If there is one thing that revolutionalised how business is being done generally, it is the introduction of e-commerce. This process allows products and services to be bought from anywhere around the world. It is really a game-changer. In this article, I want to look at the evolution of e-commerce. We want to look at how we begin the journey until we get to where we are now. Follow me as we are going to look at that in this article. 

Now the stages…

#1 Late 1970s

At this stage, e-commerce is limited to facilitation of the commercial transactions. It is only limited only to buying and selling of products and services. At this stage, technologies such as EDI and EDT is being used to facilitate commerce. 

#2 In the 1980s

At this stage, credit cards Automated Teller Machine and telephone banking was being introduced to e-commerce. This allows banks to play major roles in commercial transactions. This also increases the volume of sales globally.

#3 From the 1990s

At this stage, e-commerce now included Enterprise Resource Planning Systems, data mining and data warehousing. This was when organisations such as Amazon, and Yahoo among others launched out.

#4 1998-2000

At this time, a substantial number of businesses around the world started embracing e-commerce. It was also around this time that Google came around and change the internet business landscape generally.

#5 2000-2002

This was the period that Wikipedia was launched. it was also the period that paypal.com came around as well. It marks the beginning of internet marketing.

#6 2002 onward

This was when mobile commerce and social commerce were launched. Now people can purchase products and services using mobile phones. It now becomes possible for people to purchase products and services through social media platforms.
Action Point

I know you might agree with some of the points raised in this article. You might not agree with some of the issues raised. Let me know your views about the topic discussed. We will appreciate it if you can drop your comment. Thanks in anticipation.

CRMNUGGETs is committed to fact-checking in a fair, transparent and non-partisan manner. Therefore, if you’ve found an error in any of our reports, be it factual, editorial, or an outdated post, please contact us to tell us about it.

Does your eCommerce website have huge visitors but minimum sales? Is your website suffering from a high shopping cart abandonment rate? If yes, then you are in the right place to fix it.

Nowadays, cart abandonment is the major problem that most website wieners are neglecting. And most people are confused about how to fix it. This is the reason we have come up with the best tricks to reduce cart abandonment.

Today, we’re excited to talk about cart abandonment, why it happens, and effective ways to fix it in detail.
Are you ready?
Dive in.

What Is Shopping Cart Abandonment? And Why Does It Happen?

Shopping cart abandonment is the condition where your customers add various products to the cart but fail to buy them.

Shopping cart abandonment is over 80% worldwide.

Most shopkeepers fail to address this issue and leave a lump sum of money behind. It has been seen that every 2 out of 3 people leave the cart without buying. But what do you think about this cart abandonment?

Think of physical stores where people buy things offline. How do they manage customers leaving the shops without buying a product?

Usually, in the physical shops, people touch the products, feel a safe shopping experience within the four walls and wisely list the buying products. Isn’t it?

Now, what about online shopping? What are the reasons for cart abandonment?

Most people leave the cart for various seasons including checkout fears, no trust in the shopkeepers, minimum online payment options, high shipping costs, and many more.

How to fix them and reduce shopping cart abandonment? Here are the 7 effective ways to fix cart abandonments at your store.

Ways To Fix Your Shopping Cart Abandonment For Shopify Store

Shopping cart abandonment has become one of the major eCommerce concerns for website owners. No matter how much quality product you provide to the customers, you still face cart abandonment disorder. Isn’t it?

But don’t worry. With intense research and observations, we have come up with the 7 most popular and effective cart abandonment solutions.

#1 Reduce Checkout Fears

Have you ever shopped online? Did you feel safe while delivering your details to the website? No matter whether the answer is yes or no, question yourself why do you think like that. And know what’s missing for your eCommerce store.

According to a study by Baymard Institute, 61 out of 100 websites are asking for unnecessary details and showing themselves as spammers.

So, make sure you eliminate the check-out fears of the customers by reasoning each point that you are asking the customers.

Ensure customers about the terms and conditions of using your data. Make the customers feel secure at your website.

#2 Build Trust and Credibility During Checkout

After checking out fear, distrust on the eCommerce website is the most common reason for shopping cart abandonment. Tell your customers how you care about products while shipping, shipping period, tracking, and other details regarding shipment.

Provide trust badges showing the information is 100% secured.
Also, at each point of your website, tell your customers about the quality of the products, guide them on how to choose the best products, and what to do if customers aren’t satisfied with the products.

Question yourself and provide the best solutions on your website.
These are the few considerations ensuring trust and credibility on your website. Hence, reducing shopping cart abandonment.

#3 Simplify Your Checkout Process

Make the customer buying process easier just by simplifying the checkout process. Do not make check-out process complexes that frustrate the customers.

Make it simple that end in two or three steps.
It’s noticed that most customers lose interest in buying products when there are complex check-out processes. So, make sure to make it sweet and simple in just a few steps.

#4 Give Shoppers Multiple Payment Options

It’s important to ensure comfort and convenience for customers with the online payment options. If customers find fewer payment options that take a long time to pay, then they leave their cart.

So make sure to provide multiple payment options for the shoppers. This makes shoppers buying easier and more comfortable. Finally, it results in less shopping cart abandonment.

#5  Free or Reduced Shipping Costs

Who would not love the word free? Free shipping, Buy 1 Get 1 free, 50% off, 70% off, and free delivery are some of my favourite sentences. Each time I see them, I make a purchase instantly.

If you want to engage customers with your site and hook them to make instantaneous purchases, then free shipping is the best tool. Now, reducing shopping cart abandonment looks easier. Right?

#6 Re-engage With InactivitySensor™️ Popups

With millions of online stores and choices around the customers, it’s no surprise to forget about things easily. How many times have you forgotten your meeting timings?

Most probably several times. But there is a Google Calendar for you to send meeting notifications and re-engage yourself.

Similarly, you need an OptinMonster’s InactivitySensor to trigger pop-ups about the products in the cart. This re-engages the customers ensuring successful purchasers.

#7 Personalize Your Messaging

Have you ever visited a website with frustrating pop-ups? How do you feel? You feel irritated and want to have no pop-ups on your website.

Isn’t it? But this is one of the biggest mistakes that most site owners commit.

The problem isn’t with the pop-ups but with the usage of pop-ups. If you use pop-ups to send personalized messages and campaigns to your customers, they are a great sales booster.

So, never miss out on this opportunity to attract customers. Send personalized messages that hook the customer and show urgency.

Conclusion.

Reduce your cart abandonment rate and increase sales using the above-mentioned 7 effective tricks.
Never forget to ensure a smooth shopping experience for the customers and build trust.

Be genuine in the shipping and billing process. Tell your customer the exact delivery time and increase credibility. Reward shoppers. Re-engage shoppers with personalized messages.

Take your eCommerce business to the next level by utilizing eCommerce development services. So, get in touch with our experienced Shopify developers and boost your online business.

Make sure to follow these things and enjoy high sales. What do you say? Do you use any other trick to increase sales and reduce cart abandonment? If yes, feel free to comment and join the conversation.
Cheers!

Action Point
PS: If you would like to have an online course on any of the courses that you found on this blog, I will be glad to do that on an individual and corporate level, I will be very glad to do that I have trained several individuals and groups and they are doing well in their various fields of endeavour. Some of those that I have trained includes staffs of Dangote Refinery, FCMB, Zenith Bank, New Horizons Nigeria among others. Please come on Whatsapp and let’s talk about your training. You can reach me on Whatsapp HERE. Please note that I will be using Microsoft Team to facilitate the training. 

I know you might agree with some of the points raised in this article. You might not agree with some of the issues raised. Let me know your views about the topic discussed. We will appreciate it if you can drop your comment. Thanks in anticipation.

CRMNIGERIA is committed to fact-checking in a fair, transparent and non-partisan manner. Therefore, if you’ve found an error in any of our reports, be it factual, editorial, or an outdated post, please contact us to tell us about it.

The reliance on online reviews is growing massively when choosing the kind of business people want to employ.

More than 80% of the individuals have their faith vested in what people have to say about the brand; it is almost as powerful as word-of-mouth marketing. 

Google facilitates the consumer to write reviews. These are then displayed on the company’s Google business listing.

When users are trying to find out more about your business, they can simply read the reviews on Google and know from the past customer experience. 

Businesses can also add Google reviews to your website. To know how you can do it and why you should be doing it, keep reading. 

HOW TO ADD GOOGLE REVIEWS ON YOUR WEBSITE?

If you copy and paste the reviews on the website, you hamper the post’s legitimacy, and you can run into conflicts for doing so. However, smarter ways of doing this are listed below for you to do it correctly. 

Social Media Aggregators

Social media aggregators collect data from your social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.

Later to collecting, it curates and moderates it, which means it filters out the irrelevant and abusive data from what’s relevant to the brand, customizes it as per the brand’s requirements, and displays it anywhere on the website. 

Tools like Taggbox Widget and Tag Embed help you in achieving what you seek. 

Taggbox Widget is undoubtedly one of the best tools you can employ to add Google review widget to your website.

It is a UGC platform, which makes displaying Google reviews on the website easy. The process of embedding Google reviews is divided into two parts:

• By creating Google Reviews Widget
• Embedding Google Reviews On The Website

CREATE GOOGLE REVIEWS WIDGET

1. Create an account on the Taggbox widget or log in to an already existing one. 
2. After logging in, you will notice a dashboard. Here you will have four easy steps to create and add Google reviews on your website. Now click on the add social feeds option to fetch feeds in your widget. 
3. Choose ‘Google Review’ as the origin from amongst the different social media platforms displayed on the pop-up. 
4. A different pop-up will appear asking you to choose your location to derive Google reviews and then click on the ‘create widget’ option. 
5. Taggbox Widget will automatically fetch all the Google reviews and turn them into a unified feed.
6. After the feed is created, you can also customize, moderate, and gain insights through engagement and web analytics. 

EMBED GOOGLE REVIEWS WIDGET ON THE WE

After customizing the reviews, you need to embed them on your website. 

1. On the lower-left corner of the edit page, you will find a ‘PUBLISH’ button; click on it. 
2. You will find a list of multiple website building options appearing on the screen. Choose from amongst your preferred options. 
3. Adjust your Google Reviews feed’s height and width as per the web page segment where you want to embed it. And then click on the ‘GET’ button. 
4. Just copy and paste the code generated on the backend of your website and apply the changes. 

WHY DO BRANDS NEED TO ADD GOOGLE REVIEWS?

• Social Proof

Before making purchase decisions, consumers lookout for social proof. According to stats, 85% of the consumers go across approximately 10 reviews while making up their minds. 

When the social proof is just in front of them on the website, why would they want to go somewhere else to know about the past users’ experiences? 

If they want to purchase your brand but first read the reviews, they need not dilly-dally around, impacting their stimulation to buy. 

#1 SEO Performance

Online reviews play an essential role in your SEO ranking efforts. It is because they have the potential to affect your local rankings, customers’ purchase decisions, and click-through rates.

Embedding Google reviews on your website can give the users quick access to accurate information, which helps them form their opinion about the purchase.

Local search engines pick up websites that users turn to repeatedly due to their high-velocity reviews. 

#2 Seller Rating

Google Seller Ratings is a special extension of Google Adwords that showcases other buyers’ trust in your business. Your out of five scores will appear under the headline and URL of your pay-per-click ad. 

Research shows that more than 60% of the searches click on GSR ads when seeking their decision to make a purchase.

Furthermore, GSR can enhance your click-through rate, which positively impacts your website’s quality score while also reducing your cost-per-click. 

#3 Builds Trust

Embedding Google reviews on your website can help in gaining the trust of your user.

When they see positive reviews and well-responded negative reviews, potential users find a level of comfort in using the products and services provided by the brand. 

#4 Marketing To The Millennials

Apart from trusting online reviews as much as personal recommendations, a major part of the millennial population trusts online reviews more than they trust tv ads.

Now, if this isn’t ringing a bell in your ears, you are missing out on the amazing impact Google reviews have on your business.

Also, they are more cost-effective than the ads that are played on television making embedding on websites a better option. 

Over To You

When embedded on your website, Google reviews make a lot of difference in how your users perceive your brand.

Use Taggbox Widget or Tagembed to embed the Google reviews widget on your website and derive all the amazing benefits it has. 

To Get Email Updates when we post new content, Click Here.

There are Software Houses in Pakistan and SEO agency in Pakistan that offer Software development services. Software houses in Pakistan have a great reputation for offering Software solutions to their clients with the latest technologies and trends, while SEO agencies in Pakistan can get your website listed on the top search engine results pages.

Software houses in Pakistan and SEO agencies in Pakistan offer Software development services.In this article, I want to look at the best SEO Agency in Pakistan.


Software Houses: Software solutions offered by these companies help improve the ROI of their clients, which can be accessed through various channels like web applications, mobile apps, desktop software or video surveillance systems.

The company has a team of specialists who are well versed with Software solutions and Software development.

SEO agency: This company offers services such as website analysis, keyword research, on-page optimization of the content with appropriate keywords inclusion in it etc.

They also offer one-stop solutions for web design and software development to their clients by bringing together a team of expert Software developers who not only have good knowledge about Software solutions but also Software development.

Software Houses in Pakistan: Software houses in Pakistan have a great reputation for offering Software solutions to their clients with the latest technologies and trends, while SEO agencies in Pakistan can get your website listed on the top search engine results pages. 

The Software House in Pakistan offers Software solutions that can help improve the ROI of their clients, which are accessible via different channels like web applications, mobile apps, desktop software, or video surveillance systems.

The company has a team of specialists who are well versed with Software solutions and Software development.

The SEO agency is a one-stop solution for all your needs when it comes to web design as well as software development; they offer services such as website analysis, keyword research on page optimization by including appropriate keywords within the content etc.

They also have experts Software developers who not only have knowledge about Software solutions but also Software development. 

Company Name: https://www.intelliscence.com/ – (+92) 345 409 0775 – info@intelliscence.com 

Software Houses in Pakistan offer Software Solutions to their clients through various channels like Software, desktop software or video surveillance systems.

The Software Houses in Pakistan have a team of experts who are well versed with Software Solutions and Software Development.

The SEO Agency offers web design as well as Software development to their clients by bringing together a team of expert Software developers who not only know about the latest technologies but also Software Development. 

Software Houses in Pakistan offer Software solutions that help improve the ROI of their clients which can be accessed through various channels like web applications, mobile apps, desktop software or video surveillance system while SEO agencies in Pakistan gets your website listed on the top search engine results pages.

They both offer services such as Website Analysis, Keyword Research for On-page Optimization by including appropriate keywords within the content etc.

Software House India offers Software solutions that can help improve the ROI of their clients which are accessible via different channels like web applications, mobile apps, desktop software or video surveillance system.

The company has a team of experts who are well versed in Software Solutions and Software development. Software Houses in India also provide services such as Software, desktop software or video surveillance system with a team of experts who have knowledge about Software Solutions and Software Development.

The SEO Agency is a one-stop solution for all your needs when it comes to web design and Software development; they offer solutions like website analysis, keyword research on page optimization by including appropriate keywords within the content etc.

They also bring together a team of expert Software developers who not only know about the latest technologies but are well versed in Software Development too.

The SEO agency has the best reputation for providing Web Designers Services along with Software Developers Services which can get any company’s website listed on top search engine results pages. 

More than 80% of the individuals have their faith vested in what people have to say about the brand; it is almost as powerful as word-of-mouth marketing. 

Google facilitates the consumer to write reviews. These are then displayed on the company’s Google business listing.

When users are trying to find out more about your business, they can simply read the reviews on Google and know from the past customer experience. 

Businesses can also add Google reviews to your website. To know how you can do it and why you should be doing it, keep reading. 

Email marketing is when you send marketable email messages to your “email subscriber” contacts. Who has signed up to your email list and given specific approval to collect email information from you?

Email promoting is utilized to brighten, drive deals, and compose a local area around your image.
Current email promotion has moved away from one-size-fits. Every single quantity mailing and rather centres around assent, division, and personalization.

Email Marketing

The usage of email marketing inside your exhibition tries to propel a business’ things and organizations, similarly to lift customer endurance. Email publicizing is a kind of advancement that can make the customers on your email list aware of new things, limits, and various organizations.

It can similarly be a milder proposal to show your group on the assessment of your picture or keep them attracted to the centre of purchases. It can similarly be anything in the centre.

Mailchimp can help you design, develop, and improve your email displaying to get the best ROI in your promoting activation tries.

It can moreover accept a basic part in your publicizing strategy with lead age, brand care, building associations, or keeping customers attracted to the centre of purchases through different sorts of email marketing advancing messages. 

A short history of email marketing

Without a doubt, the principal email was sent in 1971 by a PC engineer named Ray Tomlinson. The message he sent was just a progression of numbers and letters, yet it was the beginning of another time of correspondence.

Tomlinson was in like manner the person who introduced the utilization of the “@” picture in email addresses. 

In 1978, an advancing boss at Digital Equipment Corp named Gary Turk used this new procedure for direct correspondence to pass on the essential business email to inform people concerning another thing.

His email list just had 400 areas, anyway the messages he sent happened in about $13 million in arrangements. 

By the ’90s, the web had gotten modernly available to the greater part. The way wherein people talked with one another began to change definitely, and publicists found that email could be a convincing strategy to advance.

The ascent of displaying messages in the like manner presented the prerequisite for authoritative updates; the U.K.’s. Information Protection Act, for example, was changed as per require a “quit” elective for all promoting messages 

Favourable circumstances of email marketing 

The email has become an especially notable displaying instrument for associations mostly considering the way that it controls the customer to make a type of move; an email will sit in the inbox until it’s examined, eradicated, or documented.

Nevertheless, email is furthermore potentially the most monetarily sharp gadget open, also. In all honesty, a new report by the U.K.- based Direct Marketing Association (CMA) found that for each $1 spent, email has a typical benefit from adventure (ROI) of $38. For extra on the power of email displaying, peruse our email advancing estimations by industry. 

Email marketing advancing can assist you with creating a relationship with your group while moreover guiding individuals to your blog, online media, or somewhere else you’d like individuals to visit.

You can even piece your messages and target customers by fragment, so you’re simply sending people the messages they need to see most. Here are some email elevating exertion tips to start. 

Email publicizing moreover allows you to run A/B preliminary of a title or wellspring of motivation to recognize the best performing message by using email marketing that can similarly be intended to easily pass on messages.

Peruse our Mailchimp’s email arrangements to see a more prominent measure of how you can oversee email exhibiting 

Final Thought

E-mail marketing is a great way to promote your business to the audience. If you can convert your ideas into customers, you can lead to the next level of online marketing.

To Get Email Updates when we post new content, Click Here.

1. Find “low-hanging fruit” keywords in Google Search Console

Keywords are the secret sauce of every successful SEO strategy.
A super-easy way to find “low-hanging” fruit (e.g. keywords you can rank for quickly) is to check your Google Search Console and focus on keywords on the 2nd or 3rd SERP.
All you need to do is to go to Performance – click on Pages – select the one you want to optimize – then click on Queries and you’ll see a list of keywords your page is ranking for.

Don’t forget to add the Average position segment (it is not set by default) and sort the keywords by the position.

Let’s take a look at the example from our list of link building techniques. We rank for all these keywords somewhere on the second SERP:

Once you find keywords that are relevant to the article, all you need to do is to use them in your text. (Of course, not all of them!)

2. Use Keyword Golden Ratio to find keywords you can rank for in 48 hours

Keyword Golden Ratio (KGR) is a technique created by Doug Cunnington from Niche Site Project, who is very popular among niche site SEOs.
The idea is quite simple – to find keywords for which there’s very little content on the internet so that you can rank for them almost immediately.

 

 

This SEO technique is especially great for beginners. It can help them to get organic traffic in the early stages of their blogging journey. But you can also do it at scale and see some great results.

 

Doug posted 200 KGR posts in a year and his results were pretty impressive:

The Keyword Golden Ratio formula

The number of Google results that have the keyword phrase in the title divided by the monthly search volume, where the search volume is less than 250.

It may look a little complicated at first sight, so let’s break it down into 3 steps:

1. Find keywords with a search volume lower than 250

You’ll need a keyword tool with the autocomplete function and exact search volume data.

 

The best way is to start with a specific keyword from your niche. Let’s say you have an affiliate website with personal care products. Your keyword could be “best electric shaver”. Of course, this is a big keyword with a big competition.
To make it more specific, you can take the keyword and put it into the autocomplete search with a preposition, for example: “best electric shaver for”

The tool will show you a number of suggestions.
Now, apply the filter to see the keywords with search volume lower than 250 and look for terms you find interesting.

 

 

2. Find the number of websites with exact match titles

To find out the exact number of pages that use the keyword in the title tag, you can use a simple Google search operator called allintitle.
The search will look like this: allintitle:yourkeyword

The selected keyword – best electric shaver for underarms – has only 9 results that include it in the title. That is quite a low number.

Expert insight

Robbie Richards, robbierichards.com

Competitor keyword research is one of the first things I do when building out a content strategy for clients.
One of my favorite strategies is to use the keyword modifiers: enter your competitor’s domain into a tool like KWFinder and add a keyword filter to surface the topics that align best with your monetization model.
Let’s say you have an affiliate website. You could enter the domain and filter the results to only show terms with modifiers like “best”, “vs“, “alternative” etc. to surface investigational mid-funnel keywords that are best for monetizing an affiliate site.
If you’d like to learn more, check out my training program, The SEO Playbook.

4. Use the power of internal links to give prominence to the important pages

When I did an SEO roundup and asked 30 experts to give the best tips for SEO beginners, one of the recurring answers was “do not underestimate internal linking”.
There’s a number of people all over the internet who saw great improvements in rankings after improving their internal linking. And of course, there’s a ton of guides and case studies (like this one by Niche Pursuits) with strong examples:

And another:

Why are internal links so important?

It seems like internal links are almost some kind of “a secret SEO weapon”. So what’s the big deal?

1. Internal links help Google crawl and rank your pages

Firstly, internal links are one of the ways Google explores your website. Secondly, it tells Google which pages you deem important.
Google stated it very clearly:
The number of internal links pointing to a page is a signal to search engines about the relative importance of that page.

Anchor text of internal links
With internal links, you don’t have to worry about exact-match anchor text that much. If you have a page with a guacamole recipe and you want to rank for the keyword “best homemade guacamole recipe”, you can use the exact anchor text in a couple of your internal links.
In one of the Google Webmasters hangouts, someone asked the question: “Are too many internal links with the same anchor text likely to result in a ranking downgrade?”
To which, Matt Cutts from Google answered: “Typically, internal website links will not cause you any sort of trouble.”
Watch the whole video:

Of course, you shouldn’t go to extremes here either.
What to avoid:

• Linking from irrelevant pages only to get internal links
• Creating too many internal links that don’t help the visitor with the navigation
• Using the same anchor text for all the internal links
• Using anchor text that is irrelevant to the linked page

In general, any kind of unnatural behavior won’t help you in any way.

2. Internal links help your visitors navigate through your website

As I explained in the previous tip, the site structure is very important.
One of the best ways to keep it clean and useful is to interlink your pages. You can do that in two basic ways:

• Structural internal links – menu, blog categories, breadcrumbs,…
• Contextual internal links – further reading, in-text links,…

Last but not least, internal links keep the visitors on your website.

How to structure the internal links?

Your internal links should highlight the content that is important for you.
This awesome study by Authority Hacker focused on about 1 million internal links and studied the correlation between the rankings and the topical proximity of the internal links.
The results show that the high ranking pages tend to have internal backlinks from pages that are in the same section of the website:

What does it mean?
It seems that it is better to have internal links that are topically relevant and pointing from pages close to the linked page.
This SEO technique is quite popular among niche site affiliate marketers and it’s called the content hub model (sometimes also called the topic clusters).

FURTHER READING

Content hubs for SEO: Boost the visibility and authority of your key pages

Basically, you create two types of pages in this model:

• Pillar content – your most important post or page that covers the topic broadly and aims at a bigger keyword
• Cluster content – supporting blog posts covering the details of the topic – targeting more specific keywords

One of the great ways to interlink your content is to follow the content hub model

The key is to interlink only the pages within one content hub so that you’ll highlight the semantic relationships and relevance between the pages.
Let’s take a look at the following example of a content hub:

The pillar content is “An Ultimate Guide to Jogging” while the cluster posts focus on various sub-topic keywords related to jogging. The posts within the jogging content hub link to each other and, most importantly, to the most important page – the pillar guide.
Once you’ve established the topics, all you need to do is to follow these two steps:

1. When writing a new post, always link to the pillar content of the topic cluster it belongs to (+ other relevant posts)
2. After the new post is published, link to the new post from the pillar content and other relevant posts in the same content hub

You don’t have to be 100% strict. If it really makes sense for the user, you can interlink the pages from other posts too. Just make sure that the majority of the internal links stay within the content hub.

Quick tip: If you want to easily check what pages have the most internal links, go to the Internal links report in Google Search Console.

As you can see, the most internal links on the Mangools website point to the most important pages – our blog, ultimate guides and the SEO extension.
We want to show Google that these pages are important to us.

Internal linking is a useful practice but many people tend to forget about it. I hope you won’t after reading this chapter.
Its greatest potential lies in the fact that unlike classic link building, internal links are fully in your hands.

The greatest power of internal links lies in the fact that unlike classic link building, internal links are fully in your hands. 
Tweet this

5. Leverage the authority of the giants with barnacle SEO

Barnacle SEO is a term that refers to any SEO activity in which you “latch on” a website or platform with higher authority to rank your content in Google.

This technique is useful if:

• There is a highly competitive keyword you probably wouldn’t be able to rank for with your website
• The topic you want to cover isn’t very relevant to the rest of the content on your web

FURTHER READING

Barnacle SEO: How to leverage the authority of top-ranking websites

These are some of the most common authority websites you can use for barnacle SEO:

• Medium
• LinkedIn
• Yelp (great for local SEO)
• YouTube
• Reddit (but don’t be too promotional)

Of course, you can use any big website in your industry. In a sense, any guest post published on an authoritative website in order to get more exposure can be understood as a form of barnacle SEO.

Note: This SEO technique is not about getting a high-authority backlink in the first place. So you don’t have to care if the link is no-follow as long as you can reap other benefits from the post.

You don’t have to use this technique only for new keywords. It can help you to take up more “SERP space” for keywords you already rank for too.
As an example, let’s take a look at the first 5 Google results for the keyword “SERP analysis”:

We rank #1 with our blog post and #2 with the website of our SERP analysis tool SERPChecker. Besides, my colleague Maros wrote a guest post for Mobidea and our tool is mentioned as the first in the list of 5 tools on Medium.
In other words, you’ll learn about SERPChecker in 4 out of 5 top pages ranking for “SERP analysis”.

Note: I’ve already mentioned Doug Cunnington’s technique called Keyword Golden Ratio.
His guest post on our blog is another example of barnacle SEO. Paradoxically, he outranked his own post for this term (which he coined himself).

Although it may seem illogical at first sight, all in all, he gained:

• More “SERP space” – posts of his authorship in the SERP
• More exposure to the Keyword Golden Ratio technique
• Quality backlink

Always offer something of high-quality.

Remember that barnacles are not parasites, they live in symbiotic relationships with the whales (they create an “armor” that protects them).
Similarly, you should not try to “feed” on the authority web with a spammy, overly self-promotional content.
Make sure the content you publish on other websites has high quality and brings real value. After all, your goal here is to improve the ranking potential of someone else’s website.
It is nicely summed up in Medium’s editorial guidelines:

6. Create linkable assets to get indirect links to your “money” pages

Anyone running an online business (whether it’s an e-commerce store, online course or a simple affiliate web) knows that getting backlinks to the so-called “money” pages is not an easy task.
Luckily, the page authority (also called link equity or link juice) flows further than one page.
If you’re struggling to get quality backlinks to your “money” page, use an intermediary – a linkable asset – that will attract the backlinks naturally. Then, link to your “money” page from this asset.
Here’s a simple scheme that explains how this technique works:

If you’re struggling to get quality backlinks to your “money” page, use an intermediary – a linkable asset – that will attract the backlinks naturally.
Tweet this

What types of linkable assets can you use?

In general, a linkable asset can be any quality piece of content that offers added value. People are more likely to link to an informative guide on “How to choose a sleeping bag” or a beautiful infographic “10 types of sleeping bags” rather than the “Best sleeping bags of 2020” review.

Guides, how-tos, lists

The long-form ultimate guides and various kinds of listicles and step-by-step how-to guides are very popular because they offer a comprehensive solution in an easily digestible way.

Free tools

Free is the best marketing strategy. And it applies to link building too.
To give you an example: A while ago, we created Rocking Page, a free aggregator of the most trending websites on the internet.

Although getting backlinks was not our main goal (and we haven’t actively built any backlinks to the web), it has acquired over 90 referring domains so far. Pretty good, right?

Now, you can guess which popular SEO toolset is linked from the web… 🙂

Infographics

People are “visual beings” and the old saying “Better to see something once than to hear about it a thousand times” works perfectly in online marketing.
Your visual content is more likely to be shared and get backlinks.

Original research

The statistics are clear – original research drives traffic, social shares, leads and backlinks.

Although direct links are always more powerful, the indirect internal links from your linkable assets can significantly help your money pages.
Make sure the content you create is really “linkable”. I test it with a simple question to myslef: Would I link to this content?

7. Play with title tags to improve your CTR

Click-through rate (CTR) shows how many people who see your page snippet in the search results also click on it.
It is influenced by a number of factors, especially:

• Your actual SERP position – the higher you rank in the search results, the more people will click on your site
• The presence of rich snippets – SERP features (like featured snippets, map packs, ads, rich results, etc.) influence the CTR of organic results
• Title tags of the results – the actual text in the titles of the pages that appear in the search results

The last point is quite an overlooked aspect. So we’ll take a closer look at how to improve your title tags and CTR.

What about the meta descriptions?

Meta description has a much lower impact on CTR than the title tag. The best practice is simply to have one (ideally with the length under 960px). Keep in mind that Google may create its own description based on the content of your page.

So how to create a perfect title?

Include the focus keyword

This one’s quite obvious.
If you want to rank for a certain keyword, it is best practice to include the keyword in the title tag. Ideally, the keyword should be placed at the beginning, but it’s not a necessity if it doesn’t make sense for the reader.

Be careful about the length

Title tags that get trimmed due to their excessive length are one of the most common mistakes.
But it’s not only about titles that exceed the limit. A study by Matthew Barby suggests that there’s a correlation between title length and rankings – the top-ranking pages have shorter titles.

To check the length of your title tag (and description) you can use our handy tool called SERP Simulator. It’s 100% free.

Besides the length check, it allows you to check the actual SERP results for any keyword in any location.

This way, you can compare your snippet with competitors, get inspiration from what works for them and see what can you do better.
Which brings us to the next point…

Stand out from the crowd

One of the ways to improve your CTR is to stand out among the other organic results. Here’s a list of things you can include in your title:

• Question – question in the title (especially for informational queries) may show that you can relate to the user’s problem and answer his query
• Number – titles including “10 proven techniques” or “5 actionable tips” will always be popular
• Year – for time-sensitive queries, you can include the year to show the freshness of your content
• All-caps words – I definitely don’t recommend to use all-caps for the whole title but it can be effective to highlight one important word
• Brackets with additional info – brackets can be a useful visual element to include additional info on a small space

Include your brand. Or don’t.

It is a common practice to include the name of the brand at the end of the title – divided by a hyphen or vertical bar. It can help especially if you have a well-known, established brand that evokes trust or authority.
However, nobody says you have to do that at any cost. There’s a limited number of characters you can use in your title. Use them wisely.
In Mangools, we’ve taken a simple approach. We include the brand whenever possible:

But we omit it if there’s not enough space and we need to convey a more important message:

Be careful with the power words

Brian Dean published a comprehensive study with a surprising conclusion – power words like ultimate, best, awesome, etc. may actually hurt your CTR.

So next time you’ll want to use a superlative to describe your page, think twice and remember that sometimes, less is more.

8. Use the “internal cliffhanger” technique to keep your readers engaged

Now that the visitors are landing on your page, you want them to stay there as long as possible.
You need to grab their attention.
And that’s when an old copywriting technique called “internal cliffhanger” (sometimes also referred to as a “bucket brigade”) comes in handy.
An internal cliffhanger usually consists of a short sentence that has a conversational tone and serves as a transition between two blocks of text. Its purpose is simple – to capture the readers’ interest so that they keep on reading.

Here are some examples of internal cliffhanger sentences you can use:

• Here’s the deal:
• And you know what else?
• Let’s take a look:
• Let’s dive in…
• For example:
• Think about it:
• And the good news?
• You might be wondering:

Internal cliffhangers don’t have to be used only to connect two parts of the text. They’re quite important at the beginning of the text too.
Remember the beginning of this post? I used short paragraphs with a punchy first sentence to grab the attention, introduce the topic and get to the first technique without any further delay.

Why is this important for SEO?

The internal cliffhanger may look like a great copywriting technique. But why is it included in this list?
Fair question.
The answer is: dwell time.
Dwell time is a length of time that the visitor spends on a page between clicking on a search result and returning back to the SERP. Let’s say you’re looking for a “blueberry muffin recipe“. You hit the search button and click on the first result in Google. You spend 2 minutes on the page and then return to the SERP to find another recipe. The dwell time was 2 minutes in this case.
Although Google never confirmed that dwell time is a direct ranking factor, there are several hints that it is used in one way or another. It makes sense – the time a visitor spends on a certain page may be a strong indicator of the page quality for Google.
In other words, the longer someone spends on your page, the better for you as it suggests the visitor was satisfied with your content. There are many things that influence dwell time (more on these by Andy below) and an “internal cliffhanger” is one of them.

Expert insight

Andy Crestodina, Orbit Media

A visitor searches, clicks and lands on your page …and then hits the back button. Did they spend a few short seconds or several long minutes? The answer may affect how high you rank for the next searcher.
Dwell time is the amount of time a visitor spends on your page after arriving from a search engine, and it’s likely an important search ranking factor. It’s definitely a signal of quality. And the key to maximizing dwell time is to add multiple images that keep the scan reader flowing. Don’t hit that visitor to a wall of text.
Here’s a scheme I prepared for my blog post on this topic. It shows the most important elements a great blog post should include:

9. Update or republish your old posts to avoid traffic decay

Every content marketer knows it.
The traffic of a blog post goes through various stages and unfortunately, it tends to decay after some time.
The Animalz agency outlined these five stages of a successful blog post:

1. Spike phase – the initial phase after the post is first published
2. Trough phase – the post struggles to get traffic
3. Growth phase – a sudden increase in the traffic
4. Plateau phase – the growth stops
5. Decay phase – traffic starts to gradually slow down

Luckily, there’s a very simple remedy to this – updating or republishing your posts on a regular basis.
How to do it?

1. Audit your content

First off, you need to look at your content and find out which posts need updating.
You can do that manually by looking at the traffic stats in Google Analytics or you can use a free tool by Animalz that connects to your Analytics account and does the hard work for you.
The outcome will look something like this:

The traffic of a blog post goes through various stages and unfortunately, it tends to decay after some time. One of the best ways to prevent it is to update or republish your posts regularly.
Tweet this

2. Update/republish the old posts

Now that you know which posts need to refresh, it’s time to improve them. Here are some common things you can do:

• Update the old info
• Expand the content
• Make the post more comprehensive
• Add data/research
• Improve the visuals
• Improve the UX
• Merge similar articles into one
• Build more links

…the possibilities are endless.

When to update

• The post needs only little changes or info update
• You update mostly the visual aspect and/or UX
• The changes are mostly of structural character

When to republish

• The update affects more than 50% of the content
• You’ve added a significant amount of new content
• You’ve merged 2 or more posts into one

If you use WordPress, there’s a simple plugin called WP Last Modified Info that allows you to add the date of the last update to every page or post.

3. Promote the post

Update or republishing is a great opportunity to promote the post on your social media, starting a new link building campaign, featuring it in your newsletter…
Let your readers know that you’ve improved the post!

Mini case study

Back in 2018, I published a list of best SEO blogs every SEO beginner should read. The post was OK but the rankings for the target keyword “SEO blogs” always fluctuated around the 2nd SERP.
So last year, I decided to update the post. I improved the visuals, changed the structure, added 5 more blogs and additional tips. The update was pretty big, so I decided to republish the post too.
The result? The post moved to the 1st SERP almost immediately and currently ranks in the top 5 results for the main keyword.

10. Take care of your image file size optimization once and for all

This one’s very straightforward.
On average, images make up more than 20% of website size. So optimizing their file size can significantly influence your page speed. And page speed is a ranking factor.

Luckily, there are many free online tools that will help you compress the size of your images in a few seconds. Here are some of the most popular:

• TinyPNG
• ImageOptim
• JPEGmini
• Kraken.io

And for those of you who have a WordPress website, there are useful plugins that will do the job automatically.
TinyPNG, for example, has hundreds of free compressions per month. All you need to do is to install the plugin, connect to their API and set automatic image compression of all the newly uploaded images.
It compresses both JPEG and PNG images (two most common file types) and there’s no file size limit.

With image compression being this easy, there is no excuse for having large images slowing down your website.

Read our simple guide to SEO for images to learn about all the aspects of image optimization – from picking the right format to finding the best ratio between quality and file size and writing descriptive image metadata.

11. Outrank the top SERP results with a featured snippet

Featured snippets are great.
They can be beneficial for both sides:

• For users – they provide quick answers to their queries
• For SEOs – they provide great opportunity to quickly outrank the competitors

The featured snippets study by Ahrefs shows that more than 40% of featured snippets come from pages that rank #2 or lower.

In other words, you can appear in a featured snippet if you rank on the 2nd, 3rd or even 5th position.
Look at this example:

We have a featured snippet for the keyword “keyword research for seo”. Now, if you simulate SERP without a featured snippet (you can do that with an easy trick – adding &num=9 at the end of the URL), you can see that without FS, we would rank #4.
Thanks to the featured snippet, we jumped ahead of 3 big brands.

Pro tip: In January 2020, Google announced that pages in featured snippets won’t rank as a regular organic result on the same SERP anymore. This means that having a featured snippet may not always be good for you, especially if you’d rank #1 without it. Check out this guide to find out more about this topic.

Now, what to do to get to the featured snippet:

1. See what works for your competitors

The easiest way to get a featured snippet is to look at the search queries that already show the featured snippets and analyze the page that is featured.
In general, there are 3 common types of featured snippets: paragraph, list and table.

• What kind of snippet does your competitor have?
• What formatting did they use?
• How long is their snippet?
• What is the placement of the paragraph the snippet was taken from?

Get inspiration from already works for others.

2. Follow the optimal word count

According to the study by Moz (but also many others), the majority of featured snippets have 40-50 words.

Try to stay in this range by optimizing the paragraph that should appear in the featured snippet.

3. Answer the question first

The text used in the featured snippet is usually taken from the beginning of the post.
That’s why it is good to use the so-called inverted pyramid writing style when optimizing for featured snippets.

What does it mean?
Well, if you want to have a featured snippet for the keyword “where is baby Yoda from”, you should answer the question as early in the post as possible.

FURTHER READING

How to optimize for Google’s featured snippets [a step-by-step guide]

12. Get backlink opportunities directly to your inbox with HARO

Help A Reporter Out (HARO) is an online platform that allows journalists or bloggers to find experts from various fields to contribute to their content.

In return, the source will get a mention and a backlink after the piece of content is published. All you need to do is to sign up and watch the emails to find topics you can contribute to.
In other words, the backlink opportunities will come directly to your inbox. No outreach needed.
How to get backlinks using the HARO technique?

1. Set up an account

Setting up a HARO account will take you less than 5 minutes.
Once you receive the confirmation email, you can set up the preferences:

2. Review the emails

Each HARO email includes dozens of queries. The email looks something like this (Lifestyle and Fitness category):

And here’s an example of a specific HARO query detail in the email:

You’ll receive 3 or more emails a day. I know what you’re thinking: There’s no way I’ll review almost a hundred queries every day!
You don’t have to. Just set up email filters so that you are alerted only about queries relevant for you.
Let’s say you run a coffee blog. Your filter for HARO emails in Gmail could look something like this:

This way, you can star, mark as important or label all the emails that match the filter. And of course, you can create multiple filters to cover all the keywords that might fall into your field of expertise – caffeine, espresso, barista, latte, etc.
I’ve also set up a separate filter to “mark as read” all the HARO emails so that I don’t have to open the ones I’m not interested in.

3. Make the pitch

Once you find a query that you could answer, make the pitch. You can answer directly in your inbox or through the HARO dashboard.
You should only reply to the queries you can actually answer with a relevant insight or expert opinion. Don’t forget to:

• Be helpful – do your research and make sure your answer provides real value
• Be short and precise – people using HARO won’t have time to read an essay
• Mind the deadline – every query includes a deadline, make sure to meet it
• Introduce yourself – attach short info about yourself and link to your website

You’ll be notified if your pitch is accepted. After that, just wait for the article to be published.
Voila, you just got a new backlink.

Conclusion

That’s it. These are 12 SEO techniques that will help you get more organic traffic to your website in 2020. I’ve tested all of them but I’m pretty curious what is your experience.
Have you tried any of them? What is your favourite SEO technique I did not mention in this post?
Let me know in the comments

To Get Email Updates when we post new content, Click Here.

Google advanced search operators can be a GREAT time-saver. You probably know a couple of them.
But are you using their full potential?
In this post, we’ll guide you through the most important search operators that actually work and show you how to use them effectively for:

• Competitor research
• Guest blogging prospecting
• Quick insights on the analyzed website

What are Google Search Operators?

Google Search Operators (also called Google Advanced Search Operators) are special commands that can be used to narrow down the search results in the desired way. They have many practical uses in SEO.
(Keep in mind that many of the operators discussed here can also be used with Bing and Yahoo too.)

To make the list easier to digest, we’ve divided the operators into two groups:

• Basic search operators – essential Google search operators everyone should know
• Advanced search operators – more advanced operators that can be useful in certain situations

Basic search operators

Here are the 6 most commonly used search operators used to modify the search queries:

Operator	Usage
site:	Show only the results from a certain website; e.g. site:mangools.com
” “	Limit the results to the ones containing the exact phrase in the quotation marks; e.g. “Google Keyword Planner alternative”
OR	This will show results for keyword1 or keyword2 or both. Can be substituted with the vertical pipe (|); e.g. mango OR banana, mango | banana
( )	Group multiple operators and control the order in which they are executed; e.g. (mango | banana) smoothie
–	Exclude the term (or a whole operator) by putting the minus symbol in front of it; e.g. king kong director -jackson
*	Acts as a wild-card character that will match any word or phrase; e.g. most popular * in the world

site:

The site: operator is one of the most useful ones. It limits the results to a specific domain name.

One of the most common uses is to find out how many web pages are indexed for a particular site (at least a rough idea) like so:

Just make sure you’re not putting a space between the command and domain. ‘site: healthline.com’ is wrong while ‘site:healthline.com’ is correct.

Note: Notice how Google suggests using Search Console with every search that contains the site: operator. If the website you’re searching for is yours, Search Console is always a better and more precise way to find information about your indexed pages.

” ” (quotation marks)

When you use quotes to search for something, you’re limiting the result to exact phrases only. Google will return web pages that either have the exact phrase in their title, description or body copy.
It is the quickest way to find instances where your content has been duplicated.
Simply copy a paragraph from your article and paste it within quotations.
Here’s an example:

Now, there are a couple of things you can do if someone copies your content on the web. As your website grows, it will happen sooner or later.
Our advice would be to think about whether the site that copied you is a competition for you in any way. If not, there are better ways to spend your time than filing a DMCA complaint against some nobody’s crappy blog 🙂

OR (|) directive

This operator is useful when your search doesn’t have to be too specific but you want to control the variation of your results. Using capital letters, type ‘OR’ in between your two keywords like this: keyword1 OR keyword2
It’s worth pointing out that Google will only use the words directly before and after the command. But you can combine this command with quotations.

Note: Notice that most of the search operators can be chained together to create specific combinations.

Let’s say you want to find whether HubSpot covers the topic of email deliverability or email delivery. You’ll use the site: command followed by the topic “email deliverability” OR “email delivery”.

Note: You can also use | (the pipe symbol) instead of OR to do the same thing.

( ) (group)

This operator is very useful if you need to combine more operators. It allows you to group certain parts of the search query to create logical hierarchies.
Here’s an example:
Let’s say we want to find a way to contact a prospect through social media.
We can enter the name of the prospect (Doug Cunnington) and use the OR directive for Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin and group it together with the round brackets.

– (exclude)

The – or short dash operator will exclude words from your search result. For example, entering a query like “keyword research” -tools would return results about ‘keyword research’ but exclude any info it deems relevant to ‘keyword research tools’.

You can also exclude multiple words, exact match phrases or whole operator strings.

For example, it can be used when looking for internal link opportunities. All you need to do is to include the phrase and your domain but exclude the exact page you want to create internal links for.
Let’s say we want to add some internal links for our Keyword research guide. The  combo would look like this:

* (wild card)

The asterisk character can be used as a wild card to match any word or phrase.

It has numerous uses.
You can look for the variations of a longer search phrase (like the example above), you can use it to check the correct usage of a certain word in a phrase or you can combine it with other operators.
For example, if you want to find all the subdomains of a certain domain, you can use: site:*.domain.com -www

Advanced search operators

Now let’s take a look at some advanced Google Search Operators that can be useful for search engine optimization.
Please note that this is not a complete list of all the search operators. Instead, we selected the operators that are widely used, reliable and useful for everyday SEO tasks.

Operator	Usage
related:	Look for websites that are similar to the domain in the search query; e.g. related:chicvegan.com
intitle: allintitle:	Only shows results that include (all) the searched words in the title; e.g. allintitle:best toys for 2 year olds
inurl: allinurl:	Only shows results that include (all) the searched words in the URL; e.g. inurl:seo
intext: allintext:	Only shows results that include (all) the searched words in the text on the page; e.g. allintext:apple iphone 11 pro
filetype:	Look only for a specific filetype (PDF, DOCX, TXT, PPT, etc.); e.g. filetype:PDF
cache:	Pull the last cached copy of the website; e.g. cached:mangools.com
AROUND(x)	Find pages where two words or phrases are within x words of each other; e.g. mangools AROUND(3) kwfinder

related:

Sometimes you’ll need to identify similar sites to reach out to. This is when the related: search operator comes in play. For instance, related:chicvegan.com will bring up similar sites to that domain.

This is also fantastic for niche research because you can gauge the competitive landscape before launching a new site.

intitle: / allintitle:

Ever wanted to find a specific piece of content with its title?
Allintitle: only returns results that contain every word in the title.
Intitle: works the same way except it only looks for the word directly following the command.

Keyword Golden Ratio

The allintitle: search operator is an important part of the so-called Keyword Golden Ratio technique.
It is an advanced technique for new websites that focuses on finding ultra long-tail keywords with little to no competition. It uses allintitle: operator to find the number of pages that target a specific long-tail keyword and use it in the Keyword Golden ratio formula:

inurl: / allinurl:

Similar to the previous operators, these directives allow you to search within the URL of a web page for your keywords.
For example, allinurl:marketing strategies would bring results that contain ‘marketing’ and ‘strategies’ within their URL:

Find guest post opportunities

One of the most common uses of search operators for SEO is finding guest posting opportunities. There are many ways to use them.
Here are some specific examples:

• Find websites that accept guest posts in a certain niche: email marketing “write for us”
• Find websites that accept guest posts within certain topic variations: (exercise | workout | fitness) inurl:write for us
• Find out whether a specific website accepts guest posts: “guest post” site:problogger.com
• Look for guest post articles by a certain author: seo “julia mccoy” inurl:author -site:expresswriters.com

Just don’t forget to be creative and try various phrases like “write for us”, “guest post”, “guest post guidelines”, “submit an article”, etc.
Read our guide on finding guest post opportunities to find out more.

intext: / allintext:

Allintext: will return web pages that specifically contain the searched words in the body text. It won’t always return exact match phrases though. Instead, what it looks for is instances where each word appears but in no specific order.
The intext: directive works the same way but unlike the allintext: command, not every page returned will contain all the words that make up your keyword.
This is very useful when you’re looking for articles or performing competitor research such as getting insights on specific on-page footprints.
Let’s say we would want to look for Quora pages that mention our competitors Long Tail Pro and Serpstat. Here’s what it would look like:

filetype:

When you need to find specific kinds of files, this command is your best bet! It speeds up time for things like infographic or PDF research. However, it’s best used when combined with other operators.
Here’s a quick example:

cache:

The cache: command pulls up the last cached or downloaded copy of any web page. It’s a useful way of knowing when a page was last crawled.
Simply enter something like cache:thewebsite.com and you’re good to go. You can enter the exact URL as well to show the last cached version of a specific page.

AROUND(x)

The AROUND (x) will serve you if you need to find content where two terms are placed closed to each other.

There may not be many real-life use cases but it can be useful in certain specific situations, so it’s good to know about it.
Do you have a favourite Google advanced search operator that we didn’t list here? If so, don’t hesitate to share it with other readers.

Becoming a SEO consultant is not as tough as it might sound to be. If you have proper knowledge than you can become a successful SEO consultant and provide SEO services. An SEO consultant is someone who is responsible for optimizing the website and providing a better search engine ranking to the clients.

You can follow these tips curated by SEO experts and become an SEO consultant yourself and offer affordable SEO services to people.

#1 Know how search engines work

If you wish to become an SEO Consultant then you must know how the search engine functions and that is not an overnight task. You have to dive deep into it and gather as much knowledge as you can.

The catch is that you might study the latest algorithms today but when you wake up tomorrow, Google might have rolled out a new set of algorithms. Yes, that is possible and that happens too. Therefore, you have to be on your toes and keep your knowledge up to date because you never know what might change when.

#2 Get a hold of the ranking factors

We all know how important it is to focus on the ranking factors. There are a number of them but you need to make sure that you focus on the most important ones. The ones that you should keep in mind are:

a. Relevance

This means how relevant the search result is as per the query that a person enters in the search box. If someone is looking for makeup products then Google will not show them water bottles. Your page should also have the content that people want to see.

b. Authority

You can understand the authority of a page in terms of backlinks. Your ranking highly depends on the quality of the backlinks that you have. You should make sure that the backlinks you have are relevant and related to the industry that you deal with.

c. Utility

You might have quality backlinks and relevant content but this is still not enough to help you to rank higher. Your content should deserve to have that spot on the SERP.

However, what institutes quality and utility is based on the search query itself. Therefore, the best course of action is to review the current top-ranking pages and see what’s good about them and what the shortcomings are.

#3 Pick a niche

SEO is a vast term and if you think that you will master it all then it is not going to work in your favour. You might end up getting confused which is why it is suggested to pick a niche and then work accordingly.

The different parts of SEO are:

On-page SEO

Off-page SEO

Technical SEO

Keyword Research

You can also pick a specific industry and then become the go-to SEO expert in the same. It is an amazing way to enhance your skills and increase the client through SEO Services and offering too.

If you work on the factors that we have shared with you then you will surely be a step closer to your goal of becoming an SEO consultant.

CRMNuggets is committed to fact-checking in a fair, transparent, and non-partisan manner. Therefore, if you’ve found an error in any of our reports, be it factual, editorial, or an outdated post, please contact us to tell us about it.

Hi, I now use RavenBank to send, receive and save money. I also pay my bills with ease, you should try it out too

OUR MISSION

To create well-reached contents that will increase the intellectual prowess of our readers. 

OUR VISION

To become a reference point in the blogging space by the year 2030. We want to be among the first 30 blogs in Nigeria. 

Official Social Media Pages for crmnuggets.com

To Get Email Updates when we post new content, Click Here.

In my previous articles, I have looked at all that you need to know about stakeholder management and identification for projects. In this article, I want to look at all that you need to know about stakeholder management strategies for projects. Follow me as we will look at that together in this article.

Stakeholder management strategies are management strategies that are created to ensure maximum support and minimize the negative impacts of stakeholders throughout the project life cycle.

The stakeholder management strategy is created by the project manager by identifying stakeholders. The strategy information is ideally represented in a stakeholder analysis matrix.

Typical example…

A typical stakeholder management strategy document could include:

• Stakeholders identification: A list of the identified stakeholders along with their identification-related information.
• The stakeholder map: a chart showing the interest of different stakeholders and the level of participation required from each identified stakeholder.
• The stakeholder analysis influence and importance matrix. A matrix that describes the stakeholders based on their influence and importance to the project.
• The stakeholder list- a list of various stakeholder groups involved in the project and their management.
• Stakeholder communication: a description of how the project will engage various stakeholders, the communication routes, and the frequency of communication for each stakeholder, or group of stakeholders.
• Communication efficiency: specifies how the efficiency of the communication process will be measured.

Stakeholder analysis…

The stakeholder analysis matrix is a document that lists the project stakeholders and describes the ways in which they influence the project. The stakeholder analysis matrix is a shared document, and therefore it is imperative that the project manager exercises proper judgment and due caution with regard to the kind of information and details that need to be included in it.

Now Procurement documents …

Procurement documents are the documents that are submitted to prospective sellers and service providers to solicit their proposals for the work needed.

Different types of procurement documents are available. This type of document used will depend on the project and the product or service being procured.

Typical example…

A Request for Proposal is a specific type of procurement document. A company seeking a new advertising agency for a marketing campaign will send out RFPs to several agencies.

An RFP describes the company’s marketing needs and requests for proposals that describe the agency’s qualifications and past campaigns, the key employees’ work history, and their approach to creating a campaign.

To Get Email Updates when we post new content, Click Here.

In my previous article, I talked about all that you need to know about project and project management generally. In this article, I want to look at all that you need to know about the use of expert and expert judgement for projects.

Expert judgment is advice provided by individuals having expertise in a specific knowledge area, application area, industry, or discipline.

Expert judgment may be obtained from internal or external sources such as stakeholders, professionals, subject matter experts, industry groups, the PMO, consultants and functional units.

Expert Judgement can be obtained either through a panel format such as one on one meetings and interviews, or through a panel format such as focus groups, workshops, and surveys.

During the project life cycle, expert judgement may be required only once or continuously, for a very short period or for an extended period.

Typical example…

A project team is assigned to develop a financial management software application for one of its customers. Because the project manager and the team are well versed with the software’s technical aspects but are not familiar with the financial concepts, the project manager felt that the project team required a financial expert to be present, to help them develop the software.

The expert will help analyse the ease of use, coverage of the applications to the current financial laws, and ease of customizing the parameters based on his knowledge of frequently changing parameters in financial systems.

The expert will also provide financial database data needed to carry out feasibility and reliability tests on the application while selecting an appropriate application.

The expert will suggest some typical use cases or situations that occur the whole dealing with and managing a financial system.

The project manager, therefore, decided to contract a financial expert from a financial service firm.

The expert will provide his or her services throughout the project life cycle.

Action Point
PS: If you would like to have an online course on any of the courses that you found on this blog, I will be glad to do that on an individual and corporate level, I will be very glad to do that because I have trained several individuals and groups and they are doing well in their various fields of endeavour. Some of those that I have trained include staff of Dangote Refinery, FCMB, Zenith Bank, and New Horizons Nigeria among others. Please come on Whatsapp and let’s talk about your training. You can reach me on Whatsapp HERE. Please note that I will be using Microsoft Team to facilitate the training.

I know you might agree with some of the points that I have raised in this article. You might not agree with some of the issues raised. Let me know your views about the topic discussed. We will appreciate it if you can drop your comment. Thanks in anticipation.

CRMNUGGETS is committed to fact-checking in a fair, transparent and non-partisan manner. Therefore, if you’ve found an error in any of our reports, be it factual, editorial, or an outdated post, please contact us to tell us about it.

Hi, I now use RavenBank to send, receive and save money. I also pay my bills with ease, you should try it out too

In my previous article, I talked about all that you need to know about Project Concept Definition Statements for projects. In this article, I want to talk about all that you need to how you can determine strategic and operational relevance for projects.

Having created the concept definition statements for projects, it is imperative for you to ensure that the project’s requirement aligns with the stated operational and strategic goals.

Samson, an architect in a mid-size land development company, draw up plans to build best-in-class houses only to find out that the company cancelled the construction of such houses.

The company’s strategic objective is to increase its market share in the community by building affordable housing, and the houses that Samson planned to build were too expensive and did not suit the company’s plan.

As a project manager, you need to make sure that your project aligns with your company’s business objectives or you, like the architect, may find that your project has been cancelled.

Strategic relevance …

The strategic relevance of a project determines whether the project should be done- in order words, does it align with the company’s strategic goals? To ensure that a project meets this requirement, the desired future state established in the project concept definition should align with or support the organisational strategic objectives set by senior leadership.

Strategic relevance serves as a checkpoint and requires that the project objectives and strategic priorities are clearly defined and communicated by senior leadership. it is important to remember that strategic objectives are inherently dynamic and can be influenced by unpredictable market events.

A project can meet the business requirements of solving a particular business problem in a particular department, but may not be deemed strategically relevant by senior management.

Senior management determines the prioritization of resource allocation for the organisations. If your project is not strategically relevant, you will lose your sponsor’s support.

Typical example…

Let’s take a look at the example of a Midwest-based consulting company that specialises in systems integration work.

Senior management wants to increase the hourly billable rates for all its consultants by establishing expert status on cutting-edge technology.

A Camelot marketing strategy will be the ideal way to promote this new image. Several key systems are targeted for an upgrade with the area that each new technical capability will be a showpiece in the new campaign.

One of the operations managers has several upgrade projects in the pipeline for a legacy system.

The managing director has previously authorised the upgrade projects, but the project manager assigned to these projects is now unsure that the projects are still relevant given the shift in strategic direction.

Operational Relevance

Establishing operational relevance is a responsibility that requires the desired future state described in the project concept definition to be aligned with, coordinated with, or in support of the operational priorities authorised by tactical management for the stated management horizon.

The activity requires that the project objectives and operational priorities be clearly defined and communicated by tactical management who decides if the project should be taken up. It is important to remember that operational priorities will be heavily influenced by both established and emerging strategic priorities.

Determining operational relevance…

Senior management has set a strategic mandate to improve communication across the organisation. Senior Management granted the functional management authority to establish the best approach to meeting their operational objectives.

Tactically, an intranet project has been launched, weekly video conference meetings have been established, and a comprehensive wireless phone plan has been drafted and is currently in the implementation phase.

Operational management asked the team to draft a project Concept definition that identifies the issue as the remote ability to access certain types of information in real time. In response to this, several department heads decided that they want to roll out wireless PDA technology to their groups, but the IT function has deep concerns regarding support cost and security.

The project manager must take the IT department’s concern seriously, but because the wireless PDA project is both strategically and operationally relevant, it should move forward.

Relative authority …

The relationship between the project manager and functional management is going to be heavily influenced by the Organisational context. In a strong matrix organisation, the balance of power rest with the project manager, while in a weak matrix organisation, the balance of power rests with the functional manager.

In many ways, both project and functional managers share tactical responsibilities with varying degrees of authority. This reality can cloud the process of establishing the operational relevance of any project.

Whole strategic relevance is often easy to determine and because the source of organisational direction is more clearly defined, the determination of operational relevance requires that the accountability and authority for operational priorities be clearly established and communicated.

Relevance of Strategic and operational goals…

It is important to attune the project’s business, functional and technical goals with the Organisation’s strategic, tactical, and operational goals. Primarily, the Organisation’s strategic goals are set by the executive management.

These goals need to be reconciled to the project’s business requirements. Then, the functional requirements must be reconciled to both the project’s business goals and the organisation’s tactical goals, which are set by project and functional managers.

Similarly, the project’s technical requirements must be reconciled to both the organisation’s operational goals and the functional and business requirements.

To Get Email Updates when we post new content, Click Here.

In my previous article, I looked at some of the facts that you need to know about the project concept definition document, in this article, I want to look at three major requirements to consider when making project selections. Follow me as we are going to look at that in this article.

In increasing competitive business environments, there will always be projects competing for funding, resources, and priority. As a professional project manager, you will not be responsible for selecting projects that your organisation will pursue, but you need to understand the methodologies behind making sound choices about what project to pursue, prioritise, find and when.

Applying appropriate project management methodology to this area will increase your chances of success.

Now project requirements…

A project requirement is a statement that defines the functionality that a project is designed to accommodate and how the functionality will be achieved and satisfied by the solution.

Project requirements can be classified as business , functional and technical requirements.

#1 Business Requirements

The business requirements provide reasons for embarking on the project from a business perspective. A good example is an organisation that wants to provide online access to low-cost airfares for a given city pier.

They might even decide to provide online access to all available fights provided by low-cost carriers.

#2 Functional requirements

Under functional requirements,  the capabilities of the projects are being addressed. It will list out what the deliverables must be able to do in order to deliver. Some of these examples include Real-time electronic access to carriers ABC, XYZ, and DEF routing and fare promotion.

Also, the response time to low-cost carrier information must be less than 20 minutes.

#3 Technical Requirements

The technical requirements talk about all the features that must be present in order for the deliverables to do what it supposed to do. A good example of this includes an interface to carrier information which must be compliant with current Fourth Mouse Consulting international Travel Reservation Company’s desktop and network standards.

Fourth Mouse Consulting Travel Reservation company’s interface must comply with external supplier’s security guidelines.

To Get Email Updates when we post new content, Click Here.

In my previous article, I talked about all that you need to know about business requirements documents for a project. In this article, I want to talk about some of the major components of a business requirements document. Follow me as we are going to look at that in this article.

A Business Requirements Document identifies the reasons why a project is being undertaken or which business or opportunity will address. A well-constructed business requirements document should contain a clear statement of the desired business results expected from the project.

This statement should have, at the minimum, three key elements:

• The expected business result should be stated in measurable business terms, such as reduced cost, improved cash flow, increase margin and so on.
• The desired time frame within which the management team calculates potential risks and rewards. This is also known as management horizons. For example, the project should improve cash flow within six. months.
• The expected cost/benefit or ROI should be declared.

Understanding Business Requirements For Project Execution

In my previous article, I talked about all that you need to know about different types of requirements for projects. In this article, I want to look at all that you need to know about business requirements. Follow me as we are going to look at this together in this article.

Definition

Business Requirements are the pressing organisational needs or market stimuli that drive decision-makers to sponsor projects and prioritise competing projects. They may also be referred to as problems or opportunities.

Business Requirements for projects force management to make critical choices about which project to authorise and when. Business Requirements are typically recorded In a formal business requirements document.

Typical example:

These are the business requirements for a project to develop an e-commerce capability on a large firm’s existing website.

• The desired business result is a 10 percent improvement in gross sales in the short term and a 25 percent annual improvement over the stated management horizon of three years
•  The New VP of Sales and Marketing estimated that a 30 percent improvement in the productivity of the sales team will result in an improvement of 10 percent in gross revenue within 90 days and a long-term improvement of 25 percent annually for the next three years.
• Given that the company currently has a topline of $ 50 million improvements in the first 90days. $12.5millon in the first year. $15.6million in the second year, and $19,5million in the third year. The project cost of $27.5milloon will be spread over the next three years. Within a three-year cost of $27.5 million and a three-year benefit of $47.6million, the project will provide a 173 percent return.

Business Requirement Document and Project Concept Definition

During the creation of the project concept definition, the current state and the desired state are established. Much of the information contained in the desired future state and the first two elements of a business requirements document will be similar.

In fact, If the project concept definition contains this information, it can be plugged directly into the business requirements document. However, the expected cost/benefit or ROI and the strategic context for the project will be new information.

It is important to remember that the information contained in this document will serve as the framework for evaluating the relevance of the functional requirements created later in the process.

To Get Email Updates when we post new content, Click Here.

In my previous articles, I talked about all that you need to know about business and functional requirements for projects. In this article, I want to look at all that you need to know about technical requirements for projects. Follow me as we are going to look at that together in this article.

Technical Requirements are the technical needs that are crucial for a project. The technical requirements document outlines how the solution will accomplish the goals established by the business and functional requirements.

A good technical requirements document contains five key elements:

#1  Software required

The first thing is the software required o support the stated goals contained in the functional requirements. You need to determine what software you needed to achieve the stated goals. You need to know whether the software can be provided within or outside the organisation.

#2 Data model

You also need to consider the data model required to support software development. There is a need for you to determine the technology needed to manage data that will be used for the project. This will allow you to put the necessary infrastructure in place in order to manage the customer and project data.

#3 Platform requirements

You need to also consider the systems and platform requirements needed to support the software and data components. You have to identify all components that are needed to achieve project goals. You have to make sure that all resources are available in order to achieve project goals.

#4 Network requirements

It also talks about network requirements needed to support the software and data components. You have to design and determine how many employees need access to data and where those data are needed. This will allow you to determine what the network architecture will look like.

Typical example…

As the project manager for a corporate intranet project, the business and functional requirements have been clearly established and the task of drafting the technical requirements a now before you.

It has been decided that the intranet content will be created and controlled by each of the various departments in order to keep the IT support lead to a minimum.

One of the major points in the functional requirements document is that a particular web development tool, with HTML, and coding capabilities, is used within each department but the problem is that a vast majority of the external web servers within the environment are based on Oracle. 

Based on this analysis, a document was created listing the technical requirements for this project.

The requirements include:

• The database used should be Oracle 2i with backward compatibility.
• The systems should be compatible with browsers like IE6 and Mozilla.
• The version of the web development tool (HTML) should be 1.2 or above.

To Get Email Updates when we post new content, Click Here.

 
In my previous article, I talked about all that you need to know about technical feasibility for projects. in this article, I want to look at all that you need to know about Coat Benefit Analysis for projects.
 
Cost-Benefit Analysis presents a project’s estimated costs alongside its predicted benefits to help decision-makers make informed decisions about project selection. it may be formal or informal. Although the analysis contains quantitative information, it is merely forecasted expectations rather than hard data.

 
It is important to recognise and document any assumptions used to derive cost and benefit forecasts.

The costs include current operating costs and expected project costs related to the function under analysis. The benefits include quantifiable benefits, such as increased sales or reduced costs expected as a result of the project, and intangible benefits such as an enhanced image or brand awareness that can only be described subjectively.
 

Typical example…

Senior Management of a large retail firm is considering a proposal for the development and addition of an e-commerce capability on their existing website to increase revenue. Before committing, management asks each department director to evaluate the feasibility and provide rough cost estimates.
 
The directors then agree that the project is indeed feasible given their current capabilities and should cost around $25k.
 
The Vice President and Marketing estimate that the e-commerce site will generate a five percent increase in sales in the next five years. Given the company’s current threshold of $1Million, the estimated improvement will result in an additional $50k in sales over the next five years.
 
With $25k in upfront Costs, the net benefit is estimated to be $25K. The cost-benefit analysis results in a rough estimation of the company’s net gain.
 

To Get Email Updates when we post new content, Click Here.

In my previous article, I discussed stakeholder identification.  In this article, I want to take my readers through a step-by-step guide on how we can identify stakeholders for projects. Follow me as we will do that together in this article.

It is important to identify stakeholders early in the project; analyze relevant information regarding their interests, expectations, importance, and influence, and devise a strategy to ensure their involvement to maximize positive influences and mitigate potential negative impacts.

  The guidelines…

#1 Perform a review

It is important to perform a review of the project and related information to ascertain the loss of internal and external parties who may be impacted by the project. The document or information is a valuable source for stakeholder Identification.

These may include:

• The project charter
• Procurement documents
• The organisation or company structure
• The organisation or company culture
• Government or industry standard
• Stakeholder register templates
• Lesson learned from previous projects
• Stakeholder registers from previous projects

• .

#2 Gather relevant documents

There is a need to gather the relevant documents that help you identify the stakeholder requirements. You need to use the project charter to identify the external parties who are impacted by the project, such as the project sponsor and customers, and the team members participating in the project.

You need to use procurement to identify if the project involves procurement or is based on an established contract.

You also need to use existing documents such as stakeholder registers and lessons learned from previous projects, to determine the stakeholder needs.

#3 Identify groups

There is a need for you to identify groups or individuals with specialized training or knowledge who can help in the comprehensive identification and listing of the stakeholders.

#4 Interview the identified stakeholders

In addition, there is a need for you to interview the identified stakeholders to gain knowledge of their roles, departments, interests, knowledge levels, expectations, and influence levels within the organization.

#5 Analyse your lists

There is a need to analyze your lists to identify the key stakeholders of the project. These include anyone in a decision-making or management role who is impacted by the project outcome, such as the sponsor, the project manager, and the primary customer.

#6 Determine and classify

You need to also determine and classify the potential impact or support that each stakeholder could generate during the project life cycle and define an approach strategy. You need to prioritize the key stakeholders to plan for efficient communication and management of their expectations.

#7 Stakeholders’ response

There is a need for you to access how stakeholders will react or respond in various situations during the project life cycle. You need to plan how to influence the stakeholders to enhance their support to the project and also to mitigate any potential negative impacts arising from them.

#8 Document stakeholder information

There is a need to document stakeholder information to include identification assessment and stakeholder classification. In the stakeholder register.

#9 Stakeholder management strategy

There is a need for you to decide on a stakeholder management strategy to increase support and minimize the negative impacts on the stakeholders of the project.

Typical example…

Andrew is the project manager for the Computer Networks Upgrade project in a training development company. He collects project information that includes the project charter, the organizational structure, the Organisation’s policy documents, the lessons learned and the stakeholder register of previous projects, and other relevant documents related to the current networking and computer resources deployed within the company.

He studies the information gathered to identify the stakeholders from senior management.

Andrew, interviews the key stakeholders, such as the department’s head for Marketing, Finance, Human resources, Content Development, Media Development, Quality Control, and Operations, and expands the list of identified stakeholders based on these interviews.

The additional stakeholders are the department heads for IT services, customer support, purchase, administration, and accounts.

Further, Andrew classifies the stakeholders based on their potential impact or support to the project. he documents the details of the stakeholders in the stakeholder register and based on his assessment of each stakeholder, he defines the stakeholder management strategy in a stakeholder analysis matrix.

To Get Email Updates when we post new content, Click Here.

In my previous article, I looked at all that you need to know about project management plans for projects. In this article, I want to talk about all that you need to know about Changed! Control Board for projects. Follow me as we will look at this together in this article.

A Change Control Board is an internal unit or department charged with not only monitoring, controlling, coordinating, and implementing changes to all elements of project works, but also with accepting or rejecting changes that have been requested by customers.

Normally, the CCB operates closely with the project’s sponsor, customers and other key stakeholders.

The responsibilities of the CCB should be delineated, documented, and agreed to by the stakeholders, customers, and project team.

Decisions made during the CCB meetings are documented and communicated to the required stakeholders.

Stakeholders can use this information to follow up on the necessary actions.

Scope management plan…

A scope management plan is a planning document that describes how a project team will define, verify, manage and control the project scope. The plan can be either formal or informal, depending on the need of the project.

Typical example…

The project manager of the geothermal energy program. Racheal Tagon, worked with the core project team to construct the scope management plan.

The plan contains a description of how frequently, and extensively the scope is expected to change, how the project team will identify, discuss, and classify changes to the scope, and who will approve the changes.

To Get Email Updates when we post new content, Click Here.

In my previous article, I talked about some of the facts that have to do with a requirements management plan. In this article, I want to look at some of the facts that you need to know about the scope management plans for projects. Follow me as we will look at that together in this article.

A schedule management plan, one of the subsidiary Plans in the project plan, is an approach to developing, maintaining, and managing the project schedule.

A typical schedule management plan describes…

• The purpose of the plan.
• Approved schedule development tools and techniques such as a particular project management software application.
• The number, types, and purpose of the project schedules are to be developed and maintained.
• How changes to the schedule baseline will be managed?
• Who is responsible for developing and maintaining the project schedules?
• How and when scheduled performance will be reported?

Typical example…

The schedule management plan document contains the schedule management plan for the Arithmetic on a stick project. it clearly describes the project team’s approach to developing the schedule and making changes to the project baseline.

The plan names the person responsible for maintaining the project schedule a d contains a policy for schedule performance reporting.

To Get Email Updates when we post new content, Click Here.

In my previous article, I talked about all that you need to know about cost and quality management plans for projects. In this article, I want to look at some facts about process improvement plans for projects. Follow me as we look at that together in this article.

A process improvement plan is a document that describes the steps to analyse and determine areas of improvement in the project process. The areas of process improvement include process boundaries, process Configuration, process metrics, and targets for improved performance.

Typical example…

Sharon Parker is a project manager at a software development company. When managing one of the high-priority projects, Sharon realised that the product testing process was taking longer than required.

She decided to review the existing process followed by her project. The process of testing software involves a senior developer review at the end of each phase, unit testing, system testing user acceptance testing, SME review, and customer service.

Sharon discussed the issue with the process managers and other senior managers. they agreed with Sharon and appointed her as the project manager to handle the process improvement plan initiative.

She created a process improvement plan to reduce the time taken to test the product.

The plan included information on the long and short-term goals, the purpose of the goal, action to be taken, priority levels, time estimate, and who will perform which activity whole improve the process.

To Get Email Updates when we post new content, Click Here.