Online Marketing Manual

John Vincent Kriney

• Publisher: OptFirst Inc.
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780996064033
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Business

I have had the pleasure of working with many successful business owners while running their online marketing campaigns. Over time, I noticed that they all apply the same simple two step formula for success. Firstly, they all started a project by writing out a clear plan using a pen and paper. Secondly, once they have a written plan they thoroughly follow it. I have observed these successful business people follow this simple process, time and time again. Most business people who have failed either lacked a clear plan or fell short of following through with the execution of that plan. This is why at my agency, OptFirst, we have a plan and a strategy to implement for every campaign that we run. I’ll be sharing that plan with you in this book but first, I would like to introduce my company and what we do for our clients. At OptFirst we only do two things:

1. We Run Online Campaigns: Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Paid Social, Reputation Management and Retargeting Campaigns.

2. We Code: Websites, apps, landing pages and even internal programs for our clients, in many different programming languages, in order to increase the performance of their online marketing campaigns.

Our clients, just like our expertise in online marketing, are vast and wide. We’ve helped businesses from many different industries, from locksmiths to universities to national e-commerce operations. We have even run a reputation management campaign for a client who was the subject of a Warner Brothers major motion picture. Since we work with clients across many industries, we utilize a wide range of strategies in our digital campaigns. Our expansiveness of experience gives us an advantage over business owners who try to run their own campaigns. The diversity of our clients also gives us an edge over other marketing companies that specialize in one industry.

After reading this book, business owners and marketing managers will be equipped with OptFirst’s proven steps to understand, run and actively manage their own profitable SEO, SEM, Paid Social, Reputation Management and Retargeting campaigns.?

SECTION 1:

Search Engine Optimization
(SEO)

“I’m gonna give all my secrets away.”
OneRepublic

Search Engine Optimization consists of two parts: on-page and off-page optimization.

1. On-Page – Optimizing the webpage for performance and usability and speed. This involves fixing or improving the code as well as the content. The content of the page consists of text, images and video.

2. Off-Page – Running the online campaign to build authority for the website through citations, references, mentions and links in order to gain credibility with the search engines. This will ultimately lead to search engines placing that website in a higher search engine ranking position (SERP).

On-Page SEO

Mobile First

The Mobile First search update was first announced to roll out in the beginning of 2017, but delays from Google delayed the implementation until March 2018. The official Google announcement can be read here. Since the update, Google has been basing their search results on a company’s mobile website. Mobile indexing ranks sites based primarily on the characteristics of the site’s mobile version. The priority of every website owner should now be to evaluate how their mobile site indexes and performs in order to display and rank well on search engines. This is a paradigm shift in focus, as webmasters used to measure their sites based on how they appeared and performed on desktop.

Ranking in the Mobile First Era

Prior to Mobile First there were many speculations as to what criteria Google used to rank sites. The most popular rumor was that there were over 200 ranking factors. The truth is that there are only 11 confirmed Google ranking factors. A great article that debunks the rumored 200 criteria and reviews the confirmed factors is available here.

Google’s 11 Confirmed Ranking Factors

1. Site Speed
2. User Intent/Behavior
3. Title Tags as a
4. Mobile Friendliness
5. Page Rank
6. Links
7. Anchor Text
8. Domain Authority
9. HTTPS (secure web hosting)
10. Geolocation
11. Over-Optimization

The top two factors we see at OptFirst that play the largest role in mobile rankings are site speed and user satisfaction. All SEO campaigns must take website performance into account so that they meet their users’ expectations. Mobile pages have to be fast and the consumer must be able to find what they are looking for quickly. A website owner should be able to measure if the user found what they are looking for by tracking completed actions on the page such as a phone call, form fill, sale or app download. The easiest way to know if the site is fast enough and has met the user’s expectation is through measuring conversions. To achieve top SEO rankings, the web page or landing page needs to be optimized for speed and conversions. In the past, on-page factors were not as important as they are currently. The best digital agencies must now have a team of programmers in addition to their writing and campaign teams, in order to address the increased importance of on-page SEO factors.

Website Speed

Page loading speed is playing a larger role in SEO than in past years. This makes speed testing a crucial factor of on-page SEO. It is also important to note that, according to Google, for every second it takes a webpage to load, there is a 20% decrease in conversions. Along with more conversions, improving website loading speed will also improve SEO rankings. A recommended site to test web page speed is Pingdom.com. You can find a link to their testing tool here.

Three ways to increase a website’s speed are:

1. Optimize the website code.
2. Increase server speed by increasing processing power and/or bandwidth.
3. Using a content delivery network (CDN) to serve the webpage from a physical location that is closer to the user. This upgrade may be added with the website’s existing hosting company. For example, Amazon offers this service. You can also use a third–party company that specializes in CDN. CloudFlare is a popular and solid provider. Another option, if your mobile site is created in AMP code, Google will serve the cached AMP page through their CDN. More information on how AMP code is cached is available here.

Ideally, you want to optimize both the website’s code and its server factors in order to make the page load as fast as possible for the user.

User Satisfaction

Actions on the website are part of OptFirst’s top criteria for optimization. A few years ago, a common metric to measure user satisfaction was bounce rate. Now a more detailed metric to measure user satisfaction is through tracking conversions. The Mobile First landscape favors websites that drive conversions. A conversion means the user was able to complete their desired action in an acceptable time frame. This means that the site was useful, usable and trustworthy to the converted user.

The importance of speed and satisfaction link back to Google’s core fundamental mission: to deliver a positive user experience. Google wants users to find what they are looking for in the moment they are looking for it. This is verified with data that analyzes whether the user ends up calling the business, inquiring about their services via a form filled out, or purchasing a product online. Meeting this core business goal has enabled Google to acquire more and more of the market share from their search engine competitors year after year. The more times a user finds what they want from a website that Google recommends, the more confidently Google can recommend that particular website in its SERPs.

8 Point On-Page SEO Plan

Step 1. Index – Since SEO is all about improving results in search engines, it’s important to know how search engines index your site. The best place to check is in the verified Google Search Console account for the domain. Here you can see if your core pages are indexable and if they are properly getting picked up by Google.

How to Set–Up Google Search Console

First verify the site then check that the robots.txt and sitemaps are properly set and submitted. This shows any indexing issues with the site’s no follows, no index, canonical tags, 404 errors and blocked resources. Once the site is properly verified...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Promise to the Reader
• Special Thanks
• Search Term Glossary
• Table of Contents
• SECTION 1: Search Engine Optimization
• SECTION 2 Search Engine Marketing: SEM
• SECTION 3 Paid Social Media Marketing
• SECTION 4 Reputation Management
• SECTION 5 Campaign Tracking
• About the Author