Sometimes, it becomes a gigantic task to target potential customers in your demographic region for your healthcare business. You might have formulated solid SEO strategies to acquire customers across your country. But what if you’re still not able to capture the people around you?
This is exactly where you need foolproof local SEO services for your healthcare business. Whether you’re a healthcare manufacturer, dentist, ophthalmologist, or other medical professional, promoting your business in your city is non-negotiable. Only the people around you have an innate potential to drive repetitive business with a high customer retention rate.
Still not convinced? “Near me” searches for healthcare services have doubled since 2015. In fact, 44% of Internet users search for doctors and other medical professionals online before getting treatment.
Investing in healthcare SEO services is a golden ticket to attracting local patients and increasing your healthcare business’s credibility and authority in your city. This guide discusses the best local SEO strategies to boost your healthcare business.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an organic marketing methodology that makes your business discoverable and drives quality leads. As the name suggests, Local SEO is an SEO segment that focuses on targeting people who live in the vicinity of your business location.
Local SEO is a no-brainer practice for healthcare businesses, manufacturers and medical professionals, such as doctors, laboratories, dentists, etc. Since healthcare businesses run offline, local SEO forms an integral part of such local-functioning businesses to lure patients and customers living in proximity to your locations.
Talking about digital marketing strategies for healthcare businesses, splurging on local SEO services is a must.
Thriving in the healthcare landscape is a daunting task, considering unparalleled competition. This challenge calls for a solid local SEO strategy. The reasons why local SEO is significant for a healthcare business are mentioned as follows:
Now that you understand the importance of local SEO, let’s discuss some sureshot local SEO tips for healthcare businesses.
Since people have turned to Google to search for local doctors, dentists, or healthcare providers, numerous citation websites have listed these businesses. Therefore, it is important to optimize your business profile for such listing websites.
Some of the listing sites for healthcare and medical businesses in the USA with high domain authority include vitals.com, wellness.com, healthsoul.com, holisticdir.com, etc. Ensure you provide all the right information to these local business directories to make your healthcare business discoverable.
You must include the following details of your business in these listing websites, such as:
According to Podium, 9 in 10 users make buying decisions based on online reviews. Out of all the popular online review sites, Google is a clear winner. It is home to a staggering 75% of all online reviews!
This is the reason why it is important to claim and optimize your Google Business Profile. By being listed on the Google Business Profile, customers will be able to search for your business on Google and Google Maps.
As in the above image example, there are a significant number of reviews for dentists in Houston, Texas.
You can encourage your visitors to post reviews on Google. One of the best ways to do this is to reach out to your patients through Gmail to fill in a review for your business. Don’t forget to add a link to your Google Business Profile.’
If you’re new to Google Business, you can get started with it by following the steps mentioned below:
You can’t survive in any business scenario without having an online business presence. Therefore, it is vital to have your own business website. The website must be optimized for local keywords. This means that the content on your website, such as service pages, about us, contact information, and other navigation pages, must contain local keywords.
For example, if you’re a dermatologist practising in Nashville, you must work on keywords, such as ‘best dermatologist in Nashville’, ‘cosmetologist in Nashville’, ‘dermatologists near me’, ‘skin doctors in Nashville’, etc.
This practice allows your potential patients to discover your business online. Ensure that you’re resolving customer queries and not just stuffing keywords in your website. Post relevant blogs with transactional and informational keywords to help you outrank your competitors.
Speaking of competitors, it is a crucial practice to perform competitor analysis and look for keywords with less keyword difficulty (KD). When you work on user-intended keywords, Google also ranks your page well based on the content value.
Your website creates the first impression of your business. Therefore, ensure that you follow the best practices for local SEO for healthcare businesses. Some of the important SEO practices to keep in mind are as follows:
Your website’s UI/UX should be intuitive, seamless and navigational in nature. Make sure that you’re using the HTML tags to give your website a visual structure and optimize it from a technical point of view. For example, the HTML tags for a WordPress website look as follows:
Backlinks are indeed the backbone of the entire local SEO strategy. You can increase your website’s domain authority and accountability by getting recognition from other well-established websites.
You can contact various local health organizations and partner with them through guest posting. You can also start posting and promoting your healthcare business on community websites to get high-quality backlinks. Treat backlinks as digital word-of-mouth, where your business gets backed by renowned websites and personalities.
The goal is to boost your search authority with the help of high-quality backlinks.
Note: Do not engage in spammy backlinking practices, as Google’s AI is smart enough to identify them. Google also degrades the ranking of websites that purchase backlinks.
Content is the ultimate driving force for a website’s ranking on the search engine. Quality content is also the stepping stone to beating your competitors in the market. To gain relevant traffic, you can post informational blog posts on your website.
For example, Dr. Behrooz Torkian is a plastic surgeon practising in Beverly Hills. He has a dedicated website with high-quality content. The following blog post on his website is an informative post for ‘lip fillers aftercare’.
Therefore, one must have an active blog page on their website to rank well on Google.
Utilizing schema markup is an imperative practice in technical SEO. It is nothing but lines of code that help Google understand your content better. Structured data follows a standardized format containing information about a web page and categorizing the content.
Local SEO is an indispensable practice for healthcare professionals and businessmen. It helps local people gain online visibility, therefore opening the doorway to generating consistent revenue. You can refer to this guide to gain insights into local SEO for healthcare manufacturers and medical professionals.
We understand that SEO is easier said than done. Implementing all the above-mentioned practices takes hands-on experience. This is why it is vital to invest in a reliable digital marketing agency. Established for over 18 years in the industry, Deftsoft is a renowned healthcare SEO agency.
We have a team of professional SEO experts, digital marketers, UI/UX designers, and marketing analytics professionals to help you soar your healthcare business. Our clients are a living testimonial to our helpful services.
Contact us now to make your healthcare business mainstream!
Do you struggle to attract new patients to your dental practice despite providing exceptional care? Traditional marketing methods may not be enough to reach potential customers in the digital age.
Today, prospects rely increasingly on digital channels to explore healthcare options, while most dental services are constantly vying for attention.
The competition to grab the attention of potential customers is fierce, and standing out in dental healthcare services requires more than clinical excellence. This is where dental SEO becomes paramount to ensure that your potential patients find you online for dental services in your area.
Dental SEO is a subset of local SEO specifically designed for dental services. It involves utilizing various SEO techniques to improve visibility and unpaid search rankings.
These rankings play a crucial role in driving more visitors to your website, encouraging them to contact you for healthcare services. Implementing effective dental SEO can be a powerful method to market your dental products or services.
The key goal is to attract more traffic by targeting higher positions in local search results, such as “dentist near me” or “best dentist in Oklahoma,” among others.
Strong SEO is essential for your site as it translates to more traffic and potential patients seeking your services.
Online local searches are powerful tools for brick-and-mortar businesses, including dental practices. According to a study, 80% of local searches convert, emphasizing the significant impact a robust local strategy can have on a dentist’s business success.
Conversely, not ranking for relevant keywords may result in losing business to competitors. To stay at the forefront, you can get help from dental SEO services that can help you build trust and loyalty among the prospects.
The Impact of Dental SEO on Patient Acquisition and Retention
Over 7% of Google searches are related to healthcare, with many users seeking trustworthy dentists in their area. This makes dental SEO strategies an integral part of the search journey, significantly influencing dentists’ business and credibility. Here’s how dental SEO contributes to business growth:
1. Improved Credibility: Optimizing Google Business Profile (GBP) and website content for relevant local keywords enhances dentists’ visibility. Clicking on top results leads users to believe that these listings belong to credible sources.
Detailed online profiles with positive reviews on GBP create a professional and quality care impression. More clicks build trust with Google, pushing your listing to the top.
2. SEO Brings More Patients to Our Website: Ranking at the top of the search results will help you achieve ten times the click-through rate (CTR) compared to being in the 10th position. When people search for local terms like “dentists near me” or “implants dentist in New Jersey,” your site will show up in the search results.
Quality content engages visitors and compels them to call or submit contact requests. Thus, SEO creates inbound traffic with a high likelihood of conversion.
3. Create a Memorable User Experience: Exceptional SEO and a refined user experience work hand in hand to create a memorable experience for patients. SEO helps the site load quickly and engages the visitor with useful and scannable headlines, paragraphs, and visuals.
The user’s website experience will influence SEO results. For instance, if your site loads in less than 3 seconds and pages are optimized with headings, subheadings, and original content, it positively impacts your SEO.
4. Higher ROI: Investing in robust dental SEO delivers an impressive return by consistently bringing in new patients. Although SEO is a consistent process, it is much cheaper in the long run, especially when you have achieved rankings. Those rankings can last longer in the search results with some effort.
Effective search optimization helps attract more website visitors from searches for local dentists and specific procedures.
To reach your target audience, it is crucial to capture their undivided attention by appearing on the landing page where they are directed. Additionally, it is important to remain relevant to their search by appearing when they are seeking practices similar to yours.
You need to continuously attract new patients to thrive and grow your dental business. It is where you need to focus on implementing the right SEO strategies to drive qualified traffic to your site and boost visibility for prospective patients searching online.
Here are the 6 key dental SEO strategies you can leverage to expand your patient base and fill your appointment book naturally. So, let’s get started.
A well-functional website is a must for running a successful business dental service. Only a perfectly looking site can retain visitors and turn them into loyal customers. Although various elements come under the design part, here are the key points:
Remember that creating an engaging website is a never-ending process. The trends in the latest website structures change as the trends change in the fashion and makeup industries. You cannot count on that once your website is created, it will continue to work for years. It will help you focus on creating an engaging website that attracts visitors.
SEO writing is about writing content in a way that helps the website rank high on search engines. But before you start with content, you need to create the content strategy. It is important to:
Unique: The unique design is also supported by unique content. Here are the areas that can look to optimize your content:
Your content should be original: Copy and pasted content will be penalized and eventually will lead your content to go down in SERPs. Be sure that you use a unique voice and tone that engages the visitors.
Compelling: Google has always focused on the fact that your content should be written for the user first and not for the search engines. So, ensure that the type of content you create is focused on the pain points of your patients and not on how you want to write. You need to put your patients first and address their questions and pain areas and how to solve those problems.
Keyword-Optimized: The most important of all for SEO is to ensure your content has keywords in it. To do this, you need to conduct keyword research for every page on your website and ensure those keywords are included in headings, meta info, and copy.
What makes a business stand out from others? Often, it is a catchy logo or a slogan. But it is more than that: engaging brand communications and focusing on what makes your practice unique for your target persona. A brand communicates with patients about what type of experience they can expect from the office and services your dental services offer.
A good brand will keep the patient engaged and help your SEO efforts to bring more patients to your site.
The words your patients use can have a great effect on your new patients. People who like to visit the dentist will likely read the reviews first before visiting in person. Showing the search engines that you are a trusted dentist, you need to understand the power of SEO.
One powerful technique that visitors also trust is online reviews left by patients. Whether you get reviews on Google Business profile, Yelp, or Facebook, always ensure that you have plenty of them on your site or GBP or GMB.
If you don’t know how to optimize your business profiles. In that case, you can get help from dental SEO services that are designed to make your practice stand out, give you a competitive edge, and increase patient acquisition.
Your competitors might be ranking above you, so undermining them can be a big mistake. This is why understanding your competitors is important, and analyzing the strategies they use is an integral part of dental SEO. It also becomes important as there can be several players vying for the same keyword, such as the best dental services in Oklahoma. While doing analysis, you need to focus on key metrics such as:
Every product or service you offer will appeal to a certain group. Defining your target audience will help your marketing department make campaigns that reach the correct people and create a company message accordingly. It will help you:
Your brand might focus on untargeted branding and marketing efforts if you don’t know the target audience.
The dental landscape is increasingly competitive, and an effective online presence and SEO strategy can differentiate your practices. You need to test various methods to find out what works best to increase the customer base.
Your approach for SEO should be based on a long-term strategy that compounds results over time. So, remember that you remain patient and persistent during SEO.
The online presence of any brand has become so important these days. If you have a business, you must be advised to use digital public relations (PR) strategies to achieve more success.
But what is digital PR anyway?
In easy words, it is a bunch of marketing strategies that are used by any business or website to generate traffic or audience for their brand. Let’s understand with an example. Assume that you are launching a new fitness app. Here, our main goal is to create awareness, generate user interest, and build a positive online reputation for our app.
But how would you do it? Of course, we must apply some strategies such as press releases, media outreach, social media campaigns, partnerships with influencers, content marketing, reviews, events, etc.
The practice of using such strategies to improve the brand image digitally is known as digital PR. Traditionally, we used to use print media, pamphlets, broadcasts, and live events for public relationship optimization. Now, we have just upgraded from traditional marketing to digital marketing.
If you are thinking about how a digital PR strategy can make a profit for you, here’s a brief breakdown!
In SEO, the prime focus is search engines and ranking, but digital PR is something that builds a good reputation for your business as the brand. It’s a matter of fact that, sometimes, backlink building can cause several issues. For example, if you keep relying on the sites for building the links or offer too many links to others, it may be possible that your website will be nothing but a link farm.
So, despite going for numerous backlinks, Digital PR focuses on highly ranked and authorized sites only. It will not only generate organic traffic but also be proud to be featured in top magazines.
In the world of daily scams and frauds, people get concerned and build some trust issues over the companies they find online. On the other hand, they can easily trust the brands and businesses that have a good reputation and reviews.
If a giant third party recommends you to your targeted audience, they would like to connect with you. It increases the authority and credibility of your business, too.
Unlike some immediate marketing tactics, digital PR offers a long-lasting impact. Every positive mention creates a lasting online presence, continuously benefiting your business over the years.
While the initial investment might not result in an immediate surge in traffic, the compounded effects on social media, brand credibility, and lead generation ensure a positive return on investment over time.
Digital PR serves as an effective tool to capture the attention of potential investors. Positive online content showcases your company’s strengths and achievements, providing valuable information to interested investors.
This information, when linked in the “as seen on” or “featured in” bar, offers a comprehensive view of your business to potential stakeholders.
Integrating digital PR efforts with email marketing creates a powerful synergy. By showcasing your achievements and valuable information in email campaigns, you nurture existing customer relationships, boost their interest, and potentially generate referrals.
You can ask the audience on your site to sign up for your website’s newsletter or create an account. By doing so, you can get their email to connect with them. Send helpful and promotional Emails to excite the users and convert them into your customers. This strategy helps in capturing highly qualified leads.
Keep in mind that you should be focusing on high-quality and shareable content. It can be statistics, case studies, research papers, blog posts, infographics, videos, and any kind of interactive content.
After content creation, the distribution of content also matters. You can simply post it on your website as a web blog or any third party as a guest post, press releases, media pitches, and so on.
Almost half of the world’s population uses social media. Try to build and maintain an active presence on the social media platforms of your company or service. Use polls, upload posts, get live sessions, share updates, and create day-to-day stories relevant to your name.
You can also engage with followers by replying or responding to comments and participating in their conversations. Try to post trendy short video content like “Instagram reels,” “YouTube shorts,” and “Tiktok videos.” It will help in gaining followers.
To make users interact with you, try running ads, campaigns, contests, or quizzes. The more your audience will participate, the more successful your campaign will be.
You also have options to host podcasts or webinars that are helpful for your audience.
Influencers are the people who are so popular over social media or the internet with a huge fan base. As these influencers always stay active on social media, they have an increasing audience. To promote your brand and get a good reach, you can collaborate with them. Their collaboration fee is quite less than that of other high-end celebrities.
Make sure that your chosen influencer belongs to your industry or niche. Ask the influencers to share their experiences with your brand and offer good or natural-looking reviews.
Not only influencers, you can also collaborate with YouTubers, bloggers, journalists, and other famous individuals.
Keep a keen eye on the internet and try to monitor what people think about your brand and what their resentments are for their service. You can make use of some social listening tools like Hootsuite, Brandwatch, Talkwalker, etc.
Balance the ratio of negative and positive comments and reviews of your services. But you don’t have to pretend “so perfect” as no one is that dumb, though. Only approve authentic reviews and comments. Also, try to gracefully accept the negative reviews and address them.
Highlight positive reviews and testimonials on your business site to build trust.
If you want to know why brands need online reputation management then must read this blog: https://deftsoftseo.com/why-brands-need-online-reputation-management-in-2024/
There is a big difference between SEO and Digital PR, but both are equally dependent on each other.
So, if you’re optimizing your digital assets for search engines with whitehead SEO practices, it will surely create good public relationships.
Work on CTAs! You should put a targeted link over the relevant anchor text. Also, make sure that they are following the “promoting strategy.”
1. Share newsworthy press releases for publicity.
2. Gain high-quality backlinks from various sources.
3. Find unlinked mentions of your company.
4. Add the company website to directories and top 10 lists.
5. Network with journalists, editors, influencers, and bloggers.
6. Create relevant content to build trust and authority.
7. Cross-promote content across owned media channels.
8. Write and publish guest blogs for added exposure.
9. Secure opportunities for interviews and expert opinions.
10. Implement affiliate and referral programs.
Here are common Digital PR tools:
Most large enterprises like to get a readymade approach from Digital PR agencies. It’s better to outsource rather than insource digital marketing experts.
One of the most promising advantages of hiring a Digital PR agency is the results. Many reputed digital marketing firms like Deftsoft keep a team of highly experienced PR specialists to do this job for you. The only thing you have to do is to sit back and enjoy your coffee.
However, the “self-help” option may seem quite budget-friendly, but the results demand a lot of time, experience, expertise, and hard work. Also, creating an in-house team can be very expensive for you.
So, if you’re not a pro in digital marketing and Digital PR marketing, it’s okay! Deftsoft is standing by your side. We have exactly what your business needs. Connect with us today!
So, what do you do whenever you use Google? You put your query or some keywords to get the answers, right?
After getting a search query, you get a SERP page. You must prefer clicking on the top-ranking site rather than bothering yourself by scrolling down to the second page. But what if even the first-ranking site is unable to fulfill your query?
Well, it’s obvious to get back on the SERP and choose the second or third-top-ranking sites. Here, we get the concept of dwell time and bounce rate in SEO. You have a site that is getting visitors, but instead of engaging more, completely satisfied, or going to the other pages of your website, they simply get back after visiting a single page—it’s a bounce.
The percentage of such visitors is known as your site’s bounce rate, and the time an individual spends on your web page is known as dwell time. If 70% of users have visited your site like this, your bounce rate is 70%, and if the time they spent there is 20 seconds, your dwell time will be 20 seconds.
Dwell time and bounce rate are the two most important things in SEO that tell you about the performance of your site. So, if you want your ranking to be good, you need to practice optimization for these two. But before all that, you need to know what dwell time and bounce rate actually are.
In 2011, the dwell time was first mentioned by Bing as “a signal we watch” for the measurement of the quality and audience engagement of a page.
However, it’s not a confirmed Google ranking factor, but it’s a key performance indicator (KPI), which is very important to make things better.
If you have less dwell time, it doesn’t mean that your content isn’t as good as it should be. It may be possible that the user query isn’t answered in the first paragraphs, or they are looking for something else. There are different search intent of different users. But if the average dwell time is always low on your site, you need to give it some attention.
Moreover, a low dwell time in SEO can impact the machine learning algorithms of Google or other search engines, and it can significantly lower your rankings.
Well, there is no specific formula to calculate dwell time in SEO, but you can check it via average session duration in Universal Analytics (UA) or Average Engagement Time in GA 4.
Note: Universal Analytics refers to the previous generation of Google Analytics
The average session duration measures how long the user spends on the whole site rather than one page. On the other side, Average Engagement Time is the average time a user engages in a webpage and is calculated as a sum of user engagement durations per user.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to understanding and analyzing the Average Engagement Time metric in Google Analytics 4 (GA4):
Step 1: Log in to your GA 4 or Analytics account using your credentials.
Step 2: Once logged in, you’ll be directed to the GA4 dashboard. Navigate to the “Reports” section using the left-hand sidebar menu.
Step 3: Within the Reports section, follow “Reports> Engagement> pages and screens.
Step 4: Locate and select the metric labeled “Average Engagement Time.”
The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who simply leave the site without taking any action. No clicks on other links, no purchases, no signing up, and no comments or feedback. Bounce rate is closely related to Google rankings.
The average bounce rate usually lies between 41% and 51%, and if your bounce rate is above 80%, it’s an indication that you need to improve your page, content, UX, or UI. But the bounce rate and its value depend on various niches and your targets.
For example, eCommerce & retail usually have a 20-45% bounce rate, while landing pages and blogs have 60-90%.
Moreover, it also depends on the site’s traffic and its sources. Display ads and social media traffic have the highest bounce rate of around 55%, while referrals & emails have around 35%.
In UA, the bounce rate is only dependent upon user interaction, but in GA4, it is measured on the basis of user engagement measures like page views, session duration, and conversion events. You can also analyze the bounce rate on the basis of its opposite engagement rate.
To check the bounce rate in Google Analytics (GA4), here are the steps to follow.
Step 1: Log in to your (Analytics) GA4 account and go to the left-hand side menu bar. After that, simply click on the “Reports” tab.
Step 2: Click on “Engagement” and then select “Pages and screens.”
Step 3: Use the pencil icon located on the top right corner of your screen to customize the report.
Step 4: In the sidebar that appears on the right, choose “Metrics.”
Step 5: Click on “Add metric” at the bottom of the sidebar. Select “Bounce rate” from the list.
Step 6: Click and drag the six dots next to “Bounce rate” to move it up so that it’s one of the first columns in the report.
Step 7: Click on “Apply” to confirm your changes.
Step 8: Click on “Save” and then select “Save changes to the current report.” Finally, click “Save” to save your changes. Navigate back to the report to ensure that the bounce rate is now included.
After all this discussion, I hope you had a clear understanding of dwell time and bounce rate. So, talk about how they are different from each other to make our knowledge even better from the point of view of SEO.
If you’re in a hurry, here’s a quick overview of it.
Criteria |
Dwell Time |
Bounce Rate |
Definition |
The amount of time a user spends on a webpage or content before navigating away or returning to search results. |
The percentage of the audience leaving a website after visiting only a single page, without interacting or navigating to other pages. |
Measurement |
Measured in seconds or minutes. |
Measured as a percentage. |
Significance |
Indicates user engagement and the quality of the content. Higher dwell time often suggests valuable and relevant content. |
Indicates how well a webpage retains visitors. A lower bounce rate generally indicates and shows that visitors find the content relatable and engaging. |
Interactivity |
May not necessarily involve interaction with the page (e.g., reading an article without scrolling or clicking). |
Indicates whether users are exploring multiple pages on the website or leaving after viewing just one. |
SEO Impact |
Generally considered a positive signal for search engines, as it suggests that users find the content valuable. It may contribute to higher search rankings. |
A lower bounce rate is generally seen positively by search engines, as it indicates that users are finding what they need and engaging with the site. |
Examples |
Reading a blog post from start to finish. |
Landing on a webpage and immediately clicking the back button. |
Factors Influencing |
Content quality and relevance. |
Page load speed. |
Optimization Tips |
Create high-quality, engaging content. |
Improve page layout and user experience. |
Limitations |
Doesn’t account for time spent on interactions like scrolling or watching videos without interacting. |
Doesn’t consider the time spent on a page; a user may spend a long time reading a page and still be counted as a bounce if they don’t navigate to another page. |
Now, let’s move on to the details!
If you have been reading this blog from the beginning, you already spent 5 minutes. It means you found this post interesting, isn’t it?
Here, the dwell time is pretty good, but I can’t say anything about the bounce rate. If you haven’t clicked any links, didn’t leave any comments, or take any action, you have certainly increased the bounce rate of my page.
In terms of SEO, if you ask which one is most important. It’ll be a tricky question to answer as the measurement of both metrics can be highly or almost equally profitable and wise.
It’s important to keep in mind that dwell time isn’t an actual concept by Google or GA4, and you’re simply going for its average values rather than per individual time. However, we use this concept for the site owners to improve their SEO engagement.
But in the case of bounce rate, things are more straightforward. You can simply check the bounce rate in Google Analytics (GA4) directly.
A longer dwell time generally suggests that users find the content valuable and engaging, which can positively affect search engine rankings and user satisfaction.
A high bounce rate can showcase that visitors are not finding what they’re looking for or that the landing page doesn’t meet their expectations. It can negatively impact factors in search engine rankings and conversions.
Well, there’s no standard definition of a good bounce rate. It can vary based on some factors, such as industry, type of website, target audience, and content type. For E-commerce websites, the range between 20% and 40% might be considered good. For content-focused websites, it can be 40% – 60%, and for landing pages, it should be below 70%.
Similar to bounce rate, what constitutes a “good” dwell time can vary depending on factors such as the type of website, content, and user intent. Generally, a longer dwell time in SEO is preferable. However, it’s okay if you sometimes get a low average engagement rate (as you can’t actually measure dwell time).
In the end, I would like to remind you that SEO and Google rankings depend on multiple and endless factors. Dwell time and bounce rate are one of them.
It seems pretty hard to follow all these factors but the reality is that 95% of those factors aren’t officially listed by Google. For good rankings, Google only talks about the relevance of content, quality of content, usability of web pages, context, and helpfulness. Neither dwell time nor bounce rate can exactly, directly, and instantly affect your site. Undoubtedly, they are good metrics to track the performance of your site and web pages. If you always get less dwell time and a higher bounce rate, it’s an indication to change your strategies.
Moreover, Google and other search engines are also evolving with time, and their ML algorithms are getting more advanced. In such scenarios, optimizing each ranking factor and content or page quality is highly important.
I hope you loved reading here. If this post is helpful for you, share it with your team and SEO executive buddies. Have a nice day!
It is simply too good to be true. In case you are getting a zero-bounce rate, there are possibilities that you have a massive number of visitors performing any action, your visitors are directly visiting the inner pages, your website has any technical issues, or the pages users are visiting are not landing pages.
There’s no evident proof that explains that dwell time affects Google indexing. This term is made for site owners to track the progress of their site.
Exit rate is the measure of the percentage of users who simply leave a website from a specific page after exploring other pages. On the other side, bounce rate is the measurement of the percentage of users who leave a website after visiting or scrolling only a single page.
Google reigns the search engine industry with a 92% market share worldwide. But it does not stop there; the company has expanded in various other services such as mail, productivity tools, mobile devices, enterprise products, and other ventures.
Apart from this, Google also offers powerful search and analytics tools that have become indispensable for modern marketing and web use. Its services help businesses understand and reach their audiences.
The two most powerful tools by Google are Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console. If you are wondering what the difference is between Google Analytics and the Google Search Console, we will help you in this brief post.
Google Search Console, which was previously known as Google Webmaster Tool, helps website owners monitor and improve their site’s performance in Google search results. Here is the difference between Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console.
Key features of the search console
Search Console also provides valuable insights and data about your website’s presence on Google. It’s an essential tool for understanding and enhancing your search engine visibility. Using Search Console can help drive more organic traffic to your site.
Google Analytics 4 helps in keeping tracks and visualizes reports of website traffic and user behavior:
Key features:
Google Analytics is another powerful analytics tool from Google that provides detailed insight into website users and activity. This tool provides an invalidate understanding of your audience, optimizes user experience, and measures marketing effectiveness. It also allows you to help your business to make data-driven decisions to boost conversion and revenue.
The primary difference between Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console is the way both function and the various types of data they provide.
Primarily, Search Google Search Console focuses on search engine optimization, allowing you to understand how your website performs in search results.
On the other hand, Google Analytics enables webmasters to find out how users engage with the site. It means that by using both tools, you can optimize your website for machines (search engines) and humans. But if you are wondering about the different metrics they both track, let’s find out more.
Google Search Console collects data that gives you insight into your website’s performance in search engine result pages. Here are the common metrics:
Google Analytics allows you to monitor website performance and understand user behavior to make informed decisions that can impact your business.
Here are the metrics it tracks:
Google Search Console and Google Analytics are both essential tools for marketers and serve different purposes. However, they also share some common features.
Google Analytics and Google Search Console give you deeper insights into website performance, areas that need improvement, and insights to create data-driven strategies to increase traffic and achieve your business goals. When you learn how to use them effectively, you can improve your website and enhance SEO to drive more traffic.
Google Analytics tracks and gives information about your website traffic and user activity. It provides insights into visitor behavior, acquisition channels, conversions, and other key metrics.
Google Webmaster Tools was renamed to Google Search Console in 2015. So, Google Search Console is the new name for the same service.
Google Analytics reports on user activity on your site, while Google Search Console focuses on your site’s performance in Google search results. Search Console gives data on search traffic, rankings, indexing, and optimizations.
You can connect your Search Console and Analytics accounts through the Admin section of Analytics. It allows you to pull Search Console data into Analytics for a unified view of your site’s traffic.
Yes, the data from Search Console is accurate and directly from Google. It provides authoritative insights into how Google bots view and index your site.
Google Analytics is used to understand visitor behavior, acquire users, engage audiences, and optimize conversions. The data it provides is essential for digital marketing, SEO, web development, and overall site improvement.
Has it been months since you added your app to the Google Play Store, but users cannot find it? Your app needs to be optimized!
There are over 3.718 million apps listed on the Google Play Store currently. With the raging competition and a crowded world like Play Store’s, App Store Optimization is the need of the hour. There are four major things you need to understand to master the art of App Store Optimization:
By the end of this read, you’ll know how to hit millions of downloads for your app!
Even if you’re confident in the utility and accuracy of your app, it can still get lost in the ocean of infinite apps on the Google Play Store. Therefore, App Store Optimization (ASO) is essential because of the following reasons:
Follow along to crack the code of top-notch strategies to optimize your app using App Store Optimization. The strategies are mentioned as follows:
People get attracted to what sells to the eyes. Therefore, focusing on the app title, icon, long and short descriptions, promo video, and app screenshots is a significant practice. Let’s go over the strategies for each one of them.
Since Google Play Store has now limited the app title to 30 characters, you must create a crisp one. Tailoring the app title by incorporating the most-searched keywords is essential. Another tip is to keep the title catchy and easy to read. Refrain from substituting the app title with something fancier. This practice can divert the app from what the user is looking for.
Another excellent practice for app optimization is creating an impactful and intuitive app icon. For example, if you’re building a meditation app, you can create a monochromatic icon with whitespace in the background. This practice subconsciously allows the user to connect the app icon with peace and serenity.
Note: Don’t use promotional icons such as adding phrases like ‘No. 1 app’. This technique goes against Google Play Store app guidelines.
The app’s long and short descriptions are part of the metadata. The extended description should be at most 80 characters and must contain the gist of your app. The users can understand your app’s purpose through the short description.
The extended description includes content related to what your app is all about. It should be at most 4000 characters. Since this is a long description, try avoiding stuff keywords. Google also crawls the app page; therefore, use the keywords wisely.
Tip: Always add a Call-to-Action (CTA) at the end of the long description.
Uploading a promo video for your app is one of the most innovative ways of App Store Optimization for the Google Play Store. You cannot add a promo video directly to the Google Play Store. First, you must upload the video on YouTube and then link it to the Play Store.
Tip: Keep the video at most 12-15 seconds since most users have short attention spans.
App screenshots appear right after the promo video. You must use about 7-8 screenshots for your app. Note that the screenshots must be of mobile and tablet views. These app screenshots must depict the utility and functionality of your app.
One prominent way to increase app credibility, reliability, and trust is to value app reviews, ratings, and Google Play’s Android Vitals. Let’s discuss them further.
The ratings and reviews the users drop directly affect the app’s ranking on the Google Play Store. You must be well aware of how users respond to your app. Are the majority of reviews positive? Are you addressing the users’ problems? Are you constantly fixing the app’s bugs?
All these things matter a lot when trying app optimization on the Google Play Store.
Offering a seamless user experience is a non-negotiable for any app on the Google Play Store. Therefore, taking care of the technical aspects via Android vitals is critical. The following factors must be addressed as covered in the Android vitals:
Getting your app featured on the Google Play Store can skyrocket the downloads of your app, thus leading to high app revenue. Featuring your app on the store takes time and a perpetual series of efforts. You can get your app featured on any one of the following sections in the Google Play Store:
Follow these strategies to get featured on the Google Play Store:
Google Play Console is a valuable tool for App Developers, App Marketers, and App Store Optimization (ASO) experts. It offers a full-fledged interface to test, release, track, manage, and monetize your apps on the Google Play Store. It is also an efficient analytics tool to measure customer acquisition, app performance, and conversion rate.
The Google Play Console offers the following features:
App Store Optimization is the need of the hour for every app on the Google Play Store. The goal is to increase app visibility ranking, get featured, and, thus, get more downloads. Just like Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is vital to optimizing websites, App Store Optimization (ASO) is part and parcel of the Google Play Store.
You can also harness the power of Google Play Console to visualize the bigger picture and create a strategy accordingly. Standing out from millions of apps on the Play Store is a daunting task. Yet, constant efforts can be a game-changer.
Brand awareness is crucial, especially if you’re a thriving business in the market space. Customers associate brands with specific products only if they’re well-versed with the brand’s unique offering. According to Statista, worldwide digital spending is about to reach $836 billion USD by 2026.
With too many options available, it can be daunting to choose the right digital marketing strategy. Spending money on running ads is of no use if you’re not able to build a reliable brand. Enhancing brand awareness with PPC (Pay-Per-Click) is one of the most strategic ways to spend money when working on brand building.
In this read, you’ll learn about some of the best and surest ways to enhance brand awareness using PPC campaigns. Let’s get started.
Brand awareness is the first and foremost step of the marketing funnel. It refers to the customers’ ability to recall or recognize your brand. The degree to which your customers know who you are and how your brand stands out is a great way to gauge your brand’s awareness.
You need to have a brand awareness campaign in order to capture customers in the long term. After all, you cannot simply run sales ads without depicting a complete brand story to the audience.
“90% of all purchasing decisions are made subconsciously.” – ISPO
For instance, if you go to a supermarket and always pick up a specific brand of toothpaste, you’re wired subconsciously to make that decision.
Now, you must be thinking that it takes years to build brand awareness. How can you do it overnight, especially if you’re new in a crowded marketplace? Apparently, you can’t. However, you can effectively enhance brand awareness using PPC!
You can target the audience on the following channels by using PPC campaigns for brand awareness:
PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click. It is a pricing model to attract traffic to a website. As the name suggests, PPC campaigns are ad campaigns that are run by a publisher on various channels, such as search engines, websites, etc. Every time a user clicks on an ad, the advertiser pays the publisher for each of the clicks.
Brand awareness can either be created by organic marketing or by using paid tactics like PPC campaigns. Organic marketing takes a long time to show its results. On the other hand, running PPC campaigns accelerates the process of converting users to your e-commerce website.
Now that you know that it is vital to generate brand awareness using PPC. let’s find out the best methodologies to formulate this digital marketing strategy.
Some of the best ways to enhance brand awareness through PPC campaigns are mentioned as follows:
While redirecting your PPC ads to a sales page might boost your product/service sales, it cannot engrain a deep impression on your customers. In order to boost brand awareness, you can redirect your customers to your company’s ‘About Us’ page.
For example, if you run a dental care brand, you can run ads for toothbrushes and redirect to a page that explains your brand’s Unique Selling Point (USP), such as biodegradability, disposability, etc.
You can enhance brand awareness with PPC by targeting the right set of people. It is a great strategy to target people with short and long-tail keywords. However, when you use precise keywords, it can be a game changer.
For example, if you’re a brand selling plumbing services, it’ll be an excellent strategy to run PPC campaigns for working singles who live in flats and are short on time. They sure will require your plumbing services at some time or another.
Diversifying your ad portfolio is a vital digital marketing strategy in running PPC campaigns. This is why it is a solid practice to run PPC ads on varied channels such as social media (Facebook/Instagram ads, TikTok ads), Google Ads, etc.
Customer retargeting is one of the best ways to target an audience strategically and enhance brand visibility and awareness. For instance, if you’re running a brand awareness campaign on Google, you can identify those users who engage with the ad and, later on, target them on Instagram ads.
Optimizing your brand awareness campaigns is significant and worthy of time. You must test and optimize your campaigns with time and gauge the results of each of the campaigns. Choose the one that works the best.
For example, you can run A/B testing, heatmaps, multivariate testing, and much more to check the efficiency of various PPC campaigns. Filter out the ones that work the best for you.
Running PPC ads alone cannot work to bring conversions. You must run ads on cross-channels such as social media, email marketing, newsletters, etc. This can help enhance brand awareness in the long run. This strategy also ensures that the users are getting converted.
Now that you’re familiar with how to enhance brand awareness with PPC, you must be aware of major trends in PPC campaigns for a solid marketing strategy for 2024.
Now that you know how to run brand awareness PPC campaigns, it is imperative to gauge the success of these campaigns. Therefore, there are certain metrics that help measure the success of PPC ads. These are discussed in detail below:
When you run ads on Google or other social media platforms, a lot of people happen to connect with the ads. However, they do not click on the ad. The number of times your ads are displayed, irrespective of whether someone clicked on them or not, is called impressions.
Although impressions are a metric that does not contribute to the revenue of your business, it does help significantly in creating brand awareness as it leaves an ‘impression’ on the users.
Reach refers to the number of people that your ad managed to reach via various search engines, social channels, or websites. It is an excellent metric to understand how well your ad is reaching the audience.
In other words, reach refers to the number of people who see your ad. It is the count of unique people who see your posted ads. It is another noteworthy metric to measure brand awareness campaign success.
Out of all the people who come across your ad, how many of them are clicking your ad? To find the answer to this question, you need to calculate the click-through rate (CTR). It can be calculated as follows:
CTR = No. of clicks/No. of impressions
The average Click-Through Rate (CTR) for web searches is 1.91%.
Are you looking for a pay-per-click agency? Then you’re at the right place. Deftsoft offers the best brand awareness services to help you grow your business. We help you curate the best digital marketing strategy, especially when working on PPC campaigns. We focus on the long-term goals and the bigger picture to help you achieve milestones for your business organization.
Deftsoft is a PPC company that offers various PPC packages that you can choose according to your own business needs. We have served numerous clients until now and successfully resolved their pain points. You can also talk to our experts, and we’ll provide you with the best possible solutions and digital marketing strategies.
That’s it for this blog. Beating the competition in the digital marketing space is a daunting yet achievable task. Brand awareness is the key to crack the code for long-term marketing success. It is crucial to engrain the image of your brand to make people come back for more. However, your brand image is not just limited to its logo and tagline; it takes much more than that.
Organic and paid marketing are the two main ways for a business organization to gain revenue. The latter accelerates the path to business success significantly and must be opted for by a growing business.
It is often said that the true test of a negative situation is how you handle it, and this term also applies to brands. It is because the social web gives everyone the freedom to have an opinion about you, and only a few of them would understand the facts.
The web is full of rumors, rants, and misinformation, and you will find thousands of people on social media taunting and ridiculing you. When you face such a situation, trying to cover up problems by removing online evidence or paying for positive posts is tempting, but it often backfires.
More than 90 percent of customers will read your business or product reviews before visiting the store or purchasing. This is why online reputation management is important, as it impacts 50% of brand value.
Online reputation management(ORM) is the practice of monitoring, managing, and improving the brand or person’s reputation online. The primary aim of ORM is to shape how a target entity is perceived and portrayed online, especially on social media.
Here are some of the key components of online reputation management.
The ultimate goal of the ORM is to build an authoritative, consistent, and positive online presence that showcases the best attributes of the brand or individual. You need to remember that an effective online reputation is not a time activity but an ongoing process.
The internet has become super important as we are going to enter in 2024. When someone searches for you online, what they find online becomes their first impression of you. It’s a big deal. Here are the 10 reasons why ORM matters for everyone.
An effective online reputation management strategy directly correlates with increased sales and profits. By actively managing brand perception online, businesses can build trust and credibility with customers.
A Harvard Business School study says that businesses with more star ratings can get an increase in revenue by as much as 9 percent. It means that products with lots of positive reviews attract more customers.
Reviews spread fast online, so invest in managing your reputation. Too many negative reviews can hurt sales, and that is why you need to work with a reputation management agency if needed. Good reputations reduce advertising costs, and that is why protecting your reputation is important.
Your website visibility will likely decrease if your business lacks customer interest. Good on-page SEO alone is not enough; it is only one part of the game. One key benefit of online reputation management is that it increases awareness.
Online reviews play a key part in Google’s local SEO, and 15% of Google Local Pack rankings come from online reviews. This shows the importance of managing your reputation. Google highly values user-generated content (UGC). Generating more positive user reviews on Google and review sites is an effective strategy.
A few damaging links on page one of Google can cost you customers who are turned off by what they find. A proactive online branding strategy is needed to influence what impressions people form when Googling you or your company.
People online can find you or more about your business through search engines and social media, especially if the decision is going to have commercial intent. Apart from this, your prospective customers, partners, and employers are very likely to look you or your company up online before engaging. These searches give people thorough knowledge of brands and individuals.
It is where search engines and review sites make it easy to find background information with simple online searches. However, if these searches turn up excessive negative sentiment, hostile articles, or concerning revelations, it can immediately affect their willingness to do business with you.
Getting trust and a strong online reputation is one of the key challenges for businesses. Making your customers believe that your business is worth investing in is more important for a business to grow. It is where social proof can turn things around.
But if your business has three to five stars, whether they are on e-commerce site reviews, local service reviews, or review aggregators sites, These stars demonstrate the value of online reputation management.
ORM enables you to showcase social proof on your website by highlighting client logos, displaying customer reviews, and linking to various review platforms to enhance credibility.
When people feel heard, it greatly enhances their experience and satisfaction. Incorporating their feedback helps in improving the product and services.
By closely monitoring what people are saying in reviews, mentions, and discussions, you can gain an understanding of customer sentiment and pain points.
Businesses can identify common complaints or issues and then customize offerings to better address the needs of their target audience. Proactively seeking out and implementing customer feedback for improvements demonstrate that the business genuinely listens and cares.
It is important to differentiate yourself from the competition in today’s highly competitive online marketplace.
Online reputation management can help strengthen your marketing efforts by showcasing your unique selling proposition from the customer’s point of view through online reviews. Online reputation management allows your customers’ feedback to sell your value for you, presenting it from your most authentic source: your customers.
When HR departs, recruits new talent, selling not only the job description or certain set of benefits but also the company itself. When a company has an authoritative and positive online presence, an ORM campaign can help to boost its ability to retain top talent. Online reputation management helps the brand build creditability and trust with the general public.
Implementing comprehensive online reputation management strategies through the best solutions can significantly increase trust and credibility for a brand.
When a brand is perceived as trustworthy, consumers are much more likely to purchase from that company. Research indicates that brands with stellar reputations with positive reviews and social proof can increase conversion rates by up to 270% compared to those with poor or limited reputations.
Online reputation management provides many benefits that keep business momentum going. One tangible gain is generating positive reviews on high-authority sites. ORM helps to create opportunities for your brand and products. A good ORM strategy targets getting reviews on influential review platforms like Goodreads and Trustpilot.
Reviews from established sites can significantly boost your online credibility and reputation. ORM helps sustain business growth by securing positive endorsements on reputable review hubs.
While companies want to avoid any sort of crisis, still unforeseen crises can strike any brand at any time. It may include scandals, damaging new stories, or other sudden events that put a reputation at stake. Without an effective response plan, these can go out of control and inflict lasting reputational damage. That is why a well-managed online reputation management service can demonstrate your brand resilience in challenging times.
As we enter 2024, Online Reputation Management has become even more important. Every click and positive interaction will help you write your own digital story. The power lies in your hands, and you must figure out what kind of story you want to create. Maintaining a positive online reputation requires consistent efforts as it is an ongoing process.
Running Facebook ad campaigns is just one part of the story. How do we know that the Facebook ads are converting? Welcome to the world of Meta Pixel, where you can track the performance of your ads. In the fast-paced era of digital marketing, everyone wants groundbreaking results. Yet, they use uncertain and crooked strategies that fail in the long run.
Make every penny count with Meta Pixel (formerly Facebook Pixel). Meta Pixel optimizes brand ads by targeting specific customers according to their behavior on the website.
This Meta Pixel guide is valuable for professionals seeking over-the-top results with a reasonable ad budget. You will learn what Meta Pixel is, what it is used for, how Facebook Pixel works, how to set up for your website, and how to integrate Facebook Pixel with website.
An average Facebook user clicks on approximately 12 ads per month. In fact, over 78% of total US consumers tap on Facebook ads and make purchases.
You must be thinking, if Facebook is mighty, how can you deploy it to bring in significant results? Thus, learning how to integrate Facebook Pixel with a website is essential.
“Meta Pixel is a block of code written in JavaScript to track the activity of users on your website by measuring KPIs. It is inserted in the back end of a website as tags. Facebook Pixel aims to track user activity, drive sales, optimize ads, increase ROI and convert users through targeted ads.
Suppose you own a sports shoe brand, and you wish to increase sales in the next financial quarter. Can you increase your company’s ROI by allocating a hefty budget to Facebook ads? May be, maybe not! It’s a complete shot in the dark if you don’t know your target audience! This is why this Meta Pixel guide is a gem for individuals seeking exponential brand growth.”
All the activities of Meta Pixel depend on Facebook cookies that help track user activity on a website/landing page. Meta Pixel comes in handy for the following use cases:
• Audience retargeting:
A user opens your website but does not complete a purchase for some reason. This is when Meta Pixel ads them to an audience to show custom Facebook ads when they browse Facebook the next time. This process is called retargeting.
• Building user persona:
Suppose that a few set of people buy products from your website. They fall under the category of ideal customers. You can then build a user persona around those customers to target new people with a better ad campaign.
• Create dynamic ads:
Many times, visitors to your website stop after being prompted to make a payment. This is when such an audience is added to the targeting list through dynamic ads. The ads are created through Advantage+ catalogue ad campaigns, allowing you to create carousel ads showing a series of products customized for the audience.
• Track conversions:
You can measure an ad campaign’s effectiveness by tracking conversions through various ad campaigns using Meta Pixel.
The Meta Pixel works in a series of six steps. These are as follows:
The first step is to install a Facebook Pixel code snippet to your website.
A list of valuable insights pops up, which includes the incoming traffic source, customer demographics such as age, location, preferences, gender, user device, etc., and much more.
You understand how various customers are behaving on the website. These include recording the following user actions:
You can then curate custom ads based on user behavior and run ad campaigns accordingly.
After recognizing the user persona most likely to complete a purchase, you can optimize your ad bids to the lowest possible number. This tip can save you dollars.
You can develop the best ad strategies by analyzing Facebook events, user persona, and audience behavior.
Here comes the most practical part of the Meta Pixel guide. Let’s learn how to set up Meta Pixel for a website. Follow along to get started!
There are two main steps to set up Meta Pixel for your website:
1. Open Meta Events Manager.
2. On the left side of the menu, click on Connect Data Sources and then select Web. Tap on Get Started.
3. Select Facebook Pixel and then Connect.
4. Enter a name in Name Your Pixel and then add your website URL in Check your website for easy setup options. Click on Continue.
1. It’s time to add pixel code to the website. Select the Use a Partner Integration if you use Facebook integration partners like WordPress, Squarespace, Shopify, etc. This method is code-free.
2. You can also manually add the pixel code snippet if you don’t use a partner integration tool.
1. Tap on Install Code Manually.
2. Click on the Copy Code button.
3. Copy and paste the pixel code directly above the </head> tag in your website’s header code. It must be pasted into each and every page, as well as, if you’re using one, into your header template. Press the Continue button.
4. You can turn on Automatic Advanced Matching to track conversions efficiently and accurately. Select Continue.
1. Tap on the Open Event Setup Tool button.
2. Enter a name for your Facebook Pixel ID. Open Settings and select the Open Event Setup Tool.
3. Add your URL and select Open Website.
4. You can then Review each listed event and choose Confirm or Dismiss. Select Finish Setup to move ahead.
Voila! You have learned how to integrate Facebook Pixel with the website. All you need to do is add your website URL after adding the name of the Pixel.
Driving a business in the right direction is essential. One can do so by harnessing the power of Meta Pixel. This blog is a valuable Meta Pixel guide for professionals and learners. Streamlining the process of Facebook ads to drive positive results captures the very essence of Facebook Pixel.
So far, you learned what Meta Pixel is, how to set up Pixel, how Facebook Pixel works and how to integrate Facebook Pixel with the website. The tool is here to stay, making custom marketing, retargeting, and ad optimization easier.
Have you recently created your website, but it is not ranking in the top results? Chances are that the Google ‘spiders’ have not crawled your website. Let me explain! Google follows various criteria to rank your website in the top results. It is the duty of the Google ‘spiders’ or Google bots to crawl through a website. There are two ways to get your website noticed by Google bots; either you wait for the spiders to notice your website through links or submit a sitemap to the Google Search Console to get noticed!
If you want to learn what a sitemap is, its types, and how to create one and submit it to Google Search Console, you’re at the right place. Without further ado, let’s dive in!
A sitemap is a file containing a collection of various Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) present in a website. It displays the list of pages to search engines like Google to rank the website. It is the first step to index (add the website to Google’s database) a website. Submitting a sitemap is one of the strongest digital marketing strategies.
Sitemaps are often submitted to the Google Search Console (GSC) to get ranked in the top results. If you’re not sure how to submit a sitemap, this guide is for you. There are two types of formats that the sitemap follows. We’ll discuss them in the types of sitemaps.
Sitemaps are an organized hierarchy of all the pages and contents in a website. Therefore, sitemap serves two purposes:
As mentioned earlier, Sitemaps are of two types based on the format. These are as follows:
Let’s discuss each of them.
XML is a type of sitemap specially created for search engine spiders or crawlers. It refers to a file consisting of all the pages listed on a website. These pages can contain various content in the form of website pages, videos, and the latest date when the website was modified/updated.
The key characteristics of XML sitemap are as follows:
The HTML sitemap format serves the purpose of both getting noticed by the crawlers and to make it easy for the visitors of a website. It is, in fact, a page listing all the important contents available on the website. The main target is to help users browse the website contents easily.
The key characteristics of HTML sitemap are as follows:
It is not mandatory to create a sitemap for your website. There are certain reasons that require you to create and learn how to submit a sitemap. The reasons are listed below:
New website: When you create a new website, it needs more internal links. This is when creating an XML sitemap is necessary. This will allow your website content to be acknowledged by Google crawlers and get indexed.
Large website: If your website consists of more than 500 pages, it makes sense to create a sitemap for the website. Since the website is heavy, Google crawlers might miss out on some of the important information listed on the website.
Newly added content: Google crawlers might also miss out on some of the important media content in your website. By adding a sitemap, you can increase visibility of your website, thus, contributing to the marketing strategy.
Easy navigation: An HTML sitemap is an excellent way to enhance content readability and navigation for the website users. It can help list out important webpages of the website. However, you must remember that HTML sitemap is not a replacement for a website architecture. You must know how to submit a sitemap in XML format.
Before you learn how to submit a well-cooked sitemap to the Google Search Console, learning how to create a sitemap is critical. There are mainly three ways to create a sitemap:
CMS platform: If you’ve built your website through website creation platforms such as Wix, Squarespace or Shopify, you can use in-built sitemap creation options. If you use other platforms such as WordPress, you can download compatible CMS plugins such as Yoast SEO.
Tools: If the first option does not work out for you, using sitemap generation tools such as Dyno Mapper can help you create a reliable sitemap.
Custom sitemap: If the first two options are not your cup of tea, you can get a customized XML sitemap for your website. However, you would need a website developer to do the job.
There are four main steps you must know for how to submit a sitemap to the GSC. Follow along!
First of all, you’ll need to create a GSC account. If you have one, log in. when the main menu appears, you will see a box in the top left corner of the page. You need to enter your website URL for which you want to submit a sitemap.
The next step is to submit a sitemap report. You will find a ‘Sitemaps’ option under the ‘Indexing’ dropdown menu on the left sidebar menu of the Google Search Console. After clicking on the ‘Sitemaps’ option, you’ll be presented with two sections:
Let’s learn how to add a new sitemap to the GSC.
Since your target is to rank your website, you need to find the XML sitemap of your website. One of the easiest ways to do so is to find it at https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.
You can also find it using a robots.txt file that may contain a link to the sitemap.
You can copy-paste the sitemap URL in the ‘Add a new sitemap’ section and hit ‘submit.’ A pop-up will appear that shows that your sitemap has been submitted successfully.
You’ve now mastered how to submit a sitemap! It is simple, easy and quick.
Internet is an infinite universe of webpages. Often times, your website can be lost in the abyss of the search engine. This is when sitemaps act as saviors and give you edge over others. Although the utility of sitemap is completely subjective, XML sitemaps are far more practical than using HTML sitemaps in the current decade of digital marketing and social media.
This guide is a must if you’re new to the SEO world and wish to grasp the fundamentals of sitemaps. If you’ve reached here, you must check out more useful resources on our website.