How Do Company Reviews Boost Your SEO Efforts?

When purchasing an item or ordering a service online, what’s the first thing you do? Google it, right? In today’s eCommerce-driven world, people cannot physically experience a product until it is delivered to their doorstep. So, they turn to online product reviews, seeking reassurance before committing to a purchase. Let’s face it: we’re much more likely to take action if we see other consumers – even strangers – agree it’s a good decision. That’s the thing about online reviews – they’re social proof of a brand’s quality and credibility. In fact, things have gone so far that a brand’s overall star rating and the number of online reviews started to shape how a business is perceived online. That’s why it’s all about understanding and harnessing the potential of online reviews and learning how to turn ratings into revenue. But how exactly do company reviews boost your SEO efforts?

Let’s shed some light on the subject!

 

Role of User-Generated Content

Fresh content is essential for SEO. Without content, Google’s algorithms cannot index your website’s pages properly and help you rank due to lack of information. At this point, user-generated content is a life-saver.

Reviews aren’t mere feedback from your customer – they’re content. Google recognizes them as such. And your customers are, in a way, content creators. Whenever a client leaves you a review or shares something relating to the services and products across social media platforms, it gives search engine crawlers entirely fresh and authentic content. And, it doesn’t matter if the comments are good or bad; people still use keywords (product and/or company name) relevant to your business. This provides Google with important information and helps you rank better on SERPs.

The best thing about it? There’s no hard-selling. It’s just a bunch of genuine customers talking about their shopping experiences, sharing their opinions, or offering advice to other people.

 

Google trusts word-of-mouth marketing

Virtually everyone reads online reviews nowadays. Humans are instinctively skeptical, and we base our judgments and decisions on the collective actions of other people. So, reading a few trusted positive reviews from other consumers who made similar purchases and seeing good ratings drives our confidence. It convinces us that we’re making a good choice purchasing this well-reviewed item or service and not getting ripped off. It builds trust and credibility.

And Google is just like consumers: it trusts word-of-mouth marketing. It aims to provide the best and most relevant results to a user’s query, and, for that, it relies on positive reviews from happy customers. Customers leave you good reviews, bots crawl them, and the algorithms, smart as they are, understand what they say. If the reviews are positive, Google recognizes you as of high quality and value and recommends it to the searchers.

This then puts reviews among the top factors determining a site’s search rankings.

Even negative reviews can be positive for your SEO

As it turns out, even negative company reviews boost your SEO efforts. At first glance, it seems counterintuitive, doesn’t it? Let us explain.

There are a few distinct ways these can also be beneficial at the end of the day. For one thing, negative reviews are still reviews. Business owners should stop viewing them as the grim reaper because, in the eyes of Google, the more reviews you have, the closer you are to the top of the list.

Similarly, negative reviews still imply some customer engagement, which is better than no engagement in the first place. This also gives you an avenue to respond and thus show how you handle bad experiences and take care of your customers. Even more importantly, personal insights are a valuable source of information. You can learn about their likes and dislikes and, as a result, improve your brand’s customer experience and continue growing your brand.

Next, customers will use keywords relevant to your business even if they leave a bad review. In other words, they’re giving bots even more keywords to crawl.

Finally, they give you more authenticity in consumers’ eyes. Way too many positive reviews aren’t very good for you either. It tends to look fake and biased, and Google may end up suspending them all from a key review website. So, the negative ones tend to provide a necessary balance.

 

They give you a competitive edge

The main objective of any entrepreneur on the planet is to grow a successful business – basically, to have customers and make a profit. But one cannot succeed when they’re “the best-kept secret in town.” And, it is pretty simple, reviews equal visibility. So, if you want to get more bodies on your doorstep and eyeballs on your website than your competitors, you must ensure that you have plenty of quality consumer reviews.

In an overly-saturated online marketplace, company reviews boost your SEO efforts and help you stand out from the crowd.

The three things that Google factors in for showing up search results are:

  • Relevance
  • Distance
  • Prominence

Hence, businesses with more reviews and higher average ratings get more visibility and traffic (both digitally and physically) than their competitors, even if their competitors are within your immediate vicinity. Algorithms and consumers tend to see them as an authority in their industry.

From that point on, it pretty much turns into a self-feeding cycle: Greater exposure results in more foot traffic and sales, leading to even more reviews. So, if your rankings don’t seem to improve or your brand’s struggling for more conversion, don’t worry. It only means you have to start prioritizing high-quality review generation.

 

Let’s wrap things up

The moral of the story – SEO is essential for succeeding in the online marketplace. You don’t need us to tell you that. Keyword stuffing is the thing of the past, and optimized alt-tags are no longer enough to get you ranking for prevalent KWs. But SEO is ever-evolving, and you cannot afford to rely on a stationary strategy. Customer reviews are an integral part of SEO for businesses that want to stay ahead. So, now that we discussed how company reviews boost your SEO efforts, what’s holding you back? Now is an excellent time to start if you aren’t yet collecting.

 

Learn More about SEO Automation here

Why Your Business Should Monitor Your Website Performance

You understand the importance of building and maintaining an online presence in this day and age. And to do that, you must maintain a top-notch website that stands out from the competition. Keeping your site performing at high levels will help your company create more visibility and credibility, ultimately boosting your bottom line. Below, eSEOspace dives into the benefits of monitoring website performance in more detail!

 

Implement BPM

Before we explore the advantages of monitoring your company‘s website performance, it’s important to understand how you can better align your site with customer expectations and needs. For instance, using intelligent automation & BPM tools can take your website performance to the next level and significantly boost engagement with your target audience.

BPM (business process management) streamlines processes and workflows by automating mundane tasks and analyzing interactions among individuals, data, and systems. You can use BPM to redesign processes (or create new ones) to improve customer experiences, particularly when it comes to user-friendliness and navigation. Just make sure you spend time developing a flexible-but-firm BPM framework that you can consistently monitor and modify as needed.

 

Keep Tabs on Your Rivals

The right website monitoring services allow you to identify specific performance metrics of your site, showing you areas of strengths and weakness. Some tools will even allow you to track your competitors’ website performance metrics as well.

It’s not hard to see how that information could benefit your business! You can compare your performance to that of your rivals and learn precisely which areas you need to improve. Then, you can create a detailed plan for what measures are necessary to get an edge on the competition.

 

Rank Higher on Search Pages

Anytime you do an online search, search engine results pages (SERPs) give you a selection of websites related to your search. A big part of where your business shows up on these pages is your website’s performance, speed, and reliability.

Boosting your site’s search engine optimization (SEO) can go a long way in driving traffic to your site. But your site will only rank so high on SERPs without exceptional performance. Monitoring performance will reveal changes you can make to gain more visibility for your business.

 

Check Your Hosting Service    

There are many hosting services on the market, and it’s essential to confirm that your hosting service is holding up to its end of the service agreement. The easiest way to accomplish this is by using a reliable website monitoring service to constantly evaluate and analyze your website. A monitoring service can also help you organize your site’s bandwidth, RAM, server access, system speed, and other technological resources.

 

Identify Errors

Since website monitoring provides up-to-date reviews of your systems, you will know when bugs or other errors are affecting your systems. The monitoring service will detect the origin of the problem so that you can attack it and prevent the bug from wreaking havoc on your site and business. In other words, website monitoring allows your company to improve your weak points more efficiently.

 

Boost Your Bottom Line

Lastly, the combination of website monitoring benefits ultimately leads to a healthier bottom line for your business. Constantly checking your website performance and determining how to improve it can keep steady traffic coming in, increase customer retention, and encourage repeat visitors.

All this leads to more sales and higher profits. Not to mention the ability to attack errors at their origin will help safeguard your company against devastating attacks and losses.

Having a world-class website that stands out from your rivals is paramount. And to ensure your website performance is up to par, you must monitor it regularly and identify ways to improve it.

The information and advice above will go a long way in boosting your website’s performance. But never stop learning how to maintain your competitive edge and position your company for long-term growth.

Would you like to read more helpful content or learn about our web design and digital marketing services? Visit eSEOspace.com today!

What Is Keyword Stuffing and Why You Should Avoid It

In need of getting a better ranking position, website owners would do many things. Various tactics can help a site become more prominent and thus more visible to users, meaning potential customers. Acceptable tactics, however, don’t bring such a huge success and are often not fast enough. On the other hand, the so-called black hat tactics bring quicker results. The problem is that using them regularly and without control can be pretty risky. One such tactic is keyword stuffing, so let’s see what keyword stuffing is and why you should avoid it.

 

The keyword strategy

Nowadays, more and more products and services are offered online. The internet has become one big market where people get information, buy and sell almost everything. They type what they need, and the results simply come out. And that’s how we come to the term keywords. They should reflect the words and phrases customers use when they search for particular services or products via search engines. And it’s exactly this keyword tactic that many website owners use when optimizing their SEO elements.

However, filling your content with as many keywords as possible is not the right thing you should do. What’s more, it can be pretty harmful to both your website and your ranking.

Make sure your content is catchy for your customers.

 

What keyword stuffing is and why you should avoid it

When content or a webpage is filled with the same keyword or phrase that repeats repeatedly, we talk about keyword stuffing. While this strategy is mainly employed for gaining a higher ranking position on the search engines, in many cases, it can have a counter effect. Content with too many repetitive keywords usually seems unattractive to visitors. They quickly lose interest in it, even if it offers the desired information. What’s more, this might cause them to leave the website immediately, and they would probably never return to it.

Thus, for example, if you use the keyword the best sports cars three or four times within a single paragraph, that would pretty much exceed the suggested keyword density.

 

Types of keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing comes in two main types:

  • Visible– when there’s an obvious repetition of words or the usage of phrases entirely irrelevant to the topic. They’re called visible since everyone who visits the site is able to notice them.
  • Invisibleoverusing the keyword in the comments, alt tags, or meta descriptions, or hiding the text from the readers, which you gain by using the same color for both your background and your text. These, on the other hand, are created only to manipulate and trick the search engine crawlers. The readers can’t see them, but crawlers still can.

Throughout the years, both of these were effectively used by the website owners, and they really helped them reach their goals.

 

How harmful can it be?

Because the impression a text leaves on the readers is the only thing that can keep them, once your content becomes repetitive, it becomes useless as well. At that point, it’s obvious that your content serves not to satisfy your potential customers’ needs but only those of search engines.

Your focus moves from your readers to your ranking, and this is the point where you start losing your customers. Their negative experience with your site will make them go somewhere else.

There are so many elements you need to respect when making high-quality content.

Once again, we come to the question of trust. It is equally important to convince both your potential customers and search engines of the quality of what you have to offer. However, once when people start associating your brand with poorly written content, your reputation is permanently damaged. The thing is that only trustworthy businesses really survive on the market.

Finally, you need to know that this keyword stuffing strategy is just an old spam technique. However, Google and other search engines became smarter as time went by. Nowadays, they are not only able to spot such practice right away, but they also enforce penalties. Simply said, search engines don’t approve of these actions anymore. The practice of keyword stuffing has become one of the top SEO mistakes every website owner should avoid whenever possible.

 

What you can do to make the best use of your keyword

Now that you know what keyword stuffing is and why you shouldn’t use it, it’s time to learn how to avoid it.

Take care of your SEO.

  • The first step is optimization. You should use your keywords in the right places. The primary focus should be on the quality of the content, and then you can work on properly using keywords within the context. Use them only where you see it is natural.
  • Your target word or phrase should be relevant to the topic.
  • Use synonyms. This technique can solve a great part of the problem. If you use the appropriate synonyms instead of mere repetition of the keywords, you can avoid keyword stuffing. Still, at this point, you should be careful. Always use clear, not confusing words. Unfamiliar vocabulary can also turn people away.
  • Create longer content. For content to be relevant and thoroughly informative, it is better to be longer. That ensures an in-depth development of a topic. What’s more, it helps you spread out the keywords throughout the content without stuffing them. Although there is no perfect number of words per text, most experts would agree that every content longer than 300 words is acceptable.
  • The optimal keyword density should be 2%.
  • Add keywords to the other page elements as well. That would include the title, a subheading, the beginning and end of the text, an alt tag, and a meta description.

So, if you think you are doing your best but your website still doesn’t get better results, check your keywords. Maybe this story about keyword stuffing and why you should avoid it is exactly what you need.

eSEOspace is one of the Game Changers is San Diego’s SEO Space

The SEO industry is one of the world’s most competitive and most challenging industries today. As the internet continues to grow and more people are going online, so are the number of websites that pop out every year. The market is saturated with different contenders, but it doesn’t mean you can’t find success online. Thankfully, there are SEO agencies that can help you rise above the competition!

 

Companies like eSEOspace are here to help you! For those that don’t know, our team offers fully-comprehensive marketing solutions and services like SEO. We are known for offering bespoke solutions and strategies that are geared towards answering your business needs and helping you reach your goals.

As a matter of fact, our team has been recently featured in Clutch as one of the game-changing companies in San Diego’s SEO space. We are very proud to have been considered as one of the impactful companies locally. Our team is composed of hard-working and passionate individuals! Seeing them achieve such a feat in the industry is a huge testament to the kind of service we offer.

First and foremost, what is Clutch? Clutch is a B2B listing resource in the heart of Washington, DC, committed to helping small, mid-market, and enterprise businesses identify and connect with the service providers they need to achieve their goals.

Apart from being named as a game-changer by Clutch, we are also proud of our profile on their platform. Our company has managed to receive 5 total reviews throughout the years. We managed to average a perfect 5-star rating on all of our reviews! With that being said, here are some of the ones that we enjoyed:

“The team at eSEOspace doesn’t just build a beautiful website, they make sure that the SEO setup is completed and that people can find us on internet searches. They were very patient — they showed me various options and gave recommendations when I couldn’t make up my mind.” Doctor at Sacramento Holistic Dentist

“After 2 months of the site being online, we have over 450 users and over 12,000 pedigrees stored. Every time I reached out to their team I received a response within several hours. I was impressed by the ability to receive a fully working site and also having received SEO & Google Ads setups. An all-around company.” Owner of Pedigree Database, David Gedar

For more information about us and the services we offer, feel free to leave us a message! Our team will get back to you ASAP.

The Small Business Owner’s Guide to Using Data Analytics

Data analytics can seem like a confusing concept at first – but this is an area that every entrepreneur should be getting familiar with. By learning more about data analytics, you can advance your business and make well-reasoned decisions for your company. Working with an agency like eSEOspace can help you incorporate data analytics into your business strategy. Here are a few ways that you can use data analytics to drive new business and boost your revenue.

 

Risk Management

Data analytics are absolutely indispensable when it comes to risk management for small businesses. It’s all too easy to assume that risk management is only a concern for large enterprises, but even if you are your company’s only employee, you need to take steps to mitigate risks within your operations. With the help of an IT support professional who specializes in cybersecurity, you can leverage data collection, aggregation, and analysis capabilities to conduct essential security functions. Through these functions, you’ll be able to identify, examine, and minimize cybersecurity threats.

No matter how strong your cybersecurity protections are, you need to improve your cyber security and have a recovery plan set up so that your company can quickly bounce back if an attacker does manage to get through. What should your recovery plan address? You’ll need to include directives for which applications you’ll have to recover first, time objectives for getting programs back online, and the individuals who will carry out the recovery efforts.

 

Customer Acquisition and Retention

Acquiring and retaining customers is always at the core of your business strategy. If you’re not consistently bringing in new customers while building loyalty amongst your current customer base, you won’t be able to increase your long-term revenue. The good news? You can use data analytics to establish a solid customer acquisition and retention strategy.

By using customer relationship management software, you can analyze all of your sales and marketing leads within one program. You can figure out which initiatives turned customers from interested parties into buyers, and which actions helped motivate past customers to make repeat purchases. You don’t want to play guessing games when it comes to your customer acquisition and retention strategy, and data analytics allows you to work with concrete statistics as you determine your path forward.

 

Search Engine Optimization

Today, practically every entrepreneur has heard about search engine optimization – but do you know how to make it work for your business? You might still be guessing at the keywords your customers are looking for. If you want to enhance your SEO strategy, applying data analytics is key. Search Engine Watch recommends using data sources directly from search engines, utilizing a program that allows you to create visuals for your SEO results and applying A/B testing to analyze the success of your efforts.

 

Website Design

Did you know that data analytics can also be very useful when it comes to optimizing the design of your company website? Hubspot recommends using a website reporting tool that can track data from your site, such as visitor conversions. And if you’re investing in a major site design update, A/B testing can also be very helpful – you can run tests to analyze a particular design choice, and then run a second round of tests to identify whether or not a change has led to improved results.

On the surface, data analytics can seem complicated. But by diving into the world of data, you’ll be able to glean useful insights that you can use to set up successful business initiatives. Soon, you’ll feel confident as you build your business strategy around data analytics!

Ready to step up your data-driven marketing efforts? eSEOspace can lead the way! Schedule a consultation call through our website today!

How to Build a Website That Grows With Your Business

Will your website be able to scale with the growth of your business? If you’re not designing your website around scalability, you’re going to run into problems when your business starts attracting more customers. Ensure your website is built to meet the changing needs of your business. Not only does your website need to function effectively as traffic increases, but it should also facilitate growth through forward-thinking design principles. eSEOspace explores a few effective ways to build your business website with growth in mind.

 

Don’t Overlook Email Scalability

When people think of website scalability, they often forget about email. Your email needs to scale alongside the rest of your business. Without a scalable system, it will become increasingly difficult to manage your email contacts and initiate effective email marketing campaigns. Get in touch with an email marketing company for help establishing an effective email system that will grow with your business.

 

Improve Your Website SEO

If you want your website to actively help your business grow, you must prioritize search engine optimization (SEO). By enlisting the help of experts like eSEOspace, you can optimize your website to help it rank higher in search results, so more customers will find your solutions when seeking answers online. Keep in mind that customers typically use location-based tools when searching for products and services, so if you run a local business, pay attention to local SEO as well.

Hubspot explains that starting a blog is a great way to boost your SEO. Publishing blog articles tells Google that your website contains relevant and up-to-date answers to your customers’ questions. Plus, you can leverage on-page SEO techniques to optimize your blog content and help your website rank even higher in search results.

You can (and should) also link to your website from other social media sources. For example, by creating a Facebook ad or a blog post on another site that links back to you, you can use software to track where most of your traffic comes from. This will allow you to intelligently gauge the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaign and adjust accordingly.

 

Boost Your Website Conversions

SEO will help drive more traffic to your website, but conversion optimization will turn those visitors into paying customers. Increasing conversions is ultimately how you’ll grow your business. Attractive web design, frustration-free navigation, and influential copy are just a few key elements in any high-converting web page.

Create an eye-catching header banner on your website to build brand awareness among your website visitors. Make sure your banner includes your logo so your customers can learn to recognize your brand. Still need a logo? You can find free logo design tools online that enable you to design a professional logo without hiring a graphic designer. You just choose a template that best fits your brand and make it your own with custom text, fonts, and colors.

 

Build a Fully-Integrated System

Creating a fully-integrated tech system will make it much easier to scale your business. When all of your tech solutions are connected, you’ll be able to expand each type of software you use without disrupting your workflow. This interconnected collection of software and technology is known as an Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) system. Make sure all of your software tools including your CRM tool, accounting system, and inventory tracking software communicate with each other seamlessly.

 

Understand Your Analytics

Evaluating your website analytics is essential for growing your business. Google Analytics is a free website tracking tool that provides robust data and interactive reports about a website’s performance. At first glance, looking at Google Analytics reports is completely overwhelming. Take advantage of online guides and videos that can walk you through this valuable tool and show you how to extract the most value from your data. For example, ExactMetrics recommends using Google Analytics data to optimize your content strategy so you can better cater to your customers’ interests.

Whether you run a local retail store or an ecommerce business that operates entirely online, your website will play a key role in the growth of your company. Make sure your website is set up to foster smooth and controlled growth. Pay attention to website scalability now and you’ll be able to avoid major headaches as your business expands.