But how do you ensure you stay at the forefront of their minds? By creating high-value content and posting regularly of course!

Increase brand awareness and visibility

The core of brand building on social media largely involves identifying key topics around your product or services and posting regular updates through text, images and videos. It takes time to get it right, but eventually you will find what kind of content resonates with your audience. Once you figure it out, make sure to stay active on all your social media accounts and post at times when your audience is most active, as it can improve your brand’s visibility.

Build brand loyalty and credibility

Does your brand’s personality shine through your social media posts? Quality content in the form of well-branded social media posts is a driving factor in attracting new customers and building brand loyalty. With regular posting, you provide your followers with information that is valuable to them and in turn, increases the likelihood of them seeking further information by visiting your company’s website and purchasing from you.

De-corporatize your brand
Social media platforms are a place to connect with each other in a friendly manner. No matter whether you are a large corporation or a startup, it’s important to have a conversational, friendly, caural and non-corporate approach. The truth is that consumers don’t connect with brands in the same way they connect with people, so humanising your brand to come through naturally is the key to success. The stories you tell and the entertaining content you share (memes, videos, humourous content, behind-the scenes images, and more) make your audience see the human side of your business, helping them connect far better with your brand.

If you want your business to stay top-of-mind to your audience, you need to post regularly. It’s as simple as that. Regular posting makes your brand more memorable – after all, when a buyer needs a service or product similar to what you are offering, you want them to think of your brand first!

The post How regular posting can help your brand even if organic is dead appeared first on Yoshiro Digital.

Before diving into how you can leverage this channel, you need to understand what influencer marketing is all about.

What does Influencer Marketing mean?

The practice of working with influencers to promote your brand is called influencer marketing. Influencers are trusted individuals with high visibility and a large, dedicated following on social media, who can influence their audience to take a desired action.

How to find influencers for your business?

As a brand, finding the right influencers is key to the success of your campaign on social media. The truth is that there is no secret formula that works for everyone, so take time to research and begin building a list of relevant influencers. To help you narrow down your search, make sure the influencers have an audience that aligns with your target audience and have the power to motivate consumers because of their perceived authority and elevated social status.

How to set up a budget?

Knowing the different types of influencers will help you plan your budget and strategy. Here are the different influencer types your brand can partner up with:

• Celebrities (>1 million followers)
• Mega influencers (500k-1m followers)
• Macro influencers (100k – 500k followers)
• Micro influencers (10k – 100k followers)
• Nano influencers (1000 – 10k followers)

As a rule of thumb, the amount you are willing to spend on your influencer marketing campaign will determine the type of influencer you can work with, the type of content (text post, lifestyle photo, video) and the size of the campaign (single or multiple posts). The goal isn’t to work with every influencer out there or the one that has the most followers, but the ones that can make an impact.

How to build an influencer marketing strategy?

A really simple way to make sure you are always working towards the right objective is to:

1. Define your goals (generate leads, gain more followers and engagement, promote company launch, increase click-throughs, etc)
2. Choose a campaign type (product placement, giveaway, social media takeover, discount code, event, long-term partnership, etc)
3. Have clear guidelines for the audience you want to reach and the desired action
4. Identify the best influencers and set expectations
5. Track the performance of your partnership (traffic, engagement, conversions or other metrics)

Do you want to take your influencer marketing campaigns to the next level? Contact our Social Media Management Team and we will pair you with the right influencers for the maximum return on your investment.

The post Influencer Marketing appeared first on Yoshiro Digital.

If you relate to this then guess what? You are in the right place!

Here our digital marketing agency shares with you 4 of our tested and proven methods you can implement to take advantage of the trends for 2021 and help your business grow.

#1: Design Facebook Ads

The best ads should feel less like ads and more like regular newsfeed content but still have the ability to catch the user’s eye. Delivering content that is not screaming “BUY” but more like “Look how cool this is… you can be too if you buy it” has far greater effect.

How can you do this ? Well keep reading because the next 3 tips will get you there.

#2: Relax Your Creatives, Style and Grammar

By saying “relax your creatives” we don’t mean start taking blurry pictures with your phone. 

We mean make a shift from any rigid guidelines you’ve been using. Change your settings and go lifestyle instead of catalogue-style creatives. Overall the images you are using on your social media must have a fresh design and be light. Once your ads/posts look less like an ad and more like user generated content, then users will start interacting with your brand more.

Change the way you talk (write) to your audience. No matter what type of company you are, talk like you are trying to explain your new product or service to a friend. Relaxed and casual captions make users feel like they are reading a simple post from a friend which makes them more receptive to your ad. 

#3: Brand Accountability

The last few years have been crazy in every aspect.

Politics, human rights, racism, sexism, a global pandemic, conspiracy theories and the list goes on. People (your consumers) have started taking actions for what they believe in more than ever before.

Social media platforms have became the medium for people to do this, not just watch funny cat videos, share memes or stalk their ex’s and that is exactly what they expect their favorite brands to do too.

They want to see your brand taking a stand for things that matter. It’s not about what you are selling. It’s about who they are giving their money to. Chances are, they can find exactly what they are looking for from another store. Promote your culture, what you believe in, what your brand is all about.

Turn your customers into fans by actively and genuinely taking a stand and making your brand synonymous with a cause.

#4: Humanize your Brand

Anonymous brands are a thing of the past. Transparency and authenticity are the marketing strategies for 2021. 

Building a culture and providing small, raw glimpses of who the people are behind the brand will set you apart from the competition. Not because your competitors can’t do it, but because no one can be just like you or your employees. 

So show off yourselves and your best traits, let your personality shine and capture people’s hearts. 

Social media is designed to be social and help people connect with people. Brands that are personified experience increased customer loyalty – customers become fans, friends and supporters.

So where do I Start ?

How to implement all the above?

Start by creating original content, relax the creatives and your captions – stop the “sterilized” look but keep it professional. Personify your website and use it to promote a cause you believe in. Keep your brand “look” consistent across all your media and ads for credibility and quick and easy brand recognition.

After all it’s social media… your content has to feel relaxed and friendly to reach its full potential.

The post 4 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2021 appeared first on Yoshiro Digital.

Writing good content is challenging enough – mastering SEO is worse! However, the present article discusses a full guide to teach you how to develop the previously mentioned skill. When you finish reading, you can start writing like an SEO pro which will help you in your business or as a member of a reputable SEO agency!

Start with Your Keyword Research

One of the most important things when it comes to creating SEO content is targeting the right keywords. If you do that, you can create incredible posts that also have the possibility of ranking high in Google.

To achieve the best keyword research, you should find a tool (there are tons of free and paid ones!) that allows you to have a list of good short and long-tail keywords. After that, you have to decide how many times you need to repeat them in your content so it looks natural, compelling, but also helps with SEO.

Outline Your Posts

Many young entrepreneurs make the mistake of writing without having a clear idea of what they want to say. Avoid that! Start your post by outlining the main ideas you wish to discuss, and the process can be much easier, effective, and help with SEO friendliness.

Create Killer Headlines

Headlines can compel your audience so they click on your post. However, they can also drive them away from your website.

Therefore, you need to have the ability to create incredible and catchy headlines. A good one comprises the following aspects:

–         It tells the reader exactly what they’re going to find

–         It’s clear

–         It’s attractive

–         It solves a specific problem that the reader might be looking for

Some tools can help you create headlines easily. Thus, you can incorporate them to make sure you have SEO friendly content.

Format Your Content for the Google Answer Box

Have you ever searched for “How to…, What Are…, Why Does…, etc.?” said posts are often featured in the Google Answer Box.

If you format your content following that type of outline, you have better chances at ranking higher in Google and appearing on said page. Therefore, each time someone searches for what you’re offering, they can find you.

That doesn’t mean your content can’t work if it doesn’t have the said format. However, it’s a great trick to aid your SEO friendliness.

Write for Your Audience, Not Yourself

If you’re wondering how to write SEO content, the following tip is your best friend from now on. The basis of SEO friendliness is learning that your readers only care about themselves.

Think about it: each time you go online and search for something, you want to find the answer to your problem, right? Everyone in your audience feels the same way.

You might be asking yourself what that has to do with SEO friendliness. It’s very simple: your content needs to solve your readers’ problems. Thus, each time you write, you should think about them.

Imagine your target audience. What kinds of things do they go through? What are their dreams and aspirations? What are their biggest obstacles?

After you think of that, you should also have some answers to it. If you write with that in mind, your posts can have much more SEO friendly content.

Include Relevant Keywords

When you do your keyword research, you might feel overwhelmed by the number of things that pop up. However, don’t despair: you have all the time in the world.

In other words, you shouldn’t just include 500 keywords in a 1000-word article. You should only add the ones that are relevant to your content. Otherwise, your readers can perceive it as unnatural. Eventually, they might even stop reading.

Have a Structure

To learn what does SEO friendly mean, you need to understand that your blog posts have to be structured. You can’t just post a chunk of nonsense content without any substance. If you choose to structure it instead, you can have much more SEO friendliness.

When you outline your post and decide your keywords, you should choose your subheadings accordingly. That means that you need to decide which are the specific points of the subject you want to develop in the article.

After you write some posts following the said tip, you are going to notice that it’s much easier. Since you have a structure, all you need to do is follow it.

Edit Away!

One of the worst things you could do to your SEO content is to publish without editing. Even the best writers can have some mistakes, which is why you should edit away before your content goes out there.

To edit, use handy tools like Grammarly, CopyScape, Yoast SEO, and more. They can help you fix your grammar, find out if there are some copies of your content, and tell you about the state of your SEO within the article you wrote.

After a while, you can develop the skill to edit faster. Thus, you don’t need to spend that much time in it.

Improve Readability

The readability score is what tells you what level your readers need to have to understand your content. That means that it’s a very important aspect if you want to know what is SEO friendly.

If you use tools like Yoast SEO or Grammarly, you can quickly find out about your readability score. To improve it, try to explain everything with an active voice, make concrete statements, use punctuation correctly, and make your content as easy to understand as possible.

Incorporate Visuals

Visuals are a very important part of SEO friendliness. Your reader needs more than text to feel compelled by your writing, and so does Google. As a consequence, you need to find the best sources to add some images, infographics, and videos to your articles.

There are lots of websites where you can download stock images for free, such as PixaBay or UnSplash. Besides, you can create your infographics using tools like Canva.

When you’re writing to achieve SEO content, you might wonder how many images you should add. The quick answer is that there’s no specific number. However, a general rule is that you should include at least one every 250 to 300 words.

Add Your Social Media

Social media wasn’t very important a few years ago, but it has become so popular that it’s now relevant for SEO content. Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook are, by far, the most essential platforms; however, others like Twitter are not so far behind.

Every time you can, add natural links to your social media accounts. You can also include images from them in your blog posts. Likewise, make sure you have handles on your website so your readers can quickly access your pages and start following you if they want to.

Promote Healthy Link Building

A very important aspect of SEO friendliness is inducing healthy link building. If you’re new to content writing and SEO, you might not know what that means. Don’t worry. Read the following simple explanation: it consists of adding links to your articles, which can help your readers stay on your page.

In other words, you can add links from other posts you’ve written before to your new ones. That way, if your readers find something interesting, they can click on it and stay on your website.

The previously mentioned tip works with social media, too! As it was formerly addressed, if you add links to it, your readers can follow you there.

Hook Your Readers

With so many things on the internet, it can be hard to identify what is SEO friendly content. However, a good way to view it is to understand that your posts can rank higher on Google if they are attractive to your audience.

How can you attract your audience, though? Well, with so much content already, it can be hard to stand out. Thus, you should hook your readers with something unique, things that they’ve never seen before. Write about personal experiences that might help them, case studies, or unexpected comparisons! That can help your audience stay tuned for more.

Evaluate Your Progress

Lastly, something lots of writers forget is to constantly evaluate what they’re doing right and wrong. To master the art of how to write SEO content, you need to be aware of the effect your current posts have on Google.

To do the previously mentioned thing, go through old posts from time to time and check how you’ve improved. Likewise, check your article’s stats, analyze them, and try to see what went wrong and what didn’t. That way, you can have a clear idea of the things that are working and the ones that need improvement.

To Wrap Up…

Understanding what is SEO friendly is not an easy job. It’s often the hardest skill to master when you’re starting to write content.

Nonetheless, if you follow the tips you learned, you can improve faster than you think!

The post How to write SEO friendly content appeared first on Yoshiro Digital.

We show you three tried-and-true methods for lowering your bounce rate and increasing conversions in this article.

What is a Bounce Rate? 

A single-page session on your website is referred to as a bounce. A bounce is described in Analytics as a session that only sends one request to the Analytics server, such as when a user visits one page on your site and then leaves without sending any other requests to the Analytics server during that session.

The percentage of all sessions on your site in which users visited just one page and caused only one request to the Analytics server is the bounce rate, which is single-page sessions separated by all sessions. Since there are no subsequent hits after the first one that would allow Analytics to measure the length of the session, these single-page sessions have a session duration of zero seconds.

Is Having a High Bounce Rate a Bad Thing?

Yes, a high bounce rate is bad if the site’s performance depends on visitors visiting more than one page. For example, if your home page serves as a portal to the rest of your site (e.g., news reports, category pages, and your checkout page), you don’t want a high bounce rate.

A high bounce rate, on the other hand, is perfectly natural if you have a single-page site, such as a blog, or provide other types of content where single-page sessions are required.

Lower Your Bounce Rate

When looking to lower your bounce rate, you should take a look at the issue from a number of different perspectives in order to deal with the problem in the most efficient manner. Some perspectives to look at are:

• You can look at the audience overview report as this provides the overall bounce rate for your website.
• By looking at the all pages report, you can acquire the bounce rate for individual pages.
• The channels report provides you with the bounce rate for each channel grouping that you have.
• By consulting the all traffic report, you can find the bounce rate for each source or medium pair.

If your average bounce rate is high, you can investigate further to see if it’s uniformly high or whether it’s due to one or two channels, source/medium pairs, or only a few sites. Examine whether the content fits well with the messaging you use to push users to those pages and if those pages provide users with clear paths to the next steps you want them to take, for example, if just a few pages are the issue.

If a specific channel has a high bounce rate, examine your marketing efforts for that specific channel: if users arriving via display are bouncing, make sure your ads are relevant to the content of your site.

If the issue is more common, check your tracking code implementation to ensure that all of the required pages are tagged and that they are tagged correctly. You may also want to rethink your site’s overall design, paying attention to the vocabulary, visuals, color, calls to action, and visibility of key page elements.

How to Find the Bounce Rate of Your Website

It’s a good idea to see where your site stands in terms of bounce rate before finding out how to lower it so you know where to make the changes we suggest.

This can be accomplished in one of two ways:

• Simple and Fast Method: View in your WordPress dashboard with an insight tool.
• Method 2: Look for it in your Google Analytics account.

First, we’ll teach you how to do it quickly and easily.

You can find all the data you need in your WordPress dashboard once you’ve properly set up Google Analytics on your WordPress site with any insight tool. Sign in to your WordPress dashboard and go to Insights » Reports to see your site’s bounce rate. The average bounce rate of your site can be found in the Overview Report.

If you need more details, go to the Publishers tab and look at your site’s top landing pages, which include the number of visitors, average session time, and bounce rate.

If you manually added Google Analytics to your blog, you need to log out of WordPress and into Google Analytics to see your bounce rate.

There are a variety of ways to display the bounce rate in Google Analytics, depending on what you’re looking for, which can be frustrating. We suggest looking at the bounce rates of your landing pages so you can see and pages your visitors are landing on and leaving.

To view your site’s bounce rate in Google Analytics, first sign in to your account. Go to Behavior » Site Content » Landing Pages, after that.

Knowing which pages your site visitors are most likely to land on can help you identify and address trouble areas. By seeing which of your pages perform the best, you can model the rest of your pages according to those that perform well, boosting the results that you receive.

Now, let’s look at how you can reduce the bounce rate on your website.

Tip One: Have a Direct Call to Action

Most visitors determine whether or not to remain on a website within seconds of arriving. To persuade site visitors to convert, make sure they understand what you can offer them and what you want them to do as soon as they enter your site.

Describe what you’re offering to site tourists as soon as they land on your site. Make sure the call to action is straightforward so people understand what actions you want them to take. Also, make sure you’re upfront and truthful about what you’re selling so customers don’t feel compelled to quit right away.

Should you wish to do so, you can consider downloading an analytics tool in order to see how many visitors to your website are downloading files. This can assist you in understanding how effective your call to action is, as well as how many people are actually being convinced to continue exploring your site after they see the call to action.

Tip Two: Boost Your Site Speed

The pace and consistency of your website have a big impact on whether or not people choose to stay. The longer your site takes to load, the more likely your visitors might become frustrated and leave without visiting another article.

In reality, visitors to your website expect it to load in two seconds or less. Anything slower than that can cause your visitors to leave your site, which may have a negative impact on your conversion rates.

You can make use of various tools available online in order to optimize the speed of your website as well as to optimize how fast it is. You can speed up your website by adhering to the suggestions that these tools provide you with in order to get your website running more smoothly.

Using a content delivery network (CDN), optimizing photos, investing in a quality web host, tracking plugin use, and using a caching plugin are some of the easiest ways to configure your site for faster page loading.

Tip Three: A/B Test Everything You Post

A/B checking on your website on a regular basis may reveal why people are bouncing and what makes them want to linger. After all, high bounce rates may be due to anything as simple as the color of your call-to-action button or the way your landing page directs visitors into your sales funnel.

HubSpot discovered that the red button received 21% more clicks than the green button after performing an A/B test of call-to-action button colors. While this is only an example of improved conversions thanks to button colors, the thing is, people have the propensity to leave your site if they don’t like what they see.

By running A/B tests, you can find what works best for your website, as well as which little changes you can make in order to improve engagement from visitors to the site. It is extremely important that you have a clear understanding of what works for your website so that you can get the best results. These tests can prove to be extremely helpful in that you can get an insight into the minds of the individuals who are visiting your website, and as a result, you can learn how to better target them.

To perform free A/B testing of your site’s content and make improvements to boost conversions, use the Google Optimize addon, which is designed right on top of Google Analytics.

The Bottom Line

After reading this article, you should have a much better understanding of bounce rates, as well as what you can do in order to reduce the rate itself. Lowering the bounce rate of your website means that you are engaging visitors to your page in a much more effective manner, boosting your page effectiveness substantially.

The post Tips to reduce bounce rates appeared first on Yoshiro Digital.

However, it is even possible that you have been “shadow-banned.” Accounts that have been shadow-banned are put in a state of invisibility. To put it another way, they transform into a “ghost” where no one can see them. In this article, we are going to go over what shadow banning is and how to say whether you have been shadow-banned.

More About Shadow Banning

When it comes to growing a social media following, you depend on hashtags and interaction to broaden your following and scope. So, it is understandably disappointing when the content abruptly vanishes from the internet. You could have been shadow-banned if you notice fewer likes and comments on your posts, or if those hashtags do not exist for you.

Shadow-banning makes sense from some social media platforms’ perspective. For example, Instagram uses shadow banning to weed out accounts that do not follow their terms. Some people use unethical methods to grow their Instagram followers, such as artificial robots or dozens of hashtags that have little to do with their content. In this case, Instagram can ban certain accounts so that users can continue to receive legitimate and beneficial posts and content.

Although Instagram does not publicly confess to shadow banning, in February it issued a statement addressing the issue of users’ content not turning up with those hashtags. Their comment at least acknowledges that the hashtag conundrum exists, but many assume that it is Instagram’s way of implying shadow banning without explicitly admitting it.

What is Shadow Banning?  

Shadow-banning is the practice of blocking a user’s posts on social media platforms when the user is unaware of the action. If you have been shadow-banned on social media accounts, your content is going to only feature in the feeds of people who already follow and know you.

In short, when your posts, content, or activities are not visible on a platform, but you have not got a formal ban or notice, this is known as shadow banning. It is a means for spammers to keep spamming when no one else in the network (or outside of it) notices.

Other social media users are not going to be affected by spam and malware because they are not going to be able to see it. Since the spammer is unaware that they have been blocked, they are not going to instantly begin looking for ways to bypass the shadow-ban.

All of this can seem strange or shady. There is no way to tell for sure whether or not a platform or service has shadow-banned you, and several platforms and applications reject that they shadow ban. If you suspect you have been shadow-banned, it is a possibility that a change in the platform’s search or news feed algorithm is to blame. And, since social media firms own the formulas, it is not in their best interests to make anything about the public. Regardless of if you were restricted on purpose or by mistake, the result is the same; no one can read what you have written.

Which Social Media Platforms Shadow Ban?

Since the practice of shadow banning is not completely advertised openly, there is no way to get a complete list of platforms that shadow-ban users.

Even so, shadow banning has been mentioned on platforms and apps such as Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok in the past under some circumstances. According to respondents to the survey, there are four forms of shadow-bans:

• A username or hashtag that does not appear in search results
• A drop in the number of people who are following you on Social media.
• Features and functions (such as likes and comments) are disabled.
• A temporary prohibition that is be lifted later.

How to Avoid Getting Shadow Banned on Social Media 

Different social media platforms have different views about what types of breaches warrant a shadow-ban. That being said, there are some observable general patterns worth mentioning. If you wish to avoid a shadow-ban, follow these tips:

• Observe the Terms of Service at all times and stick to them.
• Follow and observe power users on the social media platform that are in your sector or category (look at what content they share and how they share it)
• Repeatedly posting links or copy-pasted content is not a good idea.
• If you are not sure if a piece of material is acceptable, do not share it.
• Treat people with decency and dignity.
• Do not use hashtags that are not allowed or have previously been banned.
• Posting on illegal subjects should be avoided.

The Bottom Line About Shadow Banning  

You may be completely unaware that you are being shadow-banned. Although, you are going to continue to suspect it over time in many cases. To safeguard yourself, make sure that whatever you write does not violate the social media platform’s or app’s terms of service and the conditions of the platform. Further, aim to stop spamming posts or reposting “copy and paste“ content, starting online arguments and fights with other social media platform users, trolling other users, and sharing offensive or inappropriate content.

A shadow-ban can be aggravating, especially if you do not believe you deserve it. Maybe you disagree with the social media platform’s algorithm on what is and is not acceptable, or perhaps you thought you were having a productive conversation with other online users and, the platform’s algorithm mistook you for a troll.

The most effective way to avoid a shadow-ban is to recruit the services of experts who are well equipped to avoid being shadow-banned in the first place. Social Media Management will avoid the stress that comes from this very aggravating situation.

However, the advice in this guide should help you from getting shadow-banned in the future, allowing the material to gain further attention. If you have any other comments or questions about shadow banning, please let us know in the comments below.

The post How to tell if you are shadow-banned on Social Media appeared first on Yoshiro Digital.

Here, you can find out all about page speed: what it is, how it affects SEO, the metrics it affects, and how you can improve it.

What Is Page Speed?

Page speed is either the time it takes for a website to fully display an individual page or the time it takes for a browser to receive the first byte of information from the website. Every page element, such as images, scripts, videos, other multimedia, can affect page speed. It also depends on the server and website’s performance.

On the end-user side, things that can affect page speed are the pages the users visit, their connection type, internet service provider, browser, and device’s processing power. What the user is currently doing and how many apps they have open can also play a large part.

Regardless, you can only concern yourself with what you can work on if you host a website: your page and your server. Other factors are entirely out of your control.

Does Page Speed Matter?

Page speed is relevant to users as faster-loading pages provide them with a significantly enhanced user experience. Webpages that take longer than usual to load often lead their users away.

Mobile users also expect good load times. In fact, one of the best and most convenient tools for measuring page speed, Google PageSpeed Insights, now show mobile results first. The reasoning is that more than half of search engine users now use mobile devices for their searches. This tool also analyzes a website’s accessibility and user experience.

Is Page Speed a Ranking Factor? 

Ever since 2010, page speed became relevant for SEO. Google announced at that date that they would include a new signal in their search ranking algorithms, site speed. Regardless, at the time, it didn’t carry as much weight as the page’s relevance did, with fewer than 1 percent of queries being affected by it.

However, further ahead in 2018, the page speed ranking factor became even more prominent for Google search and ads, especially for mobile searches. The “Speed Update,” as Google called it, implemented site speed as a landing page factor for mobile searches, effectively making it a direct ranking factor for search engine queries on all devices.

Although Google weights page relevancy more than page speed, it becomes more important when you consider that it also improves the user’s experience.

Which Metric Is Affected by Slow Page Speed?

Many things can affect page speed. In Google’s PageSpeed Insights product, the metrics which affect slow page speed are split into different categories, field data and lab data, to show you what exactly impacts it the most.

Field data, if available, is on the Chrome User Experience Report dataset. On the other hand, lab data comes from Lighthouse, an open-source automated tool that can analyze and collect it.

Field Data

It’s the data that Google extracts from real users, and it’s the most critical one of the two. Google gets this either through Chrome or any other data provider. It’s an average, and Google lets you know whether it has enough data to show it. If it does have a dataset available, it reports the following performance metrics:

First Contentful Paint. It measures the length of time it takes for a page to render any of its content on the screen. Content refers to images, elements, or any non-white section.

First Input Delay. This metric measures the site’s response time from when a user first interacts with it to the moment the browser can begin processing the response to that interaction. If you want your site to provide an excellent user experience, you should try to have a delay below 100 milliseconds.

Largest Contentful Paint. It measures and reports the render time of the most prominent image or text block visible from the initial viewport. It’s relative to when the page first starts loading. In simpler terms, it’s the moment in which the user can understand some of the page’s content. Sites should try to score 2.5 seconds or less.

Cumulative Layout Shift. Measures the number of individual layout shifts that occur in a page as it loads. A layout shift happens every time a visible page element changes its position from one place to the other.

The score considers two measurements, the impact fraction (how it impacts the viewport area between jumps) and the distance (how much it moved relative to the viewport.) A good score would be one of 0.1 or less.

Lab Data

The Google page speed score comes from this metric. It’s useful yet of less relevance as it comes from a controlled environment. This environment is a single connection that doesn’t combine data from multiple users.

Google uses this as an alternative when they don’t have enough field data. It does this on the spot by considering six performance metrics, some of which are also present in the field data, like First Contentful Paint, Largest Contentful Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift. The other three are the following:

Speed Index. It’s a more complex metric that measures how quickly the page’s elements are visually displayed while it loads. The faster they appear, the better it is. Like the others, it’s measured in seconds, and you’re looking for a score of 4.3 seconds or less.

Time to Interactive. Measures how long it takes for the website’s interactive elements to become entirely interactive. Pages are fully interactive once they display applicable content, respond to user queries in under 50 milliseconds, and when most visible elements have their event handlers registered.

It’s similar to the now deprecated First CPU Idle metric, which reports the moment the user can begin interacting with the site. Some find this measurement more meaningful than Time to Interactive, but they’re too similar to keep using them both.

Total Blocking Time. It measures the length of time between First Contentful Paint and Time to Interactive in which a long task blocks the main thread and delays input response. The main thread gets blocked because a browser can’t interrupt a task in progress. Users who try and interact during this process need to wait until it finishes before the browser can respond.

Page Speed SEO – Best Practices

It may be hard to understand some of the terms previously described. Still, they aren’t completely essential to improve your page speed. However, it’s necessary to set a baseline before bettering it, which you can do with PageSpeed Insights. This tool also provides you with a list of opportunities and diagnostics which can help your page load quicker.

Besides these suggestions, you can also try some of these best practices to improve your page speed:

Compress and Optimize Images

Images are often the biggest problem with websites, as they can negatively impact page speed. Some of them are big and take too long to download. You need to ensure they aren’t larger than necessary and are in the correct file format.

You can easily compress PNG, which works better for pictures with fewer colors, and JPEG, which is suitable for photographs. Most browsers support these file extensions. Also, avoid having images larger than one megabyte.

Another way to speed up page load is by deferring images. With this method, users download them later as they scroll further down the web page. There may be a moment where images aren’t visible, but they show up sooner than later. Several plugins can help you implement this method, like Joomla or Magento, but you can also use jQuery with the help of a developer.

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) 

With them, you can offer high performance and availability to your end-users with the help of geographically distributed network proxy servers and data centers. It lets users access your website through a closer CDN server, improving their page load time.  These servers can also reduce your bandwidth costs because it minimizes the amount of data that the original server has to provide.

Minify HTML or CSS Structure

The HTML structure of a website dictates how it loads. A browser reads it from top to bottom and loads it the same way. If you want a specific element to load first, you have to place it higher on your page. Still, most issues aren’t with HTML but with CSS. When people write their website’s CSS poorly, it results in significantly slower load times and a bad user experience.

Optimizing and minimizing your site’s code can improve your page speed. You can do this by taking out all unnecessary information, such as spaces, commas, comments, and unused code, from it. Although most of these things can make the code more readable and easier to work on, they can pile up and reduce your page speed.

Implement an Effective Caching Policy

Web caching is the temporary file storing process in a user’s browser for later reuse. Users that visit your website for the first time need to download all of your page’s elements. With an effective cache policy, most of these files can remain in their browser, significantly reducing the page speed by eliminating the need to load the web page again in its entirety.

Limit Plugins

As you add more plugins to your website, it gets heavier and loads slower. The page’s theme may be the most extensive plugin it can have, and some come with third-party builders and libraries that can significantly slow down your site. If you’re looking for a theme, try to find one without many animations, functions, sliders, and other heavy elements.

Regarding other plugins, you only need to consider whether they are essential to your website. If you install them, test your score and loading speed to determine if it made your page run slower. Should it do so, figure out if it’s necessary to keep the plugin, look for a better alternative, or remove it entirely.

The Bottom Line

Page speed isn’t only an essential part of the user experience, it’s also a vital ranking factor in both desktop and mobile searches. Higher page speed leads to better search rankings. If you want to improve it, you can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights coupled with utilizing the services of a proven SEO agency. It’s an excellent tool that can help you analyze your site while also providing you with several possible optimizations.

You can also compress images, simplify your code, or use a content delivery network to enhance your page speed. Continue improving it and increase your page views!

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There are numerous free or low-cost tips and tricks you can utilize to promote your business and pull in new customers. The internet is a gold mine when it comes to marketing platforms, and the cool thing is does not cost you an arm and a leg. You just need to know the right places to go and to look. In the early startup stages, you might not have loads of money to throw around in promotion but there are still effective ways to get your name out there.

12 Cost-Effective Ways to Promote Your Business 

Create a Quality Website

Having an attractive website does not need to cost you a lot of cash. Using some basic computer skills, tools, and knowledge, you can create a stellar site. There are easy templates you can use where all you need to do is upload your images and the text.

Keep your website simple. It does not need to be over the top and flashy. An about page, contact page, home page, and a gallery to showcase some of your best work, goods, and services can do the trick. A website that is properly set up can have more customers and prospects visiting your site and browsing. It can help your rankings in the search engine results that result following someone’s entry into the search bar on popular sites like Google and Bing.

Use Free Internet Listings

There are many websites locally and internationally, such as Google, that have free business listings. Ensure you market your business on as many free local listings as you can get your hands. Craigslist and Yelp are other platforms that have free listings. Depending on the type of business you have, you can use these sites to promote the products and services offered.

There are other trusted directories such as TripAdvisor and HomeAdvisor that you use in some industries, so customers can see you as reputable and worthy of their business and time.

Having a Logo or Tagline That Is Catchy

This is a simple yet creative way to get your business out there. A creative catchphrase that customers and other people can relate to enhances your business and helps to give it a personalized touch and bring in more clientele.

Start a Blog!

A blog is a more direct way to connect and communicate with your consumers and helps to give your business a recognized name through followers across the globe. This must be a consistent thing where you keep people updated on things that are going on in your business, upcoming events, new products and services, and sales.

With blogging, you can reach out to a pool of persons. It is not only those who are ready to make a purchase, but also those who still need a little more convincing. You can try something called blogger outreach. This is a process where you try to put the business’ product or service in the eyes of influential bloggers and journalists through email. This is so they can talk about your business to their fanbase and send them right over to you or your website, which again, must be polished.

Try Speaking at Events

These events do not have to be elaborate or have some world-famous guest speakers. You might not have a huge fanbase or following on Twitter or Instagram, but you can consider speaking at events, regardless of the industry you are in. Invitations to speak and share your expertise may come along. You must be ready to take advantage of them. Do not just show up at the event. Take part in the proceedings.

The aim here is to get consumers interested. Local events, such as conferences with roughly 50 people can do a great deal for businesses and it can work for you too. You can try online forums, talks, summits, etc. Put yourself out there to a wide variety of people across many countries. Just like that, you can have no customers pouring in.

Get Reviewed 

As simple as it may sound, one of the biggest boosters you can get as an upcoming business is a positive rating, comment, or review. This shows customers and persons browsing that you can deliver tremendous services and that you are doing all that you say you are going to do.

Persons are often skeptical about new businesses that are just making their rounds in the industry but having a few good ratings can be the turning point for your business and have you bringing more clients in.

This rating or review can be from one of your friends or just a satisfied customer. Also, if that review came from someone influential, that alone could have you seeing new faces coming into your store, your DMs buzzing with orders and requests, and your phone lines ringing off the hook.

Go Door to Door 

This one might be a little old school but it still works. You can have flyers, posters, and postcards that are well-designed and hand-delivered, which can save you big time on postal charges. Hundreds of postcards can be handed out throughout the day, depending on how much time can be dedicated to walking the neighborhood.

You can do some research on the area and reach out to your target audience to get those persons who are most interested in your goods, products, or services. If no one is home you can leave the postcard at the door or in the mailbox.

Networking

Make friends with other small business owners and not just those in your area. Reach out to others who are more likely to support your business as you support theirs. Promote your business with others in their circles. You can buy, use, and recommend their products and services and they can reciprocate.

Socialize and get to know other vendors and business owners at various events such as fairs, pop-up shops, and other events that business people participate in. This can go as far having as them as an outlet where you can send over a few of your products and have them displayed and sold there.

Create an E-mail List

If your new customers and past customers are willing, you can collect and use their email addresses to send out specials, promotions, and educate them about new products and services that you may have. You can even include writings from your blog, tips and tricks, stories, or an email newsletter about your business.

Creating the list is another way that can have you keep in touch with your client base regardless of its size without spending a dime.

Attend Craft Fairs

This depends on the type of business you have, but craft fairs are very low-cost ways for you to sell your products or promote your list of services. While it can be long and frustrating as people do not always buy what you are selling or you are in a difficult location, it is still worth the effort.

You can take advantage of local craft fairs as they often have lower rates for local vendors and are a good way to get your business name floating in the community and on the streets.

Use Community Bulletin Boards

Banks, grocery stores, and other local organizations and businesses have bulletin boards where small businesses, tutors, and other services can post their business cards, flyers, posters, and other advertisements. You can make use of these bulletin boards to get your name and brand out there. These establishments see thousands of people daily your information is bound the catch a few eyes.

Use Social Media

For businesses that are new and upcoming, asking friends are family members how to promote your business is a good way to start. Social media is a very powerful tool that can help your business get there. With the help of a few friends, family members, and that one popular/influential person you know, your goods, products, services, and promotions can spread like wildfire on social media. This can result in persons from different locations reaching out to you for products and services, which can see your profits skyrocketing.

You must also become an active person on as many social media platforms as possible, including YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and TikTok. You must remain relevant with the jokes, content, and trends, and be able to use them to your advantage to build your followers and persons viewing your page or account. Who knows? Your next customer may be on someone’s timeline, so a retweet cannot hurt.

For a business that requires a lot of active Social Media and a strategic method in which to enhance awareness, consideration and conversions, then recruiting the services of a proven Social Media department with a digital agency can be tremendously beneficial.

Conclusion

Most of the methods listed above are either free or at low cost, and they are all decent ways to get your business some publicity. You can try them all, as they can only see your business become even more successful.

The post Free ways to promote your business if you are just starting out appeared first on Yoshiro Digital.

When you think of search engine optimization, you think about what the users see, and that’s a huge part of SEO. Technical SEO is what helps you hit those goals. You have to combine traditional SEO and technical SEO with other strategies, including on- and off-page optimizations. In fact, all of them together are what make the three pillars for SEO.

Why Is Technical SEO Important?

In a sense, technical SEO is essential because it could boost or hurt your organic performance and rankings. You could have the best content ever imagined. Ultimately, you may have backlinks from authoritative sites that are strategically placed. All of that is good, but if the search engine can’t crawl and index your website, you may not see any rankings at all. If nothing else, you might be on the fifth or sixth page. We all know that if you’re not on that first (and maybe second) page, no one is visiting your site. There are exceptions to that, but that’s pretty much what it boils down to.

The Technical SEO Checklist – Suitable for Beginners

Below, we have come up with a technical SEO checklist to cover most of the critical elements relating to technical SEO. That way, you have a website that’s technically sound and ready for action. However, this isn’t a full or comprehensive list of all technical recommendations out there. It’s up to you to make sure that you’re doing what you can to keep your website on the up and up.

In most cases, people don’t know where to begin with SEO in any form. That’s okay! You can always work with a professional SEO agency to get the help you need. Yoshiro Digital offers assistance with technical SEO, so you’re good to go.

If you want to get started on your own, we don’t blame you and commend you for such a task. By following the checklist below, you can make sure that your website has a strong technical foundation. Many of the roadblocks that prevent search engines from indexing, crawling, and ranking your site are covered here.

1. Ensure that Google Can Index and Craw Your Site.

Crawling is the process where Googlebot discovers updated and new pages that should be added to the Google Index. When Googlebot can’t crawl those pages, it can’t rank the content or index it.

Webmasters must make sure that Googlebot can index and crawl a page, and the best way to go about it is to use a special URL tool called “Inspect a Live URL.” This can be found in Google Search Console, and it allows people to test live URLs to see if Google can index them or not. If Google can’t index that URL, the test shows an error. That way, you know you have to fix the problem to ensure that it’s indexed and crawled correctly.

Here are common ways to make sure that your website can be indexed and crawled:

• Make sure you’re not blocking the search engine from crawling the page in the robots.txt file.
• Check for any orphaned pages. That means there are no internal links, so it’s harder for crawlers or users to find that page.
• Ensure that the page is in the sitemap.xml file. That way, search engines can find it efficiently.
• If you want a page to be indexed, make sure it doesn’t feature a “no-index” tag on it.

You can also use a mobile-friendly testing tool to check the HTML code of a landing page to make sure Googlebot can see the content. This is quite useful when you’re testing JavaScript for a site that is built using the JS framework. These tools can give you a snapshot of how the page is designed and offer errors that could impact crawlability.

2. Don’t Have Duplicate Content on Your Website.

Duplicate content means that you’ve got many pages with similar or exactly the same information on the site. If search engines see duplicate content, it confuses them, and they aren’t sure which version should be ranked and indexed. Typically, the search engine picks the one it thinks is best and then filters out the rest. This also holds true if you’ve got two similar pages that compete for the same keyword terms.

There are many ways to prevent duplicate content and solve this issue. The most common include:

• Use canonical tags to tell Google which page version you want it to use.
• Make sure that you’re using either a non-www or www version, but do not use both. When you do, that creates a duplicate of your entire website.
• Use various 301 redirects to get similar content pages to the right one.
• Ensure that you’re enforcing the lower-case URLs because mix-case URLs are usually considered to be duplicate content.

You can find many online tools to help you find duplicate content on your website. However, it’s often easier to work with a professional.

3. Make Sure the Website Loads Fast.

Ever since 2010, site speed is a ranking factor. Ultimately, a slower site ranks worse than one that works quickly.

You can find different tools to determine your website’s speed. With PageSpeed Insights, you can plug in the URL and get a report about the page’s performance. It also comes with a list of ways to improve speed.

Google also has a tool called Think. This lets you compare mobile page speeds with the competition to see how you rank. With that, you can also evaluate how much better you’re going to rank if your site is faster. That way, you can effectively see how much money you could make if the website speed was boosted by a specific amount.

Core Web Vitals is set to become a ranking factor for Google in mid-2021. You can keep an eye on your CWV metrics with various tools, such as GTMetrix and LightHouse. Alternatively, it might be easier to work with a technical SEO agency.

4. Focus on Website Security.

Google is now trying to create secure web experiences for its users, so it recommends that all websites use the HTTPS encryption. It has offered incentives for that by providing ranking boosts if the sites use HTTPS. On top of that, Google is marking regular HTTP sites as “not secure” as a way to protect and warn people.

It’s easy to ensure that your site is secure with a valid SSL certificate. However, we understand that some people don’t know how to go about it, and we can help.

5. Mobile-friendly Sites Are Important.

In March of 2018, Google started mobile-first indexing. Now, it’s the default. With that, if you don’t have a mobile-friendly website, you’re not ranking well.

Conclusion

Most people (unless they’re webmasters) aren’t sure how to implement technical SEO practices. Instead of muddling through it and hoping for the best, work with a professional. That way, you know things are done correctly, and it’s not going to hurt your ranking. In fact, it could help you rank better!

The post What is Technical SEO appeared first on Yoshiro Digital.

More than 34% of people worldwide use email. That’s roughly 2.5 billion people, the predictions are that email marketing will continue to grow. Any notion you may have heard that email marketing is dead or dying would be incorrect according to the statistics. Put simply, email marketing is an incredible and reliable method to connect with your audience. It is estimated that out of the 196 billion emails that are sent each day, 109 billion are business email. Now that’s a lot of emails to compete with but it proves that email marketing is a tried and tested method, and is still bringing in results for millions of companies around the globe. 

Why Email Marketing still has a role to play

Email is a big part of our lives. A very big part, think about your own experiences, you probably receive a number of email marketing newsletter daily which inspires your decision to purchase a product or service. This also applies to all of your friends and family too, do you even know anyone without an email address.  Email marketing is also a very personal way of reaching your target customers, emails from your friends and family are alongside email updates from the companies you follow.  

What the Stats Say

As mentioned the number of emails sent and received each year is only going up.  From 102.6 last year to a predicted 126.7 trillion emails expected to be sent in 2022. On average you are getting at least 13 commercial emails a day. Of course, that means nothing if we don’t check them, but with the ease of access and the mail apps allowing us to check emails directly from our phones, it’s estimated that we are checking out emails as much as 20 times a day. Over 50% check their email before doing anything else online. To put that in perspective emails are checked first by 58% off people compared to only 14% of people checking their social media first, or 5% of people checking the news first. 

No matter who or where your target audience is Emails as one of the longest standing methods remains a great way to reach your audience. 

What Practices should be used

If you’re responsible for the success of your day to day email marketing campaigns then sometimes it can feel like there are just so many elements to keep track of.  To help make sure you keep in mind these practices when creating your campaign.  

• Know your audience, your audience is more than just a demographic group, work with them and discover the best ways to communicate your message. 
• Utilize A/B testing, an important element for every campaign, a good email marketer is never done testing whether it’s the CTA, body or subject lines. 
• Follow a checklist, avoid the blushes of a simple error. Before you hit send create a checklist of all the important steps you need to check. 
• Personalizing your emails using the first names of your recipients is incredibly important when wanting to improve results. 
• Along with personalizing for the individual to make your emails relevant to the current season, your audience won’t engage with an email about winter coats in the middle of summer.  
• Track your results, without the proper tracking of whether your emails are working or not you may as well be shooting in the dark. 

Creating an effective email does not necessarily mean it needs to be complicated,  in fact, a good email can be rather simple.  As long as you follow the best practices your results will only improve.    

What Practices should be avoided

For those who are struggling with getting good results from your email marketing campaigns, there is a good chance you might be making some mistake.  But not to worry now you know what you should be doing, here’s what you should avoid: 

• Don’t forget the CTA
• Not having an automated welcome email
• Overwhelming your audience with too many emails
• Not optimizing for mobile display

Email marketing is still thriving and can achieve the results you need for your business but be sure to avoid these practices.  

How to succeed with email marketing 

So is email marketing really dead? Far from it, email marketing is alive and increasingly relevant. It’s the ideal way for you to reach audiences across demographics easily and directly. Remember, if you need help getting the most out of your email list, we’re here to help.  Let’s Talk! 

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