- Authority
- Relevance
Building authority in Google
How do you build authority in Google? Right now, links pointing to your site are the most important factor that affects your authority. SEO tools like Moz have created the concept of “Domain Authority,” which is a number from 1–100 that shows how easy it will be for you to rank in search results. You can check your Domain Authority for free using Moz. Once you have that information, you can use it to see what kind of keywords you should try ranking for.SEO ranking cheat sheet
How can you increase your Domain Authority? By building links. But how can you build links in a scalable way? Anyone who has ever sent link building emails knows that their success rate is pretty low. The answer? Make some friends! Guest post on other websites. Seek out content creators and include their quotes in your work—other creators are the people most likely to link to you…because they also create content! This approach to link building makes your blogging more effective as a whole.Social link building
Signaling relevance in Google
How can you show Google that your content is relevant to what people are searching for? Keywords! SEO is evolving past the basic keyword optimization and research that was common as recently as 5 years ago. But it’s still important to understand the basics of keyword research. When you try to decide what keywords to rank for, you’re looking for three factors.- High search volume
- Low competition
- Relevant to your business
How to choose a keyword for your business
How do you find good keywords? There are a lot of keyword research tools, but Google Keyword Planner is free, and a good place to start.- Page title (<title>)
- <h1> header
- Body text (2-4 times every 500 words)
- Meta description
- Image alt text
- File names
- Meta keywords
Beyond simple keyword research: Target the broader topic
Google used to rank the pages that had the most keywords jammed inside them. Not anymore.The third search factor: Happiness
How is happiness a ranking factor? Well, as Andy said in his talk: “If someone searches for a keyword and they find you, would they be happy?” Google wants to give people the results that are most relevant to the things they are searching for. Because of that, they use “user interaction signals” to tell how much people enjoy the pages they visit from search. Signals like:- Click through rate from search results pages
- Bounce rate
- Time on page
- Headers, subheads
- Bullet lists, numbered lists
- Bolding and Italics
- Internal links
- Multiple images
- Long content gets shared more
- Long content attracts more links
- Long content correlates with high rankings
- Long content generates more leads
How can knowing about semantic SEO help you in ActiveCampaign?
ActiveCampaign isn’t an SEO tool. But understanding how Google decides what content to show in search results can help you use ActiveCampaign better. Why? It all comes down to this quote from Andy. “If someone searches for a keyword and they find you, would they be happy?” When someone comes to your website, there are a few goals in play:- They are looking for an answer to a question
- You want to attract the right people to your website
- They are going to leave as soon as they get their answer
- You want to get their contact information and stay in touch
“Message matching” with ActiveCampaign Forms and a welcome series
By now, you’ve probably tested out a “sign up for our newsletter” call to action. I’m going to guess it didn’t go all that well. With email inboxes crowded, most people aren’t really looking for another random newsletter to sign up for. But email marketing is a still a huge, high-ROI marketing channel. People do sign up for email lists—they just don’t do it on generic forms that offer vague benefits.If most newsletter forms were totally honest
Message match your visitor’s “searcher intent”
People who come to you from Google have a specific searcher intent—a specific problem they’re trying to solve. So if you want to convert them into contacts…offer them more stuff related to their problem! You can offer a lead magnet, or just highlight a specific benefit in the copy for your CTA. Once you collect contact information, you can send people through a welcome series that gives them more information on the specific problem they were trying to solve.A form that adds people to a list and a deal while segmenting
That means you can create as many different lead magnets and welcome automations as you need. So when someone finds you because you did great semantic SEO, you don’t need to offer them something generic. Instead, you can make a specific offer that’s exactly what they’re looking for.