Digital Marketing Course Part - 1 🔥| Digital Marketing Tutorial For Beginners | Simplilearn

[Music] 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 7 tips and tricks for seo how to perform keyword research how to rank number one on google and google tag manager greetings everyone

this is rob sanders and today we're going to talk about what is digital marketing so thanks for joining us here at 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 we're just a fly on the wall 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 has 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 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 text 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

what traditional marketing reach is 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 you're trying to promote an event and you basically create a thousand flyers okay you figure that's going to a thousand 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 printing an eight and a half by eleven okay that's it you know with with digital marketing you're running display banners you have 468 by 60 200 by 200 250 by 250 300 by 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 one 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 uh it's obvious but you know digital marketing that's one of the biggest benefits instant real-time 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 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 wanna bash traditional marketing too much i mean if you're gonna put a tv ad in place you know you're gonna 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 a 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 a 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 has 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 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 real-time 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 google so depending on where you're located in the us market google tends more has a large market share so you want your pages on your website to be found and clicked on organically and so that means that 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 millions 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 gonna 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 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 myus.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 happened to click on that listing then myus.com is going to pay google something depending on what the cost per click is and so that could be anywhere from one penny to a hundred dollars 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's 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's 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 this 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 the southern part of the united states you can segment that and 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 could design it really snazzy and you could track it just like you can any other digital marketing channel so email is a very effective way to really reach a target audience 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 products 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 the product and if you purchase it you're gonna 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 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're using usually a third-party broker like commission junction or cg.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 basically see a banner basically you can see earn up to 12 advertising fees with a trusted e-commerce leader okay so if somebody clicked on that purchase for example or joined you could pay off that commission okay let's turn our attention to social media marketing so social media marketing you know i would 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 gonna promote but we know social media can be effective 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'll have a paid form of advertising that you can use to promote your product or service or you can go the 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 a lot of different social media platforms out there 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 could post an app 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 we're 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 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 a targeted audience on say instagram

then you know who your audience is and you know what the type of content you're gonna 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 and depending on the platform putting yourself out there with various types of content so for example we look at youtube you can 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 bid 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 does our 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 gonna help me in my life okay and who who is selling this i mean who is 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 talk to our customer 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 the search results and so somebody can actually see 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 can use affiliate marketing to help get the word out by using cg.com as an example build up a sales force 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 digital marketing channels you can 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 listed here low priority in the awareness stage display ads mean that if you're on google's display number 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 okay so content marketing you must create a high quality content that people are 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 sem if we're not ranking organically we can make sure we're at the top of the paid search results or the the search results for a particular keyword we want to be found for and then social media marketing using different channels depending on the

channel if 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 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 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 are 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 posts 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 those 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 sem 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 welcoming 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 your 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 gonna 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 bodes 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 hey look hey this brand really cares because they're really responding to people they're not ignoring negativity okay just those 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 it 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 in 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 even increase it to 20 percent and email's a good channel for that mobile can reach a lot of people through

sms okay social media reaching people instantaneously and then you know really 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 low 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 get them to help

promote it and incentivize their audience so let's move on from the purchase to the purse 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 well a hat work or a pair of gloves or you know blouse you know you want to be able to not push a product on your customer but think

about how you can complement that purchases that purchasers or customers 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 and 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 it's 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 you send in 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 ten percent on a future purchase is 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 follow-up 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 can say hey look if you're satisfied let us know give us a call you can even in the ee 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 network 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 four 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 gonna 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-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 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 post purchase stage so in today's world everywhere you go it's all about digital so today this 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 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 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 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 target 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 nepal or pakistan i can certainly do that and i can do that with the snap of a campaign and i 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 cost-effective alternative to traditional marketing so you know for those that are familiar with purchasing advertising on say tv a 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 on a specific target audience then you want to show your ad around the time when that program is slotted to air on tv 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 compression model allows you to really go head-to-head in kind of an auction style format where you can 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 roi 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 and then another use for digital marketing 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 we talk about remarketing is another form of digital marketing so you can set up a marketing 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 could do it via remarketing and basically that's the beauty of digital marketing allows you to really target users based 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 attended audience and allow that targeted intended 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 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 you 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 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 on-page seo you have off-page seo on-page 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 dot com or dot 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 site 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 key words 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 keyword 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 are 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 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 their 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 on page seo and now we're going to look at off page seo okay so off page seo involves using promotional methods beyond just optimizing your site for example optimizing your title tag amount 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 backlinks from high quality relevant sites to our site and it may not just necessarily have to be a link because google recognizes linkless 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 quora you have blogging okay there's lots of ways to establish yourself out there on the internet you just need to make sure they're quality sites 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 knows 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 nofollow okay and i'm gonna 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.com and really a no follow versus they do follow is simply in the href 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 backlink or external link to your site and that's simply that site just adding the rel equals nofollow 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 allow searching 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 nofollow 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 nofollow link on that site don't fret because you know google has come a long way they're not necessarily focused 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 it's 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 tripadvisor would be a good example a link that redirects from tripadvisor to you know the oprah magazine as an example so the oprah magazine is going to get a back link from tripadvisor to the site so if google crawls tripadvisor then they're going to be able to see this link and if it's a follow link they're going to give the oprah magazine that domain credit from tripadvisor so for seo because

there's a two-pronged approach involved you have on-page and off-page a lot of tools here a lot of tools so let's take a look at some of these tools we're gonna look at google keyword planner we're gonna look at moz ahrefs 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 on-page seo we can't optimize our title tag and meta 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 pay-per-click platform okay so if you want to be found via paid search you're going to use google ads but from an organic search perspective we can use google's keyword planner so we need a google ads account 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 business that delivers mails to people what keywords do we want to optimize for so we're going to be in google ads we're going to 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 keyword 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 can 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 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 that's 49 500 okay so here you got some other ones best food delivery service 9 900. 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-through 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 et cetera so a lot of information built into moz'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 curious is about what the off-page seo situation looks like well you can use a tool like ahrefs it's 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 and then you can check the backlinks 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 backlinks the total backlinks and notice 85 of them are do follow links so google is able to recognize those links and then i could see referring domains so i have 124 different domains 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 however it's only a 14-day free trial but it does give you some good insights into seo now page load 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 can 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 load time is slow and in my opinion anything over two to three seconds

is going to be slow you need to be able to take action and so the great thing about google analytics the page load 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 it has seven suggestions if i click on that then page speed insights is gonna open up and what's gonna happen is google analytics slash page speed insights is gonna 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 can 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 moz 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 aside what kind of errors are coming up here i can get some page optimization so i can choose a keyword and i can 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 explorer 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 wraps 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 us being associated with those sites 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 going 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 learn's 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 on page and off page seo so take a look at the video and if you have any comments about everything we covered with seo feel free to comment underneath this video here and we'll be sure to respond accordingly 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 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 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's it for and then you want to run content on it 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 top popular tools used for content marketing you have

buffer you have buzzsumo followerwonk hootsuite so let's go ahead and take a look at an example of a content marketing management system and we're gonna use wordpress and so if we go into wordpress here on the backend we're logging a login and so the reason why we use wordpress is because we can post blogs so in wordpress if i go to post here i'm going to be able to see all the different posts 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 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 yoast 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 yoast 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 in this case with a blog post we can ride 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 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 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 and social media platforms like twitter linkedin 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 the 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 competitors 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 again what we mean by audio 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 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 may 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 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 of 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 there's 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 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 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 is you can also work in seo so you can assign keywords and then you could add those keywords to moz 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 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 can 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 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 media marketing there are lots of tools available okay you got buffer hootsuite 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 a channel you want to have a social media platform tool that will help you organize your content publish it accordingly listen in and 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 can actually pay to have your post out there and so for example on facebook we could set up a paid 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 your ad to be shown for example desktop or mobile news feed facebook in-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 pan your ad 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 posts then doing this is a good way to really get your brand out there if it's awareness if it's 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 paid 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 and 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 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 that you you covet for certain keywords and because you're getting traffic or have 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 role 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 ad 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 up front especially when you're talking about pain 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 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 error 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 costs and you're not getting

conversions you're probably not going to be continuing to run those 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 the 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 retargeting 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 marketing is 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 simplylearn.com so they're taking advantage of three headlines and then here you can see two description lines and so each description line you can 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 can 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 option on what type of asset you want to use you know the one thing i like about facebook is they offer up a multitude of options in terms of assets so you can run a single image ad you can run a carousel meaning you get 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 buzzfeednews.com okay here you can see uh 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 with the text that it 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 and 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'm 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 two so again take advantage of what's available if you're not sure what copy to write 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

your text ad so here you can see i have four extensions these are actually site links so google ads offers up something called ad 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 in-depth video about google ads it covers everything a to z 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 search engine 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 while 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 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 steps 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 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 gonna 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 re 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 cj's 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 has 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 can see uh an advertisement here okay so you can 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 i mentioned commission junction there are also some other affiliate marketing tools out there uh amazon associates a win 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 affiliates 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 those affiliates are likely going to be the ones to convert for you and if your 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 negative advertisements means that your ad is showing up next to content that basically naturally fits so these are advertisers 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 your bands that probably won't exist without led zeppelin okay so for spotify you're 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 an audiophile here you can see an advertisement next to the article so

you can see the ad about led 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 on tv and movies and here you can 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 it and 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 simplylearn's youtube channel we have a nice uh in-depth video about affiliate marketing to 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 aligned 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 x recipients for flat fee 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 target audience you want to create probably two emails per segment 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 entice 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 why not 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 performing a b

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 be affiliate or search engine marketing organic search you want to analyze performance and in the case of emails it's always about open rates 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 how 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 marcato is a good marketing automation tool now owned by adobe marketo 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 a very easy interface okay here if 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 mailchimp we can actually see what campaigns have been dropped or sent out already and then we can 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 could see specifically how many people open clicked how many people bounced or email addresses bounced 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 send 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 you got

some templates that you can leverage so that's mailchimp kind of in a nutshell mailchimp you could pay upfront 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 for 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 press releases so

we talked about seo and social and search and affiliate and email marketing 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 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 conversions 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 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 influencers or you're active in trying to build your brand through a conversation you can always use a third party 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 pick up on those press releases so it's a good way to get your press releases out there likes of yahoo 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 it 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 can see some of the new aggregator websites of 2019 you got feedly panda tech mimi metacritic e science 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 fasten 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 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 okay affiliate marketing we'll talk about some of the tools available to you and for affiliate marketing we'd be remiss 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 comment 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 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 moz is a freemium 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 a tool in ahrefs 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 keywords 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

has given us here meal 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 because that's my business so i'm going to click click get results notice i can add another key to it 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 hone 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 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 7.46 and at the top of the page high range 16.61 so that should alert me to the fact that hey if i'm gonna 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 three dollars okay i could see some other ones that are even lower than the seven dollars 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 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 keywords 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 moz and moz 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 moz 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 so i can hone in on a specific country or different country so what moz is telling me hey for this keyword in the entire united states i'm looking

at anywhere from eleven and a half thousand to thirty thousand on monthly volume now what moz does is they give you a difficulty score so a difficulty score is a score between one and one hundred and so i could 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 a hundred 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 keyword 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 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 mazda remember moz has basically a freemium version meaning you can sign up for a free account and you can sign up for a free account as a test trial and you can 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 moz 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 and 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 what we would use some of these tools available to us well we want to be able to understand the search 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 we use some of these seo tools so we have tools available to us some majestic hrefs again moz 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 when school can recognize that you 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 4 4 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 error 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 is indexing and what they're not indexing okay so these are the errors i could see they've certainly were able to crawl and index 9115 pages 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 an issue that they found if we want these pages indexed 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 1419 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 site maps i can see that these are the urls they discovered via the sitemap and so the whole point of a sitemap 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 of what's going on today starts with mobile so they want you to understand how your site fares via mobile and when i say fares 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 before different issues okay so

here i can see what those 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 width 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 indexed quicker so if you ignore the issues and the errors especially for

mobile then you stand the chance of your pages not getting indexed 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 console shows us what pages have the most links okay so here

we can see the home page has 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 top link pages from external links meaning links on other websites pointing to these pages i can also see internal links so google is recognizing 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 has given me kind of an overview of what my leaking 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 can see the same report and analytics if you're able to link up google search console 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 into 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-through 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 three months it received 209 297 impressions so what does that mean that means this keyword was used at le or 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 209 000 plus times this site received 120 000 plus clicks so to get a sense of the click-through rate all you would need to do and google can obviously do this for you is you would simply just divide the 209 000 297 into the 120 000 397 okay so that's really going to give you that's going to give you a click-through rate and the click-through

rate in this case is 57 so over half of the clicks occur when this listing appears for this keyword okay so we can get a sense of the click-through rate for each one okay and you could 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 can choose landing pages countries devices or queries so i can 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-to-rate bike search query and then the average position so that's 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're going to use these seo tools available to us and so we already listed a number of different reasons ranging from sitemaps 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 a 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 click-through 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 moz 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 could certainly see where they rank the great thing about

moz is it's a great tool not only for rankings and on page 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 1 in 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 actually 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 mazd 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 can see here as i keep going down for example i could 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 could get into a little bit more detail and 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 moz is they have not only on-page seo tools but off-page seo tools and moz is a freemium so to speak so here you can see if you just go to moz.com free dash seo 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 moz a lot for all that it has to offer from choosing keywords 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 moz 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 platforms 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 mailchimp's a freemium version when we say freemium 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 marcato is a good tool you know marketo 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 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 marketo is a good tool for you to use because you can then set up trip 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 marketo it has drip campaigns available along with some other features there's hubspot a very powerful tool it does a lot from creating landing pages to a b testing to social to you know email so this is another freemium tool that you could use you have another freemium and send in blue email platform and then you also have convertkit 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 are 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 daily basis so it's no wonder why there's just so many tools available

and so with these tools you can certainly send bulk emails now in the case of marketo you could send emails to a segmented audience and so that's 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 a 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 marketo you want a workflow set up where hey if somebody does this you're sending email b etc so you want an 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 sub lists 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 insights meaning you know what percentage of users opened your email what percentage of recipients clicked on your email what links do 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 those 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 delivery based

on a specific time of day so these tools also allow you to you segment contacts based on geolocation you want to be able to use a tool that allows for multi-variant 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've 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 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 can see there's some lists 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 i saw 2000 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 percent 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 mailchimp you could link it with a google analytics you can link it with e-commerce 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 woocommerce 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 cart you know mailchimp 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 and summary and so most email platforms do a lot of similar features or have some 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 url 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 mailchimp 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 mail champion for using mailchimp as the source now the the thing about the url builders you always want to use lowercase because google analytics is

case sensitive so as a rule of thumb just stick with a lowercase so our source is going to be mailchimp because 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 convertkit 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 to 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 their 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 asterisk 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 gonna get subject line one and one segment that's gonna get subject line two so in this

case i'm gonna 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 appended url so my original url was visit florida.com ian-us florida-beaches.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 line underscore 2. 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 am i 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 send 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 will can i see the medium being email so now i can see for this email that was sent out in mailchimp 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 could 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 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 in 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 i.e subject line and so that's why the url builders 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 if 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 tools kind of the central focal point of all digital marketing and it starts really with google analytics google analytics is a freemium 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 its 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 freemium you have kiss metrics you have spring metrics you have youtube analytics which is part of google but youtube has its own separate 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 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 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 analytics 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 new visitors because 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 are indexing 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 google 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 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 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 site'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 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 we want to look into each one of these sections so let's start with audience and so audience and 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 olds 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 two-thirds of my traffic is female one-third 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 location under geo 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 17 percent from the us and then 16 from argentina 13 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 geo 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 percent 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 could see referral email social then i could 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 and 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 and 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 cost per click at 15 16 of our traffic so then i can look down i can 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 and 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 that utm tracking that we set up for email well we want to be able to track the performance of email and any other non-google 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 consoles so

we looked at search console earlier 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 can 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 could see the click-through rate 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 date so i can see engagement related

metrics associated with the page so this particular page here on line one i could see how many pages unique pages which is equal to sessions so i could 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 bounce rate so a bounce 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 bounce rate or maybe load 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 paid search or another channel landed on this page so here i could see this particular page on line one had 4970 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 site 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 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 load 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 suggestions 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 can 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

load 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 and page load time we see lift and page load 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 site 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 categories 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 report 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 an 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 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 set up 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 can see if somebody goes to donation dash 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 one 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 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 could see 313 goal completions total with a goal conversion rate of 1.88 and then i could see it broken down by gold 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 date 10 887 users which meant 11 000 sessions 76 clicked on that donate now button and that comes out to 0.65 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 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 so 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 playlists you'll be able to get some really good insights as to how your video is 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 baited 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 could see over the last 28 days my videos produced over 8 600 views my watch time in minutes totaled over 17 000 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 could see the total impression so how many times

my video was viewed or how many people looked at it okay and then the click-through rate so here i could see the different traffic sources so 29 came externally okay here i could see 25 came within youtube itself i could see how many times a video was viewed and played via playlist via suggested video so i could see different ways in which the traffic found my video and actually watched it here i could see externally how people were able to find my videos and i could see 46 percent found it via google search see some

lots of information here 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 could see the top videos in terms of watch time i could see the top playlist so here i could see

my partners playlist was 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 they're not subscribed 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 of that so if you're publishing videos on a regular basis you want to hone 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 in-depth 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 freemium tool like sprout social to listen in on our competitors we can use another freemium tool social blade there's a popular tool out there called spyfu that's freemium

as well moz we looked at moz earlier for keyword and organic moz is a great tool for also leveraging our competitors in terms of backlinks and buzzsumo so that's another freemium tool get there lots of tools out there these are just examples of some of the tools that we use here at simplylearn i use personally and professionally to get a sense of what our competition is doing so why would we want to use a competitor spine 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 competitors backlinks and monitor changes in the 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 backlinks 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 competitors 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 is doing okay we can also identify our

competitors top performing content for relevant topics okay we can determine what our competitors website referral traffic is okay we can pull our competitors 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 ahead 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 posts 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 to 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 that first bullet point we want to get a sense of what our competitors are 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 competitors domains in there and definitely get a sense of you know how many links my competitors have external intel 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 comparison across my domain and my competitors 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 competitors domains

in there and then i can find opportunities and so you just click on opportunities and you can 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 backlink so that's ideally what the link intersect tool is in moz 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 could put even our competitors 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 with 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 moz's link explorer tool now there's one more report we can leverage in moz and that's the inbound links report and so we can go ahead and

type in our competitors domain here and again we can get a snapshot of what their domain authority is page authority for the home page but really this is what we're after linking domains so this particular domain has over 9 000 linking domains so what we can do is actually go through and see 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 hone 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 could 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 it just another good report you can leverage in moz under the link explorer reporting tool now if i want to get a good snapshot as to what my competitors doing on search exactly well look no further than spyfu so spyfu is a another tool that you can leverage from a ppc seo perspective you know from an seo perspective you got some back linking 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 competitors 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 could see here the keywords their top competitors also rank for the rank history 12 years so this particular domain has been around a long time okay so that's on the organic side flip over to the paid side and i could

see that they are doing paid search i could see 5 000 plus keywords they're bidding on okay 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 okay now again you can pay for this because it's freemium 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 spyfu 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 at 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 moz spyfu 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 it or leave it but it's all free data available to you under spyfu 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 food is a really good tool to leverage if you just want to get a snapshot of how your competitor 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 caveat 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 autos and vehicles and i hone in on a specific country or adjust the size of the daily sessions that i get then i could see hey analytics in this case in this example i'm 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 if 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 locale and if we do that google is going to be able to adjust how many web properties are actually contributing to the report and 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 4999 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 can 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 competitor but you're honing in on your industry so you're getting a good idea as to how you compare 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 a 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 gonna type in rv rentals and now we're gonna 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 same keyword meaning they're paying for rv rental 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 in title colon and then hit enter so now i could see i 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 thousand different listings ahead of you that you need to jump over in order to rank for the keyword rv rentals so using the all in title 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 a 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 in title syntax it gives us a good idea as to what our competition is 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 could see us and i can see our competitors okay so i could see impression share so for if

we're talking about one keyword every keyword has a hundred percent 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 our 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 could 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 out rank my competitors and vice versa how often my competitors outrank me so i could 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 bing linkedin you probably want to work within those platforms as the tool of choice so you know if you're doing paid search on say google search dot com or display you could be doing display advertising on you know a network like adroll 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 third tool that you can leverage bing and google are actual advertising networks 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 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 show you 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 our keywords converting not converting now 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 competitors data and as we showed you in the competitors 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 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 there are different types of networks out there for example admiral okay curtillo celtra is another paid 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 on google ads and measure my display performance that way but if you're on adroll for example then you want to leverage adroll's 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 we 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 of minutes okay so we want to improve our campaigns by monitoring our competitors display ads as well so there are tools available that will 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 quiet tweepy you got all these cool paid search tools again i usually stick with where i'm advertising 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 our 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 preferences etc so social allows us to do that and then

with facebook as an example we can monitor any a b test we run for example if we're running call to action test we can measure the results that write 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 add 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 can see what ads are performing in terms of clicks click-through rates etc and so that way i can go ahead and pause 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 could just sort by clicks and now i can see not only what keywords are

driving clicks i could see what the click-through rate is i could 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 scores 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 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 i want my ad shown for then i can go ahead and 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 insight so we've 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 the overlap rate is position above rate top of page absolute top of page right now

rank and 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 pay-per-click 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 two dollars 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 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 gonna 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 defining 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 eyes platform you can go ahead and do a bid 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 bid adjustment on computer and that means i'm going to show my ads less so i can go ahead and do bit 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 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 seasoned 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 ca 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 wanted to turn off all these ad groups i can just highlight them all and just click status enabled to pause and i can revert back if i want to okay so you can make household changes so here i could see the campaign the ad group level if i choose an ad group then

i can see some key words 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 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 download 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 ad group level okay you can look at ads itself and make changes to the ads okay you could do a lot of different things write an editor in fact you could do pretty much most of what you could 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 still the same and some of the same tools are available from the search network as well as for

the display network right in 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 i 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 what's performing best okay and so now i can see clicks impressions click-through rate 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 can see the same metrics i could see on the search side i could see clicks impressions click-through 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 ad

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 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 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 the ability to go ahead and you can exclude it from the ad group exclude a specific placement from a campaign so you could take action on a specific placement and i could 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 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 and 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 can see if we're in the facebook ads manager we could see our campaigns we could see our ad sets 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 i can see the cost per click here at one dollar 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 creators and then i can actually see the creators 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 reap different reporting so if i click on the reports pull down menu you can see here i could see some standard reports by add ad 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 can see who's looking at my ad specifically so here i could see 35 to 44 female i could see the reach impressions and how often they're actually seeing my ad now this is key for facebook because if somebody's seen 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 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 in 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 i 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 ad set 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 ad set or my ad now remember if you're in facebook you can always go in and edit the

campaign you can edit the ad set remember in the ad set 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 is going to be and based on the 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 it out remember you can do a b testing as well so you have a lot of different options and features available to you right in 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 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 a lot of affiliate marketing platforms out there the number one probably is commission junction also known as cj

they're an affiliate platform they having a freemium model meaning you can have a free trial but basically you're gonna 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 hey when 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 really need a platform to kind of put it all together and it's a lot a 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 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 inflowers 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 am i only endorsing that platform there are plenty others out there but whatever platform you use you're gonna want to be able to set up terms and conditions with that particular affiliate so you could set up with terms and conditions for say 10 off all sales as an example okay well you're getting a platform that will help you broker that contract okay contract terms or program terms furthermore you're gonna 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 marketing you have earnings per click epc as an example most platforms measure epc from a seven day period to a three month 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 pressions 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 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 does somebody click on our product did somebody go into the shopping cart with our product did 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 gonna 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 a 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 publisher's link so we're going to click on the 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 available so here we could see the different program turns we have set up for certain publishers so we just click on that we'll be able to see that's the 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 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 can 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 the 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 a line 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 can see here the term status whether it's active or not earnings basically what they've sold over the last basically seven days or three months so you could look at basically how your publishers are performing just by clicking on manage by status here in cg.com so when you're looking at reports in cj.com or really any other affiliate program you might see the acronym epc 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 seven day period and over a three month period so you could sort based on seven day or three 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 say you 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 a certain program term so you could group your publishers any way you want by status meaning they're selling more these are our 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 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 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 the social media because social media has so many tools available so many okay the first one i can think about here is hootsuite hootsuite is a great social media marketing tool to use okay it's a freemium okay you can set up a free trial here you basically a base account and then uh you can use hootsuite to do a lot of things anything from setting up

landing pages to actually publishing content to listening hootsuite 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 decks been around a long time that is actually free and i would recommend tweetdeck 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 hootsuite 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 chelsea today as well before we do 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 could manage everything 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 so 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 is 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 the 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 posts 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's 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 hey 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 into twitter individually or facebook individually i can link

them up all within 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 my publishing i could see the top post individually i could see impressions by day you know a lot of this same material same information is already in facebook insights so if it's available on 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 tool is 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 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 you 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 again when you schedule something then you want to look at the behavior of it so it's just as simple as going from publishing to

reporting and then based on when something got published you could see the reaction of it and react to it so another thing here that i like about it's about social hootsuite 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 and twitter search we'll 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 or radius to hone in if we're local okay so this is sprout social's example of listening here let's take a look at another example i'm in later.com so later very similar sprout social and 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 could 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.com 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 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 can 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 platform's performing over a period of time so i can look at reach a lot profile views website clicks okay so i can get a lot of good insights here right in the analytics platform later you can look at specific post performance so if we posted something i could see basically how many likes it received how many comments impressions the reach and then if i wanted to 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 hashtags 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 tweetdeck so what tweetdeck 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 trending and so now i can go in and see okay these are all the different things that are trending on twitter 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 can see the you got the cricut world cup you got you know the soccer football world cup going on so you know we could pick a particular topic to follow if we wanted to 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 friday feeling in their tweets and so the whole idea behind you know tweetdeck it serves up a interesting overview so to speak of not only your account but you know a specific topic 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 sprout social 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 a 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 watch 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 tools 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 pay 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 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 keyboard planner uh in google there's also a 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 access to google's keyword planner so having a third party keyword tool will pay dividends well because those dividends pay off in the form of not only pay-per-click

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 got a third party tool here that's free solarwinds 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 target okay so i'm gonna show you another tool called hot jar so here if you log into hotshot.com you can set up an account it's actually free and with the free account you can have hotjar measure the heat map not only the heat map but the click mapping the scrolling of a particular page and so here you can see we're looking at a particular page here so hotjar 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 can see here on the page i could see people are moving over here to the right that's where they're clicking 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 page views with the free version you can measure up to 2 000 pages and so 2 000 page use 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 hotjar so hotjar.com is a tool i would recommend as well so one final tool and i'd be remiss if i didn't mention it and that's google optimized

so google optimize is a google platform that allows you to a b test and so a b 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 a b testing is to improve website performance so here you can see i have an account set up and optimized 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 can see we can look at bounces or we can look at you know basically a measure the test up against the metric that's important to our business and again the whole 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 optimize is free you can run up to five tests okay and if you can run up to five different tests and 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 where we're going to talk a little bit about why you'd 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 optimization techniques so you can get your website ranked number one and then we're gonna finish that off with the do's and don'ts of seo so let's get right to it and talk about why seo so we're gonna 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 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 longer longer than you when they have more content and more blog posts 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 it's 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 our 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 are 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 load 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 load time but also you know google doesn't want any spam content google doesn't want any pop-ups 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 the indexed is google needs to be able to index all the pages on your website so if you have a blog with a hundred 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 cream 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 a

hundred 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 exactly how seo works it's exactly all those points i just made mention 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 meta description and then again 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 site speed because site speed's important okay and when we talk about responsive design when i say response to 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 i 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 call back to their servers and when they take it back to their servers your web pages they need to you have them available for indexing 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 the 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 bots 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 do they find these pages well they basically follow links you might have heard the term spydering 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're 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 they're not going to show up for relevant keywords so we need to

make sure your site's available to 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 and if i type in the keyword simply learn okay i could see i have one million ten thousand results okay and that's how many results are showing up for simply learn okay now they may not all be simply learned pages but nonetheless simply learned is ranked number one here organically and there are 1 million 10 000 pages related to the keyword simply learn now when it

comes to organic search we don't want to get it confused with paid search so anytime 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 million 10 000 results and so that's the whole idea behind crawling and indexing google is able to cross simply learn's 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 appear in the search results so in the example i gave was simply learn well simply learn is the brand name of the company simply learn so there'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 why 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 learned 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 india you may not see exactly the same thing because both search engines the google and 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 on-page seo and off-page seo so first we're going to talk about on-page seo so on-page 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 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 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 keyword and it's it's simply the practice of going through the motions of getting your volume and getting your competition data so you can choose the keywords you want and then once you choose the keywords 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 a 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 is 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 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 a 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 we 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 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 could 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 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 keyword 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 in title syntax and now i can see every listing every one of these 136 results have that particular keyword 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 call and 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 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 three important factors in starting the process for on-page seo so again 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 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 google 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 can 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 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 particular 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 meta description 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 and the keyword but the meta 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 then you're leaving it to google to add in copy that they deem relevant and so for on-page 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 meta 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 somebody 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-through 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 x user experience after they click on the listing so the url is an element that helps not only with the click-through 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 keywords 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 meta 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 hierarchy 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 keyword 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 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 learning path 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 more important than 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 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 learn's website and so for this particular content it also links to seo 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 and 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 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 choose other relevant related keywords that's going to be more natural and so that's what we mean on 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 keywords 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 key words in the natural language process what keywords are more relevant for the content and then another element on page 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 do two types of sitemaps one is an html map and that's designed for humans so if you have a website with a lot of 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 site 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 crawl content they bring it back to their servers and index it and so we want to be able to create a site map 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 simplylearn.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 sitemaps are there for google to go ahead

and crawl and nothing more than a list of all the 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 keywords you want to be found for so it all starts with the sitemap so let's go from on-page seo which in recap is basically optimizing certain elements on your website so that

you are relevant for a 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 gonna 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 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 on page 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 linking and so for on-page 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 website's 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 it 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 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 are 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 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 wikipedia 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 specialists 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 its 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 off-page seo or link building is always going to be content so from an on-page 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 necessarily have to be a website it could be a social platform or can be another blogging platform or blogging website link 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 can share your content with them they can share their content with you and generally that's how it works naturally anyway in the web sphere 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 a 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 contents are quality relevant and of good nature okay so let's move on and finish up with the do's and don'ts of seo so we talked a lot about why seo what is seo you know how do we rank for seo 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 a 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 cat 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 because again it's not going to be good for the end user so stay away from black hat and focus on some of the techniques we talked about in today's presentation the other do 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 a site that's not of good quality then google is 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 or 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 or 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 keyword 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 site-wide backlinks meaning don't just have an internal link to the home page 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 it does take time to rank your content so remember the process you're going to write your content you're 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 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 on-page seo and off-page seo then you will rank for that keyword and then make sure your website's user friendly and mobile friendly so we 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 for relevant keywords and so the first step and search engine optimization is always going to be keyword research so it is the most important step and so what is keyword research all about well 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 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 competitions 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 they are long tail 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 tail 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 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 are 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's not necessarily going to happen because we don't necessarily know the mindset of somebody typing in a very

short tail generic keyword like italian 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 keywords 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 and well moz has a tool called the keyword explorer and within moz so if you go to moz.com and then use the 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 to look at the difficulty of that keyword you could see that it's fairly difficult because out of 1 to 100 it's got to score 43 so it's fairly difficult however if you notice the click-through rate's very high so moz estimates that we'll have a 40 organic click-through 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 usually consist of more than three keywords so tie in 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 in point so if we go back to moz and then we look at the keyword explorer and we'd actually type in italian restaurants and let's just say orlando florida moz 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 so if you're interested in conversions and you have an italian restaurant in say orlando florida then this is the key word you may want to use so there's a trade-off 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 keyword so best restaurants in the top in florida branded shoes in florida something very specific is going to generate probably a higher conversion rate than something more generic so that's the trade-off and so when to use long tail keywords well we want to use long tail keywords if we're 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 how does a search engine work so let's talk about that for a minute so we know that millions of people use search engines we know that we want to be found on search engines but how do we actually get our content in the search engine so that's the important part that we need to understand if we have our own website and we have our content so these search engines want your content in their search

engine index so how do they get your content well they send out bots or files and we'll just call them spiders so they send out these spiders to crawl your website and the whole idea behind using the insect spider is because we're talking about the world wide web and so if google for example sends a bot to your website they're going to crawl your website in spite of your website they're creating a web of pages so all they're doing is following link and every page and link that they hit they're going to bring back to

their server so these spiders scan your websites they just follow links and they take all the pages and content that they're able to gather when they hit your website and they're going to pull all that information back into their own index so if you think about google they're crawling or spidering millions and billions of websites all those millions and millions of websites are sitting on google servers so when somebody does do a search query google because they have all these websites in their index are able to quickly determine which website is the most relevant for

that search engine query so that's generally how search engines work so let's talk about the types of seo so if we want our website to be found on these search engines and google or the search engines have crawled our website then what we want to do is we want to basically look at it from a two-pronged perspective it's a two-pronged strategy so the first strategy we're going to talk about today is on-page seo so those are on-page seos defined as what we do on our website to be relevant for search engine query on a search

engine so again on-page seo is what we do to our own website off-page seo is the other the second part of that seo strategy and off-page seo determines what we do off our website to be relevant for search engine query and so off-page seo generally is synonymous with link building and we'll talk about that a little bit more as we go forward but really when you want to do seo when you want to be found for a keyword on a search engine you're going to have to apply both on-page seo and off-page seo so let's

talk about on-page seo and so this is the first part of our seo effort we want to focus on on-page seo first and so on page seo is the method of optimizing elements of web pages remember these are all the items we want to do on our website to be relevant for certain search queries so it's basically the idea behind this is to make our web pages more relevant for specific search queries on search engines and so there are a number of different elements on our website on a particular web page that we want to

manipulate or optimize if you will to be relevant for search engine query and so let's start around the idea that you know you there's a number of things you can do so let's start with schema first and so schema is nothing more than it's a collaborative effort between bing yahoo baidu google and the idea is really they want to understand more about the content of your website and so the idea behind this is that you want to be able to provide snippets of information to these search engines so they understand a little bit more about

what your web page is trying to portray or convey so that they can find out exactly what's relevant to that search engine query so it's nothing more than micro data or bits of information that you can add to your website or web page in order to provide a little bit more enhanced information to the search engines so if you think about it's collaborating with the search engine so the more basic information you share with the search engines the better off they have to understand what your web page your website is all about and so the

more information they have the better of an opportunity you have to be ranked for that search engine query and so if you have a website with reviews if you have a website with images if you have let's say a website with products with prices in other words you have an e-commerce website and you're trying to sell products well to me you want to employ schema because again schema is snippets of information that are provided to the search engine so they can better understand so you can certainly provide snippets of information in the terms of images

or prices or particular products and how much is left in stock so all this information these bits of information you can provide to the search engine so that they can better understand what it is you're trying to sell how much it cost how much is in inventory what people think about the product etc so if you have a website that sell products you probably want to employ schema and so when you do employ schema again snippets of information provided to the search engines the search engines are going to better understand and then they're going to

present that information in the search engine results so if you have ratings and reviews you can provide snippets of information to the search engines the search engines in turn are going to present that information in the search engine results so if you have positive reviews then somebody typing in in this example shoes they're going to be able to see that you have positive reviews for your website so that's the whole idea behind schema is to provide snippets of information so again it's not just related to reviews also for images so if you have images you

can provide snippets of information to the search engine so they can see you know what the shoe actually looks like when they type in in this example puma shoes or like i mentioned inventory snippets of information about your inventory the search engines are going to provide that information search engine results so if somebody's looking for women's training shoes or women's puma shoes and they see your product and they see oh this is in stock great let me go to this website and purchase these shoes so that's the whole idea behind schema is making sure you

present information critical to your website so that the search engines better understand what your website's all about it also helps with relevancy because the more those search engines know about your website the more relevant your website becomes and the better chance you have to rank for a particular keyword there's also some other information here involved with schema and those are site links so site links additional pages on your website okay that show up in the search engine result and so again the more information a search engine has about you the better chance you have to

be found the better chance you have to get a click so site links are just additional links on your site that appear in search engine results and that's all a benefactor of having schema so here you can see in this example we have additional web pages that show under a certain search engine result and so by having more links in the search engine results you have a better chance of getting the click so if you want more information about schema i would recommend going to schema.org so when you go to schema.org you can actually click

on a link that allows you to see all the information you need to get started with schema.org okay so it's got a lot of information available to you it describes what it is you have to do in order to get your information and set for the search engines to better understand focus on for on page seo is title tag and so title tag is what shows up in the search engine results so if you've ever done a search engine query meaning you've gone to google typed in a query using a keyword like italian restaurants you're

going to see specific search engine results and the title tag is what appears in those search engine results so a title tag is important because it's the title of a web page that appears in those results and so the title tag is something that's important because if we want to be found for a specific keyword we want to make sure that keyword is in the title tag because that keyword is going to describe what the page is all about and so if we want to be found for that keyword let's just say italian restaurants in

florida for example that's going to be part of our title tag so when somebody types in that particular keyword query italian restaurants in florida then we have a good chance of showing up because the title tag which is the title of the page is going to have that particular query in it and so you can edit the title tag and when you edit the title tag you want to be able to put that particular keyword in the title tag so if we do a search on google for example so if i go to google.com and

i type in italian restaurants in florida here i can see under the local search results and here i can see italian restaurants in florida central florida italian restaurants and miami so you can see that these are highlighted so the title tag is not only stands out but allows you to you know showcase exactly what your page is all about and it helps with the relevancy of that keyword query so when you're trying to optimize your website using the title tag for specific keyword you want to keep in mind a couple parameters because title tags show

up in the search engine results but certain search engines particularly google has character limits around the number of characters you can use in the title tag and so we want to keep that in mind so ideally we want to format our title tag appropriately and so to me the most optimal way to optimize a title tag using a particular keyword that you want to be found for is to use that keyword in the title tag and then separate that with your brand name so if you actually have two keywords then you can use the primary

keyword first then the secondary keyword and then the brand name so to me this is the most optimal format but keep in mind there are character limits but if you look at this format to me it's the most easiest format to abide by because it makes your title tag more relevant you don't have to worry about necessarily fitting in excess keywords in the title tag because again the title tag is character limits so if we take a look at our example in google search results if you go over those limits and the title tag is

generally between 60 and 65 characters long and so if you go over those limits let's just say your title tag is more than 65 characters google in this case is going to cut off the characters and so here you can see the ellipses after the title tag now if you follow the format that you know we at simply learn recommend you could see if our keyword is italian restaurants in florida and then separated by the brand name this gives you an optimal format for the title tag it also makes it relevant for the keyword query

so you want to keep that title tag probably no more than 60 characters because if you flirt with putting more than 60 characters then the search engines are going to cut off that title tag and then that's not going to look good and it's going to also become less relevant so we want to keep the character counts in mind so if you abide by that format of the keyword and then maybe the secondary keyword if you have one separated by the brand name then you should be good to go with making sure your title tag

is relevant for that keyword query so let's then turn our attention to the meta description so the meta description is just a short description about the content on your web page so if the title tag is the title of the web page the meta description describes the page okay so it's a description about what that page is so the meta description appears under the title tag and then the url so if we go back to our google search results we look here at italian restaurants in florida maggiano's little italy is the brand or the restaurant

we could see the url which is underneath the title tag and then here we could see the meta description and so with the meta description you have a little bit more room to work with in terms of character count but the meta description just like the title tag is just as important because one it shows up in the search engine results two it describes what the page is all about and three it allows you to optimize the meta description so the meta description becomes more relevant for that search query that somebody types into that particular

search engine so the optimal length for a meta description you can go up to 300 characters but i would not even recommend even flirting with that limit because just like the title tag search engines in the case of google will actually cut off the meta description so if we look here back at our search results if you go over those limits you'll see that the search engines will cut off the copy of the meta description with and they'll just put ellipses so we don't necessarily want to go over those lemons so my recommendation is to

keep that meta description probably 165 characters to to no more than 200 because we're trying to describe not only what the page is all about but we're also trying to optimize that meta description so it becomes relevant for the search engine query and so you want to keep it short and concise so if we look at our example here italian restaurants in florida magiano's does a good job it's a book and event space make a reservation at maggiano's in florida to enjoy delicious view maps menus and more so very concise meta description it includes their

keyword query that they want to be found for italian restaurants in florida and so to me it's short and concise describes what the page is all about and uh allows them to fit it all in within the character limits so here in this example we want to be found for amazon puma shoes so the brand here is amazon so amazon wants to include puma shoes not only in the title tag but they want to try and fit that into the meta description however the whole idea behind the meta description more than anything else is describe

what the page is all about okay you want to be relevant for the search engine query but you also want to sound natural as well you want to be able to really the whole idea between the title tag and amount of description is to get people to click on your link because remember there are nine other listings on the google search engine results page for page one so we want our meta description and our title tag to stand out so we want it to be relevant but we want it to stand out so it's important

you write that meta description according to what the page is all about but you want it to stand out uniquely and accordingly so once you've done the title tag and the meta description you want to focus your attention on the header tag and so header tags are used on a web page to really separate out content and so you have headers and subheaders and so ideally you want to be able to optimize the header tag and the subheader and so if we think about headers there's a hierarchy for headers so there's between a header one

and a header six and so we'll just shorten the word header and we'll call it an h1 so h1 is really at the top of the hierarchy for headers and so if we use a h1 on our web page then what we're trying to explain to the search engines is listen this particular keyword phrase in our header is is a header and we're empha we're trying to emphasize what it is we're trying to say and that's how really the search engines interpret headers they see an h1 h2 h3 h4 h5 and h6 they know that

if you're using an h1 you're trying to really emphasize something so if you put that keyword in the header tag what you're telling the search engines is hey i'm really emphasizing this particular keyword and so the search engine will interpret that as important and if you use your keyword in that header then really what you're saying is hey i really this keyword is really relevant to that query so naturally the other benefit of a header is it really breaks up the page as well so the header you can use subheaders and subheaders are nothing more

than say a lower h tag so if you have a header that's an h1 you can use an h2 and h3 as a subheader and so forth and so on because what you're really trying to do is not only organize the content on your web page but you're trying to emphasize that for google so if something's an h2 or an h6 you're basically telling google or the other search engines this is not as important as say in h1 so if we take a look at our example that we've been using for italian restaurants in florida

and if we click on magianas we could see that they're using headers so if we click on maggiano's we could see that this is a header here we want to bring everyone together at maggiano's italian restaurant in florida so they're using that header to break up the text here you can see they're using another header here excellent italian food and an excellent experience to match so that's a header to break up the content okay they're not using subheaders they're used using headers but that's fine they're really trying to emphasize the content by putting in that

header and so headers help not only organize the content but they help emphasize the actual keyword it is you want google to recognize so if we're not sure if something is a header we could simply just mouse over what we think is a header and we can just right click and if you right click on something you're going to see a menu and if we click inspect element then basically what that browser in this case firefox is going to do is show us the html of that particular thing of that item that we right clicked

so here we could see in this particular case this is an h2 tag so it's an h2 so if we scroll down and we mouse over this we could see this is also an h2 as well so this particular page is using h2 tags not h1 but in h2 so what they're explaining or trying to convey to the search engines is listen this is an h2 it's still relevant we're still trying to put emphasis on it but not as much so we want to be able to use our h1s and our h2s accordingly so remember

in h1 is you're providing the search engines with information by telling them hey this is the most relevant this is we're putting emphasis on this keyword and h2 nuts as much as an h1 and an h3 not as much as an h2 so use your headers accordingly uh not only just to break up the text not only for styling but for emphasis for the search engines so headers are very important elements for on-page seo okay let's turn our attention to the url structure okay so url stands for uniform resource locator and so our url is

the specific location of a web page on the internet so basically if we're found in the search engine results one of our web pages are going to go along with the title tag and the meta description in the search engine results page so if i go back to our search engine results for italian restaurants in florida we could see that the particular url in question here is locations.magianos.com florida so that's the url that shows up along with the title tag in the meta description so if we click on that link that's exactly where we're going

to go so url structure is important for on-page seo so why is it important because not only does it show people where they're going but we have an opportunity to optimize that url for the search engines to make our url more relevant for that search query so just like the title tag just like the meta description just like the headers we can also manipulate the url so if we look at a url it consists of really the protocol and the protocol means it's either a secure site or non-secure site so in this example we could

see it's https and that means it's a secure site and so ideally search engines like web pages or websites that are secure so after the protocol you're going to see the domain and then after the domain you're going to see subdirectories okay so that's generally the breakout with url structures you have the protocol the domain and subdirectories and then you may have more subdirectories so if we go back to the example we've been working with if i go back to maggiano's you can see here this is a secure site https you could see the domain

in this case it's actually a sub domain so magianos.com is the domain but they decided to put locations.magianos.com and that's okay we call that a subdomain and then here you can see they have one particular subdirectory after the domain and that's florida so a well structured url not only provides the users with information about where they're going when they click on your link in the search engine results but more importantly it also provides the search engines and some information about what the web page is all about so going back to our simple example with maggiano's

the search engines know that hey if somebody clicks on this link they're going to a page about florida pretty simple the url structure is pretty simple to understand we know it's a secure site we know it's maggianos.com and we know the subpage is florida or the subdirectory is florida you want to be careful like everything else since and seo there are parameters just like the title tag has parameters up to 65 characters the meta description tag has a limit of up to 165 characters a well structured url also has character counts but the idea here

is we don't want to get into numbers when we talk about character counts for url structure really the rule of thumb or the best practice for url is to keep it short and understandable okay if we keep it clear and concise not only does the end user know where they're going but the search engines know what the page is all about so the rule of thumb is always if you don't understand the url or what it means then the search engines are likely not going to understand what the url means we want to keep the

number of directors and subdirectories to a limit so ideally here you can see in this example xyz.com if we want to optimize that url we could put the targeted keyword in the url if we'd like to but we want to keep it probably to a minimum of one to two subdirectories the shorter this the amount of subdirectories the better off we are because that means that not only the end user will understand the url but the search engines will understand the url as well so we always want to make sure that url is readable again

for the end user and the search engine and so in this example you can see amazon.com slash men's shoes slash sneakers slash puma very easy understand as an end user i know that i'm going to a puma page uh for men on amazon.com now when you get into urls with dynamic parameters in them then ideally you as an end user is not going to really know where you're going to go so in the example here the middle example i can see that i'm going maybe to a shoes page but i have no idea what the

rest that url means and in the other example where you have a very low url readability i have no idea as an end user where i'm going to go so as an end user i need to be able to have confidence in knowing where i'm going to go once i click on a link in the search engine results so if i don't have that confidence if i don't understand what the url is then you then the search engines aren't going to understand as well and it's not going to bode well in terms of relevancy and

again the url structure is important factor for being relevant and if we're not relevant then the chances of us are ranking higher is not going to be as good because our url is not readable so ideally what we want to do is make sure we're using keywords that the end user and the search engines understand and if we need to separate out those keywords in the first example we could see men's shoes we want to separate that out with a hyphen and so ideally if you have a url that's readable and it's short and concise

then again your chances of ranking higher on the search engine results page bodes better than if you have a very long antiquated unreadable url so let's focus our attention on image alt text or alt tags if you will so alt tags or text tags as they're also known as allow uh the search engines to understand a little bit more about what's on the page in terms of images so images are a prominent part of every web page on the internet unfortunately images are you know usually files that are not readable by search engines so we

want to be able to provide some alternate text so that the search engines understand what those images are all about so again it gives us an opportunity to communicate with the search engines so that they better understand what the image is all about to make the page more relevant so generally if an image fails to load on a web page as an example well if you have an alt tag then the alt tag is going to show in place of the image not loading more importantly if we have an alt tag and the search engines

have spidered our website and somebody's actually searching for images then the alt tag is used as a descriptor for the image so it also helps us get found for the images on search engine results pages and so like everything else we've talked about with on-page seo there are character limits to all tags you know generally the rule of thumb is 125 characters for an alt tag and the alt tag is used in the html so we want to surround our image with an alt tag by putting in a descriptor and so ideally if you're trying

to be found for a particular search engine query then you want to use the search engine query as part of the alt tag and so let me show you an example here going back to maggiano's if we look at their web page and we actually inspect one of their images on this web page if we look at for example a pinterest or facebook we can actually see in this example that the image here has an alt tag it's pinterest and so you want to be able again to put in all tags for all your images

so it better communicates with the search engines what the image is all about it also allows the search engines to rank images in the search engine results based on that alt text and what the keyword query was so all tags play an important role because again if the image doesn't load on the web page for some reason then the alt tag is there as a replacement it's also there to help the search engines rank those images and understand the page a little bit better so you always want to be able to put in the keyword

query that you're trying to be found for in the alt tag and so be as descriptive as possible you have 125 characters to use so b is descriptive make it easy to read because again this is what's going to show up in the search engine results pages for images okay let's turn our attention to internal links so when it comes to seo internal links also play a vital role because basically an internal link which is a link from one page of your website to another page of your website um allows google to or other search

engines really to follow the pages as they index your entire website so it serves that purpose of allowing search engines to index so it definitely improves the indexing but internal linking also has many benefits and one of the other benefits is it helps spreads what we call link choose and so link juice is basically a way another way of saying you know this page is important because it has links from other pages on our website so if we link i have a link from one page to another and a couple of other pages on our

site linked to that same page then search engines tend to take notice and they tend to note that you know if one particular page has a number of different links pointing to it then this page may be important and so that's what we mean by link jews it's a signal for the search engine to determine what pages on your website are important because of the links that point to it and so if we look at this example here we could see that you know there's usually a navigation on a website that point two pages and

every page on a website tends to have a link but if more than one page has multiple links then again that signals to the search engines that hey you know this particular page seems to be important because it has a lot of links pointing to it our attention is sitemaps so sitemaps basically allow us to list all the web pages on our website so we could do that in a couple of different ways but when we do it it basically is going to and help the search engines find our pages easier just as i mentioned

a minute ago about internal linking when you have one link pointing to another page on your website it helps the search engines find these pages quicker while sitemaps do the same thing except sitemaps are an entire list of links on your website and it allows the site search engines to find all your pages in your website fairly easily but it also helps the end user too so if you have a big website like amazon has a huge website with a lot of different products well if you're looking for a particular product you can do a

search for it or you can look at the site map and the sitemap will list all the particular pages on the site and so it's also good for the end user as well so when we talk about the end user and we talk about search engines they're really two different types of site maps you got the html version which is for the end user that's going to be nothing more than a link on the website usually in the footer and so when you click on that site map link you'll get a list of all the

links on the website okay so that's an html sitemap then we have the sitemap for the search engines you know the spiders that want to crawl our site so that's the xml sitemap and xml is just a different format it's just a way to format all the links on our website so the html sitemap is html written in hypertext markup language designed for the end user if you click on it it helps the end user navigate the website quickly because they can find what they're looking for and so generally that is an html now if

we turn our attention to the xml sitemap that's basically designed for search engines and thing about the search the xml site map is we work with google to go ahead and and and submit the sitemap to google so google can quickly understand what pages on our website so for example if i went to a website let's just say valleyfig.com so if i went here and if i'm a search engine i'm going to want to know all the urls that are on this website well as an end user i can also just type in sitemap.xml usually

that's the xml file where all the urls are located and here i can see all of the urls on valleyfig.com and so the idea behind an xml sitemap is we want to communicate that xml file to the search engines and so google in particular has what they call a search console and search console if you go to google.com webmasters so search console is a way to communicate with google and one of the ways to communicate with google is to submit a sitemap so we want to submit our xml sitemap so if our xml site map

is located in the root directory so after our domain valleyfig.com sitemap.xml we know that that file is sitting in the root directory i can go into search console and i can submit my sitemap and when i submit my sitemap then i'm basically communicating with google telling google hey google instead of trying to find all our web pages on our website when you crawl the website we're going to go ahead and submit the sitemap to you so we're going to tell you all the pages on our website and so by doing that by submitting our sitemap.xml

file to google it speeds up the process because google's able to now understand all the pages on our website that have been submitted and then once we submit those pages then google is going to quickly index a majority of those pages if not all of those pages and so that's the benefit of having an xml site map for the search engines is that we can quickly submit that file to the search engine so our pages get submitted and indexed quicker so continuing on with on-page seo we now turn our attention to page speed and so

page speed also known as page low time of a particular page of a particular website is important for seo why is it important because google has millions of users use their search engine and google wants their users to have a good experience and so if google ranks websites based on relevancy they also want to take into account page speed because if a website does not load fast or web page doesn't load fast then it would be detrimental for google to rank that page high because what's going to happen is that page is going to get

a number of clicks and then the user experience is not going to be that great and so therefore it's going to have a negative impact not only in the end user but google as well and so page load time then becomes important for on-page seo so really when it comes to page load time we really want to pay attention to how long it takes our web pages to load in terms of seconds because if a page loads slow then chances are the user experience is not going to be good even from an analytics perspective meaning

if i go to google type in a query click on a link and then it's that link takes me to a website where the web page loads very slow chances are i'm not going to spend a lot of time waiting for that page to load i'm going to leave that page and if i leave the page then it's going to cause up what they call a bounce so i'm going to bounce from the page and that's just not good for the entire search ecosystem and so we want to pay close attention to page load time

because the faster a site or page loads google's going to recognize that and that's going to help with ranking and so how do we understand how our pages load well we can look no further than web analytics tool like google analytics for example so if we turn our attention to google analytics if i go to say valleyfig.com analytics account i can look over the last 30 days and i can see okay on average our page average page load time for the entire site was five seconds around five seconds and ideally we want our pages load

as quick as possible i would say the rule of thumb on page load time is probably no more than three to four seconds okay but there are factors involved with page load time so a couple of factors are the browser that people use so some browsers load pages differently than other browsers the other factor involved with browsers is the device so you could be on a mobile device and say internet explorer versus on a desktop using chrome and you're going to have variation in terms of average page load time so definitely browser device plays a

role but also country plays a role the infrastructure how much bandwidth is available so you could be in say san francisco united states and be on a high-speed network versus another city or another country where you're not necessarily on the same high speed network you're on a lower bandwidth or lower network and that's going to affect the page load time as well so in analytics you can actually see the breakdown of time per country and then of course the page itself so when we talk about average page load time for a website we're talking about

the average for the entire site but we can actually look at in google analytics the average low time for every page on the site so ideally if you have a particular page you want to rank organically in the search engines and the average page load time is not suitable or it's very high then you want to address what the issues are and so the great thing about google analytics is you actually have speed suggestions so if i go to speed suggestions in google analytics i'm going to be able to see the average load time for

certain pages on the site and then what google's going to do is actually give me some feedback so for example i can see that the home page loads about 5.59 seconds and so if i click on page speed suggestions then google is going to give me suggestions on how to speed up the page load time not only on desktop but on mobile as well so when you click on page speed suggestions you're actually going to go to a tool a google tool called page speed insights and then page speed insights is going to allow you

to see how quick your page loads and then it's going to be able to give you feedback on what to do in order to speed up the page load time not only for the page but for the site and the great thing again is you can see it for desktop and you can see it from mobile so page speed is important we want to be able to keep our page load time low no more than probably again three to four seconds because if it's any more than that google's going to take notice the other search

engines are going to take notice and they're not going to want to rank that particular page high on google so some ways to increase your page speed you always want to optimize your images you never want to have images that take a long time to load you want to use a simple website design now i know flash as an example has long been disbanded but you don't want to use other technology that's really going to slow the page load time of course where your website is hosted does matter so the server it's hosted on could

be shared with other websites and so that may eat into how quick the server responds to people trying to load your web page and so you want to keep that in mind so server response time does play a factor in loading and then of course optimizing your code you want to never have unnecessary code on your website and when i say unnecessary code some examples could be tracking code if you're doing any search advertising let's just say on facebook or bing you try to want to minimize the amount of extra code you put on a

site because that code has to execute and that eats into the page load time so you want to be cognizant of how much code you put on your website because that will eat into the page load time so let's talk about featured snippets so featured snippets is the search result that generally shows uh up at the top of the search engine organic results so it's informational content and you'll see it above organic results but you'll also see it below search advertising and so some of the common featured snippets you may see are in the form

of a paragraph a table or a list and so paragraph snippets tend to be the most popular and let me show an example of a featured snippet so if i go to say google.com and type in machine learning here you can see some paid search ads okay and why do i know they're paid search ads because i can see ad next to them but if i look below the paid search ads but above the organic search results i see a paragraph feature snippet and this is nothing more than again just some an informational content about

machine learning and really the whole idea behind featured snippets is really they're just informational and really it's informational and and what google likes to do is pull content in there that really answers a question so if your content doesn't necessarily answer question then you can't expect your content to show up as a featured snippet so the whole idea is with the search engines is really google searches through a number of different sites to find content that will best answer a user's question like for example what is machine learning okay so if we ask the question

what is machine learning we can expect to find a feature snippet and so really what users do a lot when they type in a query they use prefixes like how does or how do or how to or what is and so those types of questions are normally asked as part of the search query so if you could answer those questions then generally google's gonna recognize that and if it's relevant it's gonna show up as a featured snippet so the whole idea is to really create truly high quality content so about feature snippets is if you

have true high quality content that answers a question then chances are your content may show up as a featured snippet so the whole idea is you know work to create high quality content that provides a really good answer to really basic question it could be anything what is machine learning what is a fig you know how to ride a bicycle how do i surf all these are related questions that content can answer and google wants to make sure as part of a featured snippet that they provide content that answers that question and not just content

the best content that does the the best job with the most relevant information answer that person search query so here we can see our three examples you have a table format so if we want to type in aviation jobs we can see snippets of information about the latest job listings for aviation you can see in the middle screenshot what is machine learning so that's our paragraph featured snippet and then if you type in something like building a fence it's going to give you a list of you know ways to go about building a fence so

these are all answers to questions the query may not necessarily be in question form but the snippet is there just in case you want to know more information about that particular query so generally that's how featured snippets work and the great thing about featured snippets it's open to everybody the key is to have quality content if you have quality content that provides answers to questions then chances are your content can show up above organic search results which will give you more visibility drive a lot more traffic to your site and quality traffic because likely it's

answering somebody's question so let's do a a recap of everything we talked about with on-page seo so before we move on off page remember on-page seo is what we do to our website to enhance our website to be found in the search engines for relevant keywords so it's all about relevancy and remember before you do anything to your website you need to start with the basics of keyword research you need to find keywords that are highly relevant that have volume and low competition and so when you can focus on your keywords and you find out

and finalize what keywords you want to be found for then you're going to conduct on-page seo on-page seo consists of number of different factors some of which we talked about today starting with schema remember we want to have structured data to better communicate with the search engines what our web pages are about then we talked about title tags so title tags appear in search results remember 65 characters we want to make sure our keyword is in the title tag followed by our brand name and then we talked about meta descriptions meta descriptions allow us to

you know talk specifically about what that page is all about meta descriptions fall under the title tag in the search results we talked about headers h1 through h6 h1 being the biggest in the hierarchy of headers and having an h1 tag with your keyword provides the search engines with an identity of how strong or how important something is on a page it also organizes the page with headers and subheaders and it breaks up the content so it's easily understandable by the end user we also talked about alt tags so remember images on its own are

not recognized by search engines so we want to surround those images with all tags with words that help the search engines identify what that image is they also serve a purpose in the browser if an image doesn't load then we can actually see what the image is all about with the alt tag we talked about feature snippets there are lists okay there are paragraphs okay there are different types of snippets and really the whole idea again behind snippets is answering a question with quality content we talked about page speed identifying how quick our pages load

in google analytics so if your pages don't load very quickly then google actually provides suggestions to speed up the page load time of a particular page and some of the culprits that you want to look at are making sure you have images that are good quality but also not a lot in size you want to make sure they're optimized you want to look at your server response time you want to make sure you optimize code so there's a lot of different factors of page load time you just want to keep an eye on what pages

are are not loading quick enough and remember we want to keep it as low as possible but no more than three to four seconds we talked about internal linking internal linking to a particular page from one page to another provides link juice and link juice is nothing more than an indicator for the search engines to identify what pages tend to be more important than another based on the number of links pointing to that page and then we also talked about site maps so we talked about the two types of sitemaps html and xml html is

for the end user xml is primarily for the search engines xml generally is going to be a file called sitemap.xml and we could take that xml file and submit it to google search console and so that expedites the process of indexing your site and helps your site not only get indexed faster but will help google understand how many pages are on your site and then get those pages indexed so that they can be found so that you can generate traffic so all these are factors with on-page seo that you want to address before you move

on to off-page seo okay let's turn our attention to off-page seo now that we covered all the essentials for on-page we still need to focus our attention on off page remember earlier i mentioned that seo is a two-pronged approach we have to focus on on-page seo first and then to complement our efforts and to continue our efforts and to continue the effort of being relevant for certain keywords we need to do what we call off-page seo and those are our actions we take that don't involve our website directly meaning we've already updated the title tag

the meta description the alt tags the headers etc we want to do things off our website that's going to allow google and other search engines to recognize that hey we are relevant these pages are relevant for certain keywords on our website and so really when we talk about off page seo it's really the technique of promoting your website using link building when we say technique of promoting our website using link building that means establishing links on other websites that's what we mean by link building and so establishing links on other websites really enhances our seo

efforts because it improves first and foremost it improves the credibility of our website so if we're on a you know a very popular website that is known to be reputable then having a link pointing from that website to ours just improves the credibility of our own website not necessarily in the minds of the search engine but in the minds of the end user uh the other benefit here is it increases our domain authority and let's take a minute to talk about domain authority so domain authority is simply just a score between 1 and 100 and

so in digital marketing even including seo as a marketing channel everything's measurable and we want to be able to measure everything we do digitally and so off page seo is measurable one of the metrics involved with off page seo is domain authority in other words it's a score between one and one for our domain so how does google how does baidu how do these other search engines see our domain how authoritative is our domain how reputable is our domain and so having links on other websites pointing to our domain increases our reputability increases our authority

and so i'm going to show you an example so if you remember back on on page seo i when we were talking about keyword research we use a tool called moz moz.com and i would recommend using moz.com to measure domain authority so if we go to moz.com and moz.com has a tool called link explorer so if you put in your domain using their tool link explorer you're going to be able to see your domain authority and domain authority is a score between 1 and 100 and basically it's simply just scoring your website in terms of

authority how does the search engine see your site out on the world wide web the higher the score the better and so recommend using moz.com link explorer to measure their domain authority so the more links we have on external sites pointing to our own site in theory the higher the domain authority so we're going to come back to moz.com quite frequently as we talk about off-page seo because we need a tool to help manage our efforts so we're going to come back to moz.com but let's let's talk about some of these other benefits to off-page

seo so we know it helps with the credibility and increases our domain authority but what are some of the other intangible efforts that are also measurable well it increases our referral traffic and by increasing our referral traffic meaning if we're on a reputable site that gets a lot of traffic and there's a link pointing our site then naturally we're probably going to see traffic coming from that site and we can measure that in tools like google analytics we can measure referral traffic and so that's an inherent benefit to doing off-page seo because we're trying to

create the relevancy of our own website we're trying to be found for relevant keywords but yet at the same time we can increase traffic to our website and then certainly not lost in all this is improving our page rank so the idea here is you need on-page and off-page seo to work together to improve our rankings and improving our rankings in the search engine results will inherently increase our rankings and drive traffic to the site from search engines and that's ideally what we're trying to do we're trying to accomplish traffic from search engines by improving

our rankings but at the same time we improve our credibility and we accrue improve our standing in the search engine world and we also increase traffic to our site from all these other websites and so there are a lot of benefits to off-page seo um it's just let's talk a little bit more about some of these other benefits because according to a backlinko a web page with more backlinks is going to rank higher than a page with fewer backlinks but let me just say this with back linking especially from sites it's all about credibility it's

all about quality over quantity so we want to pay attention to quality over quantity so let's harken back to moz.com and here we could see we have a domain authority of 35 but we have a lot of links inbound links from other websites pointing to our website we have 575 domains out there on the internet pointing to our domain valleyfig.com and so if we want to take a specific look at these domains we can just simply click on linking domains and here we can see all the different domains pointing to our website now again it's

about quality not quantity so if we look at the domain authority and that's a score that measures the credibility of a website we could see the domain authority on some of these domains like npr.org has a domain authority of 93 and so to me that helps boost the domain authority for our own website our own domain it also has the chance of driving that traffic it also increases the credibility but in the end having quality links from other quality domains is going to increase our own rank on search engines and that's the whole idea behind

it so we could actually see that we have quality websites of quality domains linking to our domain now you can also use another tool i mentioned this earlier with on-page seo when i was talking about sitemaps so if you go to search console so that's a google tool we can also look at a link report and see what other websites are linking to us so this is google's way of communicating to us what websites are out there linking to us and so here i can see the top linking sites to our website valleyfig.com is the

crumby kitchen has 1443 links pointing back to our site cookscountry.com whole foods magazine mayan perfect kitchen these are all sites with links pointing back to our site so search console is a good tool it's a good alternative tool especially the links report is a good alternative tool to get an idea of the types of sites that are linking to your site now what you're missing here in search console is the domain authority but you can use the link explorer tool in moz.com to measure the domain authority for any domain it's just a matter of going

to the tool itself going by going to moz.com by going to the link explorer report and just typing in the domain and from there you'll be able to see the domain authority so it's all about quality over quantity i can't stress that enough so when it comes to off page really it's anonymous with link building so it's the most effective method for off-page seo and it's simply just getting links from other websites to your own so it's not as easy as it sounds especially when we're talking about quality over quantity but building these links to

our website will help our rankings and that's the whole idea behind off page seo we want to be able to link from other websites to ours so that we can help our rankings in addition to some of the other benefits i just mentioned so google recognizes backlinks as one of their top ranking factors so in addition to some of the on-page seo tactics that i mentioned earlier including title tag and meta description and url structure and headers all those are important but at the same time it's a balance so google wants to know hey yes

we understand you've optimized your title tag for keyword but how does the rest of the internet see your website are is your website worthy enough to add a link from a particular quality website to your website so if there are a number of quality links then your site must be of quality as well and so that's the whole idea behind link building being an important factor because again it's about from a google's perspective it's about the user experience they want to make sure that sites ranked on page one of google are quality sites quality sites

that load well that have good content that have fresh content not just sites that have a gazillion links pointing to them with you know keywords stuffed into the title tag so it's an ecosystem google's and other search engines want to protect that ecosystem with quality so that's why link building is an important factor and so they're different types of links so when you have a link pointing from one website to your own okay the link could be a follow link or no follow link and the whole idea behind follow or no follow is simply hey

we know that google and other search engines they're spidering the entire web the whole idea is for them to collect as many pages as they these search engines can to bring them back to their servers so they can serve them up in their search engines well as google and these other search engines spider these sites they're following what they're doing is they're following links that's as simple as it gets they're following links from one link to another so remember we talked about internal links earlier on on page seo internal links are just links on your

web pages pointing to other pages on your own website well when it comes to external links so links pointing from one website to your website that website that's linking to your website has an opportunity to say hey google you can follow this link or don't follow the link and so if they choose to not follow the link meaning they put a nofollow tag into the anchor text then google's going to follow the link but not recognize the link itself and what i mean by that is hey if you have uh let's just use valleyfig has

a link from wikipedia if wikipedia has a link pointing to valleyfig.com but the link itself is no follow then what google is going to do is not recognize the link itself they're not going to recognize the link so therefore you're not going to get credit or link juice as we say you're not going to get any juice from wikipedia to valley pig but if it is a follow link then what google's going to do is recognize the link and give you credit for the backlink and by giving you credit for the backlink that's going to

inherently increase your domain authority it's also going to likely increase your rankings so you want to pay attention to the types of link building that's out there no follow and so anytime you try to establish a link on an external website just make sure it's a follow make sure it's not a no follow because if it's a no follow link then you're not going to get the credit from the search engines and so the whole idea behind link building in terms of seo is to get some credit from a quality website to your website and

so if we look here a follow link in this example is one where the ahref or the link itself doesn't have a no follow in it but if a hyperlink does have a no follow in it then that means you're not going to get the credit for the backlink so remember no follows they don't allow search engine crawlers to follow the link so if that's the case it's not going to pass any link juice when you don't pass quote unquote link juice you're not going to get credit for the backlink and so if you don't

get credit for the backlink then if we go back to our tools that we have available for measuring off-page seo so if i go back to let's just say moz or even let's just say search console you know i'll be able to see all these links here these links that are showing up are follow links why because google's recognizing the link if they were nofollow then we wouldn't see the link in here so that's something to keep in mind as well and so just keep in mind if it is a no file you'll see in

the hypertext itself the nofollow tag and you can always check that the html of any particular link and so when we talk about link building we talk about off-page seo really we're talking about how to get links on quality websites and how do we do that well i've listed here a few ways to do that so you could do guest blogging or blogging in general is a good off-page seo slash link building strategy and i'll talk about more of that in a minute but we can list our websites in reputable and trustworthy directories i mentioned

wikipedia as an example even though wikipedia may not be classified as a directory but there are other directories out there you could ask for testimonials so if you're working with clients or other websites you could ask for testimonial or they can provide a link pointing back from their site to your site it's about relationships really is what it comes down to it's relationship building and that's what a link is relationship building or you could do content on social media so these are just examples of ways to generate links but let's go back to the blogging

part because blogging to me is an essential part to off-page seo and why is that because anytime you are part of a blog you're generating content and not only are you generating content you're generating fresh content that's likely to be interesting to the end user and with that content yes you can optimize that content but the beauty about blogging is really anybody can do it but if we want to connect blogging with relationships if we're a food blogger then we can write on other food blogs as a guest writer and we can have that blog

post linked back to our own blog as an example or we can have other bloggers in the same industry write a guest blog for us on their own blog and point their link back to our site blogging creates a lot of opportunities for link building because again it's a fresh canvas with interesting content and when you have interesting content then the opportunity for backlinking is going to be there because if you're writing about something that's interesting the natural you're going to want to link to something else related to that that's interesting and so that's the

opportunity that blogging creates so again it's vital to get links from authoritative web pages then multiple links from low quality web pages so going back to the link explorer report we want to be able to pay attention to those domain authorities or those websites with low domain authority and really you should pay attention to really quality sites okay you want to pay attention to quality sites and so when we talk about links there's inbound links there's outbound links we're interested in those inbound links we're interested in getting links from high quality websites pointing to our

own website and again that could be in the form of a blog it could be social media it could be a partner site okay these are all inbound links they just need to be followed make sure they're not a no follow so it's simple just getting a external link that's a follow to your to your own website and so the one thing i want to mention here though on inbound links from external websites and that's making sure that not necessarily every inbound link points to the home page we want to be able to have links

point to internal pages so let's harken back to search console as an example so search console our links report shows us links pointing from external websites to our own website but what are those linked pages so if we look at some of those linked pages here we can see the top link pages we can see on valleyfig.com slash recipes is the top link page then the home page then the about us then slash international so we want to make sure that if we're trying to generate backlinks from external websites to our own website we want

to make sure that they're pointing to interior pages not necessarily the home page and why do i say that because one of the benefits to link building and off-page seo is ranking so the whole idea about ranking is to get some of our other pages ranked not necessarily the home page the home page is just a doorway into your website if we have interesting content out there on the web and it's a food blogger as an example and they're talking about a particular food item well they're going to want a link to a page that's

related to what they're blogging about that particular food item they don't want to link to the home page the home page is just a doorway and so that's the whole idea behind link building we want to link to multiple pages on the site why is that because if i take this particular page valleyfig.com recipes and i just put that into moz and i look at the link explorer report for this particular page the domain authority is still going to be the same 35 that's what valleyfig.com is 35 however there's also another metric called page authority

so page authority is likewise with the domain authority to score between one and one hundred and so the more external links pointing to an internal page with high domain authority that's likely going to increase the page authority of that page so in other words if we have good links from other websites pointing to that page then it's going to increase the page authority for that page and ultimately the domain authority for that page and so just like the domain authority in this case valleyfig every page under that domain has a page authority score so the

higher the score the likelihood that that page is going to rank in the search engine results okay so that's the whole idea behind link building is we want to improve the authority of the pages not just the domain but also more importantly we also want to keep the end user in mind so if it's from a blog or social media the link pointing from that blog or social media platform should naturally point to something related to what you're talking about not just the home page because again the home page more or less is the gateway

into the website so we want to get people to where they want to go we want to naturally create a link from good content to some other good content so that's the whole idea behind backlinking so outbound links will direct a user from our own website to another website so the idea here is it's okay to have outbound links on your own website the natural ecosystem of the world wide web okay what i would recommend ear is not to have so many in a century located place for example don't have one page with nothing but

external links on it you know sprinkle these external links these outbound links throughout your website but also if it's not a reciprocal link meaning if a guest blogger is not linking to your website but you're just linking to theirs and they didn't ask you to then maybe consider a nofollow tag maybe you know ideally you want to make sure that these links are just natural in nature so don't just have a habit of putting outbound links because the whole idea behind outbound links is you want to keep people on your website but if it's a

natural link going from one content to another and you think the end user is going to benefit then no problem but just don't get in the habit of putting external links on your website because that means that hey that user that's on your website may click on that link and leave your website and not come back so keep that in mind as well because you don't necessarily benefit from an seo perspective by having outbound links on your own website you want to do it as a courtesy if somebody else is linking to you you want

to do it for the end user if you feel the benefit from additional content under the website but from an seo perspective it doesn't necessarily directly enhance your own website in terms of ranking turn our attention to duplicate content so a lot of us have websites with a lot of content sometimes we go ahead and take our website and revise it create a new one or register a new domain and put content on that new domain and so we may find ourselves in a situation at one point or the other where we have two websites

with the same content or it could be the same website with a lot of content but some of that may be duplicate as well so we want to try and stay away from duplicate content but for some of us we may stumble across it accidentally we may find ourselves having content that's duplicated and so we want to try and prevent that because that's a no-no in the world of seo so if we have duplicate content appearing in more than one url there are ways to rectify not having the search engines recognize the content twice so

some examples of duplicate content are for example a spammer takes an article and posts the same content on his website or like i mentioned before you create another website or register another domain and have that particular content on the old website still or you're writing a blog post and you tag it or categorize it and the content shows up under the tags under the categories and just shows up in general so there are a lot of scenarios where you can find yourselves with duplicate content and so we want to rectify that we don't want duplicate

content we want the search engines to recognize the original source of the content and so basically if you have two versions of a web page you may result in duplicate content issues another example that would be for example if you have products you may find that that same product may be under two different categories so how do we rectify that well there are a number of different ways and so the simple way is what they call a 301 redirect to the original url so if you find yourself in a situation where you have a new

website with the same content you could simply set up a redirect and we call it a 301 redirect because 301 refers to permanent so it's signifying to the search engines that you're permanently moving from this page to this page the other way is through a canonical attribute and so the word canonical may not register with some of you so let's just uh take a minute to talk about what a canonical is like basically canonical tag it's a page level meta tag so remember that meta tag description we talked about in on-page seo we'll think about

this as another type of meta tag and it's placed in that html header of your web page so basically all it does is by placing this meta tag it tells the search engines which url is the original version to be displayed in index so it's the purpose of a canonical is to keep the duplicate content out of the search engine index so we want to consolidate our page rank our page authority our domain authority all to original content that's the whole idea of having a canonical and it's a quick solution so all you need to

do is add a canonical tag to the header so let me show you an example if you have a site let's just use cnn as an example cnn.com has a lot of content sometimes given the breadth of content that they have they may run into duplicate content so they simply just put a canonical tag into their their header and so by doing that they're able to tell the search engines hey this page this domain is the original if you find yourself with multiple sites well you can also use google search console so remember we used

google search console in earlier examples when we talked about links to your site or we talked about that site map on on-page seo well if we go on a search console we could basically say look google because search console is a google tool we want to confirm that this is our domain so this is the domain you should be focusing on so you can leverage search console to communicate with google regarding which site is important which is the one that should get indexed you can use the canonical you can put that on any page either

website or you can set up a 301 redirect so those are the ways to fix duplicate content issues 301s are the easiest canonicals tend to be temporary because they're just the page level and then search console is a a good method because it communicates with google directly and it allows google to crawl various web pages differently than if you didn't tell them okay so if you didn't tell them they're just going to grab anything they can so by communicating via the google search console tool it allows you to tell google this is the domain i

want to focus in on so let's talk then now about how the google algorithms work so we'll shift gears here and we'll talk about how these algorithms work on google so google uses advanced concepts retrieve data so what they do is they're spidering they're spidering they're collecting webpages and they're taking all those web pages back to their server and anytime somebody does a query they're delivering those web pages within milliseconds they're delivering results based on your query so that's in general how it works so it uses a combination of different algorithms to deliver the best

results they want the best results and so some of the most popular algorithms below are google panda google penguin and google rankbrain so these are all things that google has done to make sure that they're constantly tweaking their search engines to deliver the best results so let's talk about some of these these popular algorithms and before we talk about these popular algorithms let's just make one thing clear that google's always tweaking their algorithms on their search engine and so if you want to get an idea how often they do it well they do it every

day they're constantly tweaking it but they what they do is they release major changes to their algorithm a few times a year so if you want to get a sense of what those changes look like well you could go to moz.com and you can go to google dash algorithm dash change and you can see here that hey google changes its search algorithm around 500 to 600 times while most of these are minor google again rolls out major changes like panda like penguin that affects search results in significant ways so you can go here and you

can go all the way back to 2000 and see some of the algorithm changes that have occurred over the last few years and you can see here the last major one was done in august of 2018 that was the metacore update so they're constantly making changes to their search engine to deliver a more concise more better ecosystem for the end user so if it's a better search engine for the end user end users are going to come back so the whole idea is continuing to tweak the system the algorithms to better show more accurate results

and so let's take a look at some of the the major algorithm changes that they've done in the past so the first is we'll talk about google panda and panda was an algorithm released back in 2011 so here we are in 2019 is a few years ago but still significant in that really this algorithm emphasized high quality content because before panda there was a there's just a lot of content out there on the internet and there was a lot of spam content there's a lot of duplicate content and so really the idea behind panda is

for google to really deliver in their search engine results pages high quality content so what it did was it removed web pages that had low quality or duplicate content so that was the whole idea behind you know the algorithm nicknamed panda it removed low quality and duplicate content and that kind of cleaned things up a bit where if you did a search query now you'd actually see better better results and one thing about panda is because there's so much quality because google's indexing so much there on the internet that it's constantly being updated it's updated

regularly so the next one we're going to talk about is google penguin so penguin was released after panda and what that focused in on was low quality links so remember we talked about link building we talked about quality links over quantity so naturally you're going to have links naturally from all websites whether that be high quality or low quality the whole idea behind this algorithm is to sever the links that are low quality and so the idea behind that was they focused on two areas so they focused in on link schemes and keyword stuffing so

that's what penguin focused on was link schemes were basically link almost link farming where you produced mass amounts of backlinks and not all of them were good quality they weren't natural links links should be natural from one high quality site or blog to another high quality cider blog and by creating links games you've created an ecosystem where links just went to irrelevant low quality spam related pages and so google's penguins algorithm update focused in on that effort to remove or combat pages that had poor links from being indexed in their search engine results and then

they also combated keyword stuffing keyword stuffing is nothing more than taking your target a keyword and stuffing it into the content of your page or title tag your meta description so any sites that were caught up doing that basically suffer the consequences because what penguin did was take care of sites that basically were accused of keyword stuffing or had characteristics of keyword stuffing and they removed sites that had a lot of links pointing to it from poor quality sites and vice versa sites that really had a lot of external links pointing to other poor quality

sites so that's what penguin did they took a look at those two areas i mean so we talked about link schemes again penguin's aim was to decrease the ranking of web pages that created artificially by using black hat techniques and basically what i mean by black cat techniques that artificially creating links that just didn't make sense just for the sake of getting the backlink just for the sake of passing link juice and so that's what a link scheme is or was and so google basically tweaked their algorithm to combat those poor link schemes and so

keyword stuffing as i mentioned a minute ago it's just repetitive usage of the same keyword and that just basically suffers the content is the thing that suffers here and when the content suffers the end users suffer so google is all about quality content and when you have quality content and that quality content is indexed and users find what they're looking for chances are they're gonna go back to the search engine to continue to find what they're looking for with the end result being presented with quality content so keyword stuffing really dilutes the quality of the

content and then let's talk about the third algorithm which is rankbrain so rankbrain is a processing algorithm that uses machine learning and what that does that machine learning interprets search queries that users search on google so for example if rankbrain sees a word or phrase it isn't familiar with basically the machine can make a guess as to what words or phrases might have a similar meaning and filter the result accordingly so basically take these search engine queries and present them in a way that's logical so that the end result can be something that's relevant to

what you're looking for and so for example if you're searching for online marketing you will get results related for digital marketing on search engine remote pages why because rankbrain will interpret that particular keyword and they're trying to basically match based on all the data they collected what words or phrases might have a similar meaning so online marketing digital marketing have similar meanings now that we've talked about some of the different algorithm changes that google has made over the years and continues to make let's segue into the types of seo and so when we talk about

the types of seo we're really talking about doing what's right what's expected versus doing something that you know is trying to cheat the system and so you may hear the terminology black cat seo white hat seo or gray hat seo and so the whole idea behind these terminologies is that hey what are we supposed to be doing here in terms of following best practices in order to get our pages ranked on the search engines for the keyword queries we covered and so let's talk about what not to do first and that's always black cat techniques

so i just mentioned a minute ago with panda and penguin algorithm updates you know penguin took into account you know link schemes poor linking techniques keyword stuffing so those are considered black cat techniques so black cat is a technique used to improve page rank by violating search engine rules and policies so it's clearly google's made a clear line in the sand they don't like link schemes they don't like keyword stuffing so if you take into account those practices then you're practicing black hat techniques to treat this cheat the system to try and rank faster and

so some other ways of black cat or you know redirecting or fishing having duplicate content all these are are things that are frowned upon by search engines so the result of not only algorithm changes is you could get your website blacklisted from the search engines if you are caught in violation of their policies it's pretty clear-cut so that's why the algorithms are in place uh the algorithms try and create a system an environment where you know good quality content is shown so if you're keyword stuffing you're creating lots of duplicate content that's not in adherence

with you know google's policies for creating good quality content and as a result you could get blacklisted so with black cat techniques you run the risk of being penalized and you don't want to be penalized by the search engines so white hat contrarily used to improve search engine rankings by following those rules and policies so in effect it's everything we talked about today from on-page seo to off-page seo doing the right thing with your content in terms of organizing the structure with headers creating very clear and concise meta descriptions submitting a site map all of

those are white hat techniques addressing page load time using really relevant key words naturally in your content and creating high quality content that's fresh and interesting for the end user that's a white hat technique that's going to get you ranked higher and farther and with better benefits so grey hat is just simply a combination of black and white it's the practice of improving by following the policies but they considered you know ethically dubious and so what i mean by that is listen you you don't want to purchase links you want links to come across naturally

you don't want to do excessive internal linking you don't want to have a lot of links pointing to one page it's not natural so you want to be able to do things that are natural you don't want to just take content from another side and claim it as your own so you want to do things that are natural that's going to create a good experience for the user because if it's for the end user which it is then generally it's going to be good for the search engines and so let's talk about website architecture now

so basically when i say website architecture what i mean is we want to give the search engines an idea of how our website's built so website architecture and the structure of websites important and so every website has a hierarchy it starts with the home page the home page is the top page it's the the domain it's where most people go to find other pages of your website and so generally you're gonna have a scenario where you're going to have a home page with you know if you sell products multiple categories and in those categories you're

going to have multiple products so the generally that's how a web architecture flows it follows from top down and the reason for having a good website architecture is internal links are spread equally so you want to make sure again not to apply a black cat method or greyhound method of pointing all links to one page you want links naturally to spread throughout your website because not just from an seo benefit but from an end user perspective you want users to flow through your website naturally so if you're planning on developing websites from an seo perspective

you know take these things into consideration so we want to take into account the site architecture navigation we want to take into account the url remember we talked about url structure and on-page seo the rule of thumb is if you can read it the search engines will read it so we want to keep it clear and concise and relevant to the content of that page when we talk about responsive design we're talking about multiple devices so you don't build a website just for desktop especially when mobile is being used by a majority of the users

around the world so you want to build a website that's both desktop friendly and mobile friendly we also want to take into account a robot's text file and a robot's text file is simply just a text file that allows the search engines to index certain pages it tells them what not to index and so you can always find the robot's text file normally if you go to a website and let's just say we go to valleyfig.com and then we type in robot or robots.txt file here we can see if i type in robots.txt file here

this basically is a file a text file that's in the root directory and it simply just gives the search engines an idea of what they're allowed to index and what they're not allowed to index so anything with a disallow means hey search engines please don't index these pages so that's what a robot's text file does and every site should have it because there are some pages on your website then you inherently don't want the search engines to index and you want to optimize for the crawlers so that means that making sure that your pages are

available and that means also submitting a sitemap remember we submit our sitemap via the google search console so good site architecture not only makes content easy to find but also helps to gain traffic because hey if your site is easy it's well organized it's built multiple devices the urls are easy then all that's going to be apparent to the search engines and when it's apparent to the search engines it's going to get indexed they want to get indexed then you're going to get found and you're going to get the traffic so it's just a natural

progression it's best practice so some important features of good architecture are again that url structure code your site navigation and css or html make it easy for the search engines to follow build a comprehensive structure for an internal linking meaning they should be natural internal links if a page is relevant to another page then create an internal link if you have a very big website with a lot of content or a lot of products then create a breadcrumb navigation okay so we're maybe familiar with that on amazon as an example amazon.com has a lot of

products and if you're navigating from one product to another in one directory or one category to another category then amazon creates what they call breadcrumbs to help you navigate back to where you were quickly so these are all good best practices for good site architecture good site architecture equals search engine results so responsive design helps to make your website mobile friendly it will increase the amount of time the user spends on your website which may improve site ranking so let's talk a second about mobile friendliness so if i go back to google search console there

happens to be in search console a mobile usability report and so if i click on that report basically what it's going to show me is pages that are do not follow google's best practices so some of google's best practices are making sure that the text is easy to read that clickable elements aren't necessarily close to one another and the viewport is set to the appropriate device meaning the screen is set to the appropriate device okay and so basically if we are found in violation then the pages affected are going to get flagged by google and

if the page is affected or flagged by google then those pages won't get indexed and so we want to keep an eye on the mobile usability report in google search console so remember it's better to have a good site architecture that bots can easily index so bots will give preference to web pages with relevant content and in the end it will help your website rank better and as a side note always use a site map to make it easy for the bots to crawl your website so we covered that and on page as a reminder

if i go back to search console and if i click on sitemaps i can go ahead and submit my sitemap so if i created an xml version of my sitemap called sitemap.xml and i submit that basically what i'm doing is i'm saying hey google here's my sitemap file and in that sitemap file are all the pages on my website that want to get indexed and when you submit your sitemap to google basically they're going to discover those urls and index those urls and their search index and that expedites the process of getting indexed it expedites

the process of getting found on search and it expedites the process of getting clicks on your search results pages and and having that traffic go to your website where they can enjoy the user experience and convert and remember the robot's text file is there to allow google and other search engines to know what pages to crawl so good website architecture like for example amazon they use breadcrumbs they have a hierarchy in terms of of categories okay so you can see how it's evenly dispersed on the left side on the right side a poor website architecture

is very slanted in one direction a lot of internal links no breadcrumbs the navigation isn't very clear so we want to make sure things are simple and easy so let's turn our attention to local seo so local seo is for those businesses who focus on a specific market it could be a whole state like the state of florida in the united states it could be a specific city in a particular state like orlando florida or miami it really depends on the business and who you are trying to attract and what geo location you are trying

to attract so if you're trying to attract a segment of audience in a specific location then local seo should be in your sites uh for optimization and so when we talk about local seo we're really talking about optimizing your website to get traffic from a specific location so that's what local seo is and the idea behind local seo is to put your particular service or product or whatever it is you're offering to that particular geo market that particular locale or that city or that state so you want to put yourself in front of the right

audience that's the whole idea behind local seo and so if we focus it on google you know local results are based on three factors and this is according to google so it's based on a relevancy so if somebody's looking for a plumber and you happen to be a plumber in that particular locale or city or zip code then chances of you getting found are going to be great because of relevancy and then distance so where that person's located based on your address or where you're located has a role in how you display on local seo

and then prominence so prominence is also very important because you know how prominent are you as a business are you getting a lot of reviews do you have a lot of different locations do you have all your photos and all your information posted so prominence does play a bit of factor along with distance along with relevancy on google local seo so these factors combine to help find the best match for your search just somebody typing in that plumber or say that italian restaurant or any particular product or service is going to find local results and

you want to be there to to meet that person when they're looking for your product or service so that's the whole idea behind local seo and so one of the factors with local seo is having consistent nap or not and so what is nip it's really name address and phone number so it sounds very simple and it is simple you just have to be consistent so if you have a local seo presence on say bing search engine you want to make sure that the name address and phone number are can also the same name and

address and phone number on google so it's just about consistency so that's what we want to do we want to make sure that we're consistent across the board because it's important for companies that want to rank well have some consistency and it's important too when we talk about consistency to actually have that information you need obviously the name of your company you obviously need a phone number and you need to put your address in there but really of all three the phone number's just as important because when we talk about local seo we mentioned mobile

earlier we know that a lot of people initiate their search on mobile and so if they're looking for a local restaurant or local cafe or that plumber and you appear in local seo then your phone number's going to appear with the results and that gives an opportunity for somebody to go ahead and just click on that number to call it just makes it that much easier for somebody to get in touch with you so consistency and having all your information are important factors for local seo so having an inconsistent nap if you will is not

going to bode well for you on the local seo results okay it's important because it offers up legitimate legitimacy it offers up better rankings and at the end of the day it's going to help you get those calls it's going to help you get traffic to your website so for example if a particular company that sells puma running shoes has yellowpages.com listing we want to be consistent if it's on yellowpages.com and this is their address on their website then you need to be consistent with that if it's inconsistent and we're talking about very minor details

but these minor details are important simply just putting rd as road and then spelling out row is going to cause some inconsistency so consistency is very important why because local seo is also tied to mapping you know google maps and so google wants to see consistency so that they can offer up the address and the mapping services so that's one good reason why it needs to be consistent another reason is again you know so many may want to uh drive to your location or call your location or see if that location is close to them

so that's why consistency is such a key component to local seo so in order to get started on google for local seo what you want to do is you want to just do a search for google my business so google my business is the platform in which you're going to set up your local business and once you set up your google my business account whatever that account is you want to make sure you have all the credible information in there i can't stress that enough you need to have that phone number you need to have

that address it needs to be consistent but with google my business there's a lot of things you can do here so you can manage reviews so if you do have a location you can go ahead and manage those reviews that somebody puts in for your business and so if it's a negative review you definitely want to respond to that negative review if it's a positive view you definitely want to respond to that positive review so you can manage reviews you can upload photos so photos is a big component as we talked about with all tags

and images you know having these images help appear in the local seo results you can manage a lot of other things your information you can manage posts you can offer up promotions there's a lot of things you could do you could set your business hours so the more information you put in to google my business the more information is gonna can be conveyed to the end user looking for your products and services and google my business even goes as far as offering up the opportunity to have a website so if you're a business that doesn't

even have your own website you can create a website right in google my business and so the end result is this if somebody's looking for let's just say lice removal and orlando let's just say your child comes home from school with some lice you need services that offer up lice removal well you're going to be able to see businesses listed in the atlanta region that offer up the service you're looking for and if you're on a mobile phone you can go ahead and quickly you know call that person you can go to the website you

look at the reviews so local seos are very important to local businesses very important and so you want to make sure you have consistent presence not just on google but on bing and some of these other local platforms like yellowpages.com for example so being prominent across multiple platforms is going to put yourself in front of the right audience who's looking for your products and services let's talk about how to measure your seo performance so all that hard work you've done with on-page seo in coupled with all the work you've done with off page seo are

eventually going to net results and positive results and we want to be able to measure that as you're actually doing the work as you're putting forth the effort on on page and off page and so we want to be able to measure that and so you want to be able to understand what to measure and where to measure it and so when we talk about seo we really want to hone in on three high-level core metrics and that's ranking traffic and conversion so when we talk about ranking traffic and conversion we can break that down

into this list here what kind of traffic are we getting from organic search what kind of traffic are we getting from mobile devices remember mobile is very important because as we talked about with on-page seo as we talked about with local seo a lot of searches start with mobile devices we want to look at keyword ranking remember keyword research is the first step in the seo process even before we do any work with on-page and off-page you know we want to look at the local visibility if we have local seo results we want to look

at engagement metrics so all that traffic we're driving from organic search we want to be able to measure how they're performing and behaving on our website we also want to measure some form of progress on off-page seo and that's in the form of backlinks so all of these are different metrics we can measure using different tools so let's talk about how to go about looking at these metrics and where to go look at them and measure them and so really monitoring all this behavior will help us understand how we're performing how seo is performing and

so really what we want to do is start with organic traffic and so we can look at that on a month-to-month basis we can look at it from a geographic perspective we can look at it in terms of how many new visitors we're driving versus returning and then again more importantly conversion rate and so to me the best place to start to look at that traffic from organic search is google analytics and google analytics is a free tool it's simply there to measure website performance so if you go into google analytics we can actually go

in and we can look at all sorts of data based on website behavior and so if i'm in google analytics and i go under acquisition and then i go under all traffic channels over a given period of time let's just say the last seven days for a particular website i can see what traffic is coming from organic search and then i could see the amount of new users that are coming from organic search i can also see engagement metrics bounce rate for example so i want to be able to see if somebody's typing in a

query clicking on our link in the organic search results and then coming to our website are they actually engaging with their website or are they leaving the website after only visiting the page they landed on so that's all in these are all important metrics to measure and i can measure all that right here in google analytics if i wanted to i can even take it a step further and break that down by country so if i type in country as a secondary dimension now i can see what country is driving traffic from organic search so

a lot of your organic traffic information is going to be centrally located in google analytics so we also talked about mobile traffic a majority of searches take place on mobile phones versus desktop so google basically is reporting that nearly 60 of searches now appear from mobile devices and so if we go back to google analytics we can also look at a mobile report so if i go in google analytics under audience under mobile overview i can see a breakdown of the amount of traffic coming from desktop versus tablet versus mobile and so you'll find as

time goes on that your mobile device is likely going to drive a majority of the traffic from organic search and so you can compare device information with channel so if i just type in channel and google analytics as a secondary dimension and look at the default channel groupings versus device category i could see that you know mobile from organic search has driven traffic over the last seven days this is something you want to keep an eye on because a lot of people tend to begin their searches on mobile devices so mobile ranking is different than

desktop ranking because with mobile ranking it's based on a responsive website and with that responsive website basically responsive being that the website's going to adapt to the mobile device so it's going to respond to the device that somebody's on and so therefore the metrics or the engagement metrics are going to be different but if i look back to google analytics i can see again bounce rate i can see pages per session average session duration so if i look at line three i could see all the different engagement metrics compared to those metrics from other devices

and other channels okay so you want to be able to do a comparison because if behavior is not up to par engagement is not the par on mobile then you want to do something about that so you want to hone in on mobile traffic specifically from organic search because the behavior is going to be different you know people start their searches on mobile the site's going to be different and so therefore it's a different experience altogether so make sure you track the behavior and more importantly make sure you track that page speed so earlier we

talked about on-page seo when we honed in on page speed so just as a reminder if i'm back in analytics and i go back under behavior then if i go to site speed then if i go to overview i'll be able to see the average page load time on my website i can also look at specific page timings and i should be able to see that by device so if i type in device category i'm going to be able to see how each page loads per device and so this allows me to understand which pages

are loading fast which pages are not loading as fast and address those pages accordingly to improve engagement metrics so we want to keep an eye on page speed as well as overall user behavior from mobile devices you can also use other tools that are out there like agency analytics there are plenty of tools out there i tend to use google analytics because primarily it's free and google analytics is a google product so it works with other google platforms like google search console we want to keep an eye on ranking so remember when we do our

keyword research we're choosing keywords that have high relevancy high volume and low competition so we want to be able to track keywords that we choose that have high relevancy high volume and low competition and so the tool we use or at least i recommend using is moz so i mentioned moz earlier with on page and off page seo so if we go into moz and we know what keywords we're trying to rank for we can go ahead and add them to mods and what moz does is they actually track where these keywords rank and so

if i go into mods and i click on rankings i'll be able to see on a weekly basis or a monthly basis how our keywords are ranking and for what pages they're ranking so for whatever keyword i choose to to optimize for i want to make sure i put those keywords in moz because when i put them in moz moz is going to on a weekly basis tell me where these keywords rank and for what url they're ranked for so that way i can keep an eye on ranking over time because in theory the higher

you rank the more traffic you're going to get and so we want to be able to see the trend in which keywords rank okay so if i click on a particular keyword in moz it's going to give me over a period of time where that keyword is ranked be able to see improvement in ranking for particular keyword the whole idea behind seo is to choose keywords that are relevant optimize for those keywords so that you can be ranked for those keywords in order to get the traffic and conversions so moz is a good platform that

helps us monitor rankings for particular keywords now if you don't want to use moz as an alternative you can turn your attention to google search console and so remember we talked about google search console earlier when we talked about sitemaps we also talked about mobile usability with search console we also talked about links to your site with google search console so google search console is a good tool to help you understand how you're performing with organic search and so there's one tool in particular which is performance that helps us understand what keyword queries people are

actually typing into google search and so here i can see the actual query and so with this particular website valleyfig.com i can see that dried fig recipes over the course of the last three months had 5 5414 impressions that means that one of my pages either one or multiple pages appeared in google search engine results 5414 times and over the course of those 5414 impressions i received 1100 clicks so google search console is going to be able to tell me not only you know how many impressions i receive for a particular keyword but they also

going to tell me how many clicks and if i wanted to add more metrics to that i can add them like the average ranking position for keyword the click-through rate so i can add multiple metrics to this report to give me an understanding of hey are any of my targeted keywords being used or queried and if they are where am i ranking and i am i showing up and am i getting clicks so search console sirs is a good alternative if not primary tool or platform for you to measure how your organic search results are

showing so for local visibility this metric is important for you know maintaining local seo so remember on the local seo we talked about google my business so if i go back to google my business i can go into my account and so google my business is going to be able to show me some metrics so if i go into google my business and click on insights i'm going to be able to see a number of different metrics over the course of a month i can see exactly you know what queries were used by how many

users and when i appeared so i'll be able to see how many views i receive not only on search results but on maps then i can also see what actions people took when they saw my results in maps or in search did they visit my website that they request directions that they call so i can actually see engagement metrics right in google my business i could see a breakout by zip code i could see phone calls by day of the week i could see how many people even viewed my photos so there's a lot of

insights into local seo on google my business so that gives you an idea of how you're performing organically on local search and remember you want to be able to use google my business to hone in on your specific audience so all these metrics help you align with whether you're getting in front of the right audience and whether that audience is actually behaving the way you want them to meaning you know are they actually contacting you are they going to your website are they calling you so local visibility and understanding the metrics involved with local seo

is very important so google my business is where you want to turn your attention so overall engagement metrics are important they play an important role in determining rankings for example we talked about bounce rate to bounce rate is the rate at which people go from organic search to your website and then leave after uh seeing one page and not going any further so if they land on a page and then leave the website after landing on that page it's considered a bounce and so bounce or bounce rate is a good indication of how people are

receiving our website or the content that they're reading on our website there are other metrics involved like average session duration or pages per visit all of these are engagement metrics and let's not forget about page speed so page speed is also a good engagement metric all of these metrics affect or determine rankings so we want to be able to make sure that if we're in google analytics and we're looking at engagement metrics that our metrics are good because if somebody comes to our website from organic search and there's a high bounce rate then what does

that tell us that there's a disconnect between what that person's querying and then the content that they're reading and so we want to be able to address those engagement metrics so that we can continue to not only drive quality traffic but keep the traffic engaged and then in turn drive up conversions last metric we want to look at is backlinks so content having more backlinks from good domains will effectively improve your seo performance we talk about backlinks with off-page seo and remember quality over quantity and so we can measure backlinks going back into moz we

can use moz's link explorer tool so remember if i type in a domain valley fig i can get some metrics related off page seo including my domain authority but more importantly i can see what links are pointing to my site in this case valleyfig.com so i can see there are 575 link domains i can see there are 7 900 inbound links and so just by clicking on that i can get an idea of the types of websites that are linking to my site and their domain authority and their spam score google search console so if

you go back into search console you can also just click on links and we should be able to get an idea of you know what websites are linking to our site and more importantly we want to be able to see not only what sites but what pages they're linked to remember we want our backlinks pointing to interior pages not necessarily the home page so here i can see the top link page for valleyfig.com is slash recipes so we want links pointing to our interior pages not necessarily the home page that's what's going to help your

performance your rankings for all your pages not just your home page so having quality back links pointing to interior pages help boost the domain authority and the page authority for that particular page so again using moz link explorer tool or using the links report and search console are good sources for you to identify backlinks so when we look at these these reports we want to look at the domain authority of these sites that are linking ours the number of outbound links to the site or specific pages on our site we want to be able to

look at the ratio of link distribution you know we want to be able to look at how many follows and nofollow so most of this if not all of these metrics are in moz so if i go back to moz i can actually see you know which one's pointing which ones are followed the total quality of the link that's pointing to our site again bam so moz link explorer report tends to give us all the information we need in order to measure and get a sense of our backlinks that help us with off-page seo so

there are other tools out there there's hrefs again search console there's other seo platforms out there that'll help you measure backlinks okay now that we covered everything with on-page seo and off-page seo and really everything seo in general let's take a little quiz and if you could go ahead and just put your answers in the comment section below so just a little quiz here and we'll start out with question one which the following type of site map is specifically designed for search spiders so the answer is either a html sitemap or b xml sitemap so

go ahead and put your answers in the comment section below i'll give you just another second to think about that okay another question for you from a search engine perspective which of the following link types could cause a negative effect on your rankings it's either a purchase link or b no follow link so again if you could if you know the answer or just take an educated guess go ahead and put the answers in the comment section below okay next question a website's robots text file serves what function is it a tell the bots what

pages should be crawled and not crawled or b tells the bots what links should be follow and no follow so if you know the answer you feel good about your answer go ahead and put it in the comments section below today we're going to 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 to 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 a 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 in on just dried fig and maybe we

want to focus 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 a 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 keywords so again we want to prefer keywords with high volume you want to be careful of seasonality so remember seasonality in 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 always trumps 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 in optimizing for and then maybe drive fake 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 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 seasonality 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 gonna give me a sense or an idea of what i should be bidding on that 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 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 million 500 000. so i can see that's

the actual search volume for this particular keyword however if i add a syntax called all in title before that keyword with the colon space and then hit enter then i could see the actual volume reduces to 31 000 and basically what this tells me is that 31 000 listings results have the keyword dried figs in the title tag so if a web page has dried fig our 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 divided by 31 000 if i make that into a percentage basically 26 so that's my keyword effectiveness index or kei 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 moz so moz has a keyword explorer tool okay so if i type in the keyword dried figs focusing on the united states i could see that moz says hey look there's anywhere between 4 300 and 6 500 in terms of volume out of 100 the difficulty

is 41. and so i can expect a click-through rate of you know 41 and so basically the great thing about moz's keyword explorer tool is i can also look at the search analysis search engine results pages what serp stands for and i can analyze the serp for a particular keyword in moz so i want to be able to understand what my competition is 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 in the on page one

i can also see what local results show up for that keyword so here i could 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 competitors are ranking for 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 in 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 it 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 search engine watch dot 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 why seo and front-end 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 core for example so if i

go to quora 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 dry figs safe for diabetes best ways to eat dry 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 core 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 your website so it's all about content so we've already done the keyword research we still need to kind of merge the two 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 content longer and engaging content tends to rank higher 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 gonna 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 meta 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 basically just means 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 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 examples so if you're optimizing an e-commerce category page and your keyword is one mix used for men so we want to use keywords closely related to one mix used for men for example running shoes for men or sport running shoes for men outdoor sports shoes or air cushion shoes let's take a look an 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 it 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 sports 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 keyword you could definitely show variation especially on the e-commerce side if you're dealing with different products so we want to make the content readable with the help of visuals subtitles and bullet points so if your e-commerce you want to make sure that page is laid out properly easy to read you hear i could see the descriptor along with the title all kind of merge together and so there's no break out of okay this is the product name this description it's kind of one all-in-one which

i like it just makes it more natural sounding 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 bounce rate so there is correlation between engagement and bounce rate the more you structure the more you add visuals the more you add subtitles the more engaged somebody's gonna be the less likely they are to bounce from the pitch 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 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 the reviews but there's

testimonials so i could see that here you can 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 engaging 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 can see amazon lists a lot of the benefits or one mix in this case lists a lot of the benefits so here you can see all the descriptors about the particular product it's got rubber sole it's got a breathable textile lighting you get free high 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 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 add 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 go back here here it has a sizing 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 convince the end user so in the case of the one mix on amazon you know they had a sizing chart you know they had an faq being additional information what other products that 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 reviews 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 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 a size convertible chart so if you're dealing with metrics you can go over to us metrics feet vice versa you can add a video you know show a video of if you're selling running shoes throw a video 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 is 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 meta tags in url to improve click-through rates so this is important because the meta tags i.e the title tag and the meta description and the urls what shows up in google search results so we have title tags up 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 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 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 in your title tag so with the modifier you know up to 60 to 65 characters in length with that targeted keyword 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 type in the keyword best recipes for dried figs you know here i can 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 188 best autumn dried fake recipes or 25 fantastic fig recipes or 10 best cooking dried fig recipes so these are all modifiers they're 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 lemonade 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 fake recipes by emily that's a good enticing title tag okay takes into account a 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 webpage 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 different 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 can see this example here and if we look at it on google search results so if i type in amazon bluetooth headsets ten dollars

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 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 meta description just like they do with the title tag and so we want clean natural written meta 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 valleyfig.com and i could see the meta description hey welcome to the best resource online for dried fake recipes savory is sweet snacks are healthy dried food recipes we've got it all okay 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 taken 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 can see this is valleyfig.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 that parameters but the rule of dumb 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 thumb 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 just a clean url for a particular e-commerce site that has categories and sub-categories so again we

got amazon.com your category can be electronics your sub-category could be earphones and your product could be both 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 serps 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 if we can add more information to that that will in turn allow 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 snippets 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 um other information in there like 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 information to the search engine results by working in some rich snippets so basically the whole idea is to set

up the rich snippet to drive targeted traffic okay so because the more information in the serp 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 snippets are as i mentioned increasing click-through rates you know also increasing conversion rates so when you get the traffic 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's just say 5 stars out of 5 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 and it's more likely that that information that's contained in that rich snippet is going to get featured in either the knowledge graph which is that graph on the right side or in a 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 traffic 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 pages the 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 are offers prices site links links to your site and product availability so all that information can 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 ahrefs 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 a 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 url structure that follows

your site'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 site's navigation that site hierarchy and it all starts with the home page you want to optimize your home page to drive traffic to your product pages so the home page is nothing more than a doorway into your website and so the site's navigation should link to all those different products so if you have an e-commerce site with sub categories or categories subcategories 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 home page 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 on the home page 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 they're 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 one-way street from the home page to interior pages you want basically a home page to interior interior to other relevant interior pages and that could be a lateral or that could be a situation where it's a hierarchy for example home page category subcategories sub sub 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 style sheets 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 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 stay on 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 sub-category then a sub-sub-category 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 is 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 meta tag basically we're telling the search engines this is

the preferred or canonical version of a web page okay so use this web page so it signals to the search engines which page they should basically index and pay attention to and avoid at 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 reasons 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 one-page checkout process you want to optimize your sitemap so when we talk about sitemaps we want to make sure that it's a file and xml file that basically includes all of our urls and we can then turn around and give that site map to the search engines 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 site maps i can just simply just tell google where my sitemap is located and when they recognize that sitemap they're going

to be able to basically index the urls from that sitemap so we can 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 sitemap 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 predictive 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 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 in any issues on our website 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 this is not necessarily for everyone but using a live chat widget sometimes helps in fact i 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 live 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 overlooked seo tactic because for every second delay and page load can result in 11 fewer page views 60 percent decrease in customer satisfaction seven percent decline in conversion rate so you know you can 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's 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 disable plugins you're not using getting using a simple website design going 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 load time so if your website has numerous css and javascript files basically minify and combine them and that's what we're talking about there you know you don't necessarily need a lot of you know javascript 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 site 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 is going to actually give you some suggested ways to increase speed so if we let this report load we'll be able to see some speed suggestions per page and so here you can see for example the home page 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 is going to launch another google product called page speed insights and what page speed insights is going to do is it's going to analyze the page in question whether that be the home page 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 can

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 and so analytics site speed reports page speed insights are good ways to get an idea really excellent ways to really address page load time issues so

again these are just some of the common issues with page load time there could be other factors leaning on those page speed insights reports will definitely help reduce page load 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 can 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 four seconds or less three seconds or less obviously as fast as possible so case study walmart walmart reported the following results so walmart experienced a two percent increase in conversions for every one 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 bounce rate you can correlate revenue with page speed 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 references 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 posts a boost in the serps 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 moz moz 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 entering 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 consider it all low-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 and 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 cora 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 engaged 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 than 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 okay you can also do testimonials there's lots of ways to generate quality links 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 and 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 some of these questions then we talked about in tip number three analyzing your meta tags and urls so we want to make sure that title tag meta descriptions are creative these modifiers like numbers 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 serps just by communicating with the search engines vs rich snippets tip 5 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 in 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 mods 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 piece of recipes with sausage homemade pizza toppings pizza dough recipes thin 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 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 keywords to use maybe maybe not so you need to take care and choosing the keywords to align with your content so that's really the idea why we would do keyword research because some of the issues with keywords that are poorly chosen are they could have slow 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 can 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 aligned 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 your pages may not even be found in organic search so you really have to take care in 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 long tail 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 and a phrase or shorter in some cases it may be two keywords and a phrase or shorter so short tilt 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 keywords like for example

pizza recipes could be considered a short tail keyword but maybe somebody's looking for homemade pizza recipes or pizza recipes from their favorite italian restaurant so short take keywords may not be as relevant so if we compare it with long tail 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 rate's likely going to be higher so that's really the difference

between short term keywords and long tail keywords if you want to look it 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 as not relevant versus long tail 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 it 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 keyword 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 taker keyword is probably going

to be greater because not many other websites are trying to rank for that same keyword and so the benefit of that is if you have let's just say homemade pizza recipes with mushrooms that's a long tail key 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 three key words in the

phrase very 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 gonna click get results and what google's gonna 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 recipe and pizza recipes are closely related keywords and so what google does is they consider that a close variance so meaning if somebody types 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 1000 and then i can see the actual volume over the past 12 months and then for the long tail 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 is 2400 but i could see here in december the volume went up to 3 600. but for example in may it was 1900. so it's gonna fluctuate a bit over the past few months but on average it's about 2400. so shorter tail a lot more volume longer tail not as much volume but nonetheless there is volume here and so these are the difference between a short tail and a longer tail and so what google's keyword planner also does is allow us to 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 2 400 search queries for that keyword now whether you get all 2 400 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's

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 keywords 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 keyword homemade pizza dough recipe we know that it averages 2 400 a month in search volume again we may not get all 2 400 but are we going to get a line share 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 websites that have pizza recipes the keyword pizza recipes in the title tag so if i do all in title 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 matches homemade pizza dough recipes is going to be included in the search results so i'm going

to type in my all in title 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 and 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 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 thousand so i'm gonna type in 683 thousand what was our next keyword well it was pizza or homemade pizza dough recipes so if i go back for this particular keyword is 2400 so i'm gonna put 2400 in under my volume column and then what was my competition well my competition was i typed that keyword back

in 2160. so i'm going to put 2 100 say 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 the volume or ratio of volume to competition and so basically what we could do is take volume divided by competition if i make that a

percentage i can see it's 0.35 percent is the ratio between volume and competition if i do the same for my longer tail keyword 2400 divided by 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 longer teal keyword homemade pizza dough recipes so you want to be able to do that for a number of 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 dough recipes so if 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 and 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 keyword 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 in title 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 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's going to be better so understand your business find keywords that are relevant to your business and then focus on those keywords 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 its download could be our commercial intent keyword again there may be low 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 are 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 second carry 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 be 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 choosing keywords so if a 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 cool 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 meal

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 could see healthy diet plan keyword i'm focusing on is my primary keyword has an average monthly search volume of 9900 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 9900 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 contents about that's a considered a short tail keyword because it has a lot of competition and so my ratio is 13 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 a little longer tail because i want to be able to find to keep 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 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 on 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 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 quora or reddit we can use google suggestions in the keyword 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 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 could 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 giving me some other suggestions here so they're saying low-fat 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 a healthy diet then you could

choose low-fat 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 answers a question you could certainly be found for a feature snippet for example maybe you know healthy diet recipes if i type that in you can see here there's a featured snippet so if

i'm talking about recipes that's a key word i may want to use and if i use that then google has an opportunity to see what my content is about and place my information at the top in this featured snippet you can also again see what some of the questions are being asked what males are good for weight loss what is a good healthy diet plan all of these can be keyword phrases that you can use so the answers are right here in google so core is a great platform because core is a platform that people

go and ask questions and 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 is a good place for you to go to get some ideas about a specific topic so if we're talking about healthy dieting so we can find keywords with high search volume right in core so the whole idea is you can look at you know the top five questions for specific topic like healthy dieting and find relevant keywords to healthy dieting so if you just type in that particular

keyword in quora you're gonna 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 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 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 could see some related lsi keywords at

the bottom so writing google as well you can 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 can

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 the types 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 quora 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 terms so google collects 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 is 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 assets and use it to our own advantage by finding relevant keywords in an easy fashion so with wikipedia we can identify a list of keywords in the meta description itself we could choose

keywords from the first paragraph of wikipedia it has many relevant keywords or we could 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 go to wikipedia as an example and i type in healthy diet into wikipedia here i can get just in the first paragraph alone i can see some additional keywords 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 get to see also section so it might give me some information food information 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 look no further than the see also section the references 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 on the serp so you can also do that as well so if i type in healthy diet wikipedia in 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 key wording is the average monthly searches for a particular keyword so if we type a word in key reddit and choose keywords from the auto generated list this tool will extract the keywords and give us those relevant terms with search volumes so if we go to the keyword it and show an example of that for example 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 keyword tool is going to tell me some relevant keywords and what the volume is so if you don't have the keyword planner tool and 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.com type in your keyword click get keywords 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 for 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 core 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 to brainstorm your ideas first and identify a list of keywords i.e a theme of 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 mods if i go to keyword the keyword explorer tool in moz 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 it a sense of who is already ranking for that keyword so here i can see mozmoz medium.com alexa.com

so i can get a sense of what web pages are ranked for 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 mods of 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 cleveland planner and what keyword planner does is it provides you for

a 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 keyword 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 href or the reddit tool keyword it and then moz 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 linked to this particular keyword we're interested in so here i can look at the top 10 list so this is moz's keyword explore 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 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 ranked number one on google there are some factors involved and those are factors that are going to help sam get his website ranked 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 your automobile website your 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 on-page 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 gonna get into the off-site 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 off your website meaning on other websites and so we're going to talk about what's involved with offsite 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 there's a lot of work involved and so ideally what we want to do is follow what we call the 80 20 rule when it comes to search engine optimization and ranking on google and what do we mean by the 80 20 rule well 80 20 means we're investing 20 of our effort and 80 percent of

the results are obtained so we want to invest 20 and get back 80. that's basically what we mean by 80 20. so for example if 20 of our targeted keywords bringing 80 of the traffic then that's following the 80 20 rule or 20 percent of our landing pages drive 80 percent of the overall traffic that's following the 80 20 rule or 20 of our backlinks past 80 percent of our link juice that's the 80 20 rule meaning these targeted keywords these targeted landing pages these trying to target backlinks using off-site engagement we want to put

in 20 of our effort on those keywords landing pages and backlinks in return for eighty percent of the results so without further ado let's get started with the keyword research let's talk about that keyword research for a website with shoes 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

keyword here would be shoes for kids well every keyword that you target 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 competition 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 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 third-party 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 long tail keywords or keywords with three keywords in the phrase or more you're going to always have less competition but there's always a trade-off with long-tail keywords meaning the longer the keyword phrase there's gonna be less volume but the trade-off is less competition and so what we wanna do is we wanna 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 tool called keyword planner and let's just say i 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 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 use in 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 volume so i can see the average monthly search volume here is 60 hundred 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 998 000 results that's a lot lower than 771 billion so that means that 998 000 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 element to rank number one

on google and we'll talk about that in a few minutes but if we understand that there are 998 000 results with bread recipes in the title tag then this tells us that those are the websites who are trying to rank number one on google for that keyword and therefore those are the websites we need to jump over in order for our website to rank number one on google and so therefore i'm going to put in 998 000 in my spreadsheet as the competitive number and so now i could see for the keyword bread recipes i

have 60 500 and if my competition is 998 000 then my kei or keyboard effectiveness index or in other words the ratio of volume to competition is six percent so that's nothing more than volume divided by competition so that tells me that my kei or my ratio between volume competition is six percent 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 has 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 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 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 is 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 miles so moz if you go to moz.com they have a tool called keyword explorer so if we just type in the keyword for example bread 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 reading and quora where you can ask people about certain topics using keywords to figure out how much competition or volume there might be you can 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 maybe we won't want to put all our emphasis just on one keyword to rank for we want multiple keywords to try and rank for

so the primary key work and 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 and the competition is our secondary keyword

could be built around other similar keywords like low-fat ice cream recipes or fat-free ice cream recipes or low-fat homemade ice cream recipes those are complementary key words just like our bread recipes and banana 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 keywords not necessarily target one keyword and so we want to be able to cluster keywords see 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 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 gonna get good engagement in the eyes of google you know

they want to rank content that's very informative 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 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 summer time 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 that 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 feel is 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 bounces 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.io 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 requirements so answering those questions 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 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 opt for white hat 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 they're different types of content so there's content where you just write words to install text

based you could also use an infographic an infographic is simply just a graphic that visualizes exactly what you're trying to explain for example if we want to write an article about how to write good engaging content we don't necessarily have to write all that out as a 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're

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 and 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 is engaged so we're going to rank that 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 keywords 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 a 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 keywords so if you're choosing keywords in 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 make something that's going to be you know engaging 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 long tail 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 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 end user engaged because you're 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 three month old post on buzzfeed and it's 21 pictures that restore your

faith in humanity so it has a lot of likes a lot of tweaks 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 on a 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 can 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 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's updated regularly it's engaging and it includes sources from high authority websites some do's and don'ts on the content so take into account the best practices i mentioned about creating high quality content answer those questions that the end user wants to hear you know because 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 buzzfeed 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 do's that 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 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 imagery 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 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 on page 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 on-page elements and 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 site 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 on google search so title tag and meta description together are considered meta tags so both play an important role in ranking high on google 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 in 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 meta tags so if we go back to our search results pages met title tags are generally 60 65 characters meta description tags are generally 160 characters so anything really longer than that then what's gonna happen is the meta description tag or the title tag will get truncated 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 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 figs you know we want to have a nice title tag and into this description that is going to get somebody to respond 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 in higher click-through 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 meta tags can also increase your click-through rate for example if you just put learn the importance of first page rankings not too bad but 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 gonna 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 click-through rates and so according to backlinko 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 the 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 tech because the h1 tag especially with the 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 h1 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'll 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 videos based on the last segment of high quality content definitely helps with ranking high on google search so following

hierarchical 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 blase 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 texts 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 we go back to our page example a short sweet tag here california fake banana bread it's relevant to the content it's short sweet and breaks up the monotony of the content and more importantly and 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 muller senior webmaster trends analyst at google

header tags would definitely help google for rankings in 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 a best 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 that doesn't hurt to use a favicon 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 vegan banana bread and notice the h1 tag is fake 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 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 those best practices keep your url short use hyphens put the keyword in that url and make it easy to understand want to avoid capital letters in the urls the urls are case sensitive so go lower case you should always go lower case from the url readable urls again the rule of thumb here is if you understand what the url is then google is 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 2 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 you optimize now we want to look at some website level factors that will help you optimize and rank

high 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 home page break the structure up into 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 do 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 css 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 things 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 can 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 a page where somebody can buy the ingredients so it's a natural internal link so john doherty of credo has claimed that one of the biggest changes that he can make in fixing the credo website is architecture so for example in credo john dougherty has increased the organic sessions by 74 and 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 turned 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 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 sitemaps 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 content to be updated frequently so content's not updated frequently or it's not fresh then google is going to see that site that date stamp that last modification down so we want to be able to make sure content's updated frequently we want to let google know that we change 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 sitemap we want to be able to add canonical versions of urls

in the sitemaps so we want to be able to add all our original urls in our sitemap and so we always want to build dynamic urls sitemaps for larger websites and what i mean by dynamic urls that means that if i look at this sitemap 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 site map 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 site map grow with more urls when the sitemap grows with more urls then that means then google is 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 site 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 recommend a dynamic sitemap but you can always create your own sitemap just by going to a tool called xml sitemap so if i just type in xml sitemaps into google search here i could 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 sitemap either way the sitemap's going to sit in the root directory and then what we want to do in turn is let google know where that

site map 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 is going to be able to take those urls and index them so we could see we submitted 528 urls google index 521 so one thing about urls here is when we create a sitemap 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 sitemap so according to edgy using sitemaps for seo can increase your website's visibility and help you get indexed why because what you're in fact 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 is going to be able to take all those urls quicker index them quicker and when they're indexed quicker you can get ranked quicker and when you get ranked quicker you can get traffic quicker so that's the whole idea behind site maps so let's turn our attention to page speed now so when the last factors for our website besides architecture making it secure and adding sitemaps is 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 to 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 style sheets 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 caching 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 analytics and i go under behavior and i go under site 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 four seconds anything four 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 is

give you speed suggestions so if we do have a page that loads slow we can just go to speed suggestions and google analytics and we go to speed suggestions then google's going to be able to tell us hey this particular page load fast this potential page loads slow and if it loaded slow why is it loading slow so here we could see the home page of the example is loaded on average of seven seconds well if we look here they're going to give us some suggestions so if i click on this 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 it's 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 redirect 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 response and all of those are factors and so again you can go into analytics page speed insights and you can see exactly what google is recognizing as what's lowering or slowing down your page load time so google takes site 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 declining conversions so what they did was looked at their page speed and when they looked at their page speed you'd be surprised what that did just increasing

it from one to four seconds or decreasing it basically increase 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 load is low time will make a world of difference in terms of engagement and conversions let's turn our attention to off-site engagement so previously we talked about on-page

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 on to other websites so that's off site 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 page load was good and fast so we did all the things we're 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 off site 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 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 taken 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 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 off-site engagement

and so gaining links back links from multiple danes is vital it's vital because they bring referring traffic to your site they bring credibility to your site but more importantly google is going to recognize the relationship between these sites and your website and if these sites that have backlinks or links pointing to your site and if they're of high quality then we call that passing link choose so it's going to bring quality to you in terms of organic search so if we look at an example if i do a search for banana bread recipe there are

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 moz and moz has a report called link explorer and so moz 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 shows a hyphen it's still ranked 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 824 linking domains to this one domain they have 3 600 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 break out 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 it and so we could see the breakout of the linking domains we could see the top file links to the site and we could see the page authority so the link explorer 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 to rank on google search in order for it to get high we need links from high quality sites so that's the whole idea behind off-site 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 usain bolt who's a famous sprinter if we're selling shoes and we're selling

nike shoes maybe usain bolt 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 webpage on popular bookmarking sites like stumbleupon we can also put our content on discussion forums like reddit we can join high pr quality q a sites excuse me and post answers to

questions related to our business like cora.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 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 do they 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 prove 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 usain bolt who's very famous sprinter do some influence 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 go on 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 offsite engagement we want to do some guest posts on relevant websites so if you have that ice cream blog go to another blog like 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 could just earn backlinks from relevant authoritative web pages like we mentioned quora or wikipedia 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 site-wide links all over the place pointing to the same page and we certainly don't want to be on low-quality websites or directories it's all about quality not quantity with offsite engagement so having offsite engagement complements what you do on your website for onsite together both of those efforts will get you higher search engine results so let's start out with why gtm so let's just say you're sam and you have your own

e-commerce website and you want to understand how people are interacting with your website well sam today's world of websites contain a lot of interactivity everything from videos to pdf downloads to commenting to form submissions uh to all sorts of chat functionality interactivity going on throughout the website so there's just a lot that you need to track outside of just page views and so really what gtm does is they help you track all these things i just mentioned everything from somebody clicking on the play button of a pdf to somebody clicking on the submit button of

a form to somebody entering in something on a chat function so that's what gtm is so why gtm because it helps us track all that interactivity so all gtm is is really allows you to really place a piece of java code which is just script and the script that's added to a web page to collect information so that's really what a tag is it's just some script that gets put on a web page in order for you to collect information like page views clicks etc and they send it to third-party tools okay so that's what

gtm does it it basically allows you to take all these tags that collect information and you can use them in gtm so if you want to for example collect how many people you know enter a chat functionality and start chatting well you're gonna take that script and you're gonna put it in gtm and gtm will then allow you to start tracking that information so that's really what gtm is it just allows you to put tags into a container or think of it as a toy box you have all these toys and you want to track

well you can put all those those toys or tags in a toy box or container and we're going to talk a little bit more about that but before we get into gtm let's just say you know you're communicating with your developer and there's a new user request on your webpage and you want to update the tag well your developer considering it's probably a small update to your website he's probably gonna not um hesitate and is gonna go ahead and turn around and do it normally and so normally what happens is the developer is gonna go

to the website and update the tag well what if you have a few things that you want to track all those things i mentioned before from downloads to clicks to you know somebody checking out to watching a video well your master your web developer is going to go well hold on a second now all these requests are going to take time i need to put them into the work queue so to speak well what happens is when they go into work queue usually it's going to take some time and in some cases you as a

marketer need to launch a campaign and you want to get that tracking uh added to the website in time for the campaign launch so you want to go ahead and quickly turn around the tracking for that particular campaign let's just say you're launching a campaign and you're sending people to a landing page that has a form submission and you want to be able to track how many people click on the submit button of that form submission well if you need to turn that around your developer's like well i need to put that in a work

queue the timing isn't going to always work out between you and your developer is my point and so that's where gtm comes in because there is a solution update your tags faster and that's google tag manager so when we say gtm that's what gtm stands for google tag manager it's a place for you to add tags quickly and easily so tags remember are just snippets of code that allow you to track things on your website interactively interactive activity and basically when you have gtm you can bypass the webmaster and do it quickly and easily so

that's what gtm is all about so why gtm because we just identified two benefits one you could track all the interactivity on your website and two you can bypass your web developer or webmaster and so that's the benefit of gtm so the benefit you get those tags updated very quickly via google tag manager okay so that's what tag manager is so what we're going to talk about today is specifically what tag manager is and what it does we're going to list some of the benefits of tag manager we're going to show you how it works

and then we're going to show you how to get started with tag manager tag manager if you're not familiar with working with webmasters and dealing with javascript and tags and all this jargon is just new to you today okay well don't fret sit back we're going to take it slow this is an introduction into google tag manager again let's start out with what is tag manager so we've already introduced it to some degree because we already introduced is a tool where you can put all your tags into a toolbox toy box or container so to

speak right and we already already mentioned that hey you can bypass your webmaster so you're probably thinking well if i'm if you're not familiar with tag manager how can i bypass my webmaster well first of all it's a free tool and it's a google tool hence the name google tag manager and it helps you really that's the main point is deploy and track tags on your website by passing your webmaster so that's tag manager and so examples of tags that can be deployed vehicle tag manager are numerous these are just some examples like google analytics

facebook pixel tracking or google ads there's no limit into the number of tags you can track in tag manager there is no limit you can add any number of tracking tags and tag manager okay so some of the benefits well again i we just listed two you can put any tag into tag manager and track that onto your website and we know you can bypass your web developer or webmaster and what it also does is it also allows you to test and deploy your javascript codes quicker so remember these javascript codes or snippets of codes

are just there to track certain things on your website whether that be a page view or somebody clicking on a play button or tracking somebody who converts or even just goes to your website so the biggest benefit is you can take that snippet of code let's just say facebook let's just say you're doing facebook marketing and you want to put that facebook pixel on your website so that you could track people who come from facebook and convert well you don't need to put that facebook pixel on your website you can go right to tag manager

and you can put that snippet of code right in tag manager really quickly and the other benefit here is all tags are managed in one place and that's that to me is really a good benefit because when you start adding tags on your website and you have some tags in tag manager it just gets very confusing so ideally all the tracking code you have on your website needs to be in tag manager think about that all the tracking so if you're doing bing or you're doing facebook or you're doing twitter or you're doing linkedin and

you're doing google you're doing all this type of marketing on all these different platforms you're going to have tracking code for all these different platforms and instead of putting on that code on your website return gonna slow down the slow time of your web page and website you want to put them all in tag manager so they can be organized and you know exactly what you're trying to track and the other great benefit of tag manager is there's a versioning control so let's just say you have added tags to your website via gtm for the

last six months well and let's just say you add another tag yesterday if you added that tag yesterday and something doesn't work well you can just roll back to a previous version it's that simple so you have versioning and that's that's a good thing when you have versioning you can control what gets published and if something doesn't work after it gets published then you can roll back to a previous version so it's a a piece of mind so to speak just because you've had code to your site there's no guarantee it's going to work and

so you can always control what version you're dealing with in tag manager and we'll talk a little bit more about that so the biggest benefit here to me with tag manager is you have event tracking and so we talked about some of the things you could track on your website from videos from play buttons to somebody clicking on the stop on the video or pausing it all the way to somebody again chatting or let's just say somebody clicking on that purchase button on your website okay and you want to track all these different things these

different interactivities and buttons well event tracking is what you're going to use to track all those buttons and to me this is the biggest benefit of tag manager and i'll show you some examples as we go along and if we didn't mention it already i'll mention it again it is free tag manager is free there's no limit so once you have tag manager going you can add as many tracking codes as you want there's no limit on the number of tracking codes you can add to tag manager okay so it's free and you can use

it to its fullest advantage okay so it's also high security meaning that it has different levels of permissions okay so you can have uh somebody just go in and look at the different tags and tracking codes you have in gtm or you can have somebody who is very familiar with tag manager and go in and add the tracking code to tag manager and then publish that tracking code when it gets added so those are all the benefits let's talk about how it works now specifically how does tag manager work because you're like rob okay again

a lot of jargon you know you you got tags and javascript and and versioning and publishing and all this other stuff well i know i'm throwing a lot at you at once but just bear with me here okay so let's start talking about how it actually works so you have a website okay whatever that domain is you have a website and there's chances are on your website you have some form of interactivity whether that be a video whether that be a blog whether it be a form submission you have a website with some interactivity and

let's just say you're even thinking about getting ready to launch some type of campaign on maybe google or facebook and you want to drive traffic to your website fair enough you're joining the millions of other websites that are out there that have interactivity that also drive traffic to the website so income's google tag manager and so tag manager is important because again we know we want to track people coming from that facebook campaign or that google campaign interacting with our site so if you are running facebook and you are running google analytics well guess what

you want to put that tracking code in tag manager so google analytics being a google product works very nicely with tag manager facebook has its own tracking code but you still want to be able to track people who come from the facebook campaign to your website so you're going to get that tracking code from facebook and put it in tag manager that's generally how it works so here information from your website is shared with another data source through tag manager so think about that if i add facebook tracking code to tag manager or let's just

say i had google analytics tracking code to tag manager tag manager is the one that's pushing out and doing all the heavy lifting they're the ones that are controlling what code gets fired and what code doesn't so if you're putting the code in tag manager tag manager is controlling the code think about it that way and let's show you an example of what that looks like so here i am i'm in tag manager i just went to tag manager.google.com and here i could see a list of tags so in our conversation we're talking about tracking

facebook and we're talking about tracking google analytics well google analytics is easy because it's a google product so here if i look at all the different tracking code i have on my website through tag manager let's just take a look at google analytics so if you're going to use tag manager you might as well put the google analytics code in here so here i can see i have google analytics as a tag in tag manager now for facebook if i'm running a facebook campaign well i can take that pixel tracking and put it in gtm

as well and here i can see facebook pixel that is that code is added to gtm i just basically took what facebook gave me and put it into google tag manager so you can see i can add facebook and google analytics and again i can't stress it enough any tracking code from any platform i can add to google tag manager in order to track the behavior from those sources so let's take a little bit deeper dive into how tag manager works so i just showed you an example of how you could take facebook and google

analytics code and put it into tag manager but if you're not familiar with tag manager then how do i do that well let's talk about the structure and how tag manager works so when you have a tag manager account you have a container remember i mentioned toy box earlier you have a bunch of toys if they're they're code and you're tracking different bits of code from different platforms like facebook think of those as toys and you have a toy box okay well that's what this code is and that's what a container is the code is

the code and that's going to go into the toy box or container and so the way tag manager works is you have tags triggers and variables so if i take my facebook tracking code and put it into a container i need to set up a tag and a trigger okay so let's take a look at what that is so first if i go back to tag manager i'm going to have an account and if i have an account i'm going to have a container so here i'm just going to click on an account with a

container and a container is nothing more than what website you're adding the tracking code to okay that's all the container is we're just letting tag manager know this is the website we're adding all this code to so you have tags triggers and variables that's the structure of tag manager so tags are just what it says tags what are we trying to quote unquote tag well if it's google analytics that's easy here i could see i have google analytics added so if i click on google analytics here's my tag and if i take a little bit

of a deeper dive there since google analytics is a google product it integrates already with tag managers it's pretty easy i can just choose google analytics then i'm going to check page view and that's my tag now every tag needs a trigger okay so i need to tell tag manager how or when to fire the google analytics tracking code so in this case i'm going to tell tag manager to fire on all pages so if i get somebody a visitor to my website analytics is firing on all pages so whatever page that visitor lands on

google analytics is going to fire so that's really what it comes down to is i have a tag and i need to tell tag manager when to trigger that tag that's really what the structure of tag manager is it's tags triggers and variables and variables what we're going to talk about here in a couple minutes but you have a piece of code you're going to go ahead and put that into tag manager you're going to tag it and then you're going to fire that trigger so let's take a look at another example here if i

go back here you can see facebook well here's my facebook pixel okay that's my tag so when is it gonna fire well it's gonna fire on a specific domain or subdomain that's basically what we're doing we're trying to tell gtm when to fire that particular tag so those are the three main components a tag okay which is going to contain the javascript code that you get from say facebook the trigger so you're going to go into tag manager and tell tag manager when to fire that code that's the trigger and then you have variables and

so variables are basically just additional information that tag manager may need for your tag and trigger to work so that's what a variable is it's there to get the tag and trigger to fire so variables are divided into built-in and user-defined variables so common used variables include say page path or page url or hostname or click class again they're there and these examples i just gave you are there to get your tag and trigger to work think about it that way they're just that's a component and if i go into tag manager here and here

on the left side i can see variables so remember i have built in and user defined so built in means that tag manager already built these for me so in case i need to get my trigger to work with my tag i can use a variable so those are built in and then i have user defined so these are what i define these are what i created and again the variables are there to get the tag and trigger to work okay so that's the job of the variable the job of the tag is to host

that javascript code okay in the case of facebook or analytics that's where we're putting our code so here if i click on adwords remarketing again it's a google product so i don't really need to even deal with code i'm just going to select google adwords remarketing okay so you can see gtm integrates nicely with some of the other google products but let's just say you have a facebook pixel tracking code you're going to choose custom and you're going to put the code here so that's part of the tag and then the trigger again is there

to get the tag to fire so you're telling gtm when to fire the tag and the variable is there to help you make sure that that trigger and that tag work together so that's how all three kind of work together you need the tag to put the code you need the trigger to tell gtm when to fire the tag in code and the variables there to help you define when that tag and trigger should work or how it should work so again review tags are they're just small codes of javascript or tracking pixels on your

website and so tags are allowed to manage events like scroll track and remarketing clicks downloads files play buttons you name it and even clicks on external links for example let's just say you have a click uh or a facebook uh icon on your site and when somebody clicks on it they go to facebook you want to maybe track that you're going to create a tag okay the trigger is there because you need to tell gtm when to fire that tag so it's a certain condition whether it's you know fire the tag if the url equals

facebook.com or some other condition so the tag cannot be created until the creation of the corresponding trigger so tags and triggers go together you can't just create a tag and not have a trigger otherwise your tag will never fire and then the variable is there again it stores the information when defining a trigger or transferring data to tag so a variable has a variety of data okay so you pick and choose the variable you want to use with that trigger okay so you're making sure that by defining a variable you're making sure that you're telling

gtm how that trigger should be fired so let's take a look at another example here of how all three play together if i'm in this account i'm in this container if i look down here i can see google optimize that's another google product so what i'm doing here is i just chose google optimize as my tag it's already integrated so what does that mean i don't even need to deal with any code i'm just going to select optimize well we have the tag google optimize but we need to tell gtm how to fire that and

so here we're going to tell gtm to fire it on all pages so that's basically a very simple example because we're firing it on all pages so if i want to look at something specific again facebook here's my tag here's my code what's my trigger well my trigger is it's going to fire on specific pages how do i know that well if i look at the trigger here i could see the trigger is a page view but i'm telling it to fire on this particular hostname so the tag and trigger go hand in hand so

how to get started with tag manager so first things first you have to create that account so you're going to go to tag manager.google.com or you can do a search for google tag manager and you're going to create your account and then when you create your account what's going to happen is you're going to set up a container and when you set up a container you have choices so you could set it up for your website for an app on ios or maybe android or you can even set it up for amp except an accelerated

mobile page so most people by default are probably going to set up tag manager for their website and so when you do that when you actually select website what's going to happen is you're going to get some google tag manager code in return and so the whole idea here is you're going to do a swap what you're doing is basically you're saying okay google i'm going to take this google tag manager code and i'm going to put it on my website i'm going to put it on every page in my website so notice tag manager

has two scripts one goes in the head as high as possible the other goes into the body tag as high as possible and so what you're doing is you're making a deal you're putting this tag manager code on your website and in return every code you deal with whether that be facebook or analytics or optimize or remarketing or whatever it is is gonna go in gtm okay it's gonna go into the container you created so you need the tag manager code on your website in order for tag manager to work okay so when you add

this code to your website then you're free to start adding all sorts of tags to your container but if you don't have this tracking code on your website then none of the tags you add to your container are going to work so that's the idea behind the container and then one thing i wanted to mention on the account is it's a google account so when you create your account then make sure it's the same account you use with say google analytics or some other google product that's a good best practice is always use the same

email address when you set up your account so that it integrates nicely across all the different platforms meaning you can go from say google analytics right to google tag manager in one browser without having to log out or log in okay so when you create the account you're going to create your container if you choose web then you're going to be asked to place code on your website and when you place that code on your website then you are free to start using tag manager and that means you're free to start adding tags okay so

if you want to know more information about installing google tag manager then what i would recommend is visit the quick start guide website of gtm so again if you're curious as to where that code is located in google tag manager well when you create an account and you create a container that container is going to have a specific id so if i click on that specific id here's where i can get my code okay so again when i'm logged in to tag manager i'm gonna click on workspace but in the top navigation i'm gonna see

my unique gtm id if i click on that that's where my code is going to be located and so again your code needs to go in the header and there's another script that needs to go in the body and if you're not sure how to add the code to your website well you can always click on the quick start guide here okay and that'll take you to a quick start guide page a reference page related to google tag manager so let's talk about creating a tag so once you get tag manager installed i'm sure you're

excited to get going and create that first tag so let's talk about how to create a tag in tag manager so when you're in tag manager all you need to do is basically you're looking at all your tags if you click on tag in the left side navigation you'll see all your tags and there's a new button there so you just click new and so basically what you're going to do is you're going to create your first tag and so what i would recommend once you get tag manager installed on your website i would recommend

setting the first tag up as google analytics so that will get you going with tracking page views on your website when some when somebody visits your website okay so ideally that's what you want to do you want to get google analytics as your first tag and tag manager so what i'm going to do is because analytics is a google product it's already integrated nicely with tag manager so i'm just going to click on google analytics it's going to be a page for you that's what i'm tracking and now i have to set up a variable

and so what it's going to do it's going to ask me to set select a variable and so what you're going to do is you're going to select new variable and what you're going to do is you're actually going to go and add your tracking id here that's going to be your variable so where do i get my tracking id and analytics well if i'm in analytics i'm going to go to admin and then under property settings i'm going to see my tracking id and all you need to do then is go to tag manager

and paste copy first you got to copy over that tracking id then you're going to go to tag manager and paste it and then that's going to create a variable for you and then when you create that variable you're going to see it in the drop down here so i've already created it and basically that's your tag with a variable then what are you going to do you're going to set up a trigger so see i have some triggers already set up you're going to see a default trigger already set up for you and that's

going to be all pages so ideally what you want to do is you want to select all pages in order for analytics to fire on all pages so that's what we're doing we're setting up a trigger we're basically telling tag manager hey if i get a visitor to any page on my website then i want you to fire google analytics so that's basically in summary how to set up your first tag and my recommendation is your first tag should be google analytics and when you set up analytics you're going to have to set up a

variable for the tracking id and so you get the tracking id again from admin property settings copy and paste that tracking id over save it you have your variable that variable is going to be included in with the tag then your trigger is going to be all pages and there you go you have your first tag you have your first variable you have your first trigger so that's basically what you want to do and once you've added that tag once you've added that trigger then the only thing you need to do now is basically publish

the tag and so anytime you save a tag you're going to go ahead and submit it so that way it gets published so again what you're going to do is let's take a step back here you're going to choose new tag you're going to choose analytics from the drop down menu you're going to choose page view then basically you're going to add your tracking id so you can set up the variable and then basically that's what you need to do okay you're going to add that tracking id and then voila that's your tag with a

variable and then once you've done that then you're going to click submit so when you click submit you're basically saying hey i want this tag to go live now this tag and trigger and once you've done that then analytics is ready to go and anytime somebody goes to your website on any page tag manager is going to fire google analytics so the great thing here is you have something called google tag assistant and that's an extension that works with chrome and so when you've actually added tag manager to your site or you have analytics running

in tag manager you can confirm if those tags are firing properly so let's take a look at how google tag assistant works okay so if you just do a search for google tag assistant you're gonna see here that it's basically just an extension that works in chrome and unfortunately it only works in chrome browser it doesn't work in any other browser so go ahead and install that extension into chrome and when you do that you're gonna see this nice icon here in your browser and now if you go to any website and i click on

google tag assistant and i click on enable okay so basically i'm loading google tag assistant and now once i refresh the page i can see that this particular site has google tag manager installed and not only does it have tag manager installed i can see that it's also has google analytics running i have also google optimize running and i have google ads remarketing tag running in tag manager so that's what tag assistant does it allows you to see if one tag manager is on the site and if it is great what other tags are firing

on this particular site so tag assistant's telling me i have these particular tags firing on that site and they're firing within tag manager so tag assistant is a great way to confirm if one tag manager is on the site and two what other tags are firing on the site now another way you could confirm if tag manager is firing on the site is you can go into preview mode so even before you submit and publish your tag and trigger you can click on the preview mode so if i click preview in tag manager so basically

that's going to put me in preview mode and so what does that mean well that means that now i'm free to go to my website and see if those tags are firing and so let's take a look at what that looks like so if i go to the website and just click refresh then what's gonna happen is tag manager is going to load in preview mode just as you see here okay so that's going to take a second couple seconds to load up and now what can i see in preview mode i could see that

i have gtm firing but i also have some other tags found on this page remarketing i have google analytics i google optimize i have some other tags firing as well and so the preview mode shows me what tags are firing on any given page and i can also see what tags did not fire okay so here i have a number of tags already in gtm but they didn't fire on this particular page so let's just say i clicked on the donate now button i'm still in preview mode so i'm going to be able to see

what tags fired now i could see i have a couple of tags that have fired on this particular page and then i can see what tags did not fire on this page okay so that's the preview mode you can use the preview mode before you even submit a tag and trigger to see if it fires and that's the great benefit of tag manager so if you're not sure if something's going to fire or not then you can always go into preview mode and if you are sure it's gonna fire then you can go ahead and

submit it so you can leave preview mode and just go ahead and submit that particular tag and trigger so here i'm gonna leave preview mode and now once i'm done and i'm sure the tag is gonna fire and go ahead and submit all my changes that i've worked on in terms of setting up tags and triggers so that's really gtm in a nutshell so i have my tags okay my tags are just snippets of code that i'm going to put in whether that be facebook or vet tracking or any other google product like optimize or

page view then i have my triggers my triggers are there to tell gtm when to fire that tag and the variables are there to help those tags and triggers work together so remember that particular variable we set up for google analytics okay so here it is right here because we want to tell gtm what property to specifically fire in google analytics so that's why we set up that variable but there are all sorts of variables google tag manager has built-in or variables already created for you or you can specifically define a variable so variables are

there to help the tags and triggers work together so when you set up a tag you set up a trigger you use a variable you can always go into preview mode preview it by going to the website seeing if it fires if it fires then voila you can go ahead and click submit and that will publish the tag and trigger and you're good to go that's pretty much how tag manager works and again i can't stress that there's an unlimited number of tags you can add to tag manager there's no limit so you got everything

from anything from google to non-google to event tracking okay to facebook to anything that you want to track you want to be able to put into tag manager and again there's versioning that's one of the great benefits of tag manager so if i want to go back to an older version i can simply do that so here you can see i'm on version 32. that's how tag manager works and i can't stress that you know tag manager is there to help you track interactivity on the site because if you have a site that's interactive that

has a video that has a download button let's just say you know you have all sorts of newsletter sign ups facebook youtube buttons on your website just like this website does and you want to be able to track how many people click on that particular button well you're going to need tag manager and when you have tag manager you're going to be able to track all of these button clicks and interactivity on your website 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