New Year has begun and you may be working with dedication to earn something more valuable in the rest of the year. Well, the start can be turned into an inspiration which can turn along to motivate you throughout the year. Same is the case with SEO. If you work on SEO and you really want to make things happen your favor, you can start doing right things to make sure that rest of the year brings your work in spotlight. There are a few SEO tasks which you can do to push your website towards higher ranks.
Improve page speed
While other ranking factors are still there to be taken care of, there is one big addition which specifically focuses mobile users. It’s the page speed. According to a study, page result has been one of the main factors in turning visitors into customers.
The main hurdle in this scenario is that people don’t actually realize that their websites have been performing poorly because of page speed. And then they ask reasons for the bad performance of their websites. In that case, it becomes essential to examine websites on speed testing platforms. There are several web and desktop tools available to check the website speed.
Having that said, it’s important that you invest in high quality web hosting. Furthermore, you can merge CSS and JavaScript files in order to reduce HTTP calls. Another reason for the poor speed of website has been found as slow loading of the images. Thus, you need to make sure that the images you are using are accurately scaled and compressed.
Create a personal brand
You may think about cold link outreach in order to get some valuable connection with the well-performing brands. Everyone does it in order to establish better business connection. However, this very method is quite challenging. This process can literally be regarded as a method to ask from someone who doesn’t know you at all. It’s the wrong and, sometimes, quite dangerous approach. You need to have good connection with a brand before you send a request for the placement of your link.
Here you can develop your own personal brand. With this brand, you will not have to ask someone for the placement of your links. Instead, people will come and ask for their links to be placed in your site. If you look at this process, it could actually be an opportunity for you to identify legitimate practitioners and look to form a valuable partnership based on mutual interest.
Incorporate video
If you want to market something, text, and images alone cannot drive the traffic you could consider beneficial. Therefore, incorporating video can be your best bet. The video is a visual illustration which can deliver right message to the audience, asking them to take an action.
Google’s transition towards larger text ads is something that anyone using their advertising platform has already known about for quite a while. Expanded text ads went live in a year ago. While advertisers could still run the standard text ads, changes made by the search engine giant in February 2017 make it impossible to create new ones or edit your “old style” ads in any way. You can’t even update the landing page URL anymore. Your only options are to pause your ads and unpause them.
If you want to make any changes, no matter how small, you will need to write completely new ads. Obviously, this has left some advertisers worried about how those newly-created ads will perform once they go live. According to information published by many search engine marketing experts, these worries aren’t completely unfounded. Some advertisers have reported better performance with expanded text ads when compared to the standard ones. On the other hand, there is no shortage of those who say their ads are now doing worse.
In any case, if you use Google AdWords, there will come a time when you need to update your existing ads or create new ones. The good news is that there are ways to navigate the transition to the expanded ads while minimizing potential problems.
Differences Between Standard and Expanded Ads
The previous ad format (25/35/35):
Headline – 25 characters
Description 1 – 35 characters
Description 2 – 35 characters
was replaced with a larger format (30/30/80) in the following layout:
Headline 1 – 30 characters
Headline 2 – 30 characters
Description – 80 characters
According to Google, the change was made to give mobile searchers more information. They reported an average rise of 20 percent in CTR during early tests conducted last year.
Why New Ads May Perform Worse for Some Advertisers
One reason for this is that the new ads are larger and thus require advertisers to completely rethink their message. For many advertisers, this means their ads aren’t merely rewritten, they’re completely new.
Bigger advertisers often have ads they consider “proven winners.” That is, ads they have tested and optimized over a period of years. It’s therefore normal that their new ads may not do as well as their previous ones right after they go live.
Expanded Ad Testing Strategy
If you’re unsure of how your new ads will perform, some prominent SEM experts reccommend creating an ad group with four ads written by using this strategy:
Ad 1 – Write a small ad using wording as close as possible to one of your standard ads with the highest CTR.
Ad 2 – Create a longer second ad with completely new messaging.
Ad 3 – Use the same description as ad 1, but swap headline 1 with headline 2.
Ad 4 – Use the same description as ad 2, but swap headline 1 with headline 2.
Should swapping headline positions not make sense for your ads, you can instead swap them for a portion of the phrase you use in your description.
With this approach, you get four ads instead of just one, increasing the chances that at least one of them will be successful. You’re also keeping some of the elements of your highest performing standard ad, which makes it more likely that your new one will get a high CTR as well. Run the ads as a test and you’ll get to see how each of them does. You can then use what you’ve learned when you create more expanded text ads.
