5 Important Rules When Creating Powerful Headlines

If you want to create a powerful headline that can attract a huge amount of traffic and keep them engaged, here are 5 important rules to remember.

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5 Tips to Writing Powerful Headlines that Sell

No matter how useful the body content of your article is – if the headline fails to appeal, nobody will scroll down to read the story inside, and the entire article goes to waste. It’s just the nature of all internet-readers that they only scan through the article, they want quick answer to their queries, and they only look at the headline to determine if the entire article is worth-reading.

Once you’ve come up with a beautiful, strong and effective headline for your article, the job is nearly done. With this in mind, here are 5 useful tips for you to create a powerful headline that can sell.

1. Keep It Short yet Descriptive

A descriptive headline does not have to be long, but it should contain only the most essential words that would sufficiently convey the full meaning of what the post is all about. Somewhere between 55 and 60 characters is considered as the ideal length of the web title/headline.

2. Include Keywords

By including keywords in the headline you are making sure the article is going to be found on popular searches. I don’t want you to delve deeper into the whole anchor text design and distribution scenario now, or do lots of research on how Google looks for keywords in the headlines, but trust me, adding keywords to the headlines always has a significant impact on rankings. So, if you want to optimize your post for search pages, include keywords in the headline.

Terms like “How to”, “5 Tips” are also very popular search terms, so prefer adding them to the headline.

3. Choose the Right Font Style and Size

Readability is an important part of the article’s performance. You may have created a top-quality write-up with tons of ideas and values included in it, but it never interests the readers if it’s not easy to read. This is where the font comes into effect. Choose the right kind of font style and size in order to justify the efforts you’ve put into the post. Choose a font that fits well into all the devices. Sans Serif (Arial) tops my list of fonts, and I normally set the size 11 pt.

4. Track the Performance and Learn

You may look at your analytics data to have an idea about how the articles are performing. List out the articles that are most preferred, liked and shared on social platforms, and take a look at their headlines/titles. Find out the difference between the headlines of the most liked articles and that of the disliked ones. Learn from the mistakes and evolve.

5. Avoid Over-doing

Creating an eye-enticing headline is the aim, but don’t promise the earth and moon in the headline. Promise as much as you can deliver, not beyond that because if you do, you may gain some short-term traffic, but that would never stay long. And eventually, your entire post lacks in quality and authenticity. Stay true to what you say, and be genuine with what your article tells.

Well, these are not the only rules to adopt when creating a powerful and effective headline. You may have a different mind-set and rules that differ from mine, but the aim is to come up with something that attracts the traffic and keep them engaged.

5 Great Ways to Grow Your Small SEO Firm Big

Are you a small SEO firm who wants to grow bigger? Then it’s vitally important to reconsider how you’re marketing your company and what efforts you’re putting in to get big global clients. Maybe you need to stop certain obsolete marketing ways, or add a couple of new techniques that would give overwhelming results, or even change your entire marketing strategy altogether.

Here, we present to you 5 useful ways to grow your small SEO agency big. This is kind of a step-by-step method to build and grow your business, too.

1. Develop Your Brand Constantly

Building a recognizable brand is important. If you have designed a unique and aesthetically pleasing logo, conveyed a clear and beautiful message, and reached a good customer-base through your distinct features, then you’ve achieved a great feat in terms of branding. But don’t sit there! Keep developing your brand, so it becomes sustainable in the long run and your customers would remember it for a long time.

So, how do you do that? Keep improving the quality of your SEO services and keep adding everything about you, your company, your mission, vision and culture onto your website on a regular basis. Reach out to as many people as you could. Keep designing flyers and statements that relate your brand to your active and potential clients.

2. Do Proper Content Marketing

Content marketing is of the greatest importance in the world of SEO, but it has to be proper, complete and consistent. There are a number of different platforms and a ton of ways, and you need to use them all.

First and foremost, create and submit meaningful guest posts to build up your own reputation and reach out to a large audience. In parallel, keep publishing good and relevant blog posts onto your own blog page. You should also share your opinion posts with others, so it gets you a good exposure. Writing in-depth guides on some popular topics for your readers can also help your brand grow globally.

Furthermore, include content marketing as part of your services to add some extra boost to your business.

3. Improve Customer Relationship

SEO is full of uncertainties as target search engines continue to evolve their respective ranking criteria. Clients come and clients go, and that’s pretty common in this industry.

Some may terminate just in the second month even though you’ve done all the hard work to bring them onto the top-10 list. So, the fact of the matter is that ranking is not the only concern of your clients. You can take a potentially unsatisfied client from the second month to the sixth through effective communication and good behavior.

Good customer relationship can also get you referrals, which is another important benefit. And, this works like magic, especially in SEO industry.

So, here’s a quick 3-point summary of the above:

• Do your best to achieve the optimal results.
• Constantly communicate with your clients and inquire about their business status.
• Continue to consolidate your SEO efforts so as to bring in growth in their businesses.

4. Form Partnerships

 Forming partnerships doesn’t mean that you would partner with other SEO firms and share your clients with them. Rather, search for Web Development firms, Design agencies, Paid Search providers, Social Media agencies that are looking for an SEO partner.

A good partnership with these agencies makes sure that you’re not just an SEO firm, but a full-service digital agency. This, in turn, makes way for many small jobs that you can potentially get from your SEO clients. You can get SEO clients from your partner agencies as well.

5. Learn to beat the Competition

As you grow, you would naturally face increasing competition in your niche. Your competitors would be keeping a close eye on your strategies, leads and all that stimulates your growth. They also would be trying to convert some of your leads. Therefore, you need to develop techniques to beat the competition.

You can beat the competition by implementing all the latest SEO techniques prior to your competitors and reviewing their SEO activities and backlink profiles on a regular basis. This would give you an idea of the errors you may be committing that you must rectify quickly.

Besides heavy competition, you would also face lots of obstacles and distractions on the way, but you need to stay on top of all that. Never lose your interest, passion and ambition. Never give up!

Major Advantages of Republishing Old Blog Content

Read through the following post to know the major advantages of republishing old blog content and how to do it.

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Practical Benefits of Republishing Old Blog Posts

In 2011 Google included the FRESHNESS factor in its ranking algorithm, and since then FRESH content has been enjoying more priority and privileges by Google. Talking about searchers, they too look for trending topics and fresh content. Therefore, if you want to satisfy both search engines and searchers, your content has to be fresh and interesting. While you should keep posting brand new blog posts every regularly, you should also be republishing your old blog posts on a timely basis because if your old posts are really relevant and valuable, they definitely need to come on searches.

With this in mind, let’s first take a look through some of the practical benefits of republishing your old posts, and then proceed to know the method of updating and republishing old blog content.

Get Found, Get Preferred

Google always wants to show top-quality and fresh content to its searchers. And searchers prefer relevant pieces of content that are fresh and up-to-date. So, spruce up your old blog posts that still are useful to your audience/readers by modifying texts, incorporating new ideas etc. and republish them. This way you could satisfy both search engines and searchers.

Get More Social Shares and Other Ranking Factors

Republishing and re-promoting old posts naturally earns new social shares, inbound links and other search ranking factors. This, in turn, enhances the traffic to your site from a number of different sources. The more you reach, the better you earn!

Spend Less, Earn More

Oftentimes, republishing a relevant old post and promoting it is better than creating a brand new post from scratch and promoting it because the old post already has some page authority, which makes it easier to get ranked and drive traffic.

Now that you know the practical benefits of republishing old blog posts, read on to know HOW to update and republish old blog content. Here’s a 3-step process:

Step-1: Choose blog posts that really are worth republishing. While most blog posts have a short life today, very few have the property to stay for long, and those are the posts that you would be promoting and re-promoting. A thorough keyword research would help you find the popular search terms and based on this select your old blog posts that are worth updating and republishing.

Step-2: Improvise, update and republish the selected old blog content making sure it’s got everything to reach a great audience and answer multiple search queries. Update texts and include new pictures or videos to make it look convincingly fresh and up-to-date. Change the publish date so it’s featured as a brand new post.

Step-3: Optimize the post so as to achieve both search engine ranks and better conversion-rate. Perform a good keyword-research first, and go on implementing various on-page and off-page optimization techniques to attain the maximum advantages.

In a nutshell, republishing and re-promoting old blog content has edges over creating a post from scratch and promoting it. However, you should not ignore publishing brand new content on a constant basis. While republishing old posts gets the juice flowing, adding fresh content every now and then helps your blog stay genuinely up-to-date.

What are your thoughts on republishing relevant old blog posts? How do you update and publish (old) blog content? Please, share your ideas in the comments below.

3 Ways You can Make Your Website Content More User-oriented

It takes countless hours and tons of effort to produce your website content, and you cannot let all that go to waste by overlooking certain important points while creating the content. You want each piece of your content to pay you back. Put differently, you want your content to attract users naturally, engage them and sell them your products and/or services.

So, it comes down to just one thing – ‘user-oriented content’. The more user-oriented your website content is, the better engagement rate it shows, and the more is the chance of making a sale.

There are many ways to creating user-oriented, or in other words user-focused, content, but this post outlines 3 common, basic and simple ways of making your website content more user-oriented.

1. Present all Attributes Perfectly.

If you are selling products, be sure to give complete information to your visitors so they can get enough knowledge about the products. Create individual pages for each single product. Some of the key elements you must add on each product page are:

• Multiple high-quality images captured from all angles.
• Complete texts describing the product.
• Multiple color options (if available).
• Details of the material used, attributes/features, how to use and how to care the product.
• Pricing and/or discounts (if any).
• A short explainer video.

If you are offering services, you may not have many pictures for your visitors, but you should not skip the details. You must include all that a user may want the answers for. Besides covering the ‘why’, ‘how’ and ‘practical benefits’ of your services include your achievements and success.

How you’ve helped a past client may come extremely helpful to your current and future users and some of them might find it to be their own story, and that gives you a good chance of selling your services. Why would they go somewhere else if they get all their questions answered automatically?

So, include as much details as you possibly could!

2. Partition Your Content.

Online visitors want instant solutions. They don’t have time or interest to read through a post (except for certain number of informational blog posts) entirely. They like to jump straight into the part that answers their question or solves their query. So, don’t forget to partition your content into multiple segments possessing some relationship with one another and all supporting the main idea of the topic.

The intent is clear. Your user would get multiple options and engage more with the content.

Your visitors would obviously differ from one another in terms of mentality, interests and behavior. You certainly have no idea who’s going to choose which part of your content, but with a certain amount of research on customer behavior you can know how to design and partition your content, so it can be useful to a wide variety of audience.

Constructive linking is a vital technique that keeps your users intact. You can link each segment of your content with others, so a user can click a link to explore the specific part as per their choice.

Partitioning your content is a good way of making your entire content more user-oriented. Easy to find – Easy to read – Easy to sell the stuff!

3. Blame Yourself for Anything Wrong

Many a times, people in the web sphere do a lot of mistakes. They do this, they do that, and they do all the crazy things that go wrong. But don’t criticize them for not doing the right thing.

As an instance, say a user clicked on a broken link and landed on an error page. What would the message on the error page read?

“Oops, you may have clicked a wrong link or typed in an incorrect URL”

 Or, something like this:

“Sorry, we tried but couldn’t find the requested page. You might try the following pages instead!”

The latter one is more polite and gives your users an impression that you’re really taking care of them. You’re taking the responsibility for the mishap on your own shoulders rather than criticizing them.

In web, when you cannot have a face-to-face interaction with your users, these small things in your language matter a lot. More user-oriented content means better chance of conversion.

Please, drop a comment to share your experience.