A backlink is a link from a website to a page on another website. They are an important factor in SEO because they help search engines understand the relevance and authority of a website or page, resulting in a higher ranking.

Backlinks can be incredibly useful for your website, but only if done right. So, today we’ll mention the 9 biggest mistakes and issues related to backlinks. 

Spam Backlinks

Spam backlinks are created to manipulate search engine rankings or increase the link popularity of a website. They can have a negative impact on the search engine rankings and credibility of a website. There are a few tactics commonly used to create spam backlinks:

• Automated link building: Using automated tools to generate a large number of backlinks quickly. 
• Comment spam: Leaving spammy comments on blogs or forums with links back to one’s own website.
• Directory submission spam: Submitting the website to a large number of low-quality or spammy directories in an attempt to generate backlinks.
• Link farms: These are groups of websites used exclusively for generating backlinks. 
• Blog spam: Creating low-quality blog posts or articles to generate backlinks to one’s own website.

Avoid participating in any practices that may create spam backlinks. Instead, focus on creating high-quality, relevant backlinks from reputable websites.

Link Schemes 

Link schemes are methods used by websites to manipulate search rankings through the exchange or purchase of links. There are many different types of link schemes, including:

• Link farms: These are websites that exist solely to provide links to other websites, often through automated means. The links on these websites are generally low quality and have little value to users. Additionally, they’re considered a form of spam and are prohibited by search engines.
• Link exchanges: This is when two websites agree to link to each other to boost their respective search rankings. These links are generally not valuable to users and can be seen as spammy by search engines.
• Paid links: Buying or selling links for the purpose of manipulating search rankings is against Google’s guidelines and can result in a penalty.
• Link schemes using redirects: A website creates a redirect to a different website to pass on link value and manipulate search rankings.

These schemes violate Google’s guidelines and can result in a penalty or even a ban from the search engine. Using manipulative tactics to try to improve your search ranking can ultimately harm your website in the long run.

Overuse of Exact Match Anchor Text

Anchor text is the text that is used for a hyperlink. Exact match anchor text is anchor text that exactly matches the keyword or phrase being targeted for the linked-to webpage.

Using exact match anchor text can be a useful SEO technique in some cases, as it can help search engines understand the relevance of the linked-to webpage. However, overusing exact match anchor text can be a problem for a few reasons:

• It can appear spammy to search engines, leading to penalties or a decrease in search rankings.
• It can make a website’s backlink profile appear unnatural, as it may seem like it is trying to manipulate its search rankings.
• It can limit the potential traffic to a website, as it may only attract users searching for the exact keyword or phrase used as anchor text.

So, vary the anchor text used for backlinks and use a mix of exact match, partial match, and branded anchor text. Also, use a variety of anchor text that accurately reflects the content of the linked-to webpage.

Linking to Low-Quality or Spammy Websites

Search engines use the links on your website to determine the relevance and authority of your site. If you link to low-quality or spammy websites, it can reflect poorly on your own website and may result in a penalty or a decrease in ranking. So, avoid linking to websites that engage in spammy or unethical practices, such as link schemes, paid links, or other manipulative tactics.

Hidden Links 

Hidden links are links that are not visible to users but are visible to search engines. There are a few different ways that hidden links can be implemented:

• Links hidden behind images or other website elements
• Links hidden using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
• Links hidden in the footer or sidebar of a website

These links can be used to manipulate search rankings and are a violation of Google’s guidelines and can result in a penalty. So, be transparent and only use visible links to avoid any potential issues with search engines.

Linking to Irrelevant, Banned, or Penalized Websites

When you link to a website, you’re telling search engines that you consider it a valuable resource and relevant to your website. If a website is found to be engaging in spammy or unethical practices, it can be banned or penalized, which means it won’t rank well in search results. 

By linking to irrelevant, banned, or penalized websites, you can confuse search engines, which may decrease your ranking. In addition, linking to these websites can also impact the user experience. If users click on a link that takes them to a website that is not relevant to the content they are reading, it can be confusing and may lead them to leave your website.

If you’re unsure if a website has been banned or penalized, you can check its status using tools like the Google Search Console or by doing a manual search in Google.

Broken Links 

A broken link points to a webpage or resource no longer available. Broken links can occur for a variety of reasons, such as:

• The linked-to page has been removed or deleted.
• The linked-to page has moved to a new URL, and the link has not been updated.
• The linked-to page is temporarily unavailable due to server issues or maintenance.

Broken links can prevent users from accessing the intended content, leading to a poor user experience. Additionally, they can prevent search engines from crawling and indexing webpages, negatively impacting the SEO of the linked-to webpage. Finally, they can reduce the credibility and authority of a website, as they may be seen as a sign of a poorly-maintained website.

To fix broken links, you can use a tool to identify any broken links on your website and update or remove them as needed. Try regularly checking for broken links and fixing them as soon as possible to ensure your website is functioning properly and providing a good user experience.

Backlinks with Redirect Chains

A redirect chain is a series of redirects a user must go through to reach the final destination page. Redirect chains can occur when a page is redirected to another page, which is then redirected to yet another page. They can be problematic for different reasons:

• They can slow down the loading time of a webpage, as each redirect adds additional time to the process.
• They can make it difficult for search engines to crawl and index pages, as each redirect adds an extra step for the search engines to follow.
• They can dilute the link equity of a webpage, as each redirect reduces the value of the link.

To avoid redirect chains, make sure any redirects point directly to the final destination page rather than another redirect. If there are multiple redirects in place, you should consolidate them into a single redirect. This will help ensure that the loading time and crawlability of the webpage are not negatively impacted.

Lost Backlinks

It’s normal for websites to lose backlinks over time for various reasons. Some possible reasons for lost backlinks include:

• The website linking to your site has been removed or changed the link.
• The linked-to page on your website has been removed, or the URL has changed.
• The linking website has been penalized, and the links from that site are no longer counted.
• The linking website has gone offline or has been removed from search engine indexes.

There are a few things you can do to try and recover lost backlinks:

1. Check if the link was removed or changed on the linking website. If it was, you might be able to contact the website owner and ask them to restore the link.
2. Check if the linked-to page on your website has been removed or the URL has changed. You may need to update the backlink to point to the correct page or create a redirect from the old URL to the new one.
3. Monitor your backlink profile regularly to keep track of any lost links. This can help you identify any potential issues and take action to address them.
4. Continue to create high-quality, relevant content and build new backlinks to your website. This can help to offset any lost backlinks and maintain the overall strength of your backlink profile.

Conclusion

Backlinks can be created in various ways, such as through guest blogging, commenting on other websites, or creating valuable content that other websites want to link to. But the practices mentioned above should be avoided at all costs – for your own good.

It’s also important to note that the quality of backlinks is more important than quantity, so you should focus on getting high-quality backlinks from reputable websites.

Social media is getting more significant by the second, so it’s clear that you need to utilize it to help your business. Today, we’ll discuss how you can use your social media analytics and social media sharing buttons to boost your online presence and improve your content.

Social Media Analysis

Social media analysis refers to collecting and analyzing data from social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, in order to understand and assess the performance and impact of a brand or organization’s social media presence.

This process can involve a variety of activities, including tracking and analyzing metrics such as:

• the number of followers
• likes
• shares a brand or organization receives on social media
• the content of user comments and feedback

This information can be used to gain a better understanding of how a brand’s or organization’s audience perceives its social media presence and to identify areas in which improvements are needed.

Tips for Conducting a Social Media Analysis

To help you get started, we’ve collected a few steps for analyzing your social media performance.

• Define your objectives: Clearly define what you want to achieve with your social media analysis. This will help you determine which data to collect and how to analyze it.
• Collect the data: There are a few ways you can collect data from social media platforms. You can use native analytics tools provided by the platforms, use third-party tools or services, or manually collect data by scraping or downloading it.
• Clean and organize the data: Once you have collected the data, you will need to clean and organize it to make it easier to analyze. This may involve removing duplicates, correcting errors, and formatting the data in a consistent way.
• Analyze the data: Use statistical and analytical techniques to identify patterns, trends, and relationships in the data. You may want to use software tools to help with this process, or you can do it manually using spreadsheet programs or other tools.

Social Media Sharing Buttons

Social media sharing buttons are a common feature on many websites and blogs. These buttons allow users to easily share the website’s content on their social media profiles, and can help to increase the visibility and reach of the website’s content.

These buttons are typically located near the top or bottom of the page and can be easily identifiable by their distinctive logos or icons. For example, a website may have buttons for sharing on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, which are represented by the respective logos or icons of those platforms.

To use a social media sharing button, users simply need to click on the button for the platform they want to share on. This will open a new window or tab where users can log in to their social media accounts and share the website’s content on their profile.

The Importance of Social Media Analysis and Sharing Buttons

Social media analysis and sharing buttons are important tools for assessing and enhancing the social media presence of a brand or organization, as well as for expanding the exposure and reach of their content. 

A website can increase its performance and influence on social media by collecting and analyzing data from various social media platforms, as well as by making it simple for users to share the website’s content on social media and by removing barriers that prevent them from doing so.

Struggling to rank in Google despite pouring your heart and soul into the content of your website? Your off-page SEO—or lack thereof—may be the culprit. If you want to rank high on Google and increase your brand’s visibility and organic search traffic – you need to be looking beyond your website.

Today, we are going to dive deep into off-site ranking factors to help you understand what they are, why they are so important, and what off-page SEO tactics you need to be using if you want to land on top of the SERPs.

Ready?

What is Off-Page SEO?

In short, any SEO-focused activity taking place outside of your website and contributing to your ranking is considered off-site or off-page SEO. Search engine optimization can be scary, especially when you don’t know what steps to take to rank your fresh content on top of the SERPs. But, if you can develop a basic understanding of off-page optimization and how it relates to off-site ranking factors, you’ll be way ahead of your competition.

Why Off-Page SEO Matters?

Google takes over two hundred factors into account when ranking web pages. So, it’s challenging to rank on the merit of your content alone. By telling Google and other search engines what others think about you and your site, you are helping them determine how relevant your content is to users. Without doing off-page SEO with off-site ranking factors in mind, you will struggle to rank for competitive search terms.

What are Off-Site / Off-Page Ranking Factors?

Search engines will consider multiple factors as they determine a website’s popularity, relevance, and authority. Most of those factors come from your own website, which we refer to as on-site ranking factors. Off-site ranking factors, also known as off-page ranking factors, come into play when search engines look at other reputable sources of information outside your website, to help determine how you should rank.

Off-site ranking factors also refer to the factors that help your business rank as an entity on properties like Google Maps and Yelp. Here, it isn’t a question of your website’s rank in relation to other websites, but rather your business’s rank in a list of similar businesses, based on reputation and trustworthiness.

Why are Off-Page Ranking Factors Important?

Getting your page to rank high in a competitive niche can be very difficult, especially if you’re only doing on-page SEO. That’s where ranking-driven off-page SEO will really make a difference. Off-page ranking factors are those search engines will take into account when determining your relevance. 

Think about it as building your website’s trustworthiness, credibility, and authority – something that often goes alongside building a brand. Without it, your site won’t outrank those that already have high authority.

Top 5 Off-Page SEO Ranking Factors to Focus On

Contrary to a commonly held belief, there’s more to off-page optimization than acquiring links. There’s a wide variety of techniques that can be used to give your online venture and gain a competitive advantage. How? By honoring all off-page ranking factors, of course. 

Link building is great, but it can only get you so far. Why not take advantage of a great variety of other off-page SEO strategies that can boost both your website and your brand? If you want to thrive in the digital market, these are the top off-page ranking factors your off-page SEO strategy should focus on:

1. Valuable Backlinks

This is the most talked-about aspect of digital promotion and for a good reason. Building backlinks is at the heart of off-page SEO and one of the most important off-site ranking factors. Search engines use backlinks as indications of the linked-to content’s quality. If you have a lot of other sites linking out to you – that’s a pretty good sign you know what you are talking about. So, link building should be the backbone of your off-page SEO strategy if you have the aspiration of ranking on page one.

There are three main types of links, defined by how they were earned: natural links, manually built links, or self-created links. Regardless of how links were obtained, those that offer the greatest contribution to SEO efforts are generally those that pass the most equity. Just make sure you stick to white hat SEO link-building strategies to ensure you don’t face a penalty from Google.

2. Social Shares and Signals

Google’s official stance is that social signals are not a direct ranking factor, since they are easily manipulated. Understandable. Yet, there’s no doubt that genuine social shares do have a positive influence on your rankings, albeit an indirect one. Why? Real social shares lead to more eyeballs on your content, and more eyeballs lead to more links, mentions, and all those other off-site ranking factors that we know to have a direct effect on rankings.

Treat social media platforms as discovery platforms and understand that an active presence can help put you in front of potential clients and customers who are looking for answers or to engage with the right brands on the social networks that they are using. It’s basically free traffic and traffic drives rankings and revenue.

3. Domain Age

While there’s not much you can do about your domain age, it’s important to point it out as an off-site ranking factor. The DA of your site is not a metric used by Google in determining where you rank but is a good indicator of how well your site is performing from an off-site SEO perspective.

While Google admits that there is not much difference between a domain age of six months or twelve months, when you have a site that has been established for five or ten years, you will gain some clout in Google’s eyes. So, make sure you don’t ditch your domain to start a new one if you can help it.

4. Local Ranking and SEO

When done correctly, submitting your business into local listings can be vital for increasing revenue, reputation, and rankings, particularly in localized search results. Local SEO is a separate branch of SEO that deserves its own conversation. However, you want to submit your website to as many high-quality directories as you can to improve your backlink profile – all while helping other people find your site a lot easier.

5. Reviews and Customer Service

Some say a business’ entire success is based on customers and their experience. So, it should come as no surprise that you should always adopt a customer-centric approach in everything you do – even when trying to nail those off-page ranking factors. Did you know that 93% of people say online reviews impact their buying decisions? Reviews are a massively underrated off-page SEO tactic – something that no business can ignore.

Great reviews help to increase conversions and, once again, trust.  Your online reputation, which includes reviews on popular websites like Yelp and word-of-mouth referrals, will influence a brand’s SERP performance as well. As you know, poor customer service leads to poor rankings, so make sure you always leave a good impression to drive traffic to your website and boost your rankings!

Good Reputation Matters, Even in SERP Ranking

Off-page SEO might seem harder to deal with than on-page SEO because many off-page ranking factors aren’t entirely under your control. But, think of it this way: the harder something is to earn – the more reliable it is as a ranking factor. Off-page SEO is all about managing your reputation, gaining trust, and giving credibility to your brand as an authority, which both users and search engines will respect. 

Think brand-first, and you will go into off-page SEO with the right mindset, achieving results that will truly make a difference in your brand’s online presence. By leveraging these important off-page ranking factors, you can accelerate your climb to the top of the SERPs and enjoy your growth in the ever-competitive digital realm.

Backlinks are said to be the foundation of the web and have held it together since the beginning of the digital era. Utilizing internal and external links are both great SEO tips to enrich your overall SEO strategy. But, external links have long lived in the shadow of their internal brethren. 

However, they are the bane of every webmaster trying to succeed online. Most people feel they must add external links in order to satisfy the “oh-so-cruel” Google and it’s ranking-oriented mind. Well, no more!

Today, we give external linking the spotlight it deserves, explaining what it is and how it can help you create a strong online presence.

Let’s get to it!

Link Building 101: What Is External Linking?

The internet is built on links. Without them, we would have an unorganized mess of disconnected pages that would be difficult to find and navigate. Luckily, that’s where link building comes to the rescue.

External links, also called outbound links are hyperlinks that point to (target) any domain other than the domain the link exists on (source). In most simple terms – if a website links to your website, it is known as external linking. Likewise, if your website links to another website, this is also called external linking. 

When a hyperlink from a website links to your website, it is commonly known as an ‘inbound link’ or a ‘backlink’, and when you link to a different website, it is popularly known as an ‘outbound link.’ 

Okay, now you know what it is, but, what makes external linking so precious?

Why Is External Linking Important and How Does It Affect SEO?

Content. Links. RankBrain.

These are the top-ranking factors Google considers when it comes to showing results on the search engine result page (SERP). In fact, external linking has always been a crucial ranking factor since the launch of Google.

Given that much of search engine optimization centers around getting lots of good links to and from your website, it’s essential to learn how to make these work for you. Using relevant external links plays a highly influential role in increasing your website’s ranking and visibility.

External Linking Example: What Do External Links Look Like?

To wrap your head around them, here is an example to give you an idea of how external links look like in the code:

<a href=”http://www.example-domain.com/”>Link Anchor Text</a>

In a minute, you’ll learn to see that each external link is a new SEO opportunity for you to take advantage of and grow your site’s authority, traffic and online influence.

Why Link Out? Benefits of External Linking

External links are used to indicate that a page is credible to search engines (and users). In layman’s terms – Google follows the content that’s linked. So, this is your way of telling Google:  “Hey, this content is valuable and high quality, thus, it should be in the first position when people search for a specific query!”

There’s no doubt that external links are one of the most important metrics, if not the backbone of high-position ranking. 

External linking helps your SEO in different ways:

Increases Visibility, Popularity and Relevance

External links provide important clues about the relevance of a page, which is extremely helpful for search engines that want users to find the information they’re looking for. When you outbound links to helpful content – you’re doing them a great service. In addition, the anchor text used in the links is usually a good indicator of the content on the target page or website. But, that’s not all. 

The more links a page receives from other sources – the more popular it appears. In return, this sends positive signals to search engines and can boost a page’s rank in search results, meaning that more searchers will click and view the externally linked content.

Builds Reputation and Credibility

If you link out to spammy sites, it will reflect negatively on your own. Websites with zero outbound links are dead ends. It’s safe to say nobody likes dead ends. On the other hand, including external links to relevant, high authority sources can boost your website’s reputation and help you appear as a more authoritative source, which helps improve your website’s trustworthiness and credibility.

Adds Value to user Experience

What really makes great content shine and stand out? Its ability to provide readers with as wide, and as well-informed a picture of a specific topic as possible. By linking out to other helpful content, you increase the value your website provides to its visitors and make their experience more engaging and rewarding. Ultimately, if people know that you publish and link to quality content, they’ll want to keep coming back for more.

Offers More Backlinking Opportunities

When you link out to other credible sources, they will be more likely to link back to your site. This signals to other people that you participate in the web’s natural linking environment. It’s a great way to build incentives for bloggers, journalists, and other website owners to engage with your website and link to your content, making external linking one of the best techniques to boost your ranking and credibility on various SERPs.

Best Practices: Use External Linking to Boost Your SEO

Looking for some practical external linking tips that can help you get the most out of your SEO strategy? We’ve got you covered. 

What factors contribute to high-quality external linking?

Think relevant – Link smart

The quality and quantity of the external links that you use matters. Linking to outside websites will not hurt your page rank as long as the relevant content you’re linking to comes from authoritative websites. An external link is more valuable if it links to popular and relevant pages that are highly ranked and related to the content on your web page, improving the credibility of your own.

Avoid excessive outgoing links,since they can be annoying from the reader’s perspective. Pro tip? Add as many links as needed – but not a single one more. 

Descriptive Anchor Text

Anchor text is the clickable, underlined and highlighted word or phrase that takes you to another web page. The anchor text used should be descriptive and provide a clear idea about the content on the web page it leads to. This will improve usability for both users and search engines.

Don’t Forget to Audit

The web is a living and breathing entity. Websites, blogs, web pages? They come and go. Broken links are bad for your SEO as they leak out authority, but also offer a horrendous user experience since you’ll be sending your precious traffic to dead pages. Luckily, this is easy to fix if you refresh your external linking from time to time.

Put Your Skills to Work: Leverage the Power of External Linking

External linking is a small, yet significant factor in SEO that should be paid close attention. It may take time to master this link building optimization process, but the effort will be worth it – you’ll boost traffic to your website, improve your site’s rank on the search engine’s results page and build trustworthiness and authority. 

Want to learn more about other SEO tips and tricks from the pro’s? Follow our blog.

What Is Off-Page SEO?

Off-page SEO, or off-site SEO as it’s also called, refers to all the activities taken away from the website with the goal of improving search engine rankings, increasing brand awareness, and building trustworthiness.

Without off-page SEO, an excellent piece of content would still have a chance of ranking highly, however, it wouldn’t have nearly the same reach as it does when you purposefully engage in off-page SEO. In fact, off-page SEO factors contribute more than half of the total ranking weight, so it’s safe to say that it’s necessary to the success of a website.

Why Is Off-Page SEO Relevant?

Off-page signals are crucial to any type of website because they build trustworthiness, authority, and brand awareness. While search engine ranking factors are ever-changing and unpredictable, off-page signals add the kind of value that survives Google updates and metric reevaluations.

When one website is mentioned off-page, i.e., on another domain, it’s a provision of social proof in search engines’ eyes. If one high-quality and trustworthy website is willing to link to or mention another website, it speaks volumes about the target website’s reputation and establishes relevance.

Links and Link Building

Links are at the heart of off-page SEO and the process of obtaining links is called link building. In some way, links are the currency of the internet. They have an intrinsic value that’s dependant on the quality of the website they originate on. This intrinsic value is known as link equity, or more colloquially, “link juice”.

By linking from one website to the other, you share link equity with the target website. A link from one site to another indicates trustworthiness and acts as proof of the quality of content being linked to.

High-quality backlinks (inbound links from another domain) pass on some of the equity to the target website, which is a significant ranking factor. That isn’t to say that links aren’t useful in other ways.

The process of link building involves either reaching out to other websites yourself and asking for links or shares, or receiving the links naturally. In the case of the former, you’re manually building links as part of a planned link-building activity. On the other hand, receiving links naturally happens all the time whenever someone finds valuable content worth linking to.

Since link building is so beneficial, it’s not uncommon for people to partake in activities that edge on black hat SEO. We absolutely discourage you from buying links, exchanging them for goods or services, or spamming links on forums, online directories, or comments. All of these activities that do contribute to off-page SEO in the short term are likely to earn you penalization from Google. They are not viable strategies in the long term.

Passing Link Equity

How much link equity passes between websites depends entirely on the source of the link. The linking site’s popularity, trustworthiness, and authority all have a role to play. Then, there are more tangible metrics such as the anchor text used on the linking site, the freshness of the link, and the total number of outgoing links on the source page. 

All of these factors come together to determine how much link equity the target website will receive. No two links are the same, and there are certainly links you wouldn’t want pointing to your website.

Other Off-Page SEO Practices

Links and link building comprise the largest portion of off-page SEO, which is why all the other activities come second. These extra off-page SEO practices include:

• Guest blogging
• Brand mentions
• Influencer marketing
• Social media marketing.

What all of these activities have in common is that they don’t necessarily have to link to your website in order for you to gain value from them. An important part of off-page SEO is increasing brand awareness, reaching a wider customer base, and showing you’re a trustworthy entity.

What is Conversion Rate Optimization?

A conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete the desired action, for example, the desired action can be completing a web form, purchasing a product, or signing up for a service. To get the conversion rate, divide the number of conversions by the number of visitors. All that’s left is to multiply the result by 100 to get the percentage.

There are macro and micro conversions. Micro conversions are smaller activities such as signing up for email lists, creating an account, or adding a product to the cart. They usually take place before a user completes a macro conversion like purchasing a product from the site, requesting a quote, or subscribing to a service.

What is conversion rate optimization?

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) involves improving your website and content to increase conversion rates. A high conversion rate usually means that a website is effective, well-designed, and appealing to your target audience. CRO also requires data on how users find your site, what actions they perform, and if there’s something that prevents them from completing your goals.

It’s important to emphasize that CRO happens after the visitor makes it to your site. That’s intrinsically different from conversion optimization for SEO or paid ads.

CRO Calculations

There are commonly used formulas that are providing a better understanding of where you stand at any point in time regarding the conversion rate. Three commonly used formulas are: Calculation 1: Conversion Rate Like we already explained to calculate your conversion rate, you must divide your number of conversions by your number of visitors and then multiple that number by 100 to get the percentage. Calculation 2: New Customers If you want to calculate your number of new customers, you should divide your net revenue goal by your average sales price. Calculation 3: Lead Goal To calculate your lead goal, take your number of new customers, and divide it by your lead-to-customer close rate percentage. For example, let’s say there’s a website that has 10,000 visitors per month. It generates 100 leads and subsequently 10 customers each month, so it would have a 1% visitor-to-lead conversion.

Why Is CRO Good for SEO?

Even though it’s not directly related to attracting organic website traffic or ranking on SERP, conversion rate optimization has clear benefits for SEO, such as:

Better customer insights. CRO can help you understand your key audience and learn how to respond to their needs. Conversion rate optimization is looking to find the right customer for your business.

Improved ROI. You can get more conversions without having to bring in more potential customers by learning how to get the most of your acquisition efforts.

CRO gives you better scalability. If you keep turning browsers into buyers, you can grow your business without running out of potential customers. The point is that CRO lets you grow without spending all your resources or losing prospective customers.

Good user experience. CRO teaches you what works on your site, realizing that you can work and expanding on it, which will give a better user experience.

Increased Trust. Your visitors need to have genuine trust in your website, in order to share their credit card information or any other personal information. Your site always needs to be professional, courteous, and ready to give all the answers that your customers need and want.

Successful Optimization

To make this optimization successful you need to gather data, you need to know what to optimize and who to optimize for. Don’t make decisions based on your instincts and assumptions!

Quantitative Data Analysis is a method that produces data by measuring how people behave on your site. You can start with a web analytics method such as Google Analytics and add tracking for your conversions.

Using analytics-based CRO will tell you all you need to know about how users engage with your site. This method provides information like:

Where people enter your site, on which webpage they land on first.

Where on a page they spend they spend their time.

What channel brought them in.

What kind of devices and browsers do they use.

Where or during what activity user decides to leave your site.

Once you know how users interact with your site, you can also look into the “why” behind their decisions. Here, you need the help of a people-focused method also known as qualitative data analysis. This method is more subjective and it helps you to identify who is your ideal user. You can collect this data with on-site surveys, user testing, and satisfaction surveys.

Qualitative analysis helps optimize the conversions by providing detailed information about users behavior like:

Why did they decide to visit your site? What part of your page or product appealed to them?

What do they think makes you different from competitors?

What words do they use to describe your services or products? How exactly would they describe your product or service to someone else?

With all of this, you can get a much better understanding of the pages on your site, and you get an opportunity to optimize and engage the audience you’d like to target. Spend time on gathering and analyzing information because it will pay off in the long run.

What Is Social Engagement?

Today, internet users are bombarded with content. For social media marketers, this means that it is crucial to comprehend what content will resonate with the target audience and which will fall flat. The goal is to increase engagement and traffic to your site.

Engagement is not just a simple number of followers, it is a bit more complicated than that. It would be better to define it as interactions with your brand. Also, when you add to the fact that every social channel is different and that the engagement varies from one channel to the other, you realize that it is not that easy to measure engagement.

Measuring social engagement helps you get all the necessary metrics. However, not all of them are equally significant. Keep reading and find out how important engagement is and what you need to measure to see if your content is engaging.

Engagement Vs. Reach

“Reach” is not a metric that means a lot. When we are talking about certain content’s reach, we are actually talking about the number of people that have seen it. In a way, reach is like vanity metrics, and it’s also easy to manipulate. Just think about click baits or paid content promotion ads. All of that gives you brief interaction but usually nothing more.

Instead, you need to track conversions.

We are creating content not only for people to read and then immediately forget about it, but also because we want them to take an action. The conversion rate is the number of audience replies per post or comment. This is what you should track, it’s more important than how far your content reaches.

Engagement Vs. Time on Page

Even though “Time on Page” sounds like a better measure of engagement than reach, in reality, it’s a heavily skewed metric. Why is that?

Well, in website analytics, the “time on page” is calculated as the time between the visit to the first page and the next page. This would be ok if we all browsed a site in a linear mode, by clicking links to other pages and leaving when we’re done. But, this is not the case.

We open multiple tabs and we walk away from devices, we get distracted. That’s why “Time on page” is a questionable metric, we can’t really get true results.

On the other hand, you should track “scroll depth” instead. It measures how far down a page visitor scrolls. It’s not 100% certain, but, if you take into account that most of your visitors are making it to the end of your post, you should be safe to assume you’re doing something right.

Engagement Vs. Shares

Measuring social sharing is a good way to figure out if the right people are engaging. However, don’t try to use it to understand which content is capturing most of someone’s attention. To measure the success of your content you should track comments.

Usually, visitors don’t comment if they are not genuinely engaged with it.

Measuring Engagement

You can always calculate numbers on your own, but if you’re not good at math you should try something else. 

Luckily, TrueSocialMetrics made it super easy, for all of us who don’t get along well with numbers. Once you sign up you should add connections to all your social networks and start calculating data right away. 

Next, you add all the numbers to the spreadsheet so you can send it to your client or your staff.

Our advice is to capture your metrics weekly so at the end of the month you know how well you did during the previous month.

Wrapping Up

In every form of marketing, online or offline, paid or organic, international or local, we always need to understand what is and what isn’t working.

It’s crucial to measure engagement in the right way in order to understand how people are really responding to your content. It’s not only about the clicks and likes. It’s about how many people are being driven to your page and how involved they are with the content.

When you know what is working and what is not working, you will know how to keep creating content that is better than the last.

What Is Link Equity?

Link equity, aka link juice, is a search engine ranking factor that determines how much value a web page gets from an incoming link. It affects search engine rankings by sharing some of the linking page’s authority and relevance. The exact value a web page can get from a website is difficult to assess, but we know which factors are at play.

Link equity is an evolution of Google’s concept of PageRank, an algorithm that used to be prevalent back in the early days of search algorithms. In fact, PageRank was the first algorithm that Google put to use.

This article will explain the basics of link equity, the factors that comprise it, and solve some of the common issues associated with link equity.

Is PageRank Still in Use?

PageRank is still in use to this day, however, it’s not the only search algorithm in action. Moreover, it’s far from being the same algorithm that it used to be.

The concept of PageRank has advanced from its early stages when it was all about the number of links that point to a page. PageRank assumed that a web page with more links to it must be better. It encouraged webmasters to focus on quantity instead of quality and spawned numerous link farming strategies that are all in the domain of black hat SEO today.

Much has changed since then, and now the quality of links is a far superior metric than the number of links you have pointing to a single page. We refer to this metric as link equity.

The Flow of Link Equity – Contributing Factors

When we discuss the flow of link equity, we’re really talking about the transfer of link value from external sites to the target website. While internal links do contribute to link equity as well, it’s not nearly as valuable as that of external links.

How much link equity will flow depends on a series of contributing factors:

• Topical relevance.
• Crawling.
• Nofollow links.
• Page’s authority.
• Quantity of links.
• HTTP status.
• Link placement.

Core Principles of Link Equity

By core principles of link equity, we are referring to two ground rules of passing link value. The two basic principles of link equity are:

1. External links pass more equity than internal links. It goes without saying that internal links are pretty valuable on their own, especially if your domain has a high authority rating or if the linking page has plenty of inbound links of its own (more about this below). However, in the long run, external links are going to pass more link equity, thus adding more value to your page.
2. Pages with plenty of inbound links offer higher-quality outgoing links. Pages that no one is linking to won’t share much of their link equity when they link to you. It’s always better to get links from high-authority pages that many other websites link to.

Common Link Equity Flow Issues

There are two common link equity flow issues that you should be aware of.

First, large websites often find themselves in a situation where only a relatively small number of web pages get any link equity at all. It’s possible that they aren’t the most important web pages on the site that you hope would get link equity instead. In that case, a better internal linking structure might help you direct the flow of link equity where you really want it. Rewriting content that’s not attracting any backlinks is also a good idea.

Second, small websites often face the issue of only the homepage getting link equity. The best way to solve this issue is to have your homepage serve content that’s most relevant to you. You don’t have to build separate pages for every focus keyword on your mind. Use the traction your homepage is getting to your advantage.