All sales begin with leads, and plumbers are always on the lookout for ways to add to the pipeline of leads that turn into sales. One of those ways can be through a number of different pay per lead services for plumbers, like:
HomeAdvisor
Thumbtack
Angie’s List
Porch
While these services can sometimes offer some short term help, they ultimately aren’t a key part of the quality lead generation machine of a plumbing business.
In this blog, we take a close look at pay per lead services and what dive into the pros and cons of each.
Have questions at the end? Blue Corona specializes in plumber marketing. So give us a call or contact us online to learn more about how we can help you increase leads and sales while reducing your marketing costs.
What Are Pay Per Lead Services?
A pay per lead service is pretty close to what it sounds like. There are millions of directories and sites on the internet that target specific industries or specific geographic areas. These directories aren’t just there to provide a public service, they are ways of collecting data that can be sold to an audience. If you want access to these audiences, you are going to have to pay to be listed in those directories, which can then be one way to generate leads.
There are also companies that specialize in pay per lead services. Instead of charging you for a listing, as some of the big directories do, they will give you a free listing with a tracked phone number and web form in order to figure out how many leads they sent your way. You are then charged per lead.
The Most Common Pay Per Lead Services for Plumbers
This is a big industry with lots of competition, so we’ve decided to focus on the four biggest pay per lead services plumbers use.
HomeAdvisor
HomeAdvisor is the 800-pound gorilla in the home improvement directory space. The service is free for homeowners, but plumbers who want to be listed have to pay an annual fee to advertise and pay for every lead generated by HomeAdvisor.
Pros:
Homeowners can instantly book an appointment with local plumbers directly on the site without having to call around.
Users also know plumbers advertising on HomeAdvisor have cleared criminal background checks and credit checks.
Cons:
Consumers on HomeAdvisor complain that they get bombarded with too many calls upon signing up.
Consumers are sometimes matched with contractors that aren’t local or service their neighborhood.
Plumbers have to pay for a lead distributed to them from HomeAdvisor, even if it doesn’t turn into a paying job.
Thumbtack
Thumbtack takes the opposite approach from HomeAdvisor in that instead of homeowners doing the searching, they simply post a project and plumbers can then examine those projects and contact the homeowners if they’re interested.
Pros:
It’s free for homeowners.
Cons:
Plumbing companies are charged for every lead they talk to, regardless if it turns out to be a qualified customer. For plumbers, this is a downgrade on pay per lead services, as it essentially means “pay per communication.”
No background or credit checks.
Angie’s List
In May 2017 it was announced that Angie’s List had been acquired by its largest competitor at the time, HomeAdvisor. “If you can’t beat ‘em, buy ‘em.” You could describe Angie’s List pay per lead service as “free to join, but pay to play.” If you do decide to go the paid route, you’ll pay the same fee each month whether you get 100 leads or 0.
Pros:
Background checks are performed on the plumbers who are listed.
Cons:
Leads are sent to multiple plumbers at once, so you aren’t guaranteed that the lead you are sent is definitely “yours” to win
Angie’s List shares leads with its parent company, HomeAdvisor, so if you are subscribed to both companies you may end up paying for the same lead twice.
Porch
Porch, like Thumbtack, puts the power of contacting primarily in the hands of contractors. Plumbers can see the leads before they choose to contact the lead, for which they will then be charged. Porch also touts its relationships with Lowe’s and BBB.
Pros:
A plumber can pay to be cross-listed at a local Lowe’s store in addition to their online listing on Porch.
Cons:
Leads are sent to four different plumbers, so it’s a race to connect with customers from the start.
The likelihood of price shoppers. Pay per lead platforms like Porch tend to attract (and encourage) the types of customers who are only looking for the absolute cheapest price, regardless of job quality. If those are the sorts of customers you want, this is a pro, but if not, it’s a major con.
They offer a “Porch Guarantee” which requires a strong online presence which can be challenging for plumbers who used to getting many leads offline.
Why Pay Per Lead Services Suck
After seeing some of the pros and cons for each of the big plumber pay per lead services, there are four main reasons to avoid them altogether:
Race to the bottom: Very often this is a pricing game and the lowest bid wins. Instead of being able to talk about your commitment to quality or customer service, you’re trying to win on one metric alone: Price.
Race to the phone: As mentioned, more than one of these services just throws a lead out to multiple plumbers like chum to sharks. Very often the first plumbing company to contact the lead closes it, and not everyone has the resources to man their phones around the clock.
No real tracking: These directories aren’t really working for you, you are working for them, hence they are not invested in giving you smart and powerful tools to track where leads come from and where they go. You’re also not given too much room to share what’s unique about your company. You’re forced into cookie-cutter ads.
Pay per “lead” regardless: As noted above, these platforms don’t really care whether the “lead” they furnish to you ends up being one you close (multiple plumbers receive the same lead at the same time) or one that’s genuine (no guard against those just “window shopping”).
Replace Pay Per Lead with Plumber Digital Marketing
Everything we’ve been discussing so far revolves around what happens when other people control the audience and your marketing assets.
This puts you into a position of renting your advertising instead of owning it. When it comes to lead generation for plumbers, owning is always better than renting. Here’s why:
Qualify leads: Instead of dealing with anyone who is willing to give out their contact information, you are able to educate them, using assets like:
Customize: You aren’t forced into someone else’s box so that you look just like every other plumbing company, just with a different name and contact information. You decide what your messaging needs to look like and can change it whenever you want to or the situation dictates. You also can decide how much you want to spend on advertising instead of being held hostage to whatever you are given.
Target: Plumbing pay per lead platforms were built for scale and as such, they are not as concerned with the particulars of your local marketplace. When you are working with your own lead generation assets that you’ve developed through plumber digital marketing, you can get as surgical as you want, targeting specific neighborhoods or zip codes, particular demographics, etc.
Here are replacements you can use today that are going to increase leads and sales more efficiently than plumber pay per lead services:
Pay per click (PPC): These are extremely cost-effective and allow you to target people who are searching for plumbing services right now. With PPC marketing for plumbers, you can budget how much you want to spend each month, instantly be found at the top of Google search results, and drive more traffic to your website.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) The clicks from pay per click will convert better if your plumber SEO services are on point. Part of this is related to blogs as we mentioned above, but even more important than that is making sure you have a clean and clear website that does your brand proud.
Local Services ads. Google’s Local Services program makes traditional pay per lead programs look like they are from the Stone Age. One distinguishing feature of Local Services ads for plumbers: Google will refund you for money spent on inquiries from unqualified leads.
Start Owning, Instead of Renting, Your Leads
As we said at the beginning, leads are what sales are made of. But if your leads aren’t good, the sales won’t happen.
If you aren’t excited about the pay per lead universe and want to develop a top notch plumber marketing plan to help you increase leads and sales, contact us online today!
A Complete Guide To Multiple Location SEO For Chains and Franchises
Table of Contents
How to Use Location Pages for Local SEO: A Multi-Location SEO Strategy
Expanding your online presence for local search is hard enough as it is. When you add multiple locations to the mix, things get even more daunting.
You are faced with decisions about website architecture, URL structure, whether you need location pages or a store locator, and how best to avoid filtering all of your multi-location Google My Business listings.
To help you out, we’ve put together this guide on what multi-location SEO is, common issues, and how to ensure that your multiple locations stay unfiltered and ready to dominate the local 3 pack.
The Importance of Local SEO
Local searches are searches where the location of the result is a relevant factor. For example, if a user is in City A and needs to find a restaurant to eat lunch, chances are that they want the search results to be specific to City A and their keywords would include the likes of “restaurants near me” or “italian restaurant in City A”.
Though it’s typical these terms don’t always need to have an explicit location keyword modifier, as long as the target of the search is a product or service that’s commonly consumed locally, like food or retail shops or appliance maintenance then an approximate GPS location of the user will be used to determine locally relevant results.
When considering that 72% of customers who conduct a local search visit a nearby store, and over 75% of users don’t typically go past the first page of search results, it’s clear that optimizing for local is beneficial for traffic and sales, if not critical.
The ultimate goal of Local GMB SEO is to rank in the local map pack, which is also known as the three-pack or snack pack. Commonly known tactics include optimizing your Google My Business listing, building citations, collecting reviews, and crafting locally-relevant content for your website.
Multi-Location SEO and Common Issues
Multi-location SEO is the process of ranking your website pages and GMB listings in their relevant locations.
This can get tricky because you have to target both niche and geo-specific search queries without diluting the rank of another store or causing a local filter to be sure you are increasing their visibility in the SERP and driving results, rather than harming their rank.
Below are some of the most common issues that we identify when auditing multi-location SEO campaigns at Web 20.
No Location Pages
It’s a widespread misconception that local optimization only applies to your Google My Business listing when in fact it needs to start with the foundation of your online presence – your website.
We highly recommend creating distinct pages for each location you’re trying to rank in. The general rule is that each location should have it’s own page optimized for a singular location aka a location page. If you already have location pages, the next step is to ensure that they’re discoverable by search engines. Make sure they’re easily crawlable and indexable so that they can be delivered to users.
Due to internal and external links, the homepage should be the most authoritative page of the website, so be sure to optimize it for the main target location.
In some cases, however, if the brand only has a few locations and they are local to each other then it may be beneficial to optimize the page for all of them and use it across the GMB’s as well.
Some examples where I would use just the home page for multiple locations include:
A business has 4 locations in Las Vegas. I would optimize the home page for Las Vegas and link all four GMB listings to the home page.
A business has 6 locations in New York City. Even though I would probably build location pages for each for the boroughs of New York, I would most likely link all of the GMB listings to the more authoritative home page since it will be optimized for New York City. And the borough pages would link home using keyword anchors with modifiers such as “car accident lawyer Bronx NYC”.
GMB Listing Issues
Even though GMB is at the center of most local SEO efforts, you’d be surprised to learn that more than half of listings on the platform haven’t been claimed. If you don’t claim your GMB listing, then you won’t have control over how your brand is presented on perhaps the most important business directory on the internet.
The information on your GMB profile is what shows up in the local pack or knowledge graph in the SERP. Having complete and up-to-date information is essential not just for search engines but for potential customers too.
Each location should have its own distinct and fully verified GMB listing that includes the business name, address, phone number, website, business category, attributes, description, photos, and more. Two or more locations for the same brand name using the same street address OR phone number would be considered duplicates and could lead to potential spam and filtering issues.
Most storefront locations already have completely unique NAPs, but the same should apply to service area based listings as well. Even if the visible address is removed from the listing, and unique service areas are added, the GMB will still be registered at the address where it was verified.
Additionally, when working with multi-location SABs be careful not to allow any service areas to overlap between the listings as this may cause one or more to be filtered from the search results. Check out Google’s own GMB guidelines if you want to learn more about what you can and cannot do with your listings according to TOS.
Inconsistent Name, Address, & Phone Number
Ensuring NAP consistency is a simple yet surprisingly effective way of improving your rank.
While Google is getting better at crediting brand mentions to the right entities, we all know the algorithm is still far from perfect so if each location doesn’t have a consistent name, address, and phone number used it could cause some NAP citations to go uncredited towards local prominence.
With multi-location SEO, the risk and impact of inconsistencies exponentially increase as signals may get mixed between locations.
This risk becomes more apparent when you consider bulk verified chains are required to use the exact same GMB listing name across all locations, so the phone number, city, and zip code becomes the prime elements by which Google has to identify one listing from another.
Duplicate/Low-Quality Site Content
I am a huge believer in providing quality signals to the search engines and your location pages are no exception. One of the most common mistakes made with multi-location websites is reusing the same basic content across all locations and only swapping out the city name, state, etc where mentioned.
I know many local SEO’s that will say there is no duplicate content penalty for local SEO, and they are correct. But what there most definitely is, is a Panda filter and if you have too many low quality pages you can receive an algorithmic filter.
And while a few duplicate location pages may not affect you negatively, there’s a reason why mass page builders went out of fashion four years ago, multiple spam pages just don’t index or rank like they used to.
All pages on a site should always have a high percentage of unique content and I strive to make sure none are less than sixty percent unique.
When creating a content plan be sure that you’re providing all of the info that users need for that location. The more value the page has, the more likely you’ll get higher SERP rankings.
A Lack of Local Elements
Location pages should include information about the targeted area, services offered in that area, and sub-categories of those services. Word count can vary greatly depending on the niche and competition level but should be based directly on what the top-ranking competitors are doing.
Always try to include local elements such as your operating hours, contact details, driving directions, and anything else that users normally search for.
Although you’re peddling the same brand, think of the things that make each of your stores stand out from the rest. This includes information related to the area (e.g. history, landmarks), an embedded map, events that are unique to that location, and the like.
Optimizing Location Pages
It’s obvious that on-page optimization is a must for Local SEO, but are you optimizing the right page? And how do you optimize for more than one location?
In this section, we’ll lay out the six stages to optimizing your online brand and helping search engines deliver the right location to the users searching for it.
Planning Your Approach
Before you can begin to optimize your website, you’ll need to lay the foundation of your local SEO strategy first. This involves researching your keywords, planning the site structure, and understanding what the top ranking competitors are doing.
Keyword Research
Like most search engine optimization, in local SEO you start by finding keywords that you want to target. This is called your semantic core.
Once you have a shortlist of keywords, you can then create different variations for the various locations you want to target. Then, choose your main keyword for each of your locations.
The ideal main keyword is a keyword that has a high search volume and high buyer intent.
You want a keyword variation set that will drive online traffic, but also a keyword that will drive phone calls or deliver shoppers to your store.
Site & URL Structure
After you select the top target keywords, it’s time to build out the structure of your site. Figure out your main pages aside from your home page, contact page, and about page and ask yourself, “what kind of information is my target audience looking for the most? What content will drive the most views and visitors to the site?”
Then, group those ideas in a way that’s intuitive for the user – usually this is by topic, but you can structure it any way you want as long as it’s logical, simple, and consistent.
Your location pages – one for each store or area that you want to target – will naturally be grouped together for this and your URLs need to reflect your site structure. If you only have a few locations, this is relatively easy. You can have each page directly under the locations category, like so:
Site structure
URL structure
Locations > Brooklyn
locations/brooklyn
Locations > Manhattan
locations/manhattan
Locations > Berlin
locations/berlin
Alternatively, for only a few locations it might be beneficial to skip the location folder altogether and simply write your location page URLs like this:
Site structure
URL structure
Locations > Brooklyn
/brooklyn
Locations > Manhattan
/manhattan
Locations > Berlin
/berlin
But if you have more than a dozen local pages, you might want to add even more subcategories to make navigation easier. For example, a business that operates in multiple countries could implement this hierarchy:
Locations > USA > New York > Brooklyn > Coney Island
/locations/us/ny/brooklyn/coney-island
Locations > USA > New York > Brooklyn > Prospect Park
/locations/us/ny/brooklyn/prospect-park
Locations > UK > England > London > King’s Cross Station
/locations/uk/london/kings-cross
Locations > UK > Scotland > New Town
/locations/uk/scotland/new-town
Locations > Germany > Berlin
/locations/germany/berlin
Locations > Germany > Munich
/locations/germany/munich
Here are a few examples of a great multi-site structure that was well-researched and performs very well in the local SERPs for brands with a high number of locations across the United States.
Still skeptical about building out multiple location pages? Here are some additional benefits to consider:
Each landing page can rank separately in the SERP. So if someone searches for your New York locations, they might see the New York landing page in the results. If they search for Brooklyn, they’ll be shown that landing page instead. This lets you target way more keywords and broaden your reach.
A detailed site structure is a future-proof site structure. If your business grows and you add more locations, you won’t have to do a complete restructuring to accommodate the new stores.
Keep in mind that this is just one way of structuring your website. No matter what method you choose, just make sure that you stick to one consistent system.
Website Navigation
Navigation serves two purposes: to help users find their way around the site, and to help search engines discover (and index) new pages.
With that in mind, you’ll probably want to add your location content categories to the main navigation, where they are most visible to users.
Alternatively, the pages could be placed in the footer of the website but remember that if you have more than just a few location pages, it’s better to drop just one link to the main location page (/locations) rather than a link to each.
Some sites integrate a store locator function into their navigation menu, and even dynamic menus based on the location selected.
Some sites with multiple locations integrate a store locator function into their navigation menu and even use dynamic menus based on the location selected.
Competitive Intelligence
Look into top ranking businesses in the target areas.
What keywords are they targeting?
How do they structure their websites?
What does their Google My Business listing look like?
What directories are they on?
After all, how are you going to compete for a higher rank in the local SERP if you don’t know what your competitors are doing?
Understanding why the competitors are so successful with their SEO goes a long way in replicating that success for your own client.
That being said, be warned that you should never copy the competition outright as this can hinder your own efforts – but you can typically learn a lot from what they’re doing and identify important gaps to fill.
Optimized Local Content
Now that you know where the pages are going, you need to optimize them so that search engines are able to differentiate between them and crawl the necessary info.
There are countless factors that play into on-page SEO, but when looking at the content structure we will focus specifically on the meta titles & descriptions, headings, photos, and (of course) the content itself.
Meta Title & Description
A good meta title describes what the user (and Google) can expect when they visit the page and should incorporate your main keyword since search engines use this feature to better understand your content. The title should also be enticing and clickable with a max of about 60 characters, as it is also one of the first things that users will see in the SERPs.
For location pages, you can stick to a format that includes the main product or service that you offer (which is, more often than not, part of your main keyword), the store location, and the business name.
This way, you establish both geo- and niche relevance for your location page.
Here are a few examples, but typically your best example to use would be the top ranking competitor:
Best tacos in Columbus, OH | The Taco Mill
Car Titans – Affordable rent-a-car in New Orleans
The meta description goes hand-in-hand with this and is the snippet of text that appears below the title on the search results page – here you have 160 characters to summarize the content and encourage users to click on the link.
It’s best to include a couple of keywords, as that will not only help Google categorize your content better, but it also helps users figure out if your content answers their query. Round it off with a convincing CTA (Call to action), and you’re good to go.
Headings
Your heading tags have a significant impact on your ranking. Like your title tag, the headings send critical ranking signals to search engines, so you’ll want to incorporate a main keyword variation into your H1, and make sure that it contains the location as well.
We recommend sticking to one H1 tag per page, and information should be organized in a hierarchical format according to importance (H1 > H2 > H3).
H2s and H3s have a lesser impact, but they’re still important for organizing the content on the page. They also give more detail about what the page is all about. Generally, an H2 is a subtopic of the H1, while an H3 is usually a subtopic of the H2.
This is not a hard-and-fast rule, however. And many pages have an H1 immediately followed by an H5, which is in turn followed by an H2. This is because many site designers also use heading tags to dictate format and layout. H1s are usually the largest text element and H5s are the smallest (next to the body text, that is).
Content
Let’s move onto the “meat” of your optimization – your content. Creating content for your local pages is always going to be tricky but you have to come up with unique content on every page.
So how do you do this without thinning out the content too much? Repetition cannot be avoided completely as after all, it’s the same brand on the same website that likely offers the same products/services across multiple locations. Maybe even with the same operating hours.
But there will always be something unique to write about each location. Some examples of information to include would be:
– Address – Phone Number – Reviews
– Unique Services or Products – Staff – Photos/Videos
– Driving Directions – Local Attractions or Landmarks – Contact Info
When you think about it, there are fewer similarities and more things that make each location stand out from the rest.
Remember that you don’t want your users to merely consume the content – you want them to act on it. This is why it’s crucial to have at least one call-to-action on your local page. Whether it’s “buy now”, “see offers”, “sign up for our newsletter”, or something else, the important thing is that it’s visible. You can have multiple CTA buttons if you want, but be sure not to overwhelm the user.
Map Embeds & Driving Directions
Both driving directions and maps are essential elements of a local SEO strategy because they push location relevant signals. An embedded map with your pinned location is a great way to tell Google where your business is located, and users will have an easier time locating your store if you have the Google Maps widget attached to the page.
As of 2018, the Google Maps API is no longer free to use and they now charge websites $0.50 per every 1000 page loads. Don’t worry though because if you have a high-traffic website you’ll be granted a $200 credit every month, which means that most businesses won’t have to shell out any money for the map embed. This is just to prevent spammers from adding a map to every single page on their website to increase their location signals.
If you only add the embedded map, below-the-fold, to your essential pages (e.g. location pages, potentially your contact/about us pages), and defer the loading, you can reap the benefits without significantly slowing down time to contentful paint.
Many times I prefer embedding the GMB Places listing directly rather than using the Google Maps API.
Contact Info
Technically, this still falls under “content”. But your contact information is so fundamental to local SEO that we’re going to shine the spotlight on it for a moment.
Every location page should have a contact section that lists that location’s name, address, and phone number (NAP). Each NAP should remain consistent and accurate, no matter where it’s found on the web because a consistent NAP ensures that your business gets credited for every online mention, which in turn increases your chances of ranking.
Other important contact info should be added as well when available. You can also add your business’ email address or a link to a contact form in this section of the page.
Optimized Images
A long wall of text might provide a lot of information, but it’s not exactly enticing to users. Break the monotony of the page by adding images or graphics to your local pages.
Most photo galleries include pictures of the storefront, products/services you offer, and any employees/staff working at the location. You can even add photos of the city or neighborhood itself, especially if you talk about nearby landmarks or attractions. On the user’s side, this can enhance the article and retain reader attention.
On the search engine’s side, however, it’s not as simple. As sophisticated as the algorithm is, it’s still not able to understand images well enough on its own. If you want Google and the others to know what the image is pertaining to, you need to tell them through the metadata on the image.
Instead of a default file name (image1.jpg) try renaming it to something more descriptive. For example, if it’s a photo of a bowl of fruits, fruit-bowl.jpg would be a good file name. You should also geo-tag them for local relevance and optimize the alt-text so that, if the image can’t be displayed for one reason or another, users will know what the context of the photo is.
Although this isn’t specifically for local SEO, keep in mind that images impact the page speed and loading time. Don’t add too many to a single page and minimize the file size where possible.
Making Your Page Crawlable
Amazing, optimized pages are virtually useless if search engines cannot discover them. If they can’t discover them (or parse them), Google won’t know if your content answers a specific search query.
Let’s walk through some of the different ways you can help search engines find and understand your content.
Internal Links
Internal links – or links from your content to other pages on your website – are essential for seamless website navigation. A user could be browsing through your blog and want to learn more; an internal link encourages them to explore further.
Then of course there are the search engine benefits to consider as well. Crawl bots commonly discover new pages by following links so proper internal linking can speed up the crawling and indexing process, which means that you can rank in the SERP much faster. Your local landing pages need to be linked from and linked to to create an internal silo.
When thinking of pages to link to, prioritize relevant content that you referenced on the page. For example, if you mentioned another location, you can link to that store’s page – or if you talked about client testimonials, you can link to a case study.
Don’t forget that other pages on your website need to link to your local pages as well. This is extremely important, not just for crawling and indexing, but also for passing link equity from your high-performing pages. For example, if you have a resource page that’s ranking well and has high authority, you can pass some of that “link juice” to your location pages by linking to it.
Another way to implement internal links is by using breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs are a “trail” or navigation path that shows you where you are on the website, and how that page relates to other content on the site. Through breadcrumbs, it’s clear which pages are the “parent topics” and which are the more specific subtopics.
Schema Markup
Schema markup, also known as structured data, is a way to categorize information so that search engines understand what type of data they’re dealing with. So what does that mean?
Say that you want to include your phone number on a page: 123 456 9780. To us it’s obvious that it’s a phone number, but to search engines it’s just a string of numbers. To help Google understand that it’s a phone number, you would implement schema markup.
Schemas are added to the HTML code of a page and there are many different types of schemas – more than 800 in fact, with over 1300 properties. The information that you mark up can be displayed as a “rich result” in the SERP, which goes a long way in making it stand out from the other results on the page. It also helps Google deliver rich snippets if someone searches “[your business] operating hours” or “[your brand] address” so make sure all the basic info is added at a minimum.
You don’t have to structure each type of data on the page, but it also helps Google deliver rich snippets if someone searches “[your business] operating hours” or “[your brand] address” so at the very least, you should include the basic local business information.
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Finally, the last step of this stage is to update your sitemap and submit it to search engines.
A sitemap is a file that contains the most important URLs in your site – the URLs that you want Google to crawl and index. Therefore, when you update your website with new location pages your sitemap needs to reflect that.
If you have a particularly large or new site, updating your sitemap can spell the difference between a ranking page and a page that doesn’t even show up in the SERP.
After making sure that the URLs are up-to-date, the sitemap can be submitted via Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools. It probably won’t index immediately, but more often than not it’s faster than if you’d left it to the crawlers.
Creating A Local Presence
When we talk about local SEO, we’re talking about controlling how your brand is perceived across Google’s different properties. We’re also talking about trying to get your GMB listing ranked in Maps for your target keywords.
This next stage is all about the GMB and how you can set up & optimize specifically for multiple locations, but for further details on ranking a GMB (multi or single location) check out this updated guide to ranking in the 3-pack.
GMB Listing Optimization
Google My Business is Google’s business directory. Your GMB profile can show up in one of three places – the local map pack in search, Google Maps result pages, and the knowledge graph when someone searches for your business directly.
Bulk Verification
There’s a convenient way to verify multiple locations at the same time through the bulk upload option. Instead of claiming each listing separately, you can fill out the fields in the spreadsheet and submit it to GMB (Google My Business) – this is ideal for franchises and chains with ten or more locations.
When you finally have control over your listing(s), the next thing to do is to optimize them.
According to the GMB guidelines, your business name on the listing should accurately reflect your business name in the offline world.
So if your business is “Pet Supply Hub”, it shouldn’t be “Pet Supply Hub – Pet Store” or “Pet Supply Hub 24/7 Store”, etc.
To pass bulk verification every listing needs to be named the same, without any modifiers.
So there’s a trade-off if you currently use any modifiers in the listing name, you’ll lose the relevance from the name which can affect your local ranking but gain the ability to open and launch new locations faster and without the hassle of waiting for a postcard to arrive.
To prevent a spam filter or suspension, brand formatting should be kept consistent, no matter where it appears on the web. For example, if a city name or keyword is not included typically in the branding of each location across the website, socials, citations, etc then it should not be added to the GMB listing name. This is actually against Google’s TOS and can result in the suspension of the listing.
You also will need to choose business categories for the listing. If it’s the same brand across multiple locations, you should use the same primary category across all locations (this is also a requirement for bulk Google My Business verification). You should always do competitor category research first to be sure the selected categories correspond with the target terms and try not to have secondary categories that are unsupported by content on the website and location page. Diluting your secondary categories has been shown to on occasion prevent the GMB listing’s knowledge graph from displaying for branded queries.
If you feel the need to add additional secondary categories, then be sure that there is plenty of relevant content on the site to support whichever categories you add.
Then, you can fill out the rest of the profile. For the website URL, you can link to your website’s home page or to the location page for that store. Make sure that each listing accurately reflects the correct address, operating hours, and attributes, and for storefronts, the map pin should be precise as well.
The Google My Business description should be a summary of what the business does. It’s a great way to explain to potential customers what they can expect from you.
Don’t forget to add real photos and videos to the listing, check out the guidelines for more information on photo/video requirements as well as the different kinds of visuals that you can add to your profile. When you add a photo to your listing, make sure that the metadata is optimized and geo-tagged.
Local Citations and NAP Mentions
One of the most important local ranking factors is the quantity and quality of your online NAP mentions. Citations are any mention of your brand’s NAP on the internet. This can be divided into structured citations, which are citations on a business directory like Yelp or GMB, and unstructured citations, which are any non-directory mentions on blogs, news articles, or social media posts.
Imagine that every citation you have is a “point” towards your business. The more “points”, the more popular Google thinks you are, the more popular Google thinks you are, the more they will display you in the search results. Plus, having mentions on relevant sites increases the likelihood that someone will learn about (and visit) your business.
However, not all citations are created equal. Citations from major business directories tend to carry more weight than citations from personal blogs or web 2.0 sites. A spammy citation can even harm your rank if search engines think you’re trying to game the algorithm by amassing a bunch of low-quality mentions.
You don’t need a listing on every possible directory, but you do need to hit the major ones. This includes Facebook, Google My Business, Bing, Yelp, Better Business Bureau, Yellow Pages, Angie’s List, Foursquare, and ExpressUpdate just to name a few. We have seen great success from our national citation service that specializes in submitting to the most authoritative platforms for each country.
We also recommend getting listed on industry or niche-relevant directories. For example, if you’re a medical practitioner, you may want to have a citation on WebMD’s doctor directory. This helps you rank for industry terms and related search queries. Do a couple of manual searches for the top keywords, and do your best to get the business listed on any directories that rank on the first 2-3 pages.
There are also local business directories for your town, city, state, or region (such as a local Chamber of Commerce) – get citations from there to add geographical signals to your brand and get a leg up on the competition.
No matter where you decide to build your listings, the most important thing is that your NAP (and other business information) is consistent. Any inconsistencies could result in a citation not being properly credited to your brand, which could in turn affect rankings (Just in case you missed that the first few times we mentioned it).
Reviews
Although there’s quite a debate in the industry as to whether or not review rating directly affects GMB rankings, reviews are an integral part of any SEO strategy.
A whopping 97% of consumers read business reviews, and more than 85% trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation from someone they know. Having plenty of positive reviews and a good rating is critical if you want to convert people into customers.
There are known SEO benefits to reviews as well. A high rating signals to Google that you are a trusted brand, which means that you’re more likely to show up in the local SERP. Also, note that your rating and the number of reviews are displayed prominently in the three-pack.
Reviews are even more so important for multi-location brands because reviews are always location-specific – a customer’s experience at one store won’t accurately reflect the experience at another, so you have to collect reviews individually for each listing. Just be wary about offering anything in exchange for a review (e.g. free items, discounts, etc.) because that goes against Google’s guidelines.
When you have a system for collecting reviews in place, the next step is to monitor them. If you only have a few listings, you can check on them individually. But if you have more locations – or if you want to monitor reviews across multiple platforms – you might need reputation management software to help you out.
A business should also respond to all reviews, good and bad. If someone leaves a positive review, be sure to thank them for their review and encourage them to come again. You may be tempted to sweep bad reviews under the rug, but replying to them demonstrates that you’re ready and willing to address the problem, which goes a long way towards building goodwill with your customers.
Improving Your Multi-Location Strategy
The thing about SEO is that it’s always growing and changing – what worked yesterday may not work tomorrow. Plus, you’ll want a way to monitor your progress, identify what you’re doing right, and improve where you’re lacking. But what can you use (besides a typical rank tracker) to see progress?
This stage is all about working with your tools, interpreting data, and using those insights to refine your local SEO strategy. For this, you’ll need access to Google Analytics and Google My Business Insights.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a powerful tool for tracking your website performance.
Through the dashboard, you can see how many people have visited your site, where they are clicking from, what keywords they’re using to find your content, and which specific content brings in the most traffic.
You can even set up goals for your page like phone calls, appointment bookings, and contact form submissions.
The most important metrics for organic SEO are usually phone calls and form-fills as these most closely represent a lead for your business.
You can also implement urchin tracking modules with Google Analytics to track website and appointment URL clicks from your GMB listing inside of your Analytics dashboard.
I prefer having the team set-up Google Data Studio reporting to better visualize the Google Analytics data and it makes it easily presentable for client reporting too.
GMB Insights
Unlike Google Analytics which combines both organic and local SEO tracking (using UTM parameters), GMB Insights is strictly for your listing.
The dashboard lets you see your data at a glance and manage multiple locations easily. From there, you can check what keywords people are using to find your business, which platform they’re using (Maps vs search), and what actions they’re taking on your listing.
Unfortunately, the GMB dashboard only lets you review the most recent months worth of data, so if you need to view more than that or if you would like to have the ability to compare month-over-month, and be able to access up to sixteen months of historic GMB insight data, we would recommend a Google My Business management and reporting tool like Local Viking.
Use these tools wisely, and you’ll have more than enough information to tweak your local SEO strategy for better rankings.
The Multi-Location SEO Best Practices Checklist
To sum it up, here’s a recap of everything we covered in the guide:
Research high-traffic, buyer intent keywords. You’ll want to combine a niche keyword (ex. formal dresses) with a location modifier (ex.. near me, your city/state).
Categorize and structure your local content so that it’s intuitive for both users and search engines.
Make sure your URLs are simple, consistent, and reflect your site structure.
Make it easy for users to navigate to your local content by adding links to it in the main navigation bar or the footer of your website.
Find out how your competitors are pushing local content, and use that to make your strategy better.
Create valuable, unique, location-specific content for your website. Each location/store can have a page. Do not copy-paste large chunks of text!
Embed a map of your store or driving directions on your location pages.
Add your name, address, phone number, and other pertinent contact information on your location page.
Break up long walls of text with images. Geo-tag them and add keywords to the metadata for additional relevance.
Drop internal links to other related content on the site. You should also link to other location pages and external authority content.
Implement schema so that search engines understand what type of data they’re dealing with.
Add your location pages to your sitemap, and submit it to search engines for crawling.
Create a separate Google My Business listing for each of your locations.
Ensure that the name and business category are formatted accurately and consistently for all of the stores.
Add relevant photos to your GMB listing, making sure that they are optimized and geo-tagged first.
Build citations on the top general, niche, and location-specific business directories. Make sure your NAP is consistent no matter where it appears.
Collect, manage, and respond to reviews on every platform – especially the negative ones.
Build backlinks to your business by partnering with local organizations, hosting events, and reaching out to local bloggers in your community.
Use tools like Google Analytics and GMB Insights to track campaign performance and refine your local SEO strategy.
Additional Tips for Multiple Locations
Here are other things you can keep in mind to maximize your local SEO efforts:
Optimize your website for faster loading times. Page speed is a ranking factor, and it directly affects the user experience. The faster your website loads, the more likely it will show up in the SERP, and the less likely users will bounce off the page.
Host all of your location pages on a single domain. Having different websites for different locations splits the ranking signals. The only reason to consider using separate domains for your multi-locations would be if independent franchisees are allowed to have their own company-branded websites.
Although optimizing for keywords is important, be careful not to over-optimize. Keyword stuffing is frowned upon by search engines and makes your content less readable.
Create hyper-local content not just on your website but on your GMB listing as well. Use GMB posts to talk about store-specific events, discounts, sales, and more.
Always double check your map pin, even if the address listed is correct. An inaccurate map pin can harm your SEO and make it more difficult for customers to find you on the ground.
Ask and answer questions on your GMB listing. This acts as your de facto FAQ section, clarifying for users what they need to know. Plus, they’re a great way to incorporate more keywords into your listing.
Make the most out of niche-specific GMB attributes and features. For example, restaurant listings allow their users to book a table, see the menu, and more from the profile itself.
Don’t neglect your organic SEO! Your organic rankings have an impact on your local rankings.
Conclusion
Multi-location SEO is a little more difficult than local SEO for a single business.
There are more considerations at every stage from location pages and URL structure to potential filtering issues because of overlapping service areas.
Brand dilution and keyword cannibalization can present major obstacles.
But if you forecast your total locations, follow a consistent process, and plan out your expansion strategy correctly you’ll build a viable and thriving multi-location brand that will dominate the local SERPs, organically and in maps.
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When selecting a turn-key GMB solution for your clients you want to ensure that the management team behind the fulfillment is experienced and reachable. Experience – Chaz, Mark, and Jessie can account for ranking 100’s of GMB listings every quarter since 2015. We run dozens of internal tests every year, further refining our successful and powerful processes. Reachable – our team has fully monitored live chat, phone lines, dashboard instant messaging and email support Monday through Friday 9 AM to 5 PM EST. We also offer in-depth campaign recommendations so you can be assured of selecting the perfect packages for each of your client campaigns.
Your question of; “What is a Static Website?” is often asked, and is answered here, and that’s not all as we also spill the beans on just how you make a Static Web Page with an example.
A static web page (sometimes called a flat page or a stationary page) is a web page that is delivered to the user’s web browser exactly as stored, in contrast to dynamic web pages which are generated by a web application.
Consequently, a static web page displays the same information for all users, from all contexts, subject to modern capabilities of a web server to negotiate content-type or language of the document where such versions are available and the server is configured to do so.
Static web pages are often HTML documents stored as files in the file system and made available by the web server over HTTP (nevertheless URLs ending with “.html” are not always static). However, loose interpretations of the term could include web pages stored in a database, and could even include pages formatted using a template and served through an application server, as long as the page served is unchanging and presented essentially as stored.
Static web pages are suitable for content that never or rarely needs to be updated, though modern web template systems are changing this. Maintaining large numbers of static pages as files can be impractical without automated tools, such as static site generators. Another way to manage static pages is online compiled source code playgrounds, e.g. GatsbyJS and GitHub may be utilized for migrating a WordPress site into static web pages. Any personalization or interactivity has to run client-side, which is restricting.
Background to The Meaning of Static When Rendering a Website
Static Website Definition
A static website contains Web pages with fixed content. Each page is coded in HTML and displays the same information to every visitor. Static sites are the most basic type of website and are the easiest to create. Unlike dynamic websites, they do not require any web programming or database design. A static site can be built by simply creating a few HTML pages and publishing them to a Web server.
Since static Web pages contain fixed code, the content of each page does not change unless it is manually updated by the webmaster. This works well for small websites, but it can make large sites with hundreds or thousands of pages difficult to maintain.
Static Web Site Advantages and Disadvantages
Means it’s fixed and can’t modification unless changes made in source code. A static web site will only show info that’s written into the HTML. Once a web browser requests the particular static web page, a server returns the page to the browser and also the user only gets whatever info is contained within the HTML code.
The advantages of a static website? Here are a few:
cheaper to develop.
easier for search engines to index.
easier to host.
ideal for small websites.
faster to transfer on slow connections.
The pages on a static website once created will remain static and cannot be updated or changed without coding skills. That is, if a novice business owner wants to update certain information on his/her static website, he/she would have to get a website developer to perform the needful task.
Time-Saving: The biggest advantage of a static website is that it is quick to develop. A professional web developer can develop a static website much faster than a dynamic one. Unlike a dynamic website, static websites are cheaper to develop. They are apt for businesses working on a shoestring budget.
Static websites can get dedicated servers at a cheaper price and that too with much ease so an advantage of status here is the inexpensive website hosting. Similarly, easy indexing comes with that static website. Search engines like Google, Bing etc., can easily index a static website as they are just a series of coded HTML or CSS files.
But the following disadvantages of static webpages and ultimately, whole websites is that static sites are costly to update or change. The website hosting and maintenance costs are too high if you have a greater no. of pages on the website which are static and stored at the webserver. It is very slow to design and develop.
It is laborious to keep it up-to-date. The other disadvantage is that as a site owner, you cannot change or add content or make any modification without having knowledge of HTML and other programming languages on which your website is built. The second main problem is flexibility. If you wish to sell products on your website and you have a lot of them, then you may have to construct or develop individual pages for each one, which can take huge time, effort and cost. Static site generators are also often overlooked due to their often-unfriendly installation process and lack of a user interface.
Yet, despite these issues, in some instances, an SSG (static site generator) can be better suited for your project than a CMS, or when a CMS may be overkill.
Articles, tagged with “static website”
Dynamic websites are much more efficient than static websites for large sites that contain numerous pages, news articles and/or products. Example of static vs. Dynamic code. In the example above, outlined in green is the section of code that has an effect on the respective date area in the final result.
A dynamic website is one that changes or customizes itself frequently and automatically. Server-side dynamic pages are generated “on the fly” by computer code that produces the HTML (CSS are responsible for appearance and thus, are static files).
A Discussion on Static and Dynamic Websites
It’s hard to have a discussion on static websites without comparing them to dynamic sites – especially given the prevalence of dynamic sites – I’ll try to constrain my focus to the benefits that you leverage by developing websites using a static methodology.
Most websites are a mix of static and dynamic content. A dynamically generated search request, for instance, may appear side by side with static sidebars, headers, and footers. For the sake of this discussion, though, we’re going to focus on websites that are “static first”.
Benefit a Website Can Make for a New Business
Businesses also find making simple changes to the call to action can be of benefit, thus the focus should never be solely on the animated or static website banner conversion rate.
The Right Time to Re-Design Your Website
The traditional web designing model is also time-consuming. It required you to find out the latest technology and include them in your website all at one go. It would also mean loads of prospects missed as most parts of your site would be out of bounds due to work on the new site.
Developing basic layouts and designing a website takes time. Web app testing is a tedious and time-consuming process as well as prone to errors. Basic web development decisions depend on the developer, which slows down the release.
No, not at all. It doesn’t matter if your site is dynamic or static—the design can still be the same. By simplifying the development process, more time and money can be allocated to the actual design of the website.
Importance of Quality Content in Website Development
For small websites, a fixed (static) website works fine. But for any website to be ranked higher among the competitors should have been built up with strong and quality content. The following are considered to be the importance of a high-quality relevant content on a website.
Dynamic Website Vs Static: Which Is Best For SEO?
if any website isn’t brought up to date constantly it will wither and eventually die, as they do so they would damage your SEO in the process. Several factors can improve your site’s usability, starting with the type of website itself. Whether your site is static or dynamic can have a big impact on your user experience and your SEO.
We are convinced that static websites will become commonplace shortly. In the meantime, it’s super easy to beat a bloated dynamic website at the SEO-game using a static one: now is the time to play!
Unlike static websites, dynamic websites are built-in real-time and are programmed to be responsive. Easy to target multiple keywords for SEO – as dynamic websites allow quick updates, the website operator can quickly change its list of target keywords to achieve the desired SEO results.
What We Mean by Dynamic or Static Websites
Gatsby takes markdown and other static data sources and turns them into dynamic blogs and websites using “reactjs”. By supporting the component-driven development model of React, Gatsby is able to re-use components across a site, adding consistency and speed.
While larger websites require frequent updates and hence cms is the best choice. There are numerous static websites available on the internet. It’s easy to distinguish a static and a dynamic website.
Budget for coders to cure bugs that arise during development. At first you ought to look into this aspect so as to fix on the right solution that fits your budget seeing that a dynamic website costs a lot more than the static websites. Are you still with me? Hopefully, I haven’t lost you already. In a sense, every website that you see in your browser is static. But despite this, a considerable share of all websites online are actually so-called “dynamic” websites. The results we observe are consistent with our experimentations. Dynamic websites are prone to be stuffed with unnecessary scripts and bloated. While the cleaned version of the NYT we analysed is still not a static website, it gives us a peek of what an optimized and lightweight NYT website might look like.
That’s where dynamic website design comes in. Static and dynamic web design both come with pros and cons, but dynamic web design comes out on top. Here’s a primer on dynamic web design: what it is, how it differs from static web design, and what makes it so worth the investment.
Google Search Console is by far the most used device in the SEO’s toolkit. Not only does it provide us with the closest understanding we can have of Googlebot’s behavior and perception of our domain properties (in terms of indexability, site usability, and more), but it also allows us to assess the search KPIs that we work so rigorously to improve. GSC is free, secure, easy to implement, and it’s home to the purest form of your search performance KPI data. Sounds perfect, right?
However, the lack of capability for analyzing those KPIs on larger scales means we can often miss crucial points that indicate our pages’ true performance. Being limited to 1,000 rows of data per request and restricted filtering makes data refinement and growth discovery tedious (or close to impossible).
SEOs love Google Search Console — it has the perfect data — but sadly, it’s not the perfect tool for interpreting that data.
FYI: there’s an API
In order to start getting as much out of GSC as possible, one option is to use an API that increases the request amount to 25,000 lines per pull. The wonderful Aleyda Solis built an actionable Google Data Studio report
using an API that’s very easy to set up and configure to your needs.
You can also use something out of the box. In this post, the examples use Ryte Search Success because it makes it much easier, faster, and more efficient to work with that kind of data at scale.
We use Search Success for multiple projects on a daily basis, whether we’re assisting a client with a specific topic or we’re carrying out optimizations for our own domains. So, naturally we come across many patterns that give a higher indication of what’s taking place on the SERPs.
However you use GSC search performance data, you can turn it into a masterpiece that ensures you get the most out of your search performance metrics! To help you get started with that, I’ll demonstrate some advanced and, frankly, exciting patterns that I’ve come across often while analyzing search performance data.
So, without further ado, let’s get to it.
Core Updates got you down?
When we analyze core updates, it always looks the same. Below you can see one of the clearest examples of a core update. On May 6, 2020, there is a dramatic fall in impressions and clicks, but what is really important to focus on is the steep drop in the number of ranking keywords.
The amount of ranking keywords is an important KPI, because it helps you determine if a site is steadily increasing its reach and content relevancy. Additionally, you can relate it with search volumes and trends over time.
Within this project, we found hundreds of cases that look exactly like the examples below: lucrative terms were climbing up pages two and three (while Google perceives ranking relevance) before finally making it up to the top 10 to be tested.
There is a corresponding uplift in impressions, yet the click-through-rate for this important keyword remained at a measly 0.2%. Out of 125K searches, the page only received 273 clicks. That’s clearly not enough for this domain to stay in the top 10, so during the Core Update rollout, Google demoted these significant underperformers.
The next example is very similar, yet we see a higher altitude on page one due to the fact that there’s a lower amount of impressions. Google will likely aim to get statistically relevant results, so the fewer impressions a keyword has, the longer the tests need to occur. As you can see, 41 clicks out of 69K impressions shows that no searcher was clicking through to the site via this commercial keyword, and thus they fell back to pages two and three.
This is a typical Core Update pattern that we’ve witnessed hundreds of times. It shows us that Google is clearly looking for these patterns, too, in order to find what might be irrelevant for their users, and what can kiss goodbye to page one after an update.
Aim to pass those “Top 10 Tests” with flying colors
We can never know for sure when Google will roll out a Core Update, nor can we ever be fully confident of what results in a demotion. However, we should always try to rapidly detect these telltale signs and react before a Core Update has even been thought of.
Make sure you have a process in place that deals with discovering subpar CTRs, and leverage tactics like snippet copy testing and Rich Results or Featured Snippet generation, which will aim to exceed Google’s CTR expectations and secure your top 10 positions.
Of course, we also witness these classic “Top 10 Tests” outside of Google’s Core Updates!
This next example is from our own beloved en.ryte.com subdomain, which aims to drive leads to our services and is home to our vast online marketing wiki and magazine, so it naturally earns traffic for many informational-intent queries.
Here is the ranking performance for the keyword “bing” which is a typical navigational query with tons of impressions (that’s quite a few Google users that are searching for Bing!). We can view the top 10 tests clearly when the light blue spikes show a corresponding uplift in impressions.
Whereas that looks like a juicy amount of impressions to lure over to our site, in reality nobody is clicking through to us because searchers want to navigate to bing.com and not to our informational Wiki article. This is a clear case of split searcher intent, where Google may surface varying intent documents to try and cater to those outside of their assumptions. Of course, the CTR of 0% proves that this page has no value for anyone, and we were demoted.
Interestingly enough, this position loss cost us a heck load of impressions. This caused a huge drop in “visibility” and therefore made it look like we had dramatically been hit by the January Core Update. Upon closer inspection, we found that we had just lost this and similar navigational queries like “gmail” that made the overall KPI drop seem worse than it was. Due to the lack of impact this will have on our engaged clicks, these are dropped rankings that we certainly won’t lose sleep over.
Aiming to rank high for these high search volume terms with an intent you’re unable to cater to is only useful for optimizing for “visibility indexes”. Ask yourself if it’s worth your precious time to focus on these, because of course you’re not going to bring valuable clicks to your pages with them.
Don’t waste time chasing high volume queries that won’t benefit your business goals
In my SEO career, I’ve sometimes gone down the wrong path of spending time optimizing for juicy-looking keywords with oodles of search volume. More often than not, these rankings yielded little value in terms of traffic quality simply because I wasn’t assessing the searcher intent properly.
These days, before investing my time, I try to better interpret which of those terms will bring my business value. Will the keyword bring me any clicks? Will those clickers remain on my website to achieve something significant (i.e. is there a relevant goal in mind?), or am I chasing these rankings for the sake of a vanity metric? Always evaluate what impact this high ranking will bring your business, and adjust your strategies accordingly.
The next example is for the term “SERP”, which is highly informational and likely only carried out to learn what the acronym stands for. For such a query, we wouldn’t expect an overwhelming number of clicks, yet we attempted to utilize better snippet copy in order to turn answer intent into research intent, and therefore drive more visits.
However, it didn’t exactly work out. We got pre-qualified on page two, then tested on page one (you can see the corresponding uplift in impressions below), but we failed to meet the expectations with a poor CTR of 0.1%, and were dropped back down.
Again, we weren’t sobbing into our fine Bavarian beers about the loss. There are plenty more worthwhile, traffic-driving topics out there that deserve our attention.
Always be on the lookout for those CTR underperformers
Something that we were glad to act on was the “meta keywords” wiki article. Before we have a moment of silence for the fact that “meta keywords” is still heavily searched for, notice how we dramatically jumped up from page four to page one at the very left side of the chart. We were unaware of this keyword’s movement, and therefore its plain snippet was seldomly clicked and we fell back down.
After some months, the page one ranking resurfaced, and this time we took action after coming across it in our CTR Underperformer Report. The snippet was addressed to target that of the searcher’s intent, and the page was enhanced in parallel to give a better direct answer to the main focus questions.
Not only did this have a positive impact on our CTR, but we even gained the Featured Snippet. It’s super important to identify these top 10 tests in time, so that you can still act and do something to remain prominent in the top 10.
We identified this and many other undernourished queries using the CTR Underperformer Report. It maps out all the CTRs from queries, and reports on where we would have expected a higher number of clicks for that keyword’s intent, impressions, and position (much like Google’s models likely aim to do, too). We use this report extensively to identify cases where we deserve more traffic, and in order to ensure we stay in the top 10 or get pushed up even higher.
Quantify the importance of Featured Snippets
Speaking of Featured Snippets, the diagram below demonstrates what it can look like when you’re lucky enough to be in the placement vs. when you don’t have it. The keyword “reset iphone” from a client’s tech blog had a CTR of 20% with the Featured Snippet, while without the Featured Snippet it was at a sad 3%. It can be game changing to win a relevant Featured Snippet due to the major impact it can have on your incoming traffic.
Featured Snippets can sometimes have a bad reputation, due to the risk that they could drive a lower CTR than a standard result, especially when triggered for queries with higher informational intent. Try to remember that Featured Snippets can display your brand more prominently, and can be a great sign of trust to the average searcher. Even if users were satisfied on the SERP, the Featured Snippet can therefore provide worthwhile secondary benefits such as better brand awareness and potentially higher conversions via that trust factor.
Want to find some quick Featured Snippet opportunities for which you need only repurpose existing content? Filter your GSC queries using question and comparison modifiers to find those Featured-Snippet-worthy keywords you can go out and steal quickly.
You’re top 10 material — now what?
Another one of our keywords, “Web Architecture”, is a great example of why it’s so crucial to keep discovering new topics as well as underperforming content. We found this specific term was struggling a while ago during ongoing topic research and set out to apply enhancements to push its ranking up to the top 10. You can see the telltale cases of Google figuring out the purpose, quality, and relevance of this freshly renewed document while it climbs up to page one.
We fared well in each of our tests. For example, at positions 10-8, we managed to get a 5.7% CTR. which is good for such a spot.
After passing that test, we got moved up higher to positions 4-7, where we struck a successful 13% CTR. A couple of weeks later we reached an average position of 3.2 with a tasty CTR of 18.7%, and after some time we even bagged the Featured Snippet.
This took just three months from identifying the opportunity to climbing the ranks and getting the Featured Snippet.
Of course, it’s not just about CTR, it’s about the long click: Google’s main metric that’s indicative of a site providing the best possible result for their search users. How many long clicks are there in comparison to medium clicks, to short clicks, and how often are you the last click to demonstrate that search intent is successfully fulfilled? We checked in Google Analytics and out of 30K impressions, people spend an average of five minutes on this page, so it’s a great example of a positive long click.
Optimize answers, not just pages
It’s not about pages, it’s about individual pieces of information and their corresponding answers that set out to satisfy queries.
In the next diagram, you can actually see Google adjusting the keywords that specific pages are ranking for. This URL ranks for a whopping 1,548 keywords, but pulling a couple of the significant ones for a detailed individual analysis helps us track Google’s decision making a lot better.
When comparing these two keywords, you can see that Google promoted the stronger performer on page one, and then pushed the weaker one down. The strong difference in CTR was caused by the fact that the snippet was only really geared towards a portion of its ranking keywords, which led to Google adjusting the rankings. It’s not always about a snippet being bad, but about other snippets being better, and whether the query might deserve a better piece of information in place of the snippet.
Remember, website quality and technical SEO are still critical
One thing we always like to stress is that you shouldn’t always judge your data too quickly, because there could be underlying technical errors that are getting you down (such as botched migrations, mixed ranking signals, blocked assets, and so on).
The case below illustrates perfectly why it’s so much better to analyze this data with a tool like Ryte, because with GSC you will see only a small portion of what’s taking place, and with a very top-level view. You want to be able to compare individual pages that are ranking for your keyword to reveal what’s actually at the root of the problem.
You’re probably quite shocked by this dramatic drop, because before the dip this was a high-performing keyword with a great CTR and a long reign in position one.
This keyword was in position one with a CTR of 90%, but then the domain added a noindex directive to the page (facepalm). So, Google replaced that number one ranking URL with their subdomain, which was already ranking number two. However, the subdomain homepage wasn’t the ideal location for the query, as searchers couldn’t find the correct information right away.
But it got even worse, because then they decided to 301 redirect that subdomain homepage to the top level domain homepage, so now Google was forced to initially rank a generic page that clearly didn’t have the correct information to satisfy that specific query. As you can see, they then fell completely from that top position, as it was irrelevant, and Google couldn’t retrieve the correct page for the job.
Something similar happened in this next example. The result in position one for a very juicy term with a fantastic CTR suddenly returned a 404, so Google started to rank a different page from that same domain instead, which was associated with a slightly similar but inexact topic. This again wasn’t the correct fit for the query, so the overall performance declined.
This is why it’s so important to look not just at the overall data, but to dig deeper — especially if there’s multiple pages ranking for a keyword — so that you can see exactly what’s happening.
Got spam?
The final point is not exactly a pattern to consider, but more a wise lesson to wrap up everything I’ve explored in this post.
At scale, Google is testing pages in the top 10 results in order to find the best placement based on that performance. With this in mind, why can’t we ask people to go to the SERPs, click on our results, and reap the tasty benefits of that improved position? Or better yet, why don’t we automate this continually for all of our top-10-tested queries?
Of course, this approach is heavily spammy, against guidelines, and something against which Google can easily safeguard. You don’t have to test this either, because Marcus (being the inquisitive SEO he is!) already did.
One of his own domains on job advertisements ranks for the focus keyword of “job adverts”, and as you can imagine, this is a highly competitive term that requires a lot of effort to score. It was ranking at position 6.6 and had a decent CTR, but he wanted to optimize it even further and climb those SERPs to position one.
He artificially cranked up his CTR using clever methods that ended up earning a “very credible” 36% CTR in position nine. Soon in position 10, he had a CTR of 56.6%, at which point Google started to catch wind of the spammy manipulation and punted him down the SERPs. Lesson learned.
Of course, this was an experiment to understand at which point Google would detect spammy behavior. I wouldn’t encourage carrying out such tactics for personal gain, because it’s in the best interests of your website’s health and status to focus on the quality of your clicks. Even if this test was working well and rankings improved, over time your visitors may not resonate with your content, and Google might recall that that lower position was initially in place for a reason. It’s an ongoing cycle.
I encourage you to reach your results organically. Leverage the power of snippet optimization in parallel with ongoing domain and content improvements to not only increase the quantity and quality of your clicks, but the very experiences on your website that make an impact to your long-term SEO and business growth.
Conclusion
To summarize, don’t forget that GSC search performance data gives you the best insight into your website’s true performance. Rank trackers are ideal for competitor research and SERP snapshots, but the position data is only one absolute ranking from one set variable like location and device. Use your own GSC data for intrinsic pattern analyses, diagnostics, and growth discovery.
But with great data, comes great responsibilities. Make sure you’re finding and understanding the patterns you need to be aware of, such as struggling top 10 tests, underperforming snippets, technical faults, and anything else that deprives you of the success you work so hard to achieve.
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83% of Instagram users say they find new products or services by browsing the platform. So, how can you ensure your brand attracts new audiences on Instagram?
One way is with Instagram Live.
The live feature is part of Instagram Stories and allows you to stream video and engage with followers in real-time. When a user goes live, Instagram notifies their followers and highlights their profile picture in the Stories section, making it appear first in line on their followers’ feeds.
Global Citizen is a non-profit organization with a mission to end extreme poverty by 2030. Earlier this year, the brand used Instagram Live to promote their #TogetherAtHome campaign — an effort to encourage social distancing in order to slow the spread of coronavirus.
To attract viewers, Global Citizen partnered with numerous celebrities to host an at-home concert series. Below is their Instagram Live collaboration with H.E.R., a musical artist.
In this livestream, H.E.R. advocated for quarantine, performed a few songs, and responded to live comments to lift spirits during difficult times. Besides the many heart-eye emoji reactions, viewers also shared comments such as, “This song brings me so much peace.” and “Music does heal.” to express their enjoyment.
Our socially-distant world also helped to make the #TogetherAtHome campaign popular because it was able to bring people together virtually.
The takeaway for your business:Research influencers in your industry to collaborate with and host Instagram Live takeovers. By doing so, your business will likely reach new audiences who are more willing to learn about your brand. You can also interact with the viewers in real-time in the comments or have your guest share a message about your business.
Lastly, consider tying Lives to current events to make your livestreams relevant to national or global conversations. These actions will boost your brand awareness.
Barry’s Bootcamp is a worldwide fitness studio offering workout classes. The company has been using Instagram Live to their advantage by sharing high energy workout sessions.
The live feature works well here because it can be more engaging for viewers to follow along with a live class rather than watching a pre-recorded session. In Live, they can also see how many other viewers are tuning in and watch their reactions to the class. The instructors also offer motivational words of encouragement to keep the energy going.
For Barry’s Bootcamp, live fitness classes align with their company brand and mission while providing valuable content to fitness enthusiasts. This helps to increase their brand equity and capture future converting customers.
The takeaway for your business: Instagram Live can also be used to host live workshops from your business. Lives make it easy for users to follow along and can serve as something people look forward to in their day.
Think of Instagram Lives as a way to create a virtual community of people coming together to do something. Similarly, a wellness company may host live meditation sessions. Any activity is up for grabs as long as it supports the business vision.
Chipotle is a fast food chain serving Mexican food and the company uses Instagram Live to share tasty recipes. In the below example, Chipotle’s executive chef shares how to make margaritas for Cinco de Mayo.
In this Live, Chef Chad takes viewers step-by-step through his margarita-making process and explains his thought process behind each step. This tutorial is one that viewers can trust and learn from since it comes from a top chef at the restaurant, especially if they’re already a fan of Chipotle.
It’s also worth noting how this Instagram Live celebrates Cinco de Mayo, which naturally ties into the restaurant’s Mexican cuisine. Chipotle leveraged this holiday as a great opportunity to provide entertaining and informational content.
The takeaway for your business: Ask yourself: What can we, as a business, teach members of our audience? Depending on the answer to that question, Instagram Live could be a great place to educate your audience while responding to their feedback and questions in real-time.
From the above Chipotle example, you can also better understand how acknowledging well-known events and holidays (e.g. cultural events, sports, and awards seasons) can work in your favor for this type of marketing strategy.
Speaking of food, Bon Appetit is a magazine all about cooking and recipes. Recently, Bon Appetit used Instagram Live as an opportunity to host a virtual dinner party with various celebrity guests. Each guest pairing was also creatively named after courses of a meal, from appetizer to digestif. Below is a screenshot from dessert:
Throughout the series, the chefs and guests carried out relaxed and casual conversations about anything and everything (you know how it goes at a dinner party). Bon Appetit was able to create a laid-back, yet engaging atmosphere. For those watching, this could’ve been an immersive experience to feel as if they were chatting with their friends over dinner.
The takeaway for your business: Instagram Live doesn’t have to be formal. Let your guard down and show your authenticity. Bon Appetit’s Dinner Party concept is both fun and creative — brainstorm potential themes you may be able to incorporate into your livestreams to achieve the same results.
Moreover, creating a series of Lives will incentivize people to follow your account and stay tuned for new content. Also, take advantage of Instagram’s guest feature to add someone else into your brand’s conversation.
If you prefer more structured programming, then look to Chewy, an online retailer for all pet essentials, for inspiration. Targeting pet owners, Chewy provides educational content on how to care for a variety of pets. An example of this is their Vet to Vet Live:
These Q&A sessions provide valuable insight from experts for pet owners. Pet parents can also input their questions in the comment section for instant expert advice. As a brand, these informational videos help Chewy establish itself not only as a place to shop, but also as a resource they can turn to for any pet-related needs.
The takeaway for your business: Using Instagram Live to conduct Q&As and interviews can provide insightful tips and advice for your audience. This educational content will be appreciated by your audience members who are eager to learn and help you increase customer loyalty. Additionally, listening to a conversation between multiple people, and watching that interaction live, can also be more enjoyable than a one-man show.
Origins is a cosmetics company creating products from naturally-derived ingredients. Origins aligns Instagram Live with their brand by showcasing products and hosting conversations about skincare.
As shown in the screenshot, the Origins representative presents one of their products up close to the camera. This is important because products online often only show the packaging of the product, so revealing what the product itself looks like lends potential customers a better understanding of how they might expect the product to look and feel.
The two hosts also share what they like about the products and how they use it in their day-to-day lives. Sharing their stories provokes viewers to consider how they can incorporate the product into their own routines, which ultimately pushes them closer to purchase.
The takeaway for your business: Live is the perfect place for product demos and to show customers what they can expect from your business. This can resolve any hesitations related to making a purchase. It also offers a place for experts and current users to answer any concerns about the product a prospect may have. Assess your current offerings and create a live session to discuss how the customer can use and benefit from your products.
No matter which industry your business is in, all successful Lives have one theme in common — they provide valuable content for viewers that’s entertaining and/or educational.
Google Stack Ranking is actually shorthand for Google entity authority stacking which in plain language is SEO using your Google Drive and sharing your documents freely on as many as possible of the Google Apps (word processor, presentation app, calendar, spreadsheet etc) as possible. These are all apps which Google provides for free (initially – with set usage limits) and with which you can conveniently store all your files in the Cloud (on your Google Drive). In fact, it’s pretty much what a bricks and mortar business user would do perfectly naturally when they use Google’s tools to the fullest. This includes creating a personal or business Gmail Account, a Google My Business (GMB), their Google Calendar for appointments etc completely naturally. Their business also has a premises (or operates from a geographic location), so they claim their Google Maps location, and all non-sensitive files about the business are included and shared on their G-Drive. Everything is linked together, verified, and openly visible to Google. Naturally, “Big-G” is able to keep a close eye on every move a Google stack business makes. It’s safe to assume that such a high level of transparency of a business, is what gives them the confidence to list genuine business sites with authority. Read on for our in-depth analysis of what we think this means:
We like it when this is referred to as “authority stacking”. So, what is Google Authority stacking? OK. At one level you might say that it’s an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) strategy, which we have seen described as “leveraging google properties (entities) in the hope of improving rankings using each property’s “high-authority-status”. The reality seems to be that in the eyes of Google if a person or business is using their software in the manner intended, sending emails, creating word-processor documents, doing calculations, and on spreadsheets, making appointments, taking and sharing notes, sharing downloads, etc., it’s highly likely that the business is trustworthy. It’s not going to be a “fly-by-night” spamming operation, or “cloak and dagger” hacking campaign etc., which pops-up overnight and will disappear just as quickly to avoid prosecution.
So, is it a good idea to do this for SEO purposes? The truth is nobody knows for sure whether this is a safe thing to do because Google isn’t exactly open about how they assess and calculate “trust” and “authority”. And, it is “authority” in the eyes of Google which counts here, not “Search Engine Optimisation”, although that’s not to say that an SOE’s aim of optimising the Google Stack Ranking of a client’s website isn’t the ultimate goal.
The term used is “stacking” because when the effect was first discovered by SEO’s as a way to leverage the power of Google entities (Google apps, webspace, web sites, cloud storage, geo-related services, blogs etc) they linked from one app to the next. They really just crudely experimented with passing Google’s “authority” from Google site to site, and they found that when done that way “Google authority” was increasing all the time as the “link- juice” moved ever upward through their silos until reaching the businesses “money website” or sales video.
What Is A Google Stack?
If a business does not use for Google apps, or a Google Drive to store their files, (and most won’t as users of Microsoft office, or the Apple office software suite etc.) it seems reasonable to also show Google the workings of that business by creating a Google Authority Stack. By seeing the natural workflow taking place as evidenced by real files produced within the business it is assumed that Google is able to attribute the trust and authority to businesses and their web presence. A degree of trust that such a company would naturally accrue by using Google products (while within these products Google is still assumed to be doing his anonymously/ within GDPR (privacy law requirements)) – for example, via AI systems looking at public-shared documents only.
That’s where so-called “stacking” started and is still, in essence, the synchronising of a range of file types with Google drive with natural inter-linking. However, it was soon realised that when shared publically Google competitor services could be used to perform the same role, including publicly shared files on the likes of Dropbox and Github.
It has long been the primary function of marketing to spread the word about a company as widely as possible. An early example, and still relevant today, is the use of Press Releases, for example, to offer journalists the information they need to write stories for their newspapers, magazines, current affairs programmes etc. SEO’s may lay claim to instigating the publication of company news and articles as blog posts to Blogger, WordPress and Zendesk but they are simply perpetuating a long-standing tradition within the modern media. So, good “authority stacking” practice can seem to be no more than an extension of the ancient art of “spreading the word as far and widely as possible”.
Understanding the Google Marketing Stack
Some marketing agencies offer stacking services, but is it safe to use this service?
Nobody can state categorically either it is safe or unsafe. It might be seen as building backlinks by Google, and as such, that would be against their Terms of Service (TOS) for website inclusion in their SERP (Search Engine Ranking Page) listings. Conversely, the Google TOS is clearly an unreasonable request and in many countries, the test of “reasonableness” is a common law right, a valid defence against non-compliance, and embedded in the legal system. In their defence, however, it is arguable that they are within their rights to apply whatever terms they wish to their TOS. There are other Search Engines and in theory, at least, businesses can “take or leave it” and go elsewhere. Unfortunately, the problem for businesses is that Google has done such a good job of their Search Engine and it has become such a dominant force, that going elsewhere is unlikely to allow them anything like the level of exposure that Google Stack Ranking in the Google SERPS would bring.
Surely, Google would not seriously complain about, or act against, any bonafide organisation which issues a Press Release, at the same time including a link back to their website? Even before the internet, hand-outs at Press Announcements would without-fail always include contact details for readers to find out more. Typically, when a business engages a marketing company to provide a stacking service. The marketing company creates one, or more, separate websites with a combination of different Google-owned entities stacked in. Their clients’ desired keywords are mentioned tactically. Essentially different Google properties are embedded on one or more free Google sites with all of them having a central hub and all are hyperlinked internally. Marketing companies offering such services often show evidence of previous clients showing those clients to have benefited with multiple Page-1 Google SERP rankings. These are usually for, various, low to medium competition keywords.
Few, if any, reputable marketers would reasonably claim that Google stacks are any more than a small but important part of an overall marketing strategy. But, when used with other acceptable SEO efforts stacking can be worthwhile. In particular, in the opinion of the author, when done sensibly it does work for local businesses especially for trades which provide services in a fairly restricted geographical area.
We hope you now have a general understanding of the background to the risk landscape relating to the creation of a Google marketing stack and how stacking might benefit your business. Also, never forget that Google’s decision will be final if they judge that your stack contravenes their TOS. Should they do so they would be quite likely to remove all your business’ SERP listings. Little or no warning would be given to allow enough time for the worst effects on the business to be ameliorated.
Google Stacking Risks
The act of creating a Google stack creates links from Google properties such as Google Sites, Google Drive and Google Docs to client websites and other online properties. That is against the Google TOS because for registration eligibility you are required to desist from making backlinks as the web property owner or causing others to create links on your behalf. For Google’s purposes, it is clear that doing so is likely to distort backlink frequency in your favour if you create multiple backlinks, especially if you incentivise backlinking to your site in any way.
Stacked links would be easy for Google to find, and therefore you should consider Google stacking as a strategy, but only if you are open to the presence of risk. It’s hard to understand how simply creating diverse documents and media using Google entities could be against any rules – but Google may not agree.
In the real world (Google’s rules apart), using Google Sites to build a free website paid for by Google, and at the same time embedding all the elements and drive folders is simply an action it makes sense to do (i.e. stacking). Does Google really think that astute small businesses, who are already at a disadvantage against the big multinationals with their enormous online budgets, can afford not to use every opportunity to raise their online presence?
In fact, it would arguably be a discriminatory action for Google to penalise users for doing exactly what they want them to do, namely to use their apps freely – and not the apps of their competitors, thus allowing Google’s influence and presence on the internet to become even more dominant?
Those that are willing to chance a Google de-listing are using stacking in their marketing plans. There is no hiding from Google’s inspection when they do this – using Google Analytics means you open the whole site to their full view. In fact, most stackers ensure that all their elements are publicly accessible via shared documents and wait for the full effect to appear in 6 to 8 weeks after posting the article (that delay period is our estimate of the average according to opinions we have seen).
Conclusion: We don’t know if stack creation actions will result in a negative response from Google. Use it at your own risk.
Google Stack Ranking and Your Contract with Google LLC
When setting up an account on any number of Google services, did you look at the small print? By signing up you are accepted that Google services are made available to you by a named Google company with which you entered into a contractual relationship for this purpose. For those in the US, it is Google LLC. For US citizens you also accept that the contract you enter will be “Organized under the law of US state Delaware and operated under the law of the United States”. Other Google entities apply according to location.
It is easy to forget that Google services are provided to businesses and individuals on the basis of a contract. Not as a benevolent act by Google. Your rights are governed by their Contracts and how they implement them, as long as their conditions are reasonable. And, even that would vary according to the nation/ state you live in. Consider their one-time motto ” Don’t be evil“, in this light.
The Google Technology Stack
In the IT industry, Google’s ever-rising list software apps are referred to as the “Google Technology Stack”. In fact, a large part of what makes Google such an amazing engine of innovation is its internal technology stack. These amount to a set of powerful proprietary technologies that makes it easy for Google developers to generate and process enormous quantities of data. But, where do you think that data comes from? It comes from the users of Google apps of course. Never forget that by participating in using Google apps you are also contributing to their dominance in data acquisition.
It cannot be denied that Google currently reigns supreme when it comes to marketing stacks and startup companies, it’s Google’s world, and almost all other technology providers are just living in it. If you cannot beat them many people would say “let’s join them”, and that is part of what makes Google stacks so attractive that it is tempting to ignore the risk of de-listing and membership and do some Google Stack Ranking digital marketing.
What Is An RYS Drive Stack?
A group called Semantic Mastery offers a service in which they build an RYS Drive Stack for their clients. In their own words taken from their website:
Testimonial:
“Bradley, co-founder of Semantic Mastery, likes to show, his initial RYS Stack from years ago is still powering his ranking results for “Virginia SEO [redacted]”!”
“An RYS Google Stack combines several different components of the Google ecosystem (like Google Drive, Google Sites, and more) that are then interconnected in various ways to provide powerful results to the property of your choosing.”
Why Do You Need Google Drive Stack Services?
At the most basic level, many would say that businesses clearly need to use the best services available online to run healthy businesses efficiently. There are many competitors which also offer cloud data storage. So, how does Google Drive stack up against the cloud competition? Web reports appear to agree that Google’s cloud-based document and storage solution is priced aggressively. It is no surprise that it is a natural winner, boasting as it does to have “the-best-in-class” integration with other Google services — including Google docs.
To answer this question from another level, this time the perspective of IT professionals, we refer to stack services provider “Stackdriver”. They say that “Stackdriver logging allows you to store, search, analyze, monitor, and alert on log data and events from Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services. This appears to be a little different from the previous Google Stack Ranking example given.
Google Stackdriver is natively integrated with Google cloud platform and hosted on Google infrastructure, but the monitoring capabilities can also be used for applications and virtual machines (VMS) that run on amazon web services elastic compute cloud (AWS eC2).
How Reliable are Google’s Apps Services?
The low-risk way to take advantage in a completely “white-hat” manner of the trust and authority benefits which are available to users of Google’s services for businesses is to quite simply adopt a business strategy of the fullest use of Google’s online services right across the business. encourage all staff to place all non-sensitive business documents on the company G-Drive as public-shared documents as they are produced. Use Google web space for your website and through doing that naturally link between all these properties. However, before doing that, the question arises of just how reliable are Google’s services.
We would assume that their uptime is second to none, and that seems to be borne out by the lack of negative comments we found online. We did see a comment that at its peak, Downdetector received over 2,800 reports from users having trouble with the Google suite of services.
“For about two hours back in March (year not available), Google and its main services, such as Gmail, Google Docs, and YouTube were down for US East Coast users.”
If that’s the worst that has occurred I think it is safe to say here that Google’s Apps Services are reliable!
Do I Get A New Google Account to Use in My Google Stack Ranking?
We noticed this question being asked not of a Google Stack Ranking service provider, but of an emulator with which to play android games on PSs. But, given the nature of authority stack ranking, we don’t see why a new Google Account would be needed.
This query is being made by online game players and the context is different from authority stacking as discussed in this article. It appears to be about introducing an added App Centre to a Google Account which personalizes game suggestions, an accounting system, chat, new keymapping interface, and “multi-instance”. We gather that “multi-instance” allows users to launch multiple stacks windows using either the same or different Google Play account.
The advice given seems to be, like ours, that it is preferable to host the stacks in the same Google Account as the entity’s GMB.
Disclosure: This content is reader-supported, which means if you click on some of our links that we may earn a commission.
There are many touchpoints along the customer journey. The transaction is of course one of the most important, if not the most important.
So, the way in which you accept payments matters for both you and the customer. You need to have the right software and/or hardware in place to make sure transactions are simple and secure for both parties.
Not only that, as a business owner you need to know that you’re not shelling out cash on inferior services or unnecessary additional fees.
Therefore, this post will cover everything you need to know about choosing the right credit card processing company. Plus, I’ll introduce my top picks for a wide range of businesses of different sizes and with different needs.
How to Choose the Best Credit Card Processing Company for You
Here are some key elements to consider when choosing the right credit card processing company for you:
1. Fees
Look at the payment terms and fees carefully. Different companies offer different pricing models and things can start to get a little complex.
Firstly, there are interchange fees, which is the percentage taken by the company on every transaction made. Full-service credit card processing companies also take a monthly fee. There may also be additional costs, such as setup or monthly minimum fees.
2. Accepted Payment Methods
Nowadays, you need a payment processing company that accepts more than just debit and credit cards. Digital wallets like PayPal, Google Pay or Apple Pay have become extremely popular.
3. Customer Experience
When shopping, customers want the entire experience to be quick and easy. This is particularly important in e-commerce where the checkout process needs to be streamlined.
It’s also vital that the payment gateway is secure because obviously we’re dealing with sensitive data here. So, look for elements such as PCI compliance and encryption.
4. User Experience
Of course, you or your staff are going to be the ones actually using these systems. Thus, the software, apps and/or hardware need to be user-friendly.
Furthermore, with tech, there’s likely to be a glitch or an issue at some point. This means that you need a credit card processing company that offers superior customer support. The reason being, the longer your payment processor is down, the more sales you lose.
Now you know what you need to consider when researching credit card processing companies, let’s take a look at how they work.
The Different Types of Credit Card Processing Company
There are two main types of credit card processing company. Here’s the 411:
Credit Card Processor
A credit card processor is the go-between that takes care of transactions. The processor takes the funds from the customer’s account and deposits them in your merchant account. It also ensures that the transaction information is correct, the customer has sufficient funds and notifies the payment gateway that the transaction was successful.
Full-service providers do the same as credit card processors but also provide a merchant account, meaning you don’t need an additional merchant account with a bank. These providers tend to offer lower interchange fees but also charge a monthly fee and additional fees, such as the above-mentioned setup fees and so on.
Depending on the size of your operation and the volume of payments you receive, you’ll have to calculate which type of credit card processing company is going to keep costs low overall. Look for companies that are transparent and straightforward about the way in which they operate and take fees.
#1 – Square — The Best for Ease of Use
Square is a hugely popular, low-fee credit card processing company for online and brick-and-mortar stores.
Its POS app is rich in features and easy-to-use. Square is also known for providing an exceptional, frictionless range of POS systems:
Bonus: you can get the software and Square Reader for free.
The beauty of Square truly lies in its simplicity. The company offers a transparent, straightforward pricing model: 2.6% + 10¢ for every tap (mobile payment), dip (chip card) or swipe (magstripe card) on the POS and 2.9% + 30¢ for e-commerce transactions.
Other benefits include active fraud prevention, end-to-end encryption, a quick sign-up process and live phone support.
Essentially, Square is an easy-to-use all-rounder that would be an excellent choice for a wide range of businesses.
#2 – PayPal Commerce Platform Review — The Best for Individuals & Low-Volume Sellers
You’re no doubt familiar with PayPal (unless you’ve been living under a rock), but you may not be as familiar with its commerce platform.
With the PayPal Commerce Platform you can take payments online, in-store, on-the-go with an iZettle card reader, by QR code, over the phone and via social shopping links:
If you’re a solopreneur or small business just starting out then the platform is a fantastic choice for you. PayPal offers a flat-rate system where you only pay for the processing services you use.
The other great thing about PayPal is that it’s a highly recognizable and trusted brand. Therefore, advertising the fact that you accept PayPal payments could lead to more conversions.
Overall, the PayPal Commerce Platform is a secure, user-friendly and low-cost solution for beginners, individuals and low-volume sellers.
#3 – FIS — The Best for Small Businesses
FIS (formerly Worldpay) is a global banking software provider that offers payment processing solutions for large enterprises, small businesses and e-commerce stores.
However, this company puts most of its focus on small businesses, serving a range of industries including grocery, retail, restaurants, personal and professional services:
And this is where FIS really shines as they work directly with small businesses to give them competitive terms and rates. You must contact FIS for a quote.
FIS also stands out as a great provider because of their superior 24/7/365 customer support. Furthermore, their software integrates with 1000+ POS systems which is great if you don’t wish to purchase one of their smart terminals.
FIS is the choice for you if you own a small business and want a customizable solution.
#4 – Stripe — The Best for Internet Businesses
Stripe was designed with a range of online businesses in mind, including e-commerce, mobile commerce, subscription services, marketplaces and other platforms. So, if you’re primarily a web-based business then Stripe is the choice for you.
What also makes it the best choice for online businesses is that the company provides tons of pre-built integrations and ready-made checkout forms for major e-commerce platforms, subscription services and the like:
There’s a simple pay-as-you-go pricing model of 2.9% + 30¢ with no additional monthly or setup fees.
Stripe is also one of the most technologically-advanced solutions out there with its dedication to improving the platform and machine learning models for intelligent optimizations.
If you’re looking for a competitively-priced credit card processor that will integrate easily with your online business, choose Stripe.
#5 – Payline Data — The Best for High-Risk Merchants
Payline Data offers in-person, online and mobile payment solutions for companies of varying sizes.
It’s the best option for high-risk merchants that struggle to get approved for accounts elsewhere. Thanks to its partnerships with major banks and premiere support team, Payline Data is able to simplify high-risk account management.
Payline Data’s pricing model is a little more complex than other options with setup, monthly and other additional fees involved. Take a look:
However, you can work out exactly what your monthly costs will be using their payment calculator tool.
Another advantage of using Payline Data is its integrations with major POS, shopping cart and accounting software providers, along with developer APIs for a customizable solution.
As long as you consider the costs carefully, this could be the simplest and cheapest option for those looking for a high-risk merchant account.
#6 – Fiserv — The Best for High-Volume Retailers
This company provides a convenient, secure and reliable payment processing service as well as end-to-end accounting services, if you require them.
What makes Fiserv the best choice for high-volume retailers is the fact that you can negotiate favorable interchange-plus pricing and terms. Or you can opt for flat-rate pricing via its Clover platform.
Having recently merged with international payment processing leader First Data, Fiserv is also a great option for those who operate globally.
Seven out of the ten largest digital merchants trust Fiserv. Plus, retailers can accept a range of payment methods that are popular around the world, such as Alipay.
Fiserv is the right choice for more experienced, high-volume and global retailers.
#7 – BitPay — The Best for Accepting Crypto
Though technically not a credit card processing company, BitPay is a forward-thinking payment processing company for those who want to add crypto into the mix.
Owned by Shark Tank powerhouse, Mark Cuban, BitPay allows you to accept a range of cryptocurrencies online, via email and in-store.
The way it works is simple – the customer gets an invoice, they pay in crypto at a locked-in exchange rate, BitPay converts the payment into your local currency and you receive the payment in your account the next day:
Due to the nature of crypto, you can accept payments from around the globe without having to worry about fraudulent purchases. What’s more, BitPay promises a flat rate fee of 1% and no hidden fees.
So, if you’d like to expand your reach and gain access to the crypto market, BitPay is for you.
#8 – Adyen — The Best for Growing Enterprises
Adyen isn’t for newbies. It counts the likes of Uber, Virgin Hotels, Hunter and Spotify among its customers. So, it’s perfect for growing enterprises that are ready to take their business to the next level.
You can benefit from transaction optimization to help you get the most revenue from your sales, as well as in-depth reporting on the platform to better understand your customers and aid growth:
Fees vary depending on the payment method used. Yet, Adyen provides a transparent list of all fees for each payment method on their site.
Other benefits include data-driven security, fraud prevention and access to a dedicated team of payment specialists who will provide you with expert advice.
Overall, if you’re focused on growth, Adyen is the perfect partner.
#9 – Dharma Merchant Services — The Best for Quick Service Payments
Dharma is a low-fee credit card processor that specializes in retail and quick service transactions. In other words, if you own a restaurant, bar, fast food joint or other quick service business then this is a great choice for you.
The company offers a low fee of 0.15% and $0.07 per transaction above interchange for storefronts and restaurants:
Plus, the virtual terminal and app are free. The e-commerce rate is slightly higher at 0.20% + $0.10.
With Dharma, you also benefit from exceptional customer service. If you’re new to credit card processing you can get a free consultation and ask all of the questions you need to. Plus, they offer 24/7 tech support.
Choose Dharma if you own a quick service business and need support along the way.
#10 – Fattmerchant — The Best for Professional Services
Fattmerchant provides a range of smart payment processing solutions, but really nails it when it comes to professional service providers.
The reason being, the platform offers the ability to send invoices and retrieve recurring payments quickly and easily. There’s also the option to create payment links and even buttons to take payments for subscription services.
The platform has features which will speed up your business processes through automation, e.g. automated payment reminders:
Fattmerchant offers a different pricing model to many other credit card processing companies. There’s a flat rate subscription fee starting at $99 but 0% markup on interchange and no pesky additional fees.
Essentially, Fattmerchant’s software is a fantastic choice for a range of businesses, but especially for those in professional services or that take recurring payments.
Summing Up
Naturally, there are several criteria to consider when choosing a credit card processing company. Often it will depend on the type of business you run and the volume of payments you take.
Furthermore, some options are better suited to smaller businesses or beginners while others provide more advanced solutions for experienced, higher-volume companies.
Above all, you want a company that offers transparency, security, strong customer support, great software and hardware and the right pricing model to suit your needs.
Now it’s over to you to explore these top providers further and make the right choice.
The advantages of shared hosting always come back to the fact that it’s the cheapest, easiest and most popular way to get a website online in which the website owner remains free to move his website around without being forever bound to stay with any particular internet service provider. In this post, we’ll explore the advantages of shared hosting. We’ll also look at the types of sites that will benefit most from this type of web hosting. If you are planning to host a website or blog for your business, you can decide it after going through this article.
As the name implies, shared web hosting allows multiple users with individual Internet domains to share and utilize one web server. Multiple websites can also be set up under one user account.
Before you make a decision to use or discard using a shared hosting option, it is important to understand both the advantages and disadvantages of the service.
Perhaps the biggest advantage of shared web hosting is that it is usually offered at extremely affordable rates. Account-holders can benefit from choosing these services over some other, more expensive ones while also having many opportunities for acquiring more space almost free of charge, if and when their websites and the traffic it attracts grows. This is due to the strong competition caused by the very large number of web competing shared hosting firms in the market.
There is no predetermined maximum number of websites that a single server may host, so the number could be in the tens, or the hundreds or even in the thousands. This sharing of the resources of a single server is the very reason why shared hosting plans are offered at affordable low and cheap prices.
Aside from the resources mentioned above, you are also made to share with the computer processor, the memory and the maintenance costs of the server.
Shared hosting plans comes much cheaper compared to dedicated hosting and VPS which means that even websites for personal blogging and small businesses can afford it. The low cost and easy availability of shared hosting make it possible for just about anyone to open an account, sign a contract and begin setting up a site.
Shared hosting works best for new sites and small sites that don’t see much traffic. That allows them to remain within the limits established by many users drawing from a shared server’s finite resources and allows sites room to grow – to an extent. In web hosting, there are many different types of web-hosting environments, web-hosting types with examples. Here we go with the concept of shared hosting in detail and its advantages. You will get a clear idea about the concept of shared hosting after reading this article.
Web Hosting Types – Their Advantages And Disadvantages
For someone on shared hosting wondering whether to upgrade, we ask: “does it make sense to upgrade to Virtual Private Server (VPS) cloud hosting”? The answer to this question is not a simple and straightforward yes or no. There are many factors that need to be taken into account.
Both shared hosting and VPS cloud hosting hold the data for your website on shared server resources. When web users access your website from their browser, the server sends your data to them. The “cloud” is a computing concept there are no computers in the clouds! The idea of a cloud is the computer servers space is available on more than one server globally and the files which are served can, and will, be moved around to be where they are needed around the world according to the demand for your website. The difference between the two hosting types is the type of server on which your website is stored. With shared hosting, your website lives alongside others, which are neighbouring users utilizing the same server.
With dedicated hosting plans, your website has a server all to itself, and on a virtual server, although the server storage space is shared, your website looks to the web as if it was a dedicated server. Virtual means in this case that your website is sent out using clever software that ensures that your server space runs very much as if it was not shared. There are distinct advantages and disadvantages to all types of hosting. The one certain difference between shared hosting and dedicated hosting or VPS is the cost of the account. Shared hosting is always cheapest, and if you find an offer which doesn’t comply with this rule do look very carefully because there are almost certainly hidden costs you will discover later, and the second billing period (and beyond) is undoubtedly going to hit your wallet very hard!
The Shared vs VPS Hosting Comparison
In addition to the above benefits, many VPS plans offer you a choice of services. In comparison, most shared hosting provides little other than a place to store and run your site. One of the most important decisions to make is whether to opt for a managed or unmanaged VPS plan. An unmanaged VPS offers complete freedom, but also makes you responsible for configuring and maintaining your virtual server. If that sounds like a lot of work, then you can opt for a managed plan where your web host takes care of everything for you. That way, you can focus on your website and business but the cost will be higher.
Shared hosting wins hands down under the cheapness category. However, VPS web hosting prices can justify its greater advantage for larger and higher traffic websites. While VPS hosting costs slightly more than the shared hosting plans, they offer more storage space and much more bandwidth when compared to what shared hosting has to offer.
Those are some of the general benefits of each hosting type: advantages of shared hosting vs. VPS. vs dedicated servers. However, this doesn’t tell the whole story. Let’s get a bit deeper with some one-on-one comparisons.
The Bad Thing About Cheap Hosting
There are a number of issues with standard shared hosting, most of which stem from its business model. Although the accounts are cheap, they’re cheap because hundreds (sometimes thousands) of users are put on the same server. This leads to the so-called ‘bad neighbour effect’. The server, which houses hundreds of accounts, has a fixed amount of memory. If one website exploits more than its fair share of the available memory, all of the other sites housed on the same server will experience issues because of this one ‘bad neighbour’. This essentially means that one troubled website has the potential to cause thousands of unrelated sites to load slowly, or even in the worst-case scenario, not at all.
How To Choose The Right Web Hosting Service
The exponential growth of the web hosting industry can be attributed to the fact that the internet has reached every nook and cranny of the world. This wide reach of the internet provides an excellent opportunity for marketing and promotion for various business houses out there. For marketing, promotion or even to provide information about your business on the internet, you need a website. Your web hosting forms the foundation for your website. Your website is built on it, and functions from it. A web hosting service has the potential to make or break any online business if it is good or bad. That’s why it’s very crucial to choose your web hosting service wisely and don’t be afraid to spend some time to compare the services and prices of various companies in the market. The reason we say that is that once chosen its a bit of a chore to change the web hosting service for your website.
If you are looking for a middle approach for the best shared-hosting experience, our own EZi-hostingaccount should be your prime choice, and you can find out more about just how competitive we are on pricing by looking at our banner below:
While there are several entry-level options in the form of 1&1 and high-end options like Amazon, EZi Hosting would be your excellent option to choose between the two options. You get assistance installing cloud hosting by Cloudflare with built-in SSL Security, which is free fully-fledged cloud hosting. Alternatively, you could make a choice between the popular cloud services such as Amazon, Vultr, Google, Linode or Digital ocean, but it would be a lot more difficult. You can configure them using their web portals. On the other hand, the EZi-hosting service provides all of the excellent Cpanel services and features including cloning, backup and restores, and email. High-end performance at a lower cost and more straightforward usability should make EZi Hosting an easy choice!
Look at it this way when considering shared vs dedicated hosting. The main advantage of having your own server is that you can control everything you do. You are solely responsible for maintaining the server. With dedicated web hosting, you can avoid any problems due to the actions, or inactions of other people also on your server. Choosing the right host for your website is one of the most important things to think about. Many of these companies offer different packages depending on the services you want to use. You can choose between, uninterrupted service, managed service, and a dedicated server. Each option offers advantages in terms of the site administration at a cost. You should choose the web host with the most features and benefits you actually need in the foreseeable future for your business. You can get the most benefits by comparing the characteristics of different providers. This will save you a lot of time and is the best guarantee that you’ll get the service you want.
Essential Features of Web Hosting
As we’ve noted, shared hosting plans are typically very inexpensive, typically costing only a few dollars per month on a provider’s introductory promotional rates. Those rates typically go up to the site’s standard package rate after that promotional period ends, but even at those standard rates, shared hosting remains the least expensive option for basic website hosting. And while shared hosting generally offers relatively few extra features, it does include the essentials for setting up and maintaining a small website.
Choosing Web Hosting to Maximize Your Online Profitability
Would you be wealthy if you had all the information necessary to maximize your online profitability? You probably don’t know the answer, but ensuring that your web hosting plan is the most affordable you can get for the products you use is a great first step to getting control of your budget. This provides you with the information you need to find a good hosting service for a great price. All good web hosts offer a variety of add-ons to their plans, but the types of features will differ between companies. When you are analyzing the different providers, compare the different levels of service so you know you are getting the right features you require. For example, one host’s low price advantage may disappear when you find that a feature you want is only included on a higher-priced package.
In choosing a website hosting service, most website owners usually consider several website hosting features such as affordability, scalability, reliability, security and level of restrictions website-hosting service providers offer to their users. Web owners should also consider their website inherent features and needs. Shared website hosting services are perceived to be most suitable for establishments whose websites generate low to medium range of traffic and who are comfortable with the level of control exercised by the hosting provider. On the other hand, institutions whose websites generate heavy traffics and support custom applications mostly welcome VPS hosting.
The standard Cpanel back-office used for Linux web hosting is an integral part of most hosting plans and widely popular among web developers. There are many options for web hosting services in all nations, but to choose shared web hosting or dedicated web hosting is a challenging question. Here are the benefits of shared web hosting compared to dedicated hosting. Shared web hosting has multiple benefits. Here go some notorious benefits of shared web hosting. One of the most prominent reasons for citing the advantages of shared hosting is that it is pretty cheap. Price flags higher if you go for dedicated server services, but for shared web hosting, you don’t have to pay much. You may buy these web hosting services by simply paying 5-10$. The best part of shared web hosting services is that the customers do normally get enough space on even the cheapest entry plans to place their website, due to the high competition in the market. Normally 10 Gb to 40 Gb space is provided along with the shared hosting within the hosting plan purchased.
Managing Your Website Hosting Files With Cpanel File Manager
With a little practice and a lot of watching YouTube how-to videos, most people starting-out can manage their sites without any technical skills. In reality, the majority of popular shared web hosting services provides a good control panel like Cpanel which lets you upload and download files with easy clicks. In addition, the Cpanel file manager tools come with options to copy, delete, rename, move, and even change the permissions of files and folders of your blog or website. Unlike VPS or dedicated servers, when you have a shared web hosting account, you can easily add FTP users, change passwords, and compress folders or unzip them on upload. That’s not possible on the VPS or dedicated hosting without expensive tools and complicated configurations.
A Definition of Shared Hosting – Making It Work The Way You Want
Shared hosting’s definition describes it as a web hosting model whereby a variety of websites make use of a common pool of server resources. This process entails distributing storage capacity, ram, and the device’s CPU (which acts as the basis of this model) throughout all the involved users. Websites running on shared servers can be accessed with their own individual domains and are stored on a separate partition of the hard drive space. This allows users to work on their own individual projects despite the fact that hardware is being shared. Inexpensive hosting options are particularly popular when starting out. We’ve laid out the advantages of shared hosting as a web hosting model and highlighted some of the differences to look out for when opting for free hosting options, using dedicated servers, and operating private servers.
Despite the number of advantages that shared hosting plans bring to their clients, it also has its share of disadvantages. These are the common disadvantages of shared hosting plans: security concerns, the number of websites sharing the same server could bring serious security concerns, despite the number of deterrent factors that service providers have put in place. It is inescapable that, any website on shared hosting that is affected with any malicious activity could put the entire network of websites using the server at risk. Another concern about shared hosting is often also sluggish website performance – except when using the Cloudflare free service on EZi domains hosting.
Advantages of a dedicated server and other hosting services
Before discussing the VPS in the UK’s main hosting packages, let’s have a look at some of the advantages of shared hosting. Most of the web hosting providers offer different characteristics in shared hosting. The top-most reason that customers get attracted to shared hosting is its flexibility of sharing server resources. Shared hosting is an open-source hosting platform that provides many free-cost services, you get to use it at a low price. Whereas the VPS holds the advantages of shared hosting and dedicated hosting. In short, VPS lies between the shared and dedicated server hosting.
Benefits of VPS Hosting for Your Website
With the internet becoming more resilient, routers being more advanced as well as server technology growing at a record pace, shared hosting performance is increasing. Sure, it will never be as fast as a VPS or dedicated hosting, but for most people that’s ok. Most people’s blogs and small business run very smoothly on shared hosting servers. As you can see, there are many benefits to going with shared hosting. It’s affordable and it works for the majority of website owners. Make sure to check out our reviews of the best shared hosting companies and pick the right web host for you.
Shared hosting plans bring along with them a lot of benefits. Among these benefits are the following: shared hosting plans comes much cheaper compared to dedicated hosting and VPS which means that even websites for personal blogging and small businesses can afford it. Shared hosting plan prices are usually offered with prices ranging from $3 to $10 per month. The administration and maintenance of the server are taken care of by the hosting provider which means that you don’t need to concern yourself with technical issues of the server.
First off, shared hosting is not a bad thing. As a matter of fact, it is the most popular and common type of hosting around. That there are many advantages of shared hosting being said, it does lack a lot of VPS benefits. Shared hosting is very popular for small business websites and personal blogs that are low in traffic. A shared platform means your website shares resources with a bunch of other websites at the same time. This is why most of the newer shared hosting plans offer a lot of “unlimited” resources.
Circumstances When You Must Buy the Best Cloud VPS Hosting for Your Business
A dedicated server is a physical server that you buy or rent solely for your own business. Dedicated servers are mostly favoured by large businesses that require high-level data security or have a high demand for server capacity. Just like with cloud hosting or VPS hosting, you will still need technical knowledge to maintain and update the dedicated server. Dedicated servers do cost more than other hosting options, but there are plenty of reasons businesses choose them. For instance, a dedicated server is your own personal server that is not shared by anyone.
What is Shared Hosting?
Web hosting is an incredibly useful service, as it allows a company to ‘host’ your website on the internet, generating traffic and interest in your content. However, it can be difficult to determine which exact service that you require. For instance, when should you use shared hosting, and when should you use a managed VPS host? We walk you through an explanation of the two different services and some ideas of when one should be used rather than the other.
Hostgator is one of the largest web hosting companies in the world. They offer shared hosting, reseller web hosting and dedicated server. You have the option to host personal sites large and small, blogs, forums and online retailers of all sizes. For just $ 14. 99 you are entitled to unlimited disk space, host unlimited domains, unlimited bandwidth, MySQL databases, CGI, PHP, Perl, SSL, a website builder software, Cpanel, etc. But in reality, they place limits on the total resources your websites can use which varies with each hosting plan. They do that by limiting the number of iNodes each account holder can use in each month and if you exceed the number allowed they shut down your website for the rest of the month.
As web hosting evolves as a service in a bid to cater to the needs of various customers, hosting providers are often asked about the peculiarities of every hosting service, cloud and shared hosting in particular. This query, asked by bloggers, web professionals and businesses alike, has often been a subject of discussion so as to come down to a better decision while choosing a hosting package. However, both shared as well as cloud hosting have their own characteristics which allow its users to make the most out of them.
What Is Dedicated Hosting or a Virtual Private Server?
The web hosting industry has undergone a rapid shift in the last 10 years and its outcome have been the diversified hosting options available to the users today. Whether it’s a small business, eCommerce project, an online business or a growing enterprise, the website is essential today. VPS (Virtual Private Server) is one of the website hosting options, offered by many web hosting providers.
What is a virtual private server? A virtual private server is basically a dedicated server but its resources and instances are segregated to host multiple websites. Virtualization technology isolates all the websites on the server and keeps them separate from each other. In simple words, one dedicated server is divided into several small virtual servers to meet the needs of multiple users.
When you are looking out for a hosting service and finding it difficult to decide whether you should get dedicated hosting, shared hosting, or VPS hosting just look carefully at the bullet point lists which tell you what you will get in each web hosting package. All the hosting services have their own unique sets of advantages and disadvantages. These are the most common hosting services that are popular these days but you need to understand when you should prefer dedicated hosting over shared and VPS hosting services.
If you’re determined to spend as little as possible – just choose shared hosting and hope for the best. But if you have a large site and lots of visitors you will want stability and security above all else. when that happens, it’s time to take a serious look at moving your websites to dedicated servers.
Dedicated servers come with additional options, including software packages that are required to run the server. Some examples may include Windows Licensing, Cpanel, and other paid software options you need. Sometimes you can find free alternatives to paid software packages. But, they aren’t recommended because stability software issues can arise. One exception you can find is the use of Linux instead of Microsoft as well as other paid os’ run on dedicated servers.
Shared vs. Dedicated server price differences are a subject we touched upon. Let us conclude now by saying that when it comes to price, shared hosting costs less. This is due to the server’s resources being shared among many users.
In a moment we’ll get started on how to use Tumblr to generate income online, but before we start I’d like to give you a short pep talk! You are clearly intelligent enough to understand that it is very possible to generate income from Tumblr through microblogging and have arrived here. But, if just starting out in the competitive world of blogging, you may find yourself questioning whether it’s worth starting your own Tumblr blog. After all, there are over 153 million blogs overall across the web and that number grows by the day. 10 years ago blogging was the main method of expressing yourself and having your own little creative corner of the web, but that’s changed. Nowadays, sites such as Instagram, Facebook and Tumblr seem to be the ‘it’ places to express yourself. So, why spend time on Tumblr where the sheer numbers of competitors on that website alone might put you off of blogging.
The reason is the Tumblr community which is generally a lot more open to art and art forms, and less stuck on the funny cats and baby videos than most other places. Tumblr is a creative social platform where people share many types of content, including short articles, images, music and videos. The watchword is to be yourself and just “create”, and you will eventually get noticed. Posts are short that’s why it’s rather similar to Twitter. So, this combination of blogging tool and social community is developed for those who prefer brevity while writing. But, don’t just create, follow others, add notes, and comment, and use hashtags to your advantage.
If you’re not already on Tumblr you’ll need to create an account and start a blog. Think about whether you want your Tumblr to represent you as a person or whether you want Tumblr to be for your business. Of course, you can have more than one account, but it’s a good idea to focus your money-making energies on one or the other.
To create a new Tumblr blog, simply go to tumblr.com and make an account. If you already have a personal blog you can easily create a new Tumblr blog for say, your jewellery business or your consultancy. For each new Tumblr blog, pick a title and URL and then choose the privacy settings and make them public. You can change the URL at any time.
Success on Tumblr is a matter of having many followers for your blog and many “notes” on your posts. Posts get notes when someone likes or reblogs them. Having highly shareable images, quotes and GIFs can improve your chance of attracting followers on Tumblr. That means you will have plenty of opportunities to be genuinely creative in what you blog about and post. If you are artistic and can create your own stunning images, you will do well on the microblogging site.
Using keywords, tags and hashtags will help users find your Tumblr and help Tumblr recommend your blog to the right users. That’s because the first 20tags you add to any blog post (but not to re-blogs of others’ posts) will all be searchable on Tumblr. So, if a user decided to explore a tag you used (e.g. NYC) via a Tumblr tag page, he or she would be able to see your post. That’s why tags are so useful for gaining new followers. You can use hashtags or regular tags, and your tags can have spaces or periods in them.
You’ve now set up your Tumblr blog and decided on a look and tone. Now it’s time to keep up a consistent stream of posts. Experts suggest at least a few times a week. To start, you may want to follow some brands and people you admire and see how they use Tumblr. You could try emulating their posting schedule, but of course, you don’t want to copy their look and voice. You need to establish your own. Plus, to stay on users’ dashboards and on their minds you’ll need to post frequently. If you don’t, you won’t build the kind of engaged following that you need to make money on Tumblr. There are various services that let you queue up posts in advance.
Tumblr Tips for Beginners
1. Infographics usually perform well on Tumblr. Use them to promote a course or e-book you are selling by posting the infographic along with a link to your course or e-book to learn more.
2. Use any Tumblr affiliate program or post photos and videos as a guide to various sites and landscapes or create tutorials. You can publish quotes to promote some places of interest, ways of travelling, or offer win-win solutions for travellers.
3. You can add AdSense to a blog that’s hosted by Tumblr so long as it meets their guidelines, but one thing you can’t do is apply for Google Adsense using a blog with a Tumblr URL (like ). To obtain an Adsense Account you need to show them a TOS compliant website you own. You can do that by buying a domain and adding it to your Tumblr account as a custom URL. For those with an existing Adsense account, just add your Tumblr URL to your already approved account and add the Adsense ads script to each page.
4. Reblogging is an important Tumblr feature to keep in mind when trying to make money on their network. Reblogging is essentially the option other Tumblr users have to repost posts from your Tumblr blog to theirs. Another important feature to keep in mind is tagging: tag your posts with a few good keywords so that your posts show up when someone is searching on a tag. Now, without further ado, here are ways to make money on Tumblr.
5. If you want to raise an existing Tumblr income, use any Tumblr affiliate program, or post photos and videos as a guide to various sites and landscapes or tutorials. You can publish quotes to promote some places of interests, ways of travelling or tips to offer win-win solutions for travellers. Formats and content of posts depend on your niche in “travel”. For instance, the “insatiable traveller” blog shares tips on how to improve your photography skills and a helpful list of dos and don’ts for every country.
Tumblr: Further Reading
From social networking services to instant messaging apps, to video sharing websites, there are numerous means by which information can be shared online with others. However, when it comes to communicating thoughts and ideas effectively over the web, there’s hardly a medium that works better, than blogging. Probably this is the reason that these days, anyone and everyone, from individuals to big corporations, has a blog.
Out of the many blogging platforms available out there, the Verizon owned Tumblr is probably the most unique. Built around a “short-form” blogging approach, it lets users post text, pictures, as well as multimedia from an easy to use dashboard.
From the 1980s, porn has always been available for instant viewing via the internet, and Tumblr allowed it. It seems that with every new technological advance, the availability of sex and porn websites has followed. Recently x-rated content has been shutdown on Tumblr. With the rise of SOPA, many other sites have also removed their Adult content. Many parents are also using internet filter programs as a way to protect their computers and families from unwanted content.
Tumblr ads are a way to raise your profile on the platform. They are created as sponsored posts, sponsored video posts, or sponsored days. They are selectively shown to relevant audiences based on factors such as surrounding content users are viewing, the information provided, apps used, search history, and friends’ recommendations. Ads on Tumblr serve across desktop, mobile, and tablet. For the successful microbloggers reading this, Tumblr ads might be right for you.
Concluding: Using Tumblr to Generate Income Online
In the competitive world of blogging, you may find yourself questioning whether it’s worth starting your own blog. After all, there are over 153 million blogs and that number grows daily.
Yes, it is because Tumblr is a great platform, with a relatively attentive community to appreciate your efforts when finding your voice as a blogger.
Once you have a following you will know how to build more and larger followings and by showing even a small amount of business acuity, money-making opportunities will develop from there.
Tumblr Themes to Improve SEO and Send Traffic to a Main Website (or Sites)
A Tumblr theme will help you to improve the experience of your Tumblr blog by being more unique or visually interesting than competing blogs. There are a ton of free Tumblr themes bring in a lot of features, design styles, responsive interface, and much more. You can also go about and edit the themes by adjusting the raw HTML codes that go into building them.
However, once you have built yourself a nice following and want to branch out with a self-hosted blog on your own webspace you will benefit from an SEO theme like TumblriX, which will allow something called direct “follow” links (backlinks) on special static pages which it creates in a sidebar for you. These are most simply described as the opposite to “no-follow” links where a no-follow link is a link which the page creator/ owner is telling Google not to use the link to index the linked page either favourably or unfavourably.
Our Theme is a simple low “one time” cost Tumblr theme which comes with a clean look. We made it really, really simple for people to make a blog and put whatever they want on it. But, the real power is the static pages which it builds automatically. Add suitable text and anchor text links to those and you will find that those are powerful “follow” inks which convey a lot of Google “love” to any page or post you link them to. Once you have a popular Tumblr this theme is the one which will help you rank your related money making website. When the theme is used correctly, like that, it’s a wonderful traffic booster. It does this by raising the page-rank of your linked website. Once the content on your money-making website is seen by many people in the search engines you will have the opportunity to sell whatever you like, to them.
