here you can see an H1 is going to be at the top of the high so that means it's going to be bigger and Bolder then you have an H2 which is going to be bigger and Bolder than an H3 but not as big and bold as an H2 so with headers not only are you organizing the content accordingly but you're also

signaling to Google how important that particular header is and of course the header needs to include the key word we're trying to rank for so let's take a look again at that example so if we go to how to become a digital marketing specialist if I click on on that page I can look at the content and I can see that there are headers in here so the headers are there to organize the content and that's what we want we want to be able to organize the content and if you look at the other example

I'm showing here how to become a digital marketing specialist uh learning paths explored you can see that's an H1 but below it's a subheader the growing digital marketing job market so that's an H2 and so we're not stressing to Google that that's in more important than an H1 but nonetheless we're stressing at Google that it's important nonetheless so we want to be able to use headers we want to be able to use keywords in our headers in order to stress to Google what's important and also to organize the content because Google likes content organized okay

the next element we want to focus on is internal linking and so internal linking if you remember uh earlier in the presentation is basically links from one page on your website to another and so here we can see on this particular article how to become a digital marketing specialist there's also links to other pages on simply learns website and so for this particular content it also links to sco specialist PPC specialist social media marketing specialist and digital marketing specialist so the whole idea behind internal linking is to link from one page to another where it's

relevant and in this case it's relevant because we're talking about how to become a digital marketing specialist that's what the whole content is about and so what simply learns doing here is offering up other pages on their website that are relevant to becoming a digital marketing specialist and so this is a best practice when you're optimizing a web page so you want to be able to have internal linking on your site and the whole idea behind internal linking is it also allows users to navigate through the site naturally so when I say naturally they don't

always have to refer back to the top navigation they can naturally and seamlessly go from one relevant article or page to another and so that's the whole idea behind link building and internal link building it allows Google to identify you know pages that they want to crawl in index because they're linked to one another but it also helps the end user because it allows the end user to go from one page to another and it's signaling to Google hey this particular page is linked to this page so we're going to also index that page and

so that's the whole important part of internal linking it's about the end user experience and it's about allowing Google to find the pages on your website so they can crawl them and index them so you can be ranked for them and so also in addition to internal linking we want to be able to use natural language and so what what do I mean by natural language or natural language processing so what Google does is in terms of natural language processing they're looking for the content and the keyword it needs to be relevant so when your

website is about digital marketing you don't necessarily want to rank or try to rank for the keyword digital marketing one it's too broad two there might be some competition but three you're probably not going to write something as broad like digital marketing so ideally what you want to do is you want to to other relevant related keywords that's going to be more natural and so that's what we mean by natural language processing we want to choose keywords that are more natural to the content you're writing so instead of the keyword digital marketing maybe we want

to talk about the types of digital marketing or digital marketing examples or what is a digital marketing strategy or how to become a digital marketing specialist so those are all relevant key wordss to digital marketing and more relevant to the content because if you try to rank for the keyword digital marketing again it's probably going to be a little bit broad probably more competition and not as relevant to your content and as a result probably not a good user experience so think about some other keywords that you could optimize and rank for and that goes

back to the keyword research that's why the keyword research is so important because it allows us to identify other keywords and the natural language process what keywords are more relevant for the content and then another element to onpage SEO is the sitemap and so with the sitemap it's basically a list of all the pages on your website and the whole idea of listing all the pages on your website in one document is it helps both users and search engines understand the structure of your website so there two types of sitemaps one's an HTML sitemap and

that's designed for humans so if you have a website with a lot of cont content at the footer or the bottom of your web page you probably want to have a link to sitemap so if somebody clicks on that sit map they're going to be able to see all the pages on your website structured in an organized manner well an XML sitemap and XML is just a different format it's designed for crawlers and so the whole idea remember is Google likes to crawl content when they craw content they bring it back to their servers and

index it and so we want to be able to create create a sitemap for Google or other search engine crawlers and so XML is the format so let me show you example of how that looks so if I go to Simply learn.com and simply type in say sitemap.xml just as an example I'm going to get this particular page and this particular page displays two XML sitemaps so these sit maps are there for Google to go ahead and crawl and nothing more than a list of all the page pages on your website and so this is

a quick and easy way for Google to get a hold of all those pages so that they can index them and that's the whole idea behind SEO you want to be able to have Google index all the content you want to be found for for the key words you want to be found for so it all starts with the sitemap so let's go from onpage SEO which in recap is basically optimizing certain elements on your website so that you are relevant for particular keyword and that meant updating the title tag The Meta description the URL

the headers choosing the right keywords to put into the content having internal linking and also updating the sitemap well those are elements that you can do on your website so we're going to switch gears and talk about a different strategy off-page SEO because without on page or off page you can't have a page ranking so the two work together so you can do is as much as you want on on page but you still need off-page SEO and you could do all the off-page SEO you want but you still need onpage so both of these

strategies have to be in full effect in order for you to rank so let's now switch gears to off-page SEO and so off-page SEO is simply the process of linking or promoting your website using link building and so if you remember I talked about this earlier on there's two types of links internal and external link and so for onpage SEO we used internal linking for off-page SEO we're going to talk about external linking and external linking allows us to improve our websites recognition or relevancy or credibility and why do we want to improve our relevancy

and credibility and trustworthiness and Authority because we want Google to know that our web page is trustworthy it is recognized by other websites and it is relevant for a particular keyword and so if we can do that using off-page SEO methods then Google's going to rank our web page for the keyword we want to be found for so it's really off-page SEO is synonymous with link building and there's plenty of opportunities to do link building and just comes down to creating a strategy so again some of the benefits to off page well we talked about

you know being credible and trustworthiness and relevant we need to do that in order to rank but there's some other benefits there so if we're have a link on another credible website then it's likely going to increase the traffic to our own website it also creates high domain Authority and so what I mean by high domain Authority is if we have basically links to other web pages pointing back to us then basically our domain Authority is going to improve and when our domain Authority improves other websites are going to want to link to us so

the higher authoritative we are for our website then other web pages going to want to link to us and so the more external linking we have the higher the domain Authority so it all starts with linking to other high domain Authority websites so linking to a high domain Authority website for example having a link on Wikipedia that points back to our web page creates high domain Authority for us and it helps Drive traffic so some of the other benefits of off-page SEO are in credibility so if we're linking from Wikipedia to our web page it

does create credibility for us it also helps us increase our page rank so remember that external linking helps build domain Authority helps build credibility trustworthiness and it's going to in turn help us rank for that particular page and then certainly not last having a good off-page SEO link building strategy increases our brand awareness because if we're on other high Authority websites wiip Media or say a social platform it's going to increase our brand awareness and increasing our brand awareness increases our trustworthiness and so if somebody is looking to say become a digital marketing specialist then

likely instead of typing in digital marketing specialist on Google they may type in our brand name in this case simply learn and so these are all the benefits to off-page SEO so it's nothing more than having links on other websites that are pointing back to ours and again there's lots of benefits it's drives helps Drive traffic and increases our Authority so those are things that we want to take advantage of when we want to rank and the key behind off- page SEO or link building is always going to be content so from an onpage SEO

perspective having quality content allows that content to be optimized for Relevant keyword and ranked but also from an off-page SEO strategy having high quality content allows us to have other sites and it doesn't necessar have to be a website it could be a social platform or it could be another blogging platform or blogging website linked back to ours why because the content is original it's natural it's well structured it reads well and so that's the whole idea behind off page you can't have links on other websites if you don't have quality content so one of

the ideas behind off-page SEO is not only do you want to create good content but you probably want to spend a lot of time or a bit of time on others websites so remember the example I used earlier in this presentation about having an ice cream blog and ice cream recipes well it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to say spend some time on other blogs related to desserts related to cakes related to food in general related to vegetables or other items that people could link from so the whole idea is understanding who else is

out there who has relevant content that you could share so you could share your content with them they can share their content with you and generally that's how it works naturally anyway in the web spere if somebody likes your content they're going to link to it they don't necessarily have to wait for you to ask them but it might not be a bad idea to understand who else is out there that has content similar to yours so that you can you know get a link on that particular website or blog post and so some other

ideas behind having external links pointing back to your website is social media so social media is not just Facebook or Twitter but it expands beyond that there's there's core there's medium there's all sorts of content generated websites like Reddit so the list goes on and on you just need to find what's relevant for your content if it's relevant for your content then it's worth putting or trying to get the external link on that social media platform and then again going back to my ice cream blog recipes blog post yeah if you find a particular blog

that you want to have an external link on there's nothing wrong with reaching out to that particular blogger you know in some cases very flattering but in other cases if the content is relevant then why not it's only going to help your end user experience if you add somebody who has say a Blog about cakes having their link on your blog post so there's nothing wrong with it because it also adds to the user experience and if you're going to ask somebody to put an external link on theirs you might want to be open-minded and

make sure that you're are able and willing to put an external link on your blog post or website pointing to their content that's how the web Works especially if the content of quality relevant and of good nature okay so let's move on and finish up with the dos and don'ts of SEO so we talked a lot about why SEO what is SEO you know how do we rank for SEO you know what is on page SEO what is off-page SEO and so let's just wrap up with some of the things you again want to do

to rank your page for particular keyword and some of the things you don't want to do so the first thing on the list is optimize for white hat techniques and what I mean for opting in for white hat techniques is basically everything I just mentioned today you want to do keyword research you want to choose a natural language processing form format so you could choose keywords that are going to be relevant natural to the content and you don't want to opt for black hat techniques and black hat techniques are probably not even worth going into

detail but one example is choosing a keyword arbitrarily like say digital marketing and just stuffing that keyword into the content so that's probably not something you want to do cuz again it's not going to be good for the end user user so stay away from black hat and focus on some of the techniques we talked about in today's presentation the other du we want to do is get backlinks from relevant sites so that's off-page SEO again it's what I mentioned earlier it's about linking your quality content to another person's website that also has quality content

we don't want to have a backlink from an irrelevant site why because it's not going to be relevant and it's also going to hurt our Authority because if it's on site that's not of good quality then Google's going to look at us and say well this site is linking to your site but it's not relevant so therefore you know we're not going to look at you in the same way as if you were on a quality website we do want to use our keywords naturally because title tags are what people see first on organic search

but you don't want to use the same title tag on every page of your website so we want to stay away from doing that so you want to have a unique title tag for every web page on your website and ideally what does that mean that means using our keyword research to choose one to two keywords for page and optimizing your web page for those one to two keywords so you ideally what you want to do is have one to two different keywords for every page on your website we definitely definitely definitely want to write

engaging content so the content should be engaging remember user experience we want users to stay on our website we want them to enjoy the content that they're reading and we want them to go from one page to another naturally we definitely don't want to leverage or plagiarize or just copy content from others websites because it's not one probably going to be relevant to what you're writing about two it's duplicate content and it's somebody else's so that's a black cat Technique we want to stay away from I can't emphasize this enough we need to do key

word research first before you do anything else you need to find relevant keywords and not only that you need to understand the volume and the competition for each of those keywords okay you don't want to choose a keyword that has low volume High competition you want to choose a keyword that has high volume low competition but above all you want to choose keywords that are relevant to your content we want to avoid keyword stuffing so don't take a keyword and just stuff it everywhere on the page it's not going to be natural and Google's going

to be able to pick up on that so we want to maintain some level of quality with our content and quality with the keywords that we choose so reminder when you have quality content it's always going to link internally to another page on your website with quality content but it's got to be natural and don't just build sitewide backlinks meaning don't just have an internal link to the homepage or don't have every page on your website linking to just one page so internal linking should be natural naturally linking from one page to another not only

does it help Google understand and crawl all the web pages on your website but it's good for the end User it's good user experience and certainly last but something I didn't talk about does take time to rank your content so remember the process you're going to write your content you're going going to choose keywords you're going to change the elements on that page for those keywords and all the while you're going to make sure Google can crawl that content and when they crawl it they're going to index it the process takes time especially if you

choose a keyword that's competitive so just be patient if you have quality content and you've optimized for onpage SEO and off-page SEO then you will rank for that keyword and then make sure your website's userfriendly and mobile friendly so talked about responsive content earlier so remember most users today start the process of search on mobile so we want to make sure your websites are mobile friendly search engine optimization starts with the keyword because we want to be found four relevant keywords and so the first step in search engine optimization is always going to be keyword

research so it is the most important step and so what is key keyword research all about well it's process of identifying keywords we want to be found for on the search engines so millions of people use search engines on a daily basis we want to be found for those keywords that people type in that are relevant to the content we want to be found so going back to the Italian restaurant example if we're writing a blog post about Italian restaurants if somebody types in the best Italian restaurants or Italian restaurants in a specific City we

want to be found for that content if it's relevant to what we wrote about so keyword research should be done based on two factors really it's F based on the factor of how much traffic or volume a particular search engine query has and it's based on competition and really the underlying Factor here is that all keywords in your keyword research should be relevant so you need to understand what those keywords are so are they relevant to the content that you want to be found for if they are then really the two factors you want to

look for is the volume how much volume or traffic each keyword has associated with it and then the competition how many other websites are trying to be found for the same keyword so those are the factors involved with keyword research you always want to choose relevant keywords and then once you find or choose those relevant keywords you want to be able to find out exactly how much volume and how much competition is associated with each of those keywords and so when you look at keywords you're always going to choose relevant keywords but there are two

types of keywords there are short tail keywords and there are longtail keywords and we're going to talk about both of these here so let's start with short tail keywords so short tail keywords are generic keywords generally they're less than three words in a keyword phrase for example Italian restaurants so short ta keywords generally have very high search volume that means that if somebody types in Italian restaurants then there's going to be a large amount of volume with that meaning that generally a lot of people type in the keyword Italian restaurants however with high volume always

comes High competition so if you want to be found for Italian restaurants know that if you are ranked number one or number two or even on page one of Google you're going to get a lot of traffic however to get to page one of Google or even position one or two it's going to take you a while because there probably a lot of websites who are in front of you who want to be ranked and found for the same keyword so the whole idea with short tail keywords is it's a lot of visibility it's a

lot of traffic a lot of volume but also a lot of competition and generally the underlying Factor here is that if you are ranked for a very broad or short tail keyword like Italian restaurants then chances are it's not going to be as relevant so if you get the traffic to your website then chances are the conversion is not necessarily going to happen because we don't necessarily know the mindset of somebody typing in a very short tail generic keyword like a tiean restaurants they could be doing research on Italian restaurants they could be a chef

who's trying to get recipes for Italian food it could be a tourist looking for Italian restaurants in a different city or it could be a person just looking for Italian restaurants near their location or where they're living and so there's a lot of different factors with short tail keyword so you just don't know because it's so generic and because it's so generic if you do get the traffic for that generic keyword then the chances of the conversion are going to be lower than say if it's a more specific relevant keyword so let's take an example

of a short tail keyword let's just stick with Italian restaurants so I'm going to go to a tool called Moz well Moz has a tool called the keyword Explorer and within MZ so if you go to moz.com and then use their keyword Explorer you can get an idea of how much volume and competition are associated with a particular keyword so in this example we're using Italian restaurants it's a very broad keyword we could see that the monthly volume is between 70,000 and 118,000 per month okay so that means for a particular keyword in the United

States on a search engine you're going to get about 70,000 to 118,000 people who type in that keyword and so if we were look at the difficulty of that keyword you could see that it's fairly difficult because out of one to 100 it's got to score 43 so it's fairly difficult however if you notice the clickthrough rate's very high so Moz estimates that we'll have a 40% organic click the rate for that keyword if we're ranked for it so if it's relevant to us and we want to get some visibility to our site then yeah

we want to use that generic short tail keyword however if we're interested in conversions then we really want to turn our attention to longer tail keywords however if you want the visibility then you want to use short tail keywords if you want the conversion then you want to switch over to longer tail keywords so longer tail keywords are more specific they use it consist of more than three keywords so Tian restaurants very generic if we add a few more keywords that keyword phrase it then becomes longer tail so compared to short tail keywords longer tail

keywords are generally less competitive and the search volume is not as high case and points if we go back to MZ and then we look at the keyword Explorer and we'd actually type in Italian restaurants and let's just say Orlando Florida mod is going to generate some monthly volume for us and they're going to allow us to understand how difficult that keyword is and so here you could see very very little search volume in fact so little volume there's 11 to 50 okay so that means on average that this keyword generates 11 to 50 queries

a month so very low compared to our short-tail keyword Italian restaurants the difficulty here didn't necessarily lessen but it is less uh competitive so if you're interested in conver vers and you have an Italian restaurant in say Orlando Florida then this is the keyword you may want to use so there's a tradeoff between longer tail and shorter tail but when visitors land from longer tail keywords they're usually ready to make a purchase they're usually more specific intent there's more intent involved with a longer tail keyw so best restaurants in it in Florida branded choose in

Florida something very specific is going to generate probably higher conversion rate than something more generic so that's the tradeoff and so when to use longtail keywords well we want to use longtail keywords and for targeting pages with a product or specific article so if we're interested in that particular conversion then longer tail keywords are likely more the way we want to go versus something more generic which means if you're using a generic shorter tail keyword you're more interested in the visibility and the traffic not necessarily the conversion today we're going to talk talk about SEO

tips and tricks so let's get started and throughout this series we're going to have a few tips to share with you and we'll start out with tip number one opt for smarter ways to do keyword research and so if you listen any of our SEO tutorials in the past you know that keyword research is the first step but the most crucial step in starting SEO so when we do keyword research we want to be able to basically find keywords that we feel are relevant to our business that we want to be found on search for

and so here are a few tips that can help you do that research in a more efficient manner the first thing we want to do is identify a list of keywords that are relevant so we only want to focus on relevant keywords for our business that's a given so what I would suggest is as the best practice maybe you know put down some of those keywords in a spreadsheet so think of them as a theme of keywords because when you do research you're going to want to include a theme of keywords related to one another

so you can pick the best ones out of that theme and so as an example if we have a company that sells dried figs in a spreadsheet as an example if I show you a spreadsheet maybe we want to focus it on just dried fig and maybe we want to focus it on dried fig recipes so go ahead and put those in a column you know some of these keywords that you know you want to be found for so that's really the first step they need to be relevant so put them in a spreadsheet so

that you can build keywords around that list then we want to choose keywords and when we choose keywords we want to have some criteria around choosing them and so we always want to choose keywords with a lot of volume and what I mean by volume I mean how many people on average type in that keyword or a related keyword per month the second criteria is the keyword of product fit meaning you know is the keyword relevant you always want to stay true to relevancy the third is commercial intent what is the intent of the keyword

is it trying to get us a sale is it answering a question so what is the intent of that keyword and then last it's difficulty so we want to definitely take a look at how difficult a keyword is to rank for on organic search so that's some of the criteria you may have some additional criteria that you want to use but this is the criteria basically for choosing key wordss so again we want to prefer keywords with high volume you want to be careful of seasonality so remember seasonality and this example Christmas tree you're only

going to have a spike you know during the winter or excuse me the October November December months so be careful of seasonality when choosing high volume keywords and again keywords that are relevant to your product even though it doesn't have much search volume relevancy o trumps uh volume or any other metric commercial intent so we want to look at keywords that for example have Buy in them they may have low search volume but if somebody's typing in that keyword then we can insinuate that the consumer who typed in that keyword is ready to make the

purchase so we want to look at what the intent is of that keyword and then again the difficulty always opt for keywords that have low difficulty or competition and so in order to get these metrics we can use third party tools and I'm going to show you a couple of examples of third party tools you can use that will give you some of this information so the first tool I'm going to show you is Google ads Keyword Planner so if I'm having a Google ads account I could simply go to tools and then choose the

Keyword Planner and from there I want to find new keywords so if I choose the keyword dried figs because that's the keyword I put in my spreadsheet that I'm interested and optimizing for and then maybe drive fig recipes that was the other keyword theme so if I enter those two keywords in just to begin with basically what Google is going to give me is the average search monthly volume so here I can see dried figs I have an a average monthly search volume 8,100 that means on average over the last 12 months that's how many

people have typed in that keyword here I can see a little bit of a trend I just hover my mouse over that graph I could see again for seasonality impact if there is any season ality what the volume is on average per month then I can see the competition is high and because this is Google ads because it's paid search they're going to give me a sense or an idea of what I should be bidding on the keyword now that's another topic for another day but it's good information to have because if you're not ranking

for a keyword you could decide to bid on it for paid search so don't discard the bidding information go ahead and put it in a spreadsheet for later use but for now we're focused in on keywords that are relevant how much volume how much competition okay so once I get this information here I can simply go back to my spreadsheet and put that information in there what's the volume for dried fig what is the competition now for competition notice that Google ads gives us a higher low now if we're trying to measure ratio between volume

and competition we want to get an actual sense of what that competition is so what I always do as a best practice is is go into Google search if I go to Google Search and I type in dried figs I'm going to see the actual volume is 34 mil 500,000 so I could see that's the actual search volume for this particular keyword however if I add a syntax called all and tile before that keyword with a colon space and then hit enter Then I could see the actual volume reduces to 31,000 and basically with this

tells me is that 31,000 listings or results have the keyword dried figs in the title tag so if a web page has dried fig or targeted keyword in the title tag then ideally we can insinuate that that page is trying to rank for that keyword so therefore in order for us to rank number one on Google we have to jump over 31,000 results so we want to be able to include this information into our keyword analysis so if I go into our keyword analysis here and I go ahead and enter in that information so what's

my keyword my keyword is dried figs okay my volume was 8,100 my competition was 31,000 and so that gives me a ratio of 81 / by 31,000 if I make that into a percentage basically 26% so that's my keyword Effectiveness index or Ki or ratio between volume and competition and so that's an a way that you can gather information is by using Google ads enter the information into a spreadsheet and then sort all your data by Kei you could sort it by volume you could sort it by competition all these metrics matter alternatively as another

tool you can use MZ so MZ has a keyword explore tool okay so if I type in the keyword dried figs focusing on the United States I could see that Maz says hey look there's anywhere between 4,300 and 6500 in terms of volume out of 100 the difficulty is 41 and so I can expect a clickthrough rate of you know 41% and so basically the great thing about moz's keyword Explorer tool is I can also look at the surf analysis search engine results Pages what surf stands for and I can analyze the Ser for a

particular keyword in MZ so I want to be able to understand my competition's doing so here I could see if I really want to try and optimize for that keyword I could see what the other pages are ranked for that keyword and the on page one I can also see what local results show up for that keyword so here I can see that we have a number of different sites listed here so if we want to be number one these are the sites that are basically above us that we need to climb over to be

number one on Google so I find that the keyword explore tool in Moz is very helpful for understanding your competition as well as getting a alternative check on volume and competition or difficulty if you will and so remember we want to identify a list of keywords that are relevant I can't stress that enough we want to choose keywords based on difficulty we want to choose keywords based on volume on Commercial intent and more important relevancy we can also identify Trends from a site search query like Amazon and know what your competitor are ranking four so

we can also go back into Moz and we can see just by typing in some of the keywords we're focusing on we can see if our competitors are ranking for the same keywords just by using that keyword Explorer tool and then another thing we want to look at is LSI or latent semantic indexing so that's a fancy word which basically means we want to find keywords related to the topic of the page you're trying to optimize so if there are other keywords on that page then you could Sway and that direction and so when it

comes to choosing keywords you want to choose always a primary and secondary keyword and so if we go back to our spreadsheet it doesn't necessarily always have to be just one keyword it doesn't necessarily have to be dried figs we could choose another keyword that has a good volume to competition ratio so we want to choose keywords that are always relevant and if we're analyzing nothing but relevant keywords then we want to be able to choose keywords that have a good ratio between volume and competition so you always want to choose at least two keywords

per page we could also stay up to date on industry news as will help you learn new jargon so it doesn't hurt to subscribe to sites like search engine watch or search engine land they have lots of good tips so here I'll show you what that one of those sites look like if I simply just go to searchengine watch.com I find this is a good resource to stay up on the latest news when it comes to search engines here we could see the Y SEO and frontend developers are the perfect search marketing team another article

about optimizing your channel YouTube channel five easy steps so there's a lot of information here on search engine watch that pertain to SEO and keyword research we could also look at other third party sites like Wikipedia Reddit and Kora for example so if I go to Kora I can do a search for dried figs and I could see what's being written about that topic so that should give me some ideas to build a keyword a list around so for example the health benefits of dried figs okay are dried figs safe for diabetes best ways to

eat dried figs so those are all good keyword themes that we could build a keyword list around and I did that simply just by typing in dried figs on Kora so that's a a good tip for you to leverage when you're trying to build out a keyword list okay let's uh talk about tip number two which is publish high quality content to get more traffic to website so it's all about content so we've already done the keyword research we still need to kind of merge the two but when we talk about merging the two it's

not just building content around those keywords it's much more than that when it comes to SEO and so that's why we always talk about high quality content so let's talk about some of the tips that can help you create high quality content so first tip is we want to be able to publish longer and engaging cont content longer an engaging content tends to rank hire on Google why because you have more content to work with and when you have more content to work with you can optimize it you can structure it you can insert different

assets like videos and images and by keeping it long you're going to likely keep it engaging and so Google tends to lean in favor of content that is well organized structured and long because it is more likely to be engaging for the end user we definitely want to include those Target keywords so you want to be able to you know insert those keywords into those metat tag descriptions into those title tags into those alt tags but you want to work them in naturally you don't want to force anything content should be naturally written because if

it's naturally written it's going to be engaging so we want to use LSI keywords in the content so LSI or basically latent semantic indexing basic Bally just means uh different terms and concepts related to your target keywords so feel free to use terms that are similar to what you're currently using these keywords can definitely be used for SEO because they can create more visibility and potentially higher rankings because it gives you an opportunity to use keywords that are natural and work for different variations and let's look at an example so if you're optimizing an e-commerce

category page and and your keyword is one mix shoes for men so we want to use keywords closely related to one mix shoes for men for example running shoes for men or sport running shoes for men outdoor sport shoes or air cushion shoes let's take a look at example of Amazon so if I go to Amazon I could see the one mix shoes for men page and if I look at this page I can see a lot of product and each product has basically some content associated with I.E the title of the particular product and

so you want to be able to use different descriptors for this particular product for example men's running shoes or breathable lightweight gym sport shoes or lightweight casual sneakers or walking casual sneaker all of these are LSI related keywords they're similar to what we're trying to optimize for so you don't necessarily always have to be brand heavy or stick with one key word you could definitely show variation especially on the e-commerce side if you're dealing with different product so we want to make the content readable with the help of visuals subtitles and bullet points so if

you're e-commerce you want to make sure that page is laid out properly easy to read you here I could see the descriptor along with the title all kind of merged together and so there's no breakout of okay this is the product name this description it's kind of one allinone which I like it just makes it more natural sound in okay and you can see these are all broken out uh pretty well laid out page and Amazon is more or less you know consistent in terms of how their pages are laid out so make it readable

add visuals add subtitles add bullet points it helps break out a lot of the content especially if you have a long amount of content or large amount of content so the use of subtitles bullet points and visuals will help break it out structure it and make it more engaging for the end user you definitely want to write an effective and organized content in order to reduce the balce rate so there is correlation between engagement and balce rate the more you structure the more you add visuals the more you had subtitles the more engaged somebody's going

to be the less likely they are to balance from the page we also want to share customer reviews and ratings so if you have a web page you sell products even if you don't sell products it's always good to have testimonials or some type of customer review so if we go back to our example Le on Amazon and we clicked on a product uh one of the running shoe products we look here we can see the image we could see kind of the description well I may not be so interested in buying this product I

want to know a little bit more about it well that's where the breaking point comes in that's where the decision Factor comes in where if I read other reviews then I can possibly have my mind made up to buy this product so here I could see that not only there reviews but but there's testimonials so I could see that here you could see that there's a lot of stars and you can see the kind of the review title these running shoes are very comfortable and lightweight so you have a lot of different feedback and so

reading custom reviews is always helpful because even though you're making the decision it kind of will help sway you in one direction or another at least it does for me so that's the the beauty of a customer review and a rating we want to be able to use those to our advantage and then you want to be able to update your content on a regular basis so and that goes for testimonials and reviews you want to make sure you're always getting reviews if you're always getting reviews then that's just adding to the particular product and

so if you're always updating your content on a regular basis as well then Google's going to be able to see that and Google likes fresh content okay we also want to include the benefits of the product so if you're selling a product any product you always want to include the benefits you want to do as much as you can to make your product engage into to the end user enticing so that they can buy it so in addition to customer reviews or adding content about the product you want to include benefits so if we go

back to Amazon here we could see Amazon list a lot of the benefits or one mix in this case list a lot of the benefits so here you could see all the descriptors about the particular product it's got rubber so it's got a breathable textile lining you get free hot quality socks with every shoe so these are some of the features and if we continue to scroll down we could see some of the details about the fabric type specifics about the fabric and there's a lot of information on this product page even a sizing chart

so a lot of different features that will help the end User make the decision so don't hold back at as much information as you possibly can as much information as you have available it doesn't hurt because in the end what you're trying to do from a product perspective is sell the product and you can't really sell it unless you have information that's going to convince the user that this product is what they want to buy so include the warranty size recommendation return policy and some offers so it should all be listed on the page easy

for the end user to see so can't stress it enough provide as much product information as possible I go back here here it has a size and chart what colors are available again some of the descriptors if I scroll down here I can see some more of the benefits you know waffle rubber outsole soft deodorant insole again fabric type it's got all sorts of information it's got images about the fabric itself the shoe itself how it's structured so a lot of information about this and it even does a comparison and so there's a lot of

information about this particular product so don't hold back add as much as you can to convin the end user so so in the case of the one mix on Amazon you know they had a sizing chart you know they had an FAQ they had additional information what other products did customers view from one mix and then testimonials so these are some of the basic bits of information you want to add on your page if you don't have customer views it's okay add FAQ in its place again the end result is to convince the customer to

purchase the product and then build a comprehensive internal linking structure of web pages so every product page page should link to similar products so if I go back here here I can see other products from one mix so you should always have a linking structure so that if the end user doesn't want to particularly buy that particular product then you have links available so they can go to another page and then add different varieties and related short videos of the product so if we go back to our product page you know they have different varieties

that they're showcasing here they have the size chart they even have have a size convertible chart so if you're dealing with metric you can go over to us metric fee vice versa you can add a video you know show a video of if you're selling running shoes show a video of somebody working out you know it doesn't have to be a full-blown commercial per se but it could be a short 30 second video of what the shoe looks like on somebody else's feet so that they could see somebody walking with those shoes on so video

doesn't have to be a big production you can do it right from your phone so review your content before you publish this goes without saying you want to do that just you make sure you include everything possible because when the content does get published remember Google's going to index that content when they index it it's going to show up in the search results so we want to make sure we have all the information readily available not only for the end user but for Google as well we want to be able to analyze our metat tags

and URL to improve click through rat so this is important because the meta tags I.E the title tag in The Meta description and the URLs what shows up in Google search results so if we have title tags step first that's the first important element that's what shows up in the search results so what we want to do is we want to optimize the title tag and when we optimize it we want to use modifiers and when I say modifiers I mean you know feel free to use the word best or cash back or free shipping

or discount so for example if you're selling running shoes 25 best sneakers or up to 70% off or free shipping or buy shoes on discount very action oriented but you know it includes these modifiers that are going to help somebody click on that link so some tips for optimizing the title tag in addition to the modifiers we want to watch the title length and we want to include those Target keywords in the title tag so remember you're likely going to have two keywords to work with you want to have at least one of those keywords

words in your title tag so with the modifier you know up to 60 to 65 characters in length with that targeted key word should get you a good title tag that's going to get somebody to click on it so let's look at an example so if I typee in the keyword best recipes for dried figs you know here I could scroll down here's my title tag stands out my URL is right underneath that and underneath the URL are is the meta description and so here I can see some modifiers 100 88 best Autumn dried fig

recipes or 25 fantastic fig recipes or 10 best cooking dried fig recipes so these are all modifiers that going to help somebody get the click get them to click on your link and go to your website so when you don't hit the 65 character limit if you go over that Google's going to cut off the title text so we want to avoid that at all possible so the whole idea is you know like 10 best cooking dried fig recipes by yly that's a good enticing title tag okay takes to encounter modifier includes the targeted keyword

and is under the 65 character count some additional tips for writing meta description we always want to provide a unique description for each web page of the website so no duplicate meta tag descriptions every page needs to be unique then we also want to be specific about what we're offering so if you have say you're selling headphones and you have a particular set of headphones from a diff specific brand include that in the meta description if you have that particular product from that brand on sale include that in the meta description so you want to

be as specific as possible the whole idea behind a meta description is to describe the page but also to get the end user to click on your link so here's an example of using modifiers and describing a page if we look at Amazon again we could see this example here and if we look at it on Google search results so if I type in Amazon Bluetooth headsets $10 are on sale here we can see a lot of Amazon listings in Google search here you can see the use of modifiers in the title tag and also

in the meta description here we could see that you know this particular headset Bluetooth headset is on sale 50% off so if something's on sale feel free to include it be descriptive about the pay page let people know where they're going and use those modifiers don't be afraid to use numbers in The Meta description even if it's the price itself even if it's not on sale but it is the price included it's not going to hurt the more information you can include in a meta description the better chance you have of somebody clicking on that

link use numbers symbols you know percentages off always help use catchy words like discount or cashback you're competing with other listings on the page so if you have something on sale if it's on clearance list that it's on clearance here I can see they even included the coupon code so feel free to list as much specific information about that page as possible the whole idea is you're competing with your own web pages but in other cases with competitors so the meta description along with the title tag and the URL helps separate out you from the

rest of the listings on search engine results and we don't want to keyword stuff we want to keep it within 160 something characters or 160 65 characters because Google will break off the metad description just like they do with the title tag and so we want clean natural written metad descriptions that separate you from the competition so that means including the keywords but making sure those keywords are naturally included in the meta description so if I go back again to Valley fig.com and I can see the meta description hey Welcome to the best resource online

for dried fig recipes Savor is sweet snacks or healthy dried fig recipes we've got it all they start cooking with figs and so it's natural sounding it does include the keyword it's not keyword stuffing it's natural sounding that's hopefully going to get that person to click on this particular website let's turn our attention to the URL so we want to make sure that the URL is basically taking into account best practices so if we take a look at this particular URL here it doesn't necessarily look as attractive as we would like so first of all

I don't understand some of it so that makes it unpleasant boring and messy to say the least so you want URLs that you know basically are clean and understandable so in other words we want to make them SEO friendly because if they're SEO friendly somebody understands the URL then they're likely going to click on it so the old rule of thumb is if you can read the URL then the search engines can read the URL so here are some tips for creating friendly URLs for SEO make it readable you want to include the target keyword

in the URL so if it's dried figs the URL should include dried figs if it's dried fig recipes make sure it's dried fig recipes now avoid using too many subdirectories in the URLs so we want to keep it as close as possible to the root directory and match the URLs to titles most of the time so let's go back to our example here here we could see this is Valley fig.com recipes not necessarily dried fig recipes but recipes nonetheless it's in the root directory okay so at all cost now this is in some cases unavoidable

given that you may be dealing with an e-commerce website that's calling you know content from a database so if it that is the case you're going to have some Dynamic parameters in the URL which is fine just make sure you avoid having too many of those Dynamic parameters it's understandable at parameters but the ru of th generally is no more than two different parameters in the URL so prefer to create short URLs that's really the way to go the shorter the better is the rule of Thum and you know if you're going to break up

the URL then use hyphens instead of underscores it's just cleaner it's a more understandable search engines tend to read it a little bit easier if it's hyphen so here's what a friendly URL looks like for search you got your domain you got a subcategory broken up with a hyphen and then the product so that's a just a clean URL for a particular e-commerce site that has categories and subcategories so again we got amazon.com your category can be Electronics your subcategory could be earphones and your product could be boat earphones it's that simple let's start with

talking about rich Snippets this is tip number four so we want to add Rich Snippets to improve your website's visibility on serers so tip number four is all about rich Snippets so let's start out by asking ourselves what is a rich snippet so rich snippet is simply just a term used to describe structured data markup that you as a website owner can add to your HTML so hypertext markup language or HTML is what is basically constructs a page so if we can add more more information to that that will internal all search engines like Google

to better understand the information that's on that web page so the more Google understands about that web page the more they can put into the search engine results page so rich niit bits is basically some structured data markup that we can add to our existing HTML and so if we want to add Rich Snippets to search engines then how would you prefer your products to be displayed well if we have products then we want to make sure that maybe we have reviews or maybe we have so other information in there like uh links to our

site okay so there's a lot of different types of Rich Snippets that you know we can add that Google can recognize and add to the search engine results so if you have a product then there's a lot of things we can add like specifically product reviews so we want to be able to add more in information to the search engine results by working in some rich nippet so basically the whole idea is to set up the rich nippit to drive targeted traffic okay so because the more information in the Ser the more likelihood you're going

to get the click and the more likelihood that click is specific traffic so some of the benefits of structuring the data for Rich nippet are as a mention increasing click rates you know also increasing conversion rates so when you get the traffic from from organic search to your website if somebody's looking for specific product and you have a number of different good reviews showing up let just say five stars out of five stars and you have 100 reviews showing five stars then you know somebody's probably going to send take some trust in your brand and

your conversion rate probability is going to go higher it also helps improve your search engine visibility because you're adding more information so in other words the more Google knows about your page the likelihood it's going to rank that page page and it's more likely that that information that's contained in that rich nippet is going to get featured in either the knowledge graph which is that graph on the right side or any featured snippet which usually shows up at the top of search engine results so in other words the more information you give Google the more

they can use that information on their search results page and there's no disagreeing that the more information that you have in your search engine result the likelihood of getting more tra trffic increases so for Rich Snippets you could always start with images so some of the common properties that you can add to your product page if you have a product page just a page itself is an image you can always start there you can always add a description you can always add in ratings and you can always add in reviews so these are some of

the most common attributes you can add as a rich snippet so if you add that Google picks it up it's going to include that information in the search results okay some others or offers prices site links links to your site and product availability so all the information could be conveyed to Google Google understands what you're trying to pass along it's going to include that in the search results so did you know that according to HRS over 99.58% of featured pages that have structured data already rank in the top 10 list of the Google search results

page so in other words if you have Rich Snippets in your page your chances of ranking in the top 10 of a Google result is going to be very very very good okay let's talk about tip number five optimize your site structure for great user experience so let's go over some of the tips that you would do for planning a good website for SEO and so tip number one is you want a Ural structure that follows your s's navigation hierarchy so obviously home page interior pages so depending on what type of site you have obviously

the navigation needs to follow that sites navigation that site hierarchy and it all starts with a homepage you want to optimize your homepage to drive traffic to your product pages so the homepage is nothing more than a doorway into your website and so the s's navigation should link to all those different products so if you have a e-commerce site with subcategories or categor sub categories then you want to be able to make sure your navigation reflects that you want to build a comprehensive structure for internal linking as well because when you're from the homepage obviously

you want to be able to easily navigate to other Pages however when you're on other Pages you want to be able to have a link pointing back to relevant pages and not necessarily the homepage so this serves two purposes one for the end user obviously you want the end user to navigate through your website seamlessly right second for the search engines their following links they want to be able to understand how your website flows and links together so you don't want a scenario where it's a oneway street from the homepage to Interior Pages you want

basically homepage to Interior interior to other relevant interior pages and that could be a lateral or that can be a situation where it's a hierarchy for example homepage category subcategory category Etc you want to be able to make sure your site is constructed in a manner in which the search engine can read it so CSS or cascading stylesheets or hypertext markup language HTML are your two most common languages that's basically what browsers load that's what search engines like to index it just makes it easy for them to understand what your page is all about remember

we talked about rich Snippets in the previous tip Rich Snippets are nothing nothing more than supplemental HTML to describe what the page is all about so that the search engines can understand that page and include reviews or include site links in the search engine results so this is all based on HTML so the more you provide the search engines in a more structured manner via HTML the more the search engines are going to understand the page adding breadcrumbs to your product pages is also a good practice if you have an e-commerce site and you have

a category then a subcategory then a sub subcategory then a product page well it's probably not a bad idea to make sure you have a breadcrumb so that was that way somebody can easily go right back from the product page to say the category page or to the subcategory page directly without having to hit the back button or having to go through the navigation some good examples I think Amazon does a good example of using breadcrumbs giving the amount of products they have on their site so go check out Amazon if you want a good

example for breadcrumbs and then canonical tags we want to make good use of canonical tags and that's in order to avoid duplicate content so a canonical tag is nothing more than a link element basically or an HTML element that basically prevents duplicate content issues so in other words if we have a canonical tag as a metat tag basically we're telling the search engines this is the preferred or canonical version of a web page so use this web page so it signals to the search engines which page they should basically index and pay attention to and

avoid all the other pages that have similar content so that's the idea behind a canonical tag so that's a good best practice and then optimize your site for desktop and mobile I can't stress the mobile part enough most users begin their Journey on mobile so if you're not sure about what the search engines like or don't like you can always refer to Google search console for an example so if you go to Google Search console they have a report called mobile usability so if you click on mobile usability you can see what pages they like

what pages they don't like from a mobile perspective and if you have errors they're going to tell you what those errors are so if your website has text that's too small to read They're going to tell you that these are the pages with this error and so that allows you to go and address those errors because from a Google perspective if you have if a page has a mobile usability error then Google will not index that page so leverage Google search console to get a sense of what type of Errors your site has from a

mobile perspective you also want to prefer to keep your checkout page simple so again from an e-commerce perspective you want to keep the checkout page as simple as possible for obvious reason you want the end user to have a good experience and you obviously want the conversion so when I say keep a checkout page simple really now with today's technology you can create a onepage checkout process you want to optimize your site map so when we talk about sitemaps we want to make sure that it's a file an XML file that basically includes all of

our URLs and we can then turn around and give that site map to the search Eng ions so if you have a sitemap in XML make sure you go to Google Search console so if I go to Google Search console and I click on sit Maps I can just simply just tell Google where my sit map is located and when they recognize that sit map they're going to be able to basically index the URLs from that s map so we could see here how many URLs they discover and how many they index so make sure

you create the sitemap in an XML format submit the sitemap via Google search console and then you can go back and see how many pages they've indexed versus how many you've submitted and you want to make sure that sitemap is dynamic meaning anytime you publish a URL that URL is added to the site map fixing broken links so broken links is not something you want but it's something every website has it's unavoidable you know people publish Pages all the time there's test Pages there's all sorts of reasons why a site has broken links you want

to be able to address those and again going back to Google search console we can basically see just by looking at some reports what pages have broken links and which ones don't so we could certainly look at search console to get information about basically what pages are broken which ones aren't and then we want to prefer predicted searches and integrate product typographic errors on your search bar so basically have a search bar that's a best practice but anticipate knowing what people are typing in so that means maybe going into Google analytics and looking at the

Search terms report so we can go into analytics and look at Search terms uh to get a sense of what people are searching for but you know when we talk about integrating product typographic errors we're talking also about fonts so we want to make sure we're using the latest fonts so that we don't run into any issues on our website uh people not being able to read based on a specific font that you're using and then as a best practice what I found and and this is not necessarily for everyone but using a live chat

widget sometimes helps in fact that would even go beyond sometimes most the time again depending on your business but I see most businesses now have live chat enabled and so basically having live chat enables somebody who has a question to immediately reach out to somebody versus picking up the phone versus sending an email it's just instantaneous gratification in some ways so inserting life chat on a website is more common practice than not nowadays given it it lends to a better user experience tip number six improve your page speed and reduce the bounce rate so let's

talk about page speed and how page speed correlates with higher bounce rate if it's a high page load and so according to Crazy page speed is an important over SEO tactic because for every second delay and Page load can result in 11% fewu page views 16% decrease in customer satisfaction 7% decline in conversion rate so you know you could see here regardless of how specific the numbers are when you have a page that loads slow you're going to have lower user engagement and a poor user experience so you have to pay attention to page speed

and so since 2010 Google has been using page speed as a factor for page ranking in the search engine results so here are some tips to focus on making sure your pages are optimal in terms of speed so enable browser caching okay you can reduce plugins if you're using Wordpress as an example you know disabled plugins you're not using getting using a simple website design going back back to tip number five stick with CSS and HTML don't do anything fancy in terms of Technology because it's only going to complicate matters optimize your code Minify files

meaning hey if you're not using any code just get rid of it because code has to execute and that slows down page low time so if your website has numerous CSS and javascripts files basically Minify and combine them and there that's what we're talking about there you know you don't necessarily need a lot of you know JV script on your page you can leverage Google tag manager or you know other features that help minimize the number of JavaScript files you have and so you can also get some of these ideas by going into Google analytics

so in analytics under Behavior under sight speed under page timings you can basically see how quick each page loads and then if you click on speed suggestions right below page timings what happens is Google's going to actually give you some suggested ways to increase speed so if we lit this report load we'll be able to see some speed suggestions per page and so here you can see for example the homepage has an average page load time of 4.89 seconds you can see right next to that we have page speed suggestions seven total so if we

click on that basically what it's going to do it's going to launch another Google product called page speed insights and what page speed insights is going to do is is going to analyze the page in question whether that be the homepage or an interior page and what they're actually going to do is not only analyze the desktop version of your website but also the mobile version and so now we could see opportunities to improve our page speed by making sure the images are properly sized making sure server response time is changed again defer unused CSS

not using CSS that's or getting rid of CSS or minifying it so there's lots of things you can do and again this is desktop and mobile so on the mobile side we could see some of the other issues too that are causing High page load so analytics sight speed reports page speed insights are good ways to get an idea really excellent ways to really address page loow time issues so again these are just some of the common issues with page low time there could be other fact so leaning on those page speed insights reports will

definitely help reduce page low time so basically according to Google a website should have you know time to First Bite lesser than 200 milliseconds milliseconds is very very fast so in case your website is slower than 200 milliseconds such as 500 milliseconds or more you need to improve it so you don't even have to measure it by milliseconds you can even go by seconds which is what most of us count time and again you could see that simply going into the speed suggestions report in Google analytics so ideally in terms of seconds you want something

that's about you know 4 seconds or less 3 seconds or less obviously as fast as possible so case study Walmart Walmart reported the following results so Walmart experienced a 2% increase in conversions for every 1 second of page speed Improvement so think about that there's definitely correlation between page load time and speed so in conversions and user engagement so the quicker your page loads the higher the engagement so with that Improvement they also experienced an increment in Revenue so meaning the pages load people had a better user experience they were able to check out easier

and that led to more Revenue so they were able to measure Revenue against milliseconds and that's something you can certainly do in analytics you can correlate Revenue with balce rate you can correlate Revenue with PHP tip number seven build quality links and increase their domain authority of your website so Google's top three search ranking factors includes link building so you need to have quality links from quality sites pointing to your site and so that's a factor in terms of ranking so that's falls under off page SEO you need to build reference es and links on

quality sites and so building quality links to your content can give your product or category Pages or even content or blog post a boost in the serers so it's all about quality over quantity so it's always building quality links not quantity so let's talk about what kind of strategies you should Implement so if you implement these strategies then you're going to likely see a lift in the serps so earn backlinks from relevant and authoritative web pages so what's authoritative well authoritative is subjective to some degree but it's also measurement in others so you could use

Moz as a good tool to measure page Authority or domain Authority so if I go into MZ MZ has a page and domain Authority score between 1 and 100 and so you can actually see what sites have good domain or page Authority just by ENT ing in the domain so relevant you obviously want to rank to something that's relevant so if you're in the food industry something food related you want to promote your content regularly on social media so social media I always considered a lwh hanging fruit when it comes to backlinking you know there's

so many different social media platforms available Facebook LinkedIn Twitter there's so many varieties from images to Pinterest and Instagram to video being YouTube so there's lots of ways to get your content out on social media that will allow you to not only promote your band build a community but also establish a reference back to that page you can opt for guest blogging okay so you can reach out to another blogger and blog on that platform it could be reciprocal as well a blogger can certainly you know blog on your platform and have a link back

and it works both ways influencer marketing so influencer marketing is working with somebody who has a large amount of followers who can influence those followers to you know mention you in a hashtag link to your particular product or brand or even drive traffic to your site so you want to take advantage of social media platforms and start your own page as well so Facebook's a good example it could be having a YouTube channel if you're into video you can certainly set up a YouTube channel build a following around YouTube as well so always start your

own page if that's the platform of choice the last thing you should do is set up a page on social media and not keep it updated you could certainly participate in forums you can participate in other websites like Kora or Reddit that's very you know content based content driven user driven I always recommend starting your own blog blog is a good way to not only generate content but it's a good way to incorporate different types of content so you could set up different types of content and categories it's a good way to incorporate different assets

like images and video it's a good way to get users engag by having comments or having social share buttons it's a good way to leverage that content onto other social media platforms so there's lots of benefits to blogging very few cons the only con would be a time constraint but it's better to have one blog post in one month consistently then not blogging at all so getting listed on high quality link directories like Yahoo directory is still a way to add a link from a high quality site and then make use of broken link building

so again on the last tip we mentioned search console search console certainly has reports available for you that allow you to see what pages on your site are no longer there and allow you to see what pages they're linking from and you can also do testimonials there's lots of ways to generate quality langage in a way you almost have to get creative but creative in a way that's going to generate quality not quantity quality is the key so even if it's one source whether that be somebody else's blog so be it as long as it's

quality that's what counts so let's talk about some of the key takeaways from today's tips so remember tip number one we want to opt for smarter ways to do keyword research so remember we want to look at volume we want to look at competition we want to create themes put them in a spreadsheet so we want to be smarter in which in the way in which we choose our keyword tip number two remember publish high quality content to get more traffic when we say high quality content remember break up the content use different assets organize

it structure it you know make sure it's answering somebody's questions then we talked about in tip number three analyzing your metatags and URLs so we want to make sure that title tag meta descriptions are created of use modifiers like numbers or or promotions you know we don't want to go over character counts we want to make them unique and distinct so that somebody clicks on them then we talked about rich Snippets and tip number four remember Rich Snippets are just additional HTML that communicates the search engines so the search engines can understand exactly what's on

your page so if you have recipes if you have reviews if you have videos if you have images if you have ratings all these things can be added to the Surs just by communicating with the search engines via Rich Snippets tip five optimize your site structure we want to make sure that you know you have good inbound links you want to make sure you incorporate breadcrumbs you want to make sure users can navigate your site more easily and then at tip number six if your pages load fast then it's going to enhance the user experience

it's going to increase user engagement and increase conversions and then tip number seven we want to build quality link quality to increase the domain Authority so remember we can use mod to measure domain Authority it's all about quality whether that be via influencer marketing guest blogging directories social media setting up a social media page there's always something you could be doing to generate a quality link to your website today we're going to talk about keyword research so what are we going to talk about when we talk about keyword research we're going to talk about why

we would do keyword research for SEO we're going to talk about the types of keywords that we need to research we're going to talk about some methodologies best practices on how to do keyword research some alternate suggestions we're going to talk about keyword clustering and then we're going to talk about some tools that you can use to do your keyword research so let's start with the why we would do keyword research so Jesse is planning to publish a Blog of pizza recipes so she was doing pizza recipes step by step pizza recipes with sausage homemade

pizza toppings pizza dough recipes think Crust Pizzas she's doing a lot of different topics on pizza recipes well what Jesse needs to do is understand what's going to drive traffic to these blog posts if she's writing about you know different topics around pizza recipes so she's Unsure how these blogs are going to to drive traffic so she really needs to understand that hey you need to choose the right keywords to drive traffic so the question is if you're writing a blog post about recipes with sausages is pizza recipes with sausages or recipes for free the

best keyword to use maybe maybe not so you need to take uh care and choosing the keywords to align with your content so that's really the idea why we would do keyword research because because some of the issues with keywords that are poorly chosen are they could have low search volume for example you may choose a keyword that just a lot of people aren't using to search for or they can be highly competitive so if you choose a keyword that's very broad or popular it could be very competitive and take you a long time to

be found for that keyword or you could just make the mistake of choosing a keyword that isn't align with your content or you can choose keywords but use them incorrectly with your content so these are some of the issues that you can encounter if you just go about choosing keywords randomly without due diligence without the proper research so low search volume will lead to less traffic High competition you may not even rank at all okay if somebody finds you for a keyword that's not relevant to the topic they're just going to leave the page and

if you're not using the right keywords and or if you are using the right keywords and not using them correctly in the content then then your pages may not even be found in organic search so you really have to take care and choosing the keywords to me that's the most important step with SEO is keyword research so we're going to talk about the types of keyword research then so we have short tail keywords and we have longtail keywords so if you write a blog post about pizza recipes well what are you going to choose a

short tail or long tail so let's talk about short tail keywords first so short tail keywords are keywords that are usually three keywords in a phrase or shorter in some cases it may be two keywords in a phrase or shorter so short tail keywords usually have high search volume which means likely means higher competition but what it also means it could be lower conversions because short-tail key words like for example pizza recipes could be considered a short-tail key word but maybe somebody's looking for homemade pizza recipes or pizza recipes from their favorite Italian restaurant so

short tail keywords may not be as relevant so if we compare it with longtail keywords chances are you're going to have lower competition that's one of the benefits but you're also going to have lower search volume but with longer tail keywords the keyword is probably going to be more relevant with the content you're writing about so therefore the conversion rates likely going to be higher so that's really the difference between short tail keywords and longtail keywords if you want to look at simplistically short tail keywords are Broad in nature it's going to capture a lot

of eyeballs but those eyeballs may look at your content is not relevant versus longtail keywords that may be very relevant but not as many eyeballs on them so short tail keywords the characteristics they're not as specific usually they're less than three words they have high search volume and high competition so if you just choose pizza recipes could take you a while to rank for that keyword but when you rank you're going to get the traffic but again it may not convert because the key word is Broad in nature so pizza recipes is a short tail

keyword that may not be exactly what you're writing about in your blog post so it may draw a lot of traffic but the traffic may not do anything so the longer tail keywords are very specific they consist of more than three words in the search query they have relatively low search volume competition so the chance of you ranking higher faster for that long TI word is probably going to be greater because not many other websites are trying to rank for that thinky were and so the benefit of that is if you have let's just say

homemade pizza recipes with mushrooms that's a long TIY word but if somebody's looking for that type of pizza recipe then you know you're going to track the right traffic and chances are that traffic is going to engage or convert based on the type of conversion you have in place so example would be homemade pizza dough recipes that'd be another example more than th key words in the phrase very specific specific we're talking about homemade pizza dough recipes so we're not talking about just pizza recipes so it's a little bit more uh specific in nature longer

tail so these keywords are used for targeted Pages including blog posts if you're writing a blog post specifically about pizza recipes with homemade dough then this is the keyword you likely would want to use versus just pizza recipes so let's look at an example between a short tail keyword and a long tail keyword and to accentuate the differences we're going to use Google's Keyword Planner tool so Google's Keyword Planner tool is located in Google ads the Google ads platform and when you're in the Google ads platform you can simply click on tools and then Keyword

Planner and so what Keyword Planner allows us to do is get a sense of the type of volume that a particular keyword has so what Google's Keyword Planner does is they show you the average monthly searches this is the average monthly search volume of a keyword over the past 12 months and so in this example we're going to choose pizza recipes and homemade pizza dough recipes so one short tail and one long tail so we enter those keywords in we're going to click get results and what Google's going to do is it's going to show

us the volume of those keywords so for pizza recipe we could see the average monthly search volume is 33,100 for pizza recipe so note that pizza pizza recipe and pizza recipes are closely related keywords and so what Google does is they consider that a close variance so meaning if somebody ties in pizza recipe then they're also in Google's eyes looking for pizza recipes so it's a close variance and so for the keyword pizza recipe which is short tail we could see on average over the past 12 months this keyword received 33,100 queries and so if

we hover over the graph we could see basically the volume the average volume per month so here I could see for this particular keyword here the volume per month is 33 1,000 and then I can see the actual volume over the past 12 months and then for the longtail keyword I can see homemade pizza dough recipe again close variance homemade pizza dough recipes I can see over the past 12 months what the search volume is for this on average it's 2400 but I could see here in December the volume went up to 3,600 but for

example in May it was 1,900 so it's going to fluctuate a bit over the past 12 months but on average it's about 2400 so shorter tail a lot of more volume longer tail not as much volume but nonetheless there is volume here and so these are the differences between a short tail and a longer tail and so what Google's Keyword Planner also does is allow us to get get a sense of what the competition is and so here I can see the competition is low for both of these keywords fair enough so we now know

that if we want to optimize or choose the keyword homemade pizza dough recipe for our blog post we know for ranked on page one of Google even in the top spot we can expect about 2400 search queries for that keyword now whether you get all 2400 clicks for that keyword remains to be seen chances are you're not going to get all 2400 you're going to get a lion share of those clicks but you're going to at least get some volume on it so even the longer take keywords have a lot of Promise because there is

some search volume here for this keyword how to do a proper keyword research so we looked at Google's Keyword Planner tool in Google ads and we typed in two keywords and we were able to get a sense of what the average volume is so we definitely want to choose key words based on the following factors we want to choose it based on search volume search volume is a good indicator of the potential traffic we can obtain so again for the keyw homemade pizza dough recipe we know that it averages 2400 a month in search volume

again we may not get all 2400 but are we're going to get a line share of that we also need to look at competition and so Google's Keyword Planner gives us a high medium or low in terms of the competition but if you're somebody who wants to get a better sense of what the competition is and you should because competition is a key component in choosing keywords and so what I want to do is get a sense of how many people are actually optimizing for that keyword so Google's Keyword Planner tool is going to give

me a low medium high really what I want to do is get a better sense of that numerically so what I can do is go into Google search and I could type in pizza recipes and I could see there's about 1 billion results that's a lot of results however that means that every potential web page out there on the internet that mentions pizza recipes is going to be included in this number here and so I want to get a better sense of who's optimizing for pizza recipes so I'm going to put in the all entitle

syntax and so what that is going to ask Google to do is tell me all the web sites that have pizza recipes the key word pizza recipes in the title tag so if I do all in tile colon space then pizza recipes my result drops down to 336,000 so what that tells me is that there are 336,000 results with the keyword pizza recipes in the title tag now if I want to focus in on my other keyword if I choose uh my other keyword was a longer tail keyword homemade pizza dough recipe so if I

type that keyword in the homemade pizza dough recipe or recipes remember close variance and I just click enter or type the keyword in hit my enter key I'm going to get 35 Million results but again is that really an indicator of the type of competition I have no because every listing that men's homemade pizza dough recipes is going to be included in the search results so I'm going to type in my all en tile colon space and then I'm going to get a better sense of how many websites have the keyword homemade pizza dough recipes

in the title tag and I get 2,160 different results so here I can see the first result in the title tag homemade pizza dough recipe second one homemade pizza dough recipe so these are sites or web pages that have that keyword in the title tag so now I have a numerical number to work with and so the thing you have to understand about SEO specifically about keyword research is you need to do research on a few different keywords not just one or two so what we want to do is have a spreadsheet the spreadsheet is

going to contain keywords that we can potentially want to optimize for choose as keywords to optimize for SEO and so my recommendation is you come up with a theme first so the theme for us in this exercise is pizza recipes and so that's our theme so we chose the keyword pizza recipes so the close variance here is pizza recipe what was the volume well we we know the volume was 33,100 for pizza recipe so what are we going to do we're going to put that number in in our volume column what was the competition well

if we go back and type in pizza recipes it was 683 th000 so I'm going to type in 6 183,000 what was our next keyword well it was pizza or homemade pizza dough recipes so if I go back for this particular keyboard is 2400 so I'm going to put 2400 in under my volume column and then what was my competition well my competition was if I type that keyword back in 2,160 so I'm going to put 2,60 so now I have an idea of what kind of volume and what kind of competition I have now

you want to do this for a number of different keywords and when you do it for number keywords what you do want to do is obviously choose a relevant keyword that has high volume and low competition so another way of saying it is is the volume or ratio of volume to competition and so basically what we could do is take volume divided by competition and if I make that a percentage I can see it's. 35% is the ratio between volume and competition if I do the same for my longer tail keyword 2400 / 2160 I

can see that 111% so this just kind of proves the point that yeah I'm still going to get some volume but I have a better chance of ranking for this long longer teal keyword homemade pizza dough recipes so you want to be able to do that for number keywords and examine the volume the competition and the ratio between volume and competition for your themed keywords in this case pizza recipes so relevancy you want to choose keywords that are very relevant to the content that you're writing and then again commercial intent what keywords are going to

drive more conversions and revenue for the business so when we talk about commercial intent we're talking about you know are you choosing keywords that are going to get somebody to do what you want them to do so we could say You Know download Pizza D recipes so somebody's typing in the keyword download pizza dough recipes then chances are they're going to find you come to your site and take action by downloading that pizza dough recipe so you want to be able to also think about the intent of the keyword is it going to help you

drive conversions and revenue if you're an e-commerce site so search volume is the average monthly search volume made for a particular keyword and phrase so we can get that number using Google's Keyword Planner tool in the Google ads platform we want to Target keywords with high search volume that will help bring traffic to the website we want volume but we want to take into account seasonality as well so that's where the Google's Keyword Planner tool comes in place because if we go back again we can just hover over we can get a sense of any

particular trend going on or seasonality so for example if I saw large growth in the winter months and not much volume growth in the summer months then that might indicate to me that this keyword is more popular during the winter time so pay attention to the graphs that you know the Keyword Planner tool gives you use them to your advantage to take into account seasonality so a good example would be funny Halloween costumes well we know that for Halloween you're going to have a spike probably towards the end of September all the way through October

and then it's going to drop after October 31st which is Halloween so that's an example but in the case of pizza recipes you know you may find that more people are choosing to search for pizza recipes during maybe the summer months versus the winter months so pay attention to seasonality it will affect search volume so competition based on our example it's one of the most important key metrics you don't want to choose a key word that's highly competitive because if it's competitive then it's going to be harder to rank number one or even on page

one of Google depending on competitive it is so high search volume low competition in other words the ratio between the two is the ideal combination so going back to the spreadsheet recommend you have that spreadsheet handy put your theme in place okay theme pizza recipes we use Google's Keyword Planner tool to find the volume we use the All In title syntax to find the competition so we entered both of those numbers in and we get our ratio and so when you have these numbers for a number of different keywords you want to be able to

choose that ratio of high volume low competition but always relevancy always trumps ratio so always go with a keyword that is going to be relevant to your content don't choose a keyword that's not relevant if you choose a keyword that's not relevant it's not going to bode well for user engagement so the difficulty of a keyword ranges from 0 to 100 in Google's keyword tool so it's going to be easy it's going to be medium it's going to be hard but my recommendation is also to get the numerical factor and that's the all entitle syntax

and again relevancy is what drives the traffic to your website and keep the traffic there on your website and also not only will it keep the traffic on your website but hopefully get that traffic to engage and convert so that's the key about relevancy you always want to choose keywords that are relevant to your content even if it's sacrificing volume relevancy again trumps volume and competition so always choose relevant keywords first so when you do that you're always almost guaranteeing that at some point somebody's going to find your content because somebody out there might be

looking for it and if they do you're going to get found and then the engagement is going to be better so understand your business find keywords that are relevant to your business and then focus on those key wordss that'll help you with getting the right traffic to your site always keep in mind the commercial intent so these keywords are more specific and result in conversion rate for example buying is a good commercial intent keyword so if you really want somebody to come to your website and buy then focus on those types of keywords in the

case of the pizza recipes maybe it's download could be our commercial intent keyword again there may be search volume but those are the type of keywords you want to focus on because that's the type of traffic you want to drive to your site so some other examples of commercial intent keywords or discount deal your coupon shipping you don't don't be afraid to use some of these keywords as part of your longer tail keyword phrase again the volume may not be high but the traffic quality is probably going to be better so keyword research is the

foundation for SEO so if you have chosen your keywords properly then if you do get ranked for those keywords then it's going to lead to better engagement with some conversions and so when we talk about keywords we also want to talk about our primary and secondary keyword so every page should have at least a primary keyword and then a secondary keyword to work with so primary keywords are really defining the nature of your content the secondary keywords are relevant to the primary keyword so why do we choose a primary and secondary keyword because you may

choose a keyword as a primary keyword that is relevant to the content but may not necessarily rank very high or have a lot of volume that secondary keyword is also relevant to the primary keyword but also relevant to content and you may rank for that secondary keyword so you always want to go with two keywords versus just one keyword you want to give your yourself a chance to rank for at least two different types of keywords of relevant nature so for web page there can several secondary keywords but only one primary keyword so your primary

keyword is always going to be relevant to your content secondary keywords can be relevant to the keyword but and you may have multiple secondary keywords but it's also going to be related to the content and it gives you a better opportunity to be found between both the primary and secondary in search Okay so let's take a look at another example of how to use primary keywords and secondary keywords when using keywords so if our primary keyword is healthy diet plan remember healthy diet plan is directly related to the content so that's what we're talking about

but these secondary keywords are also related to content and play off the primary keyword and so what we want to do is go to co Google's Keyword Planner tool and get an idea of the volume for healthy diet plan and then also the volume and competition for some of these secondary keywords like healthy diet for weight loss healthy diet food low carb diet healthy mail plans and diet plan weight loss so if I go in to Google's Keyword Planner and type those keywords in I'm going to choose get results and now here I can see

healthy diet plan keyword I'm focusing on as my primary keyword has an average monthly search volume of 9,900 and then some of my secondary keywords healthy diet foods diet plan weight loss low carb diet you know Google will give me a number of different keywords to work with so I'm going to look at the search volume of those as well and so ideally what I want to do is be able to then look at the volume and then look at the competition so healthy diet plan I go into my keyword analysis here that's my theme

so that's my keyword what's my volume for healthy diet plan 99,900 what's my competition so my competition is 74,700 and that's going to give me a ratio of volume to competition of 13 % so that's what my content's about that's a considered a short tail keyword because it has a lot of competition and so my ratio is 133% and what I want to do is I want to be able to put these other secondary keywords in here as well maybe even go to a little longer tail because I want to be able to find two

key at least two keywords I want to be able to find my primary keyword that's relevant to my content and then I want to be able to find my secondary keyword which is again Rel related to the primary keyword which is also related to the content and so I want to be able to choose two keywords basically and I want to choose two keywords that are relevant that have good ratio between volume and competition so that's the whole idea again of how to do keyword research you want to be able to find your keywords use

the tools available to you and get a sense of what the volume is what the competition is look at the ratio between the volume and competition and then based on the content choose choose that primary keyword and then again based on the keyword you chose choose some secondary keywords as well because you want to be found for not just one keyword but multiple keywords okay let's look at some alternative suggestions to keyword research so for doing keyword research we want to take into account LSI keywords we could take into account other platforms that host a

lot of content like Kora or Reddit we can use Google suggestions in the key word search bar we can use popular platforms like Wikipedia and we can use social media bookmarking like Reddit so there are lots of suggestions that we can obtain from various sources so let's start with LSI keywords and LSI stands for latent semantic insect indexing and so basically what it is it's just keywords that are linked to your primary keyword and so when you're choosing keywords you always want to choose that primary keyword and then secondary keywords that that are similar to

the primary keyword and usually those are LSI or latent semantic indexing type keywords so they're used to drive relevant traffic to your page so if you're focusing on one keyword we want to have other keywords that are similar to increase our visibility on the search engine result pages so we could find latent semantic indexing right in search so if we use the term healthy diet if we go to Google search for example if I type in healthy diet in Google search all I need to do is scroll to the bottom of the page and I

can see searches related to healthy diet so healthy diet menu healthy diet essay what does a healthy diet look like notice at the top Google's also given me some other suggestions here so they're saying lowfat diet veganism gluten-free diet so there's lots of different suggestions right in Google search bar so all of these are LSI related keywords so if you're optimizing a page for healthy diet then you could choose lowfat diet as a secondary keyword you can use gluten-free diet as a secondary keyword it really depends on what the content is but you always want

to support your content with as much LSI keywords as possible so you can be found for as many different keywords as possible in Google search so it's important because if you have a Blog that you know talks about python so how do the search engines know if the website python is about the programming language or the snake so Google for example uses LSI keywords to understand what the page is specifically focusing on so if you're just focusing on Python and your content you want to support that with LSI keywords and so that will allow your

web page to better communicate with Google also to have the visibility to show up on search so they can certainly improve your search positioning and featured Snippets as well so if you have a keyword that a question you could certainly found for featur snippet for example maybe you know healthy diet recipes if I type that in you could see here there's a featured snippet so if I'm talking about recipes that's a keyword I may want to use and if I use that then Google has an opportunity to see what my content's about and place my

information at the top in this featured snippet you can also again see what some of questions are being asked what meals are good for weight loss what is a good healthy diet plan all of these could be keyword phrases that you can use so the answers are right here in Google so cor is a great platform because core is a platform that people go and ask questions in a community responds with answers or responses to that particular question or topic and so the great thing about core is it's a good it's a good place for

you to go to get some ideas about a specific topic so if we're talking about healthy diet in so we can find keywords with high search volume writing Kora so the whole idea is you can look at you know the top five questions for specific topic like healthy dieting and find relevant key wordss to healthy dieting so if you just type in that particular keyword in Kora you're going to probably get some responses to questions or responses to somebody else's question and so if we take a look at core for example so if I just

type in healthy dieting what I'm going to do is I'm going to get some responses to the the topic healthy dieting so what's the best diet for Healthy Living what are the top five tips for a healthy diet habit so all of these could be keyword phrases that you could take away with for your own content and so the benefit here is you're getting kind of an idea of what's trending what people are talking about and if you use tips for a healthy diet habit for example and you optimize for that well again that could

turn around and bode well for you because you could be featured feed in Google as a featured snippet at the top here you can also turn around and use LSI related keywords for healthy diet habits and you can simply just look for those LSI keywords right in Google remember at the bottom or at the Top If I scroll down I can see some related LSI keywords at the bottom so writing Google as well you could see in the Google search bar that Google provides some LSI related keywords to your query so if I go back

here and type in healthy diet recipes I can see here Google suggesting some other related keywords healthy diet menu healthy diet for men healthy diet foods healthy diet for women so these are all LSI related keywords that you can use to support your primary keyword and the content you're writing about so we've talked about LSI keywords where to find them so they're found right here they could be found at the top of Google and they can be found at the bottom you can also then go to core as well and get some ideas for thep

of questions they're being asked so if you ask a question and use that as your keyword phrase then again you have an opportunity of showing up for a featured snippet in Google just by doing some additional research within Google itself or on Coral so according to Google the autocomplete predictions are automatically generated by Google's algorithm without any human intervention it's based on a number of factors but the primary factor is how often past users have searched for term so Google col all the keyword queries that somebody types in and they're suggesting some of the most

popular terms that people have typed in so if I go back to Google again if I start to type in recipes I could see some of the other queries that somebody else has typed in or some of the most popular queries related to that topic so if you enter the keyword healthy diet Google's going to suggest multiple keyword suggestions that users have asked in the past and you could certainly get the search volume of those keywords just by looking in Google itself I could see for healthy diet recipes billions of pages related to healthy diet

recipes I can also get the search volume by going into Google's Keyword Planner so if I type in healthy diet I'm going to be able to see what my search volume is for that keyword and in addition I can see the seasonality of that particular keyword and in addition to that Google's going to provide some other related keywords to my search query so if I'm looking for healthy diet Google's going to suggest hey maybe you should choose healthy food or healthy eating or how to lose weight so those are LSI related keywords that Google provides

in the keyword plan which is built into the Google ads platform another option for you is Wikipedia so Wikipedia is a vast platform of content so we could turn Wikipedia into our own asset and use it to our own Advantage by finding relevant keywords in easy fashion so with Wikipedia we can identify a list of keywords in The Meta description itself we could choose keywords from the P paragraph of Wikipedia that has many relevant keywords or we can take a look at keywords from the Wikipedia content section so we can also see additional Pages like

the see also section that gives relevant keywords that you're looking for we can also look at the references section as they contain relevant keywords so we go to Wikipedia as an example and I type in how healthy diet into Wikipedia here I can get just in the first paragraph alone I can see some additional key wordss that I might choose to use like micronutrients I never knew that micronutrients was related to healthy diet but Wikipedia is providing some information about what micronutrients is and maybe I can use that as a keyword an LSI related keyword

to my content so if I scroll down I can to see also section so it might give me some information food information to Consumers for example dietary guidelines I can look at categories like dietetics and diets I can also look at the references section so I can also see what information was provided like health effects of overweight and obesity I can look at diet and physical activity so all of these are related to my main keyword healthy diet so the answers are right in here on the platform they're just all over the page so Wikipedia

has an abundance of information you just need to know where to look so again with Wikipedia you can look no further than the first paragraph you can look no further than the SE alsoa section the referencing section category section there's lots of information right on the page itself to help you get ideas for keywords so if you Google your keyword with Wikipedia term in the search query and get relevant keywords from the title tags and the Ser so you can also do that as well so if I type in healthy diet Wikipedia and search I

can also get some information here as well so people also search for healthy food advantages or healthy food habits essay or information about healthy food all of these are related to my keyword healthy diet so again another bit of information for you to choose or look to choose some additional keywords for so Reddit it's a popular Community where people post content discuss a variety of topics so that's what Reddit is so with the help of subreddits an individual can find relevant keywords with with high search volume so in Reddit there's an easy way to find

out keywords they have a keyword tool called keyword it so keyword it gives the average monthly searches for particular keyword so if we type a Word in key Reddit and choose keywords from the autogenerator list this tool will extract the keywords and give us those relevant terms to search volume so if we go to the keyword it and Show an example of that for example Le healthy food if I get keywords I can see what keywords are relevant and the search volume of that keyword so if I just type in healthy food keyworded tool is

going to tell me some relevant keywords and what the volume is so if you don't have the Keyword Planner tool in Google ads available to you this is a good alternative solution to finding keywords so it's free you just need to go to keyword it.com type in your keyword click get keywords and and what it's going to do is give you some relevant keywords related to your primary keyword with the search volume let's talk about keyword clustering now so the whole idea about keyword clustering is to really take advantage of the keywords that we're optimizing

for to gain higher ranking so if we can cluster keywords together in a theme and that theme of keywords is relevant to a specific page of a website then we have a better opportunity to rank so in other words why do we have to Target just one keyword when we can Target many so keep in mind you know LSI keywords we want to group a bunch of keywords together that are similar core content so for example after some keyword research you can thematically group keywords into a core topic so for example we can cluster these

group of keywords together like for example what is SEO how does SEO work intro to SEO what are the basics of SEO all of those are related to the court theme what is SEO another cluster of keywords for example could be SEO techniques SEO best practices tips and tricks website optimization on page SEO techniques Etc so those are clusters of keywords okay that we can group together in themes and if we group keywords together in themes we can apply that to a particular content on our website so the whole idea behind clustering keywords it's going

to provide more diversity more of an opportunity for us to be found so that's the whole idea behind clustering so some additional steps remember stay up to date on industry news so brainstorm your ideas first and identify a list of keywords like a thema keywords that you can cluster together and then you could determine the keywords that your competitors are already ranking for so for example if we want to rank for the keyword SEO best practices for example we can use a tool called keyword MZ if I go to keyword the keyword Explorer tool in

MZ and just type in SEO best practices what it's going to do is it's going to give me some volume related to that particular keyword but more importantly what it's also going to do is going to show me what pages are already ranked for that particular keyword so therefore I can get a sense of who is already ranking for that keyword so here I can see mzmz medium.com alexa.com so I can get a sense of what web pages are ranked for a particular keyword or group of keywords I want to rank for myself so if

we look at tools for keyword research look no further than Moz that's the Moz is the tool I would just use but you could also use Google's Keyword Planner which we used in the example so for example if I go back to the Google ads Keyword Planner if you're in Google ads you click on tools you click on Keyword Planner and what Keyword Planner does is it provides you do for particular keyword the average monthly search volume over the past 12 months it provides you information on seasonality so if I hover my mouse over a

graph I'm going to be able to see the volume per month over the last 12 months what the keyboard planner also does is it provides me some additional ideas for my particular keyword and in addition to that it's going to provide me some sense of how competitive that keyword is by telling me whether it's low medium or high in terms of competition so there's sem rush there's also other additional keywords tools out there like word stream or HRA or the Reddit tool keyword it and then MZ is is another tool I particularly use so if

I go to Moz again here I can just type in a keyword that I'm interested in it's going to give me the search volume of that keyword it's going to give me the level of difficulty so 50 out of 100 so it's halfway between difficulty and easy and then it's going to give me some additional metrics like for example what my expected organic click-through rate would be if I were to rank for this keyword but more importantly what I like about this is we could see exactly what other sites are link to this particular keyword

we're interested in so here I can look at the top 10 list so this is moz's keyword Explorer tool so that's what this tool is and it's part of moz.com so there's a lot of tools at your disposal Al I particularly use Moz I particularly use Google's Keyword Planner and those are the tools I use but there are lots of tools out there let's go with the scenario that you have a friend named Sam and he has a website where he sells shoes but Sam doesn't understand why his website's not ranking number one on Google

and so typically to rank number one on Google there are some factors involved and those are factors that are going to help Sam get his website rank number one on Google so he can sell his shoes get traffic and convert that traffic to conversions so there are factors involved and so what are those factors well it always starts with keyword research so in order to rank for a website where you sell shoes or you sell products other products like clothing or food or you're an automobile website you know you're a mechanic it doesn't matter whether

you're selling to customers or selling to other businesses you have to start with the keyword research and so we're going to go into really explicit detail on how to conduct a proper keyword research and then the second factor involved is high quality content so in order to rank high on Google search you need to have high quality content so we're going to go over what's involved with creating high quality content then we're going to take that content we're going to optimize it using onpage elements and website level factors so we're going to take into account

what's involved with your website and what's involved with specific pages on your website in order to rank number one on Google then we're going to get into the offsite engagement so when it comes to ranking on Google you need to optimize your website and you need to do some elements off your website you need to be engaging on off your website meaning on other websites and so we're going to talk about what's involved with offside engagement so SEO being a major channel for most companies and websites where the opportunity to drive a lot of traffic

is there but you have to earn that reward the reward is a lot of traffic but you have to earn the reward and there's a lot of work involved and so ideally what we want to do is follow what we call the 8020 rule when it comes to search engine optimization and ranking on Google and what do we mean by the 8020 rule well 8020 means we're investing 20% of our effort and 80% of the results are obtained so we want to invest 20 and get back 80 that's basically what we Me by 8020 so

for example if 20% of our targeted keywords bring in 80% of the traffic then that's following the 8020 rule or 20% of our landing pages Drive 80% of the overall traffic that's following the 8020 rule or 20% of our backlinks pass 80% of our link juice that's the 8020 rule meaning these cared keywords these targeted landing pages these trying to Target backlinks using offsite engagement we want to put in 20% of our effort on those keywords landing pages and backlinks in return for 80% of the results so without further Ado let's get started with the

keyword research let's talk talk about that keyword research for a website with shoes and and it doesn't really matter what particular product you have if you need to rank number one on Google it all starts with the keywords as I mentioned before and so in this example if you have a website where you sell shoes for kids you're going to want to be found for certain keywords so the obvious key word here would be shoes for kids well every key word that you target has has search volume associated with it so that means when we

talk about search volume we're talking about how many people on average type in that keyword or related keyword on google.com or Google search and there's always an average number of searches associated with every keyword and we call that search volume how much search volume so obviously if we're going to Target a keyword we want to have as much volume as possible however there's always going to be competition for those keywords meaning there's always going to be other websites who want to rank number one on Google for the same keywords and we call that competition or

difficulty so for every keyword you're going to have volume and you're going to have competition or difficulty and the difficulty ranges as well depending on the tool you use and we'll get into that in a minute but search volume is how much on average people are typing in that keyword or close variance of that keyword and the difficulty is measured in terms of how many other websites are trying to rank for the same keyword and so ideally when it comes to keyword research we want to find that nice balance we want high volume and we

want low competition but at the same time we want to focus on keywords that are highly relevant to our business so if we're selling shoes for kids and shoes for kids is highly relevant has high volume and low compe I then that's a keyword we want to Target so we always want to focus in on those three areas so there's always a trade off with keywords so shoes for kids might have high volume but also might have high competition or difficulty if we look for another keyword that's just as relevant for example shoes for children

it may still have high search volume but the competition or the difficulty may be lower and if that's the case then that may be a better keyword word for us to Target instead of something highly competitive like shoes for kids we can focus on another relevant keyword like shoes for children with just as much volume and lower competition and the reason why we want lower competition is because we want to be able to rank for that keyword so the higher the competition the harder it is for us to rank number one on Google for that

keyword and so the whole idea Beyond keyword research is analyzing and choosing the best keywords so we want to identify a list of keywords that are always relevant we want to choose the keyword that your competitors are ranking for and we want to use thirdparty tools to choose keywords to identify which keywords have low competition and what keywords have high search volume so one thing to take into consideration when you're doing keyword research is that the longer the keyword phrase or in other words longtail keywords or keywords with three keyword words in the phrase or

more you're going to always have less competition but there's always a tradeoff with longtail keywords meaning the longer the keyword phrase there's going to be less volume but the tradeoff is less competition and so what we want to do is we want to brainstorm some ideas and find those relevant keywords so let's look at an example here so if we go to Google ads so Google ads has a toe called Keyword Planner and let's just say I have have a a website where I'm selling dried figs and if I'm selling dried figs I want people

to buy these dried figs however in order to attract them I want to be able to show them that hey we have a a bunch of recipes and if I show you a bunch of recipes where you can use dried figs maybe you'll buy these dried figs to using these recipes and so we're going to look for keywords related to bread recipes because if we can optimize for our recipes page for bread then that will attract an audience who wants to make bread and use dried figs with those bread recipes so that's the example I'm

going to give here and so if I look at the Keyword Planner in Google ads if I just type in bread recipes what Google is going to do is they're going to give me an average monthly search fum so I can see the average monthly search volume here is 60,500 and so in order to do keyword research what I would recommend is keep a spreadsheet and so the idea behind the spreadsheet is to document the volume and the competition you're getting for certain keywords so if I go into a spreadsheet here my theme of keywords

is bread recipes my keyword is bread recipes and my volume therefore is going to be 60,500 however if I go back into Google's Keyword Planner Google's telling me the competition is low so that's great I want high volume I want low competition but how low is low so we want to be careful so if we're going to put in numbers into a spreadsheet we want to figure out what that competition really is for the keyword bread recipes so if I go to Google and just type in bread recipes I'm going to be able to see

771 billion results for the keyword bread recipes now is 771 billion are real competition maybe maybe not what we want to do is put in a syntax and we want to put in the syntax all in title and then colon space and then our keyword and the reason why we do that in search is because we want to be able to identify the true competitive number or the true number of websites who are trying to rank for bread recipes and if we put in the syntax all entitled colon and then our keyword bread recipes we'll

be able to see that there are 98,000 results that's a lot lower than 771 billion so that means that 9 198,000 sites or listings have the keyword bread recipes in the title tag and the title tag is what shows up in the search engine results and so if I look down and scroll down here I can see bread recipes on every one of these title tags so title tag is an important important element to rank number one on Google and we'll talk about that in a few minutes but if we understand that they're 998,199 18,000

in my spreadsheet as the competitive number and so now I could see for the keyword breed recipes I have 60,500 and if my competition is $998,000 then my Kei or keyword Effectiveness index or in other words the ratio of volume to competition is 6% so that's nothing more than volume divided by competition so that tells me that my Kei or my ratio between volume competition is 6% so remember we want more volume than we want competition so anytime you do a keyword research you're going to find a number of different relevant keywords so if I

go back into Google's Keyword Planner if I typed in bread recipes you could see that Google is going to give me a number of different keywords related to bread recipes let's just say I have another keyword that I want to think about optimizing for being ranked on Google for and that's banana bread recipe very similar keyword as bread recipes except it's a little longer tail now if I type in banana bread recipe in Google's Keyword Planner now I can see the average monthly search volume is actually gone up it's 368,000 I can also see the

competition is low so those are good signs so now I can see 368,000 I'm going to go ahead and put that in my spreadsheet now I'm going to go into Google I'm going to put in my syntax all in title I'm going to put in banana bread recipe I'm going to hit enter and now I can see I have 233,000 results with the keyword banana bread recipe in the title tag so if I look at the title tags I can see banana bread recipe banana bread recipe banana bread recipe on all the listings in the

Google search results so that tells me I have 233,000 results that I have have to jump over in order to rank number one on Google so I'm going to put 233,000 in my spreadsheet now I can see my Kei or my volume to competition ratio is 157 158% and so to me that's a lot better number to work with or in other words that's a lot better keyword because it's just as relevant and it has a higher ratio of volume to competition so therefore for banana bread recipe is going to be a better keyword to

optimize for in order to rank number one on Google so that's the whole idea behind keyword research you want to brainstorm ideas there are plenty of tools out there so the tool I recommend is Google ads Keyword Planner Google's going to give you how much search volume they're going to tell you the competition but then you're going to go into Google search you're going to use the syntax all in title to get a more accurate read on the actual competitive number and so to find out how keywords that your competitors are ranking for you can

use those keyword tools that I mentioned another tool that I use is M so MZ if you go to moz.com they have a tool called keyword Explorer so if we just type in the keyword for example red recipes it's going to be able to tell us how much volume and the difficulty so you can use other tools at your disposal figure out the volume and the difficulty there are plenty of tools out there but the one thing I would just make sure is you use everything at your disposal so you can use social media to

find the most shared article for a particular topic or keyword like bread recipes you could check other platforms that have a lot of shared content like Rin and Kora where you can ask people about certain topics using keywords to figure out out how much competition or volume there might be you could stay up to date on industry news to get an idea of what types of keywords are trending but when it comes to keywords and keyword research remember for every web page we want to be able to pick two keywords we want a primary and

secondary keyword so when we do keyword research and we enter all our keywords into our spreadsheet we want to be able to have a number of different keywords in this case we're focusing on the theme bread recipes we want to have different keywords because we want to be able to choose a primary keyword and a secondary keyword because we want to be able to focus on multiple keywords for each page because we don't want to put necessarily all our eggs in one basket meaning we won't want to put all our emphasis just on one keyword

to rank four we want multiple keywords to try and rank four so the primary keyword can to find the nature of our business the secondary keyword could be just highly relevant to our keyword at the end of the day we want to choose multiple keywords to try and rank on Google for that page so for example we have a Blog and we're using ice cream recipes and we're blogging about ice cream recipes we can have a primary keyword that is about ice cream recipes or homemade ice cream recipes we're going to always want to find

out what the volume in the competition is our secondary key keyword could be built around other similar keywords like lowfat ice cream recipes or fat-free ice cream recipes or lowfat homemade ice cream recipes those are complimentary keywords just like our bread recipes and bnana bread recipe so one thing we want to do when we do keyword research is we want to be able to Target one keyword per content when you can Target many we want to be able to Target multiple key wordss not necessarily Target one keyword and so we want to be able to

Cluster keywords so we don't want to Target just one we want to Target multiple keywords per page and when we talk about clustering if we go back to our keyword research what we're doing is we're clustering a bunch of keywords under the theme bread recipes and so by looking at the volume looking at the competition looking at the Kei we can choose different keywords for our page and that's what we mean by clustering we want to Cluster keywords into a Content theme so why Target only one keyword per content when we can Target many because

we don't want to put all our eggs in one basket we don't want to Target just one keyword we want to Target many and so that means clustering your keywords into a theme and choosing multiple keywords for that particular page and when we do that we have a better opportunity to rank high on Google Search and and the whole idea behind ranking high on Google Search is we can get the volume so if we know we're ranked number one on Google search for bread recipes or banana bread recipe we know we stand a chance of

getting a majority of the volume associated with that keyword and if we can get the volume and get the traffic then we can get the conversions so let's move on to high quality content and talk about the impact content has on your ability to get your website ranked number one on Google so let's just say you have content on your website and the content is ranking on you know page four of Google and it's that blog with ice cream recipes and if it's just content for the sake of content is not really informative then it's

not necessarily going to get good engagement in the eyes of Google you know they want to rank content that's very inform it's very fresh it's exciting to read it's interesting it's going to have good engagement so if it's a recipe or an article about any topic if it's the content is just not informative then you're not going to get good engagement and when you don't get good engagement if people don't stay on the site to engage in the content and they just leave the website after landing on the page causing a bounce then the content

is just going to continue to fall down the rankings and we want to prevent that we want to move up the rankings we want to be number one on Google we don't necessarily want to fall in the rankings for our content so content is a key driver in being able to rank number one on Google so if the content is on page nine what can we do well we want to be able to you know take that content and do something with it we feel like we did write engaging content so let's go ahead and

share it on social media and to me social social media is a good platform to share your content because on social media platforms like Facebook for example you're building a community on that platform that Community is already interested in your content so if you're sharing an ice cream recipe especially in the summertime and you're engaging with your community on that platform then the likelihood of that community on that platform is going to increase engagement increased engagement will send social signals to the search engine it says hey this content is good quality likewise for any other

platform most social media platforms have engagement metrics and those engagement metrics pass signals is it good is it not good do we like this content are we giving it a thumbs up are we going to want to follow it are we going to want to share it and so if you share content that you feels engaging on social platforms then it's going to be engaging and it's likely going to cause an increase in engagement for example a decrease in balances and once you share that quality content then the likelihood of it moving up the rankings

even as far as number one on Google is going to be greater so you always want to start out writing good quality content so let's talk about good quality content because Google does take content seriously they do take into account what other people think of that content so high quality content is an important factor so how to create good content that's always the question so let's talk about some best practices here remember in the last segment we talked about keyword research so we want to perform good keyword research why because we want to choose keywords

remember we're choosing multiple keywords per page one keyword could be related to our brand one keyword could be related to the content but another keyword could be related to a user's intent like recipes if you recall the example we use with bread recipes maybe somebody's looking to type in a keyword that says how do I make you know a bread or how do I make a specific type of bread or how do I make banana bread or what's the best recipe for banana bread they're question related and we want to be able to answer those

questions so that's where choosing those right keywords that's going to respond to a user's intent so starts with choosing the right keywords so remember we talked about a number of different tools when we talked about keyword research so there's a research tool that you can use called phrase. iio and that will help you do quick research on you know keywords and Trends and whatnot so if you know about a research tool that you use for keyword research then drop us a comment below I'd be interested in getting your comments about keyword research and what research

tools are out there so if you know something better than phrase. IO drop a comment below and we'd be interested in getting your perspective so keyword research is key but creating content that fulfills users's requirements so answering those questions if it's a recipe we want to answer that question if it's directions we want to answer that question if they don't know how to do something we want to answer that question and that's the whole idea behind content content is not just to fill a page it's to really fulfill users requirements that's when you get good

engagement so if somebody's typing in something on Google and they're looking for an answer your content should answer that question but we also want to make the content readable so in other words you know write for your audience don't impress anybody with very high vocabulary type words that somebody doesn't necessarily know the meaning of don't use jargon don't use a street language for example use everyday common language that's just easily digestible when your audience is reading and then we want to keep that content organized and so when we mean organized we want to use headers

and subheaders you know break your content into paragraphs keep the flow organized if we can keep the flow organized then it's going to be easier for somebody to read and then it's okay to add resources especially resources from credible sites so if you can incorporate those resources in there then it's just going to add The credibility to your content let the audience know that hey I've done my research on this topic and this is what this person has to say about it this person who seems to be credible okay so it only adds value to

your content so these are all tips to Remember When creating content and then the one important tip here is we want to use white hat techniques and when we say white hat techniques that means you know if we've chosen keywords that are going to answer somebody's question we don't want to stuff those keywords into the content we want the content to be naturally written so when we say op for white heck techniques that's what we mean write the content naturally keep it organized keep it readable include third party sources and make sure it answers a

question so there are different types of content so there's content where you just write words it's all text based you could also use an infographic infographic is simply just a graphic that visualizes exactly what you're trying to explain for example if we want want to write an article about how to write good engaging content we don't necessarily have to write all that outs of text we can create an infographic so for example here's an infographic on 20 effective ways to basically not bore your readers but write engaging content so you could see this is an

infographic it's all graphically laid out so infographics tend to be easier to understand because they're visual they easy for the end user to comprehend because there's generally no jargon it's usually images that are portraying the point of what you're trying to get across and so it tends to break it up the monotony of just text it's more visually appealing and it's laid out and organized so you can see this infographic has 20 different steps or rules and they lay those out all here in this infographic and the great thing I like about infographics is you

could you could share them on social media you can re-engage them as a post you could save them on really any social platform so infographics tend to tell a better story versus say just writing text you can use video and images so you don't necessarily have to lay it all out in an infographic you can certainly insert a video or an image into your content especially if it's a blog post if it's a blog post then sometimes video and images on its own tell the story you don't necessarily need text to go ahead and tell

your story a video or an image as they say tells a thousand words and so images and videos are great to use in a blog post so using different forms of content you know you always want to review your content when a user dwells on your web page for a longer time Google will tend to think okay this person's engaged so we're going to rank favorably so if you're using infographics videos and images then the chances of somebody being more engaged are going to increase versus just text that's not well organized and written out in

a way that somebody doesn't necessarily understand so be creative in the types of content you use so longer engaging content tends to bode well with search engines so this is according to HubSpot so the more word count you use the more words you use the chances of you ranking higher are going to be better just take into account best practices you want to maybe break up the content with an image organize it make it engaging use headers so it's not necessarily just words it's the words and how those words are written how they're structured the

types of keyword you're using how you're engaging with your audience there's a lot of factors again those best practices we just went over but the key is you know if you have longer more engaging content then it's going to bode better for you on search engines so couple of steps to create high quality content so you want to begin with a comprehensive introduction so always introduce your content remember the content should be relevant to the keyword so if you're choosing keywords and your keyword research think about answering that question if somebody's typing in bread recipes

maybe they're looking for banana bread recipes how to make the best banana bread or how to make banana bread using dried figs we want to be able to align our content with that keyword naturally you want to create a title that's worthy that's click worthy so remember if you're in Google search and you're doing search for something simple like bread recipes we want to some make something that's going to be you know gauging for somebody to click on like easy perfect yeast bread or easy crusty French bread or something that's going to be engaging you

know the best bread recipes or how to make the best homemade bread you know something that's going to draw somebody's attention to the title of that blog post so we want to include LSI keywords so what I mean by LSI keywords in your content we mean you know longtail keywords make it natural headings and subheadings should consist of keywords and variants so if you're writing headers and subheaders include the keyword in there and that way the the content always stays relevant to the audience okay shorten your sentences and paragraphs so don't write long paragraphs remember

we want to break this up we want to make it easy for the end user to read and we want to always put internal links on our blog post why because if we have internal links then if we have a link from one blog post to another blog post or say our blog post to an internal page on our website we want to make sure that it's relevant content that way if somebody's reading something and you have an internal link let's just say from a bread recipes page to a banana bread recipes page then they

may find it interesting click on that link and go to the banana bread recipes page so it's keeping somebody engaged on your website so putting in internal linking will help keep the the end user engaged because your offering up links that's relevant to the content you always want to break up that content with images okay we want to use alt tags meaning we want to pen the image with text so that way if the image doesn't load then at least the alt text will load so we can incorporate call out boxes and more importantly we

want to update our content regularly so we always want to get the best recipe out there if it's banana bread or different ways to create banana bread or always just coming up with ways to update the content so we want to keep our content our blog post fresh and then we want to include a CTA call to action if we include a call to action then that's going to keep somebody engaged and have them act on your content so these are steps to creating high quality content and so let's look at an example here and

this is a 3month Old Post on BuzzFeed and it's it's 21 pictures that restore your faith in humanity so it has a lot of likes a lot of tweets and that means it's engaged people are engaged when reading that and so if we go and look at it as an example we could see it in on BuzzFeed here 21 pictures that will restore your faith in humanity so this was written back in 2012 again a lot of Engagement but if we look at it we can see immediately that it's taking into account third party sources

it's got some content it's got images it's being broken up by images we could see there's call to actions on there in the form of social so people can go ahead and go ahead and share it if they like it okay it includes videos it includes images third party sources so it's a good post because listen you know it's engaging content it's probably answering somebody's question about humanity and we could see clearly that look you know there's a lot of different examples here from a lot of different sources and we could take action on this

content so not just video not just images but text as well and so it's very engaging answers questions takes into account the different types of content available so this is a good post in that regard so content updated regularly it's engaging and it includes sources from high Authority websites some dos and don'ts on the content so take into account the best practices I me mentioned about creating high quality content okay answer those questions that the end user wants to hear you know CU that likely is going to be their search and so you want to

be able to respond to the end user that's part of creating high quality content different types of content I.E in the form of infographics or videos or text or images you can add images from public domain sites you can be relatable and use examples to clarify points just like the buzz feed article simplify complex words don't use sophisticated language talk to your audience as if you they were standing right in front of you and use bullet points to exemplify your examples your points so some dos the don'ts obviously don't lift content we don't want to

lift content from another website so that's plagiarism so we want to have our own unique content we also don't want to take images from other websites and so if you you do happen to find an image that works for your post and it's on somebody else's website ideally that's not a good situation but if you do happen to do that then always give credit to the website okay so if you took it from xyz.com credit xyz.com for the image and even put a link back but ideally you don't want to take images from other websites

just as much as you don't want to take copy you don't want to take images use your own imag and content but if you don't have imagery then you can always go to stock photography there are plenty of websites out there where you can sign up for a subscription like uh Adobe stock images as an example you can sign up for an account and in some cases you can sign up for a free account and use stock imagery okay don't give less information to your audience give them to your audience what they deserve which is

the information they're looking for they're looking for the best banana bread recipes give them the best banana bread recipes incorporate your own images break it up with titles give them a good quality piece of content that they're going to be able to engage with and so if you put long paragraphs in your content then it's going to be less engaging so try to avoid those long paragraphs remember shorten up the paragraphs keep the language simple add in images answer those questions use third party credible sources but write it in your own words and you should

be on your way to creating good quality content okay so now that we've talked about high quality content in order to get your pages ranked high on Google search let's turn our attention to optimizing onpage elements and discuss some website level factors that are both going to help you rank high on Google search so let's just do an overview of what we're talking about when we talk about onpage elements and we website level factors so optimizing on page elements include a number of different things but primarily we're going to focus in on meta tags also

known as meta description tags header tags also known as title tags and URLs so those are just some of the on page elements we want to be able to optimize using relevant keywords in order to rank high on Google search we also want to take a look at some website factors that will affect our ranking on Google search they include website architecture having a secure website having a Sit map and taking a look at page speed so all of those are some of the website factors we need to take into account in order to rank

high in Google search so title tag and meta description together are considered metat tags so both play an important role in ranking high on Google so so we want to be able to write unique title and descriptions for each page on our website when I say unique that means a title and The Meta description need to be different for every page on the website and so if you're not quite sure what a title tag and a meta description tag is if you go to search and just type in any particular search query the title tag

is what's going to show up here and bold and then the description is going to show up below it below the URL and that's going to describe the page so both of these meta tags are important because it describes what your page is all about and that's what Google uses in the search results pages so we want to be able to pay attention to the length of our metatags so if we go back to our search results Pages met title tags are generally 60 65 characters metad description tags are generally 160 characters so anything really

longer than that then what's going to happen is the meta description tag or the title tag will get trunc headed and so if we look here for example we can see all of the title tags here fit the 65 character limit but if you run over the character count on meta description then Google is going to truncate the copy so you want to stay within your parameters in order to avoid getting your content truncated and so the the other thing when we're writing title meta description tags we want to minimize keyword repetition so if we're

optimizing for keyword we don't want to necessarily just plug that keyword into the title tag and meta description multiple times we want to make sure our title tags and meta descriptions are naturally written so if somebody's typing for banana bread recipe with dried fix you know we want to have a nice title tag and a this description that is going to get somebody to respond uh based on their need and so we definitely want to avoid keyword repetition but we want to be able to use that keyword in the title tag because if you remember

from the earlier segment when we did the all in title syntax to find out exactly how many competitors were using that particular keyword well we obviously want to use that keyword in the title tag because again the title tag is an important factor when it comes to search engine results so we want to use the keyword but we want to avoid stuffing or using it repetitively in our title tag and our meta description we want the title tag and The Meta description to describe the page sound natural but also be engaging because the point is

we want people to click on our link and go to our website from search engines so title tags with numbers tend to result and higher click the rates this is according to mods so for example if you just put in a title tag that says learn digital marketing well that may work but if you put a number in there like five easy ways to learn digital marketing that might get somebody to click on your link and go to your website so having questions in your metatags can also increase your clickr A for example if you

just put learn the importance of first page rankings not too bad but they again generic but if you put it into the formal question how to rank number one on Google it's more action oriented it's going to get somebody to resonate with the question that they have and that may be their query how to rank number one on Google and so these techniques will help you get higher clicky rates and so according to back Linko title tag with a keyword can improve site ranking so remember we want to include that keyword in the title tag

even though we only have 65 characters we want to include that keyword but we want to avoid stuffing the keyword in there we want to again make the title tag action oriented maybe with a number maybe as a question with the keyword in there once naturally not easy to do but that's the beauty of SEO if you can follow these best practices and write a good title tag then the chances of you improving in your search results are going to be greater so having only one H1 tag in your post is going to be good

so remember when somebody clicks on a link so let's say they do find a title tag engaging and they click on this this link here and they go to that website you know you want to start out with having that particular H1 tag because the H1 tag especially with a keyword in it is going to signal to Google hey we're organizing our page and because it's an H1 tag it's important we're structuring the page according to best practices so having only one AG one tag in your post is definitely helpful having multiple tags H tags

in your post help organize the page a lot better so we want to add that targeted keyword in that tag and your header tag should be relevant to the content so if we go back to our example of the using dried figs with banana breads well the title says California fig banana bread and remember the last segment when we're talking about high quality content we look no further than including a video into our content so not only will this video help keep the engagement high but it breaks up the monotony of the page and it's

from a third party source so it adds credibility to the page so adding a video based on the last segment of high quality content definitely helps with ranking high on Google search so following hierarchal structure that means putting those H tags in there H2 tags help break up the content and we want to avoid repetition of H1 tags on your different web pages of your site meaning don't just put the same H1 tag with the same keyword in it and keeping it Blas we want to make those H1 tags exciting to read but also used

appropriately to break up the content so remember all white hat techniques we want to avoid hidden text we want to avoid stuffing keywords we want things to be natural we don't want things to be forced and your H1 tag should be 20 to 70 characters don't make long H1 tags so if you go back to our page example a short sweet tag here California fig banana bread it's relevant to the content it's short sweet it breaks up the monotony of the content and more importantly again any content you have on the page should always answer

the user's intent remember people are using search to answer questions find information our content should be able to answer that for them so according to John Moher senior Web Master Trends Analyst at Google header tags would definitely help Google for rankings and the search results so we want to use header tags so when it comes to URLs we want to use hyphens and avoid underscores so if we look at this URL here this uses hyphens fig and banana bread so it's all broken up with hyphens that's the best practice practice remember canonical URLs a canonical

URL signals to Google this is the original content so we want to use original content and if you have multiple sources of content out there on say different websites we want to use a canonical tag to signal to Google this is the original content please Index this content and not doesn't hurt to use a favon URL meaning a small icon it helps to break up the monotony and help your URL stand out we can add targeted keywords in the URL so again looking at the URL here I can see we're using targeted keyword as part

of the URL structure fig and banana bread and notice the H1 tag is fig banana bread so it's all consistent and it flows naturally URLs that are no longer existing then we want to be able to set up a redirect for those URLs meaning a 301 redirect is a server response for Google that says Hey Google this page is no longer available but it we permanently redirected it to this page which is now available so that's what a 301 redirect does it helps signal to Google and all the other search engines that if the page

is no longer there that's fine you're just going to go to this page this is the page that's permanently there now and another thing we want to do here is if you have mobile URLs you want to include those in the sitemap and we're going to hit on that in just a minute but all urls should be mobile friendly as well as desktop friendly meaning take into account this best practices keep your url short use hyphens put the keyword in that URL and make it easy to understand want avoid capital letters in the URLs the

URLs are case sensitive so go lowercase you should always go lowercase on the URL readable URLs again the rule of thumb here is if you understand what the URL is then Google's going to understand what the URL is so the shorter the URL the easier it is to read the easier it is to read the better chance you have to rank high on Google search so according to backlink to URLs that are shorter definitely definitely help you rank so we want to be able to shorten those URLs keep them short and sweet don't make them

long and unreadable so those are some on optimized ways or on page elements that help help you optimize now we want to look at some website level factors that will help you optimize and rank K on Google search so good site structure provides better crawling for search engine Bots and what do we mean by that well we mean having your site organized in a fashion that Google's going to be able to find all the pages so what do we mean by that create a logical hierarchy structure so if you're selling shoes you know you're going

to have a homepage break the structure up into men men's shoes women's shoes Children's Shoes then under men's shoes you could have it by brand it could be Nike Puma Adidas on the women's side it could be Nike Puma Adidas on the child side it could be Nike Puma Adidas and so you want to keep the structure flow in a hierarchy so we want to balance the amount of subcategories within each category so the men's if it has Nike Puma Adidas the women should have Nike Puma Adidas and so you want to code your site

navigation and see s or HTML meaning we want to be able to use something that Google is going to be able to index so most sites are built in HTML and that's what Google likes to index they like to index something that they could take back to their servers and then more importantly build a comprehensive structure for internal linking so internal links mean that if you're on a site you should have natural links pointing to other pages on your website so to keep the flow going and we don't want to have unnatural inbound links you

always want to have natural internal links to keep the flow of the user going from one page to the other so here I could see as an example all the ingredients in this recipe well this has an internal link to another page on our site and this happens to link to page where somebody can buy the ingredient so it's a natural internal link so John DH of crto has claimed that one of the biggest changes that he can make in fixing the crto website is is architecture so for example in Credo John dhy has increased

the organic sessions by 74% in Pages by per session by 41% just by changing the site architecture so you'd be surprised by changing the site architecture what that will do to engagement and so let's turn our attention to secure versus non-secure so what we mean by that is securing your site we want to make it sure that compliant with certain protocols and so if we go back here we can see that this particular site is compliant it is secure https means it has a secure license meaning the site is secure so Google likes secure versus

non-secure so non-secure would be HTTP so we want https as our protocol and what that means is just enabling SSL certificates and that means when you enable an SSL certificate that means your domain or your protocol is going to be turn to https so Google prefers sites that are secure versus non-secure so if you use hsts as a protocol that adds an extra layer of security over the https and hsts prevents cookie hijacking so adding multiple layers of security always helps in my opinion if you have an HTTP website a non-secure website you should look

in into buying an SSL certificate getting your sites flipped over to https because what's going to happen is your url structure is going to change when your url structure changes Google's going to recognize that because they're going to index your site and when they index your site they're going to see those secure URLs and that's going to work favorably in your favor and help you rank higher on Google search so websites using secure or https have a higher chance of ranking higher so https is a ranking signal because Google indexes those pages so let's also

talk about site Maps so sitemap is one of the most important ways to improve your website ranking why well because sitemaps are a way to organize all your URLs into one file so we're basically going to prioritize all our web pages in a sitemap so if you go to any particular website and you type in sitemap XML you're likely going to see all the pages on your website so usually the site map is located in the root directory so if I type in sitemap.xml I'm going to be able to see all the pages in my

root directory and I can also prioritize them I can also alert Google as to how often they change and every page is going to have a date stamp associated with it so Google can actually see how often it changes so remember we want our cont content to be updated frequently so if content is not updated frequently or it's not fresh then Google's going to see that site that date stamp that last modification D so we want to be able to make sure our content's updated frequently we want to let Google know that we changed it

frequently and we want to be able to prioritize our Pages let Google know hey these pages are important to us so all that can be set up in a sitap we want to be able to add canonical versions of URLs in the sit map so we want to able to add all our original URLs in our sit map and so we always want to build Dynamic URLs sitemaps for larger websites and what do I mean by Dynamic URLs that means that if I look at this s map and we're always adding content let's just say

in the form of a Blog well guess what we want those pages to be added to the sitemap as they're published so as we add pages to the blog or to the site then they should automatically be added to the sitemap and so in effect what's going to happen is we're going to be able to see the sitemap grow with more URLs when the sitemap grows with more URLs then that means then Google's going to index more pages they're going to index more fresh pages so they're going to be able to get those pages that

are just published quicker so that's the whole idea behind Dynamic sit Maps is we want to be able to capture all the URLs just as they're published and we want to be able to maintain our site maps and so I would always Rec recommended Dynamic sit map but you can always create your own sit map just by going to a tool called XML sitemap so if I just type in XML sitemaps into Google search here I can see XML sitemaps generator and I can be able if I have a small website just create a free

and simple sitemap on my own when XML sitemaps creates it or your platform creates a dynamic site map either way the site map's going to sit in the root directory and then what we want to do in turn is let Google know where that sitemap is so in search console we want to be able to submit the sitemap so you're going to add the sitemap you're going to let Google know where it is it should be in the root directory and it should be called sitemap.xml and when you do that Google's going to be able

to take those URLs and index them so we could see we submitted 528 urls goodle Google index 521 so one thing about URLs here is when we create a site map we're putting all your URLs in there we do not add no index URLs in your sitemap and what that means is that any URL we don't want Google to index we're just going to exclude from the sitemap okay so we want Google to take all the URLs we want indexed and put them in the sit map so according to edgy using sitemaps for SEO can

increase your website visibility and help you get indexed why because what you're in effect doing is taking all your URLs that you want index you're telling Google how often they're modified you're telling Google which ones are important and you're submitting that to Google and so Google's going to be able to take all those URLs quicker index them quicker and when they're index quicker you can get ranked quicker and when you get ranked quicker you can get traffic quicker so that's the whole idea behind sit Maps so let's turn our attention to page speed now so

one of the last factors for our website besides architecture making it secure and adding site Maps is you want to take a look at how quick our Pages load here are some tips in order to optimize page speed because ideally the quicker a page loads the more engaged the user is going to be if it takes a longer time for the page to load all the elements of that page then what's going to happen is the user is going to get impatient maybe leave the website all together or go to another page and so we

want to be able to optimize images so any image that's of large size in terms of megabytes we want to be able to optimize that compress the image so that's one way to speed up page speed we want to use a simple website design you know HTML with CSS or cascading stylesheets just a simple design with simple hierarchy and website navigation structure so nothing fancy nothing complex just a simple website design with optimized images we want to leverage browser cach in and we want to upgrade the server response time meaning all your files are sitting

on the server so when somebody goes to web page the server is serving up all of those files the images the text Etc and so we want the server to respond as quick as possible so when it comes to page speed we can look at the factors affecting page speed in Google analytics so if I go to Google anal Antics and I go under behavior and I go under sight speed and I go to overview I'm going to be able to see what my average load time is for my site and ideally we want our

pages to load as quick as possible so that means anything under 4 seconds anything 4 seconds or higher and it's likely the end user is going to leave the page there's a correlation be between page load time and bounce rate and so what Google actually does does it give you speed suggestions so if we do have a page that loads slow we can just go to speed suggestions in Google analytics when we go to speed suggestions then Google's going to be able to tell us hey this particular page load fast this particular page load slow

and if it loaded slow why is it loading slow so here we can see the homepage as example is loading on average of 7 Seconds well if we look here they're going to give us some suggestions so if I click on those page speed suggestions it's going to load a report and a tool called page speed insights and basically what it's then going to do after it's done running is this going to tell me all the ways in which I can optimize my pages not only for desktop but also for mobile so here I can

see for desktop or for mobile I can look at some ways in which I can optimize it to increase page speed for example sizing my images properly server response time reducing my server response time avoiding multiple page redirects so there's a lot of opportunities that we can do to speed up page load time and all that's found in page speed insights and all that's found within Google analytics so remember optimizing code minimizing redirects optimizing your images upgrading your server respons all of those are factors and so again you can go into analytics page speed insights

and you could see exactly what Google is recognizing as what's lowering or slowing down your page load time so Google takes sight speed as one of the most important ranking factors why because they're going to rank Pages not only with high quality content that are relevant to the keyword queries but they want those pages to have a good user experience so if somebody clicks on the page then the user should be able to see that content fairly quickly and so that's why it's such an important factor so the quicker your pages load the chances of

you ranking higher are going to be better so according to web performance today Walmart as an example experienced a decline in conversions so what they did was looked at their page speed and when they looked at their page speed youd be surprised what that did just increasing it from 1 to 4 seconds or decreasing it basically increased conversion so there's always going to be a correlation between how quick a page loads and how engaged the user is because if it's users engaged they're going to stay on the site and if they stay on the site

then their chances of converting are going to be higher so just even one to two seconds increase in page low low time will make a world of difference in terms of Engagement and conversions let's turn our attention to offsite engagement so previously we talked about onpage elements and website factors that affect our rankings for search results but we also need to turn our attention away from our website meaning what we do on our website and turn our attention what we can do for our website off our website and onto other website so that's offsite engagement

and so let's look at an example so that ice cream recipes blog so we did everything we possibly could we updated The Meta tags the title tag The Meta description we added H1 tags we made sure the site architecture was sound we submitted a site map we we made sure the the page load was good and fast so we did all the things we were supposed to do on our web page but we're still not ranking well what do we need to do well we need to turn our attention away from our website into other

websites we call this offsite or off-page SEO and we need to basically generate links from high quality sites back to our site so if we've done everything we can on our own website and we're still not ranking where we want to be well then we need to turn our attention to other websites and so if we turn our attention to other websites and other websites that are relevant other websites that are of quality other websites that have high domain Authority then we're going to see an increase in rankings so it's just a matter of getting

quality links from quality websites that are relevant that's what's going to move the needle on search after we've taking care of all the on page elements so more backlinks from high domain Authority results in higher rankings SEO is a combination between what we do on our website meaning optimizing the page and making sure our website has good site architecture and follows the best practices in terms of site maps and Page load then we need to turn our attention to the backlinking to improve our domain Authority so according to backlinko analysis is offsite engagement is one

of the most important elements for ranking number one in Google so you can't just focus your attention on updating the title tag and making sure the pages load fast you have to turn your attention as well to getting back links from high quality sites that's offsite engagement and so gaining links back links from multiple DS is vital it's vital because they bring referring traffic to your site they bring credibility to your site but more importantly Google's going to recognize the relationship between these sites and your website and if these sites that have back links or

links pointing to your site and if they're of high quality then we call that passing link juice so it's going to bring quality to you in terms of organic sech so if we look at an example if I do a search for banana bread recipe they're 241 billion results for banana bread recipe Why did this particular page from Simply Recipes rank number one well we can turn our attention to M and MZ has a report called link Explorer and so MZ link Explorer report helps us identify our own page Authority our own domain Authority and

how many links we have from other quality websites so if I put that particular URL into link Explorer and notice the URL here is short even though it uses an underscore when it should use a hyphen it's still rank number one and why because off page elements help this page rank number one why their page Authority out of 100 is 58 their domain Authority out of 100 is 82 and what does that mean well that means that they have a lot of good links from other domains of high quality they have 82 24 linking domains

to this one domain they have 3600 inbound links and they're ranking for a lot of different keywords so if we scroll down we're going to be able to see kind of a breakout the quality of websites that are linking to them so they have 19 domains with a domain authority of 91 to 100 linking to them they have 15 domains between the range of 81 and 90 so what does that tell me between 15 and 19 that's 34 particular domains that are very high quality linking to them and so we could see the breakout of

the linking domains we can see the top file links to the site and we can see the page Authority so the link explor report gives us an overview of what pages are linking to ours and it also gives us an idea of what our own page Authority and domain Authority are because domain Authority and Page Authority both need to be high in order for us us to rank on Google Search and in order for it to get high we need links from high quality sites so that's the whole idea behind offside engagement so some of

the offside engagements are influencer marketing meaning is there somebody out there on social who has a huge following but not only do they have a huge following but are they relevant to our product for example usin B who's a famous Sprinter if we're selling shoes and we're selling shoes maybe husin Bol can reference us on Twitter or Facebook that's influencer marketing getting people to influencing people to buy our product we can engage with audiences on multiple social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter meaning if we're running a promotion on those running shoes then we can

promote that on Facebook okay we can promote that on Twitter we can also bookmark our web page on popular bookmarking sites like St upon we can also put our content on discussion fors like Reddit we can join High PR quality Q&A sites excuse me and post answers to questions related to our business like kora.com so we can engage in sharing our content and answering questions so there's lots of ways to get links to your website if you have a blog post as an example you can make sure that maybe that content is is shared on

a similar blog post so if you have an ice cream recipe blog post well maybe you can look at a dessert blog post and share your content on that particular blog post and have a backlink pointing from that blog post to yours as an example and you can reciprocate so the whole idea of content is sharing the content but at the same time of sharing it you're producing backlinks and backlinks help domain Authority so not only did it help domain Authority but they improve the search rankings so in Google's eyes the higher your domain Authority

higher the page Authority in Google's eyes that means your page is important it's credible and we're going to improve it in the search engine rankings it increases brand visibility if we have our content on a highly engageable website a highly popular website or a Blog it's not it's going to lift our brand visibility if we have usin B who's very famous Sprinter do some influenc in marketing for us then that's going to increase our brand visibility so anytime we can associate with something that has some influence or some clout or high domain Authority then it's

only going to increase our brand awareness and visibility so again it's going to increase our domain Authority because of the association of passing link juice from one domain to another it's going to then as a result increase referral traffic because if we're on a high quality website that gets a lot of traffic then the chances of some of that traffic going our site is going to be great and again it improves The credibility and Trust of our website and that's what we want we want Google to trust us and a way to build trust is

by associating our website with other websites of high equal or higher quality so when we talk about offside engagement we want to do some guest post on relevant websites so if you have that ice cream blog go to another blog like the the dessert blog and do a guest post so not only that will that improve your brand awareness but it'll generate a backlink and maybe drive some referral traffic you can participate in forums and blog discussions like core.com or Reddit get your content out there start a discussion about a specific topic to engage users

build brand awareness and generate that backlink you can always you know put your your site on a directory like Yelp for example or Yahoo directory you could prefer testimonial link building meaning if you serve products or offer up a service well somebody could provide a testimony on their website or you can just earn backlinks from relevant authoritative web pages like we mentioned Kora or Wikipedia or there's plenty out there so the idea is to associate yourself with high quality websites but do it naturally you don't want to force anything so if you're selling a specific

service or you're selling a specific product look for like mining services or products that complement what you do and that'll create the natural environment natural ecosystem that will eventually give you the benefits that you need to rank higher in the search results pages so we don't want to purchase any links we don't want to cloak content we don't want to just inject links on sites that aren't relevant we don't want to just have sitewide links all over the place pointing to the same page and we certainly don't want to be on lowquality websites directories it's

all about quality not quantity with offside engagement so having offside engagement complements what you do on your website for Onsite together both of those efforts will get you higher search engine results thanks Rob with that we've reached the end of this video stay tuned for part two where we'll be covering topics like Google ads Google Display Network Google analytics Facebook and YouTube ads and much more thank you for watching and stay tuned for more from Simply learn staying ahead in your career requires continuous learning and upskilling whether you're a student aiming to learn today's top

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