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Essential Building Blocks for Your Brand’s SEO Strategy

Essential Building Blocks for Your Brand’s SEO Strategy. Crawlability: Build a Strong Foundation. Optimize Your Content. Content Creation: Share Knowledge.

Published

3 years ago

October 11, 2019

Kathy Parker

Essential Building Blocks for SEO Strategy

The world is becoming increasingly competitive when it comes to running an online business. Today, SEO Houston expert is more important than it has ever been. One-third of consumers in the U.S. have used Google or some other tool as a way of starting their online purchases, more than three times the number that has started their search on a retailer’s site or in a retailer’s app. Only Amazon is ahead in terms of being the starting point for product research. If you want to take advantage of that, you need a good SEO strategy. Here are four building blocks that can help both B2C and B2B brands achieve the next level with their SEO.

Table of Contents

Crawlability: Build a Strong Foundation

If you want your site to feature in the search results, it must first be found by the relevant search engine. This means that you need to ensure that the site is visible to crawlers. The robots.txt file is a key component of this. Make sure that the file is present, and that it contains instructions telling the search engines which pages it should index, and which it should ignore.

You should also have a sitemap which explains the structure of the site to the search engines. Some content management systems update sitemaps automatically for you, but not all do, so you should make sure that you have a good sitemap, and that it is up to date. It should include all of your product pages, categories, and subcategories, and be updated regularly. When you update your sitemap and robots.txt, submit them to Google and other search engines so that they know to come and re-crawl your website.

If your site has a lot of content that relies on Silverlight, Flash or some other ‘interactive’ platform from a few years ago, then you will have some issues there because that content is not crawlable by the search engines. You should make it a priority to get that content converted to something more modern such as HTML5 or Flash. Again, update your sitemap, and submit it to Google once the conversion is done.

Optimize Your Content

Optimize Your Content for SEO

Once you have all of your crawlability issues solved, the next step is to make sure that your content is useful, valuable, and relevant. Use the Google Keyword Planner to start making a list of the keywords that you want to target based on both search volume and expected ROI. Use that list to plan out your content and to enhance your meta tags as well. Start with the top-level pages and work through all of the categories and subcategories on your site. If you have products or service pages listed, then block those out too.

A potential alternative to working through the site is to focus on optimizing select pages, for example, if the one specific page or category is doing very well, use Google Search Console to figure out why then optimize the category page based on that to boost the performance of the page. This is a good way of guiding your future SEO efforts.

Build Engagement With Other Brands

Off-site SEO is useful, too. This is a way of promoting your site not just to the search engines, but also to other people through influencer and blogger relationships. You can start off-site work quite early on while you are still building up the rest of your on-site content. With that said, the more complete your site is, the more SEO benefits you will get from link building and from promoting your site to influencers and bloggers.

Link Building Analysis

Link building takes time and research, as well as patience, and you should make an effort to understand the ethics and best practices laid out by Google before you make a start. The best way to find potential links is to use a tool such as SEMrush that helps you to work out where your backlinks originate from. This tool will display a list of potential sites, so you can reach out to them and send out link requests. Don’t ask to link up with all of them, focus on high-quality sites with good traffic, and with a strong social media presence.

The same goes for influencers. Look for the influencers that are most relevant to your industry or niche, and work with them. The influencers with the biggest following aren’t always the best choice for your business. You want ones with a good ROI, and that might mean micro-influencers that have a lot of trust and authority with a smaller group of followers. It doesn’t make sense to spend a fortune on influencers with hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of followers if their word does not carry a lot of weight.

Content Creation: Share Knowledge

If you already have a decent SEO program then your focus should be on content creation. At this stage, you need to go beyond just describing your products and services, and start answering questions instead. For example, if you run a hairdresser’s, write about how to make the hair dye or perm last longer, or how to stop hair getting frizzy in humid conditions. You will need to do keyword research to work out the kind of questions that get a lot of searches, and you should look at what your competitors are doing as well.

Use tools such as SEMrush to identify content gaps based on your market and the search phrases that are popular. For example, you might already have “haircuts” and “semi-permanent hair dye” covered, but there may be other searches that you have missed, such as “long hair perm” which could generate traffic too. With this kind of analysis, you can come up with a huge list of keywords that can be used to write useful non-promotional content.

You do not need to do this until you have reached a good level of technical SEO. Crawlability must come first, and optimization is important too. Once those technical aspects are in place your influencer marketing will be more effective, and content creation comes on top of that to help build up organic traffic. All of the steps are important for the growth of your site.

Digital Marketing

What Are Privacy-Friendly Website Analytics Tools?

I have listed the top 5 privacy-friendly website analytics tools that will help you evaluate your website better and safely without getting concerned about data theft or your security.

Published

4 months ago

November 23, 2022

TwinzTech

With the increasing dependence on technology, the concern of online data breaches and fraud relating to personal data is also increasingly bothering internet users.

Though many web analytics tools are available in the industry, they are a bit complicated and privacy-invasive. Regarding facial recognition, personal data, and location tracking, the privacy concern list is too long. The same concern goes for online website analytics tools.

It’s essential to choose a web analytic tool that is privacy-friendly as well as hassle-free to use. This article lists the top web-analytics tools that offer analytics services without invading users’ privacy.

Let’s begin!

Table of Contents

A. How are Privacy-Friendly Website Analytic Tools Important?

Here are the top reasons to opt for a privacy-safe website analytic tool:

Ensures you keep your data safe: Before using your data, these web analytics tools ask for your consent, and even after the consent, the control is in the hands of the user.
Offers transparent data collection and processing: Private-safe web analytics tools are transparent about where your personal information is stored and how they use it, which minimizes the chances of data misuse.
Provides data security and protection: Privacy-friendly analytics tools minimize the risk of data leaks and breaches, prevent malicious attacks, and protect your data from human errors. They safeguard your data from unauthorized access, corruption, and online theft.

B. Top 5 Privacy-Friendly Websites Analytic Tools

Here are the top 6 privacy-friendly web analytic tools:

1. Fathom

Fathom is a privacy-focused Google Analytics

Fathom is a privacy-focused Google Analytics alternative that helps you make better business decisions and understand your web visitors better to generate leads and more sales without compromising your privacy.

They have a simple UTM builder to create and track campaigns to increase traffic. Fantom also offers uptime monitoring for free.

Top Features:

Provides real-time website insights
Compliances with GDPR and cookie directive
Offers to track files through super fast CDN
Offers to track goals like specific pages or clicks, newly signed-up email lists, and more
Provides shareable dashboards and password-protected links

Plan:

Free trial and all the plans include up to 50 sites, uptime monitoring, ad-blocker bypassing, and unlimited email reports.
Fantom paid plans start at $14/month with up to 100,000 monthly page views.

2. Finteza

Finteza is a comprehensive web analytics tool

Finteza is a comprehensive web analytics tool that tracks and analyzes your website traffic, sales funnel, conversions, landing pages, and advertising campaigns by keeping your privacy safe.

Top Features:

Offers detailed traffic analysis
Uses special tools for webmasters
Offers optimization of conversion rate
Provides smooth data export feature
Identifies referral sources
Tracks real-time traffic sources

Plans:

Finteza’s analytical service plan costs around 10 EUR per 100,000 unique visitors.
Their advertising engine plan is priced at 4 EUR per 100,000 ad zone impressions.

3. Plausible

Plausible is an open-source web analytics

Plausible is an open-source web analytics with no cookies and fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and PEC designed in Europe owned by cloud infrastructure. It is one of the top Google Analytics alternatives.

Top Features:

Reduces your cookie banners
Provides shareable links to statistics
Offers password protection feature for shareable links
Provides seamless integration with WordPress, Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, Ghost, Google, and many more.

Plan:

Plausible pricing starts at $9/ monthly pageviews, which includes 50 websites, custom events, email/slack reports, unlimited data retention, 100% data ownership, and unlimited team members.
You will have to pay for services according to your need for monthly pageviews.

4. SimpleAnalytics

Simple Analytics is a privacy-first web analytic tool

Simple Analytics is a privacy-first web analytic tool that encrypts your data and provides no cookie banners for your visitors.

Their business model is based on privacy protection and complies with all privacy policies, including GDPR, PECR, CCPA, and many more.

It shows you crucial website data such as total viewed pages, referrers, number of page views, screen sizes, and more to better your customer experience.

Top Features:

Provides a smooth and straightforward interface
Offers analytics report directly to your email
Shows you the original traffic-driving referrer tweet
Bypasses Ad blockers
Provides easy accessibility to export data in CSV files or aggregates with JSON API
Offers two modes of operation, i.e., dark mode and light mode

Plans:

Simple Analytics basic plans start at $9/month with 100,000 data points per month, a single user, ten websites, and aggregated reports.
Their business plan costs $49/month, allowing ten users, 100 websites, and basic level export.
Simple Analytics offers enterprise plans that cost around $99/month, allowing more than ten users, 100+ websites, and faster email support.

5. Insights

Insights is a privacy-safe web analytics

Insights is a privacy-safe web analytics and easy-to-use tool for developers. They provide faster-loading speed, page views tracking, and anonymous event tracking for your website to gather as much insight about your brand performance as possible.

Top Features:

Provides you with a customizable script that refrains you from navigating through multiple reports and pages
Offers faster performance in terms of page loading speed
Displays page statistics such as page visits, bounce rates, scrolling rate, and session time without saving your IP data, personal information, and cookies
Offers transparent services by entering open-source Insights.js code on Github, and you can also view data they collect from your website

Plans:

Insights offer a free plan that includes up to 3k events or page views per month.
Their paid plan starts from $12/month, which allows up to 100k events or page views.
Insights offer their startup plan costing $29/month, allowing up to 1 million events or page views.
Their business plans cost around $79/month, which allows 10 million events and page views.

Final Thoughts

Privacy concerns are increasingly growing all around the world. Privacy-safe analytics tools help you analyze your business numbers better without worrying about your personal and visitors’ data breach.

I have listed the top 5 privacy-friendly website analytics tools that will help you evaluate your website better and safely without getting concerned about data theft or your security.