SEO H1 Tags Best Practices

Long-Form Content, Here We Come!

According to a study by SEMRush, long-form content with a hefty word count of over 3,000 words gets three times more traffic and four times more shares. To top it off, they also manage to achieve 3.5 times more backlinks than articles of the average length of 901 to 1,200 words.

However, the larger the word count, the more engaging your content has to be to keep your readers hooked. Start focusing on long-form content to achieve higher search rankings. Also, if your content is, or has the potential to be educational, don’t miss out on a chance to show it off to students looking for answers, reference studies, etc.

Long-form content that is data-driven has infographics and great internal linking tends to have the lion’s share of eyes and views. The goal is to provide users with shareable information that keeps them engaged and wanting more. 

PRO TIPS:

• Break up long blocks of texts with appropriate H2 & H3 subheadings. This makes this easier to read for readers and search engines alike. This is especially crucial to mobile sites. 
• If your blog post consists of news stories, facts, or other reference articles, ensure that you link to relevant, authoritative sources with a solid authority score.
• Finally, ensure your content is easy to share. Include obvious sharing links and CTAs.

Voice Search Will Have A Notable Impact on Search Rankings

At home assistants and innovations like Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri, and Amazon’s Alexa, are increasingly popular and will only get bigger. According to Google, 72% of people who own voice-activated speakers, claim that these devices are integrated into their daily routine. Voice search technology has indeed come a long way. In fact, TechCrunch predicts that 55% of households are predicted to own a smart speaker by 2023. 

You get the idea. Hence, to optimize for voice search, carefully consider your keywords. Try to identify the longer phrases that people would use in everyday conversation. The longer and more natural colloquial sounding phrasing it is, the better. This is very different when people type, as they tend to abbreviate.

For example, a person might voice search, “What are the best SEO trend strategies for 2023” but, they will type the words, “SEO strategy 2023."

Mobile-Friendly Sites Are Never Going Out Of Style

In June 2019, Google rolled out mobile-first indexing, which means that Google predominantly uses the mobile version of your content/website for indexing and ranking accordingly. Usually, the index used the desktop version of a page's content as the primary reference when evaluating the relevance of a page to a user's query. Since the majority of users now access Google Search with a mobile device, Google announced that the Googlebot will now primarily crawl and index pages with the smartphone agent going forward.

Furthermore, starting July 1, 2019, mobile-first indexing is enabled by default for all new websites, whether they are new to the web or previously unknown to Google Search. For older or existing websites, Google will still continue to monitor and evaluate pages based on SEO best practices. 

This change makes the most sense, given that projections state 73% of internet users will access the internet solely via mobile devices by 2025. Check how effective your mobile site is with Google’s free mobile-friendly test. Next, take a peek at the “mobile usability” report in Google Search Console.

PRO TIP:

• You must ensure that Google can crawl your URLs to make your site mobile friendly, so make sure you don’t have a “disallow directive”.

Googlebot won’t load content requiring user interactions, like clicking or swiping. Stray away from placing content on sliding panels. You have to make sure Google can see this so-called lazy-loaded content. Finally, ensure you use the same meta robots tags on the desktop and mobile sites.

Artificial Intelligence To Play A Much Bigger Role

Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the way we interact with each other and content online.

Google’s AI algorithm deserves an honorable mention. Historically, marketers have slogged away trying to crack the algorithm that could lead to a promising world of mass visibility. The algorithm called RankBrain plays an essential role in Google’s content indexing and ranking. RankBrain is not a new algorithm though. However, it is getting better and you need to up your SEO game too!

So, the million-dollar question is, how do you optimize your SEO for RankBrain, the AI? While Google won’t share details, experts believe that excellent user experience is the key determinant. These could include factors from click-through rate, bounce rate to time spent on-page. You need to captivate your readers with engaging, on-brand content. Online tools such as SEMrush can help you assess your webpages’ strengths-based on factors like backlinks, readability, and more.

Optimizing Video Content Is Now An SEO Trend Staple

With content being rolled out daily by video giants like Netflix and youtube, it now seems that online video seems to be the way forward, in terms of visual content. YouTube has more than 2 billion logged-in users. But here’s the kicker, 70% of what people watch on youtube is from the ‘Recommended’ section. Still not on board? According to Cisco, video content is projected to surpass all else in terms of media consumption.

So, how can you optimize your video content? Firstly, ensure you optimize your channel’s name and description. Use keywords that describe your niche or what you do, but make sure you don’t stuff the description with too many keywords! The idea is to provide a quick, painless overview of what your channel is all about.

You can also make good use of Youtube’s autocomplete feature if you need a bit of a push in the right direction. Simply start typing in your video's topic and see what pops up in the search field. This is essentially a list of suggested keywords, generated by youtube, telling you exactly what people on YouTube are searching for (related to that topic).

Learn & Implement the EAT Concept

In SEO terminology, EAT is short for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. These factors are promptly mentioned in Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. Google mentions that they use third-party Search Quality Raters globally that are highly trained to provide feedback. This helps them understand what changes could make Google’s Search more useful. 

PRO TIPS:

• Produce professional, industry-standard documents with regards to your market or niche.
• Acquire backlinks from high authority domains.
• Hire professional writers who can help deliver quality, fact-checked content.
• Update content and photos on your website.
• Get as many reviews on Google as possible. Think about incentivizing your customers to leave a positive review.
• Get a Wikipedia page and showcase your expertise to Google.

Schedule a call with us if you’d like us to help. Our fool-proof framework, dedicated specialists, and incredibly affordable price points are just a few of the many perks that come with getting a website designed professionally. Keep up with SEO trends and have jaw-dropping website design!

If you're getting tired of updating your own website - or just don't know how to - contact our web development team. We service all across Canada and North America.

Buckle up, folks. It's time to talk about social media KPIs.

The term "KPI" stands for "key performance indicator" and it's the thing that tells you whether your marketing strategy is working—or failing. 

KPIs are one of the most important things to keep an eye on if you want to grow your business. So let's take a look at some of the most important social media KPIs for business growth.

Social Media KPIs 101

We know you’re excited to jump into the KPIs and how to use them.

But first: some quick questions and answers about social media KPIs.

What are KPIs

KPI stands for "Key Performance Indicators," which is just a fancy way of saying "what you're measuring."

KPIs provide data you can analyze to measure the success of your social media marketing efforts. There are a variety of different social media KPIs to choose from, depending on what you want to accomplish with your strategy (we’ll get to that later, don’t worry!).

Basically, if you're spending money on advertising and marketing, you need a way to measure its effectiveness. This will help ensure that your brand isn't wasting time with ineffective ads and can focus on ones that work!

KPIs simplify marketing strategies

You want to know how many people are seeing your content, how many of them are engaging with it, and how many actually buy or sign up for something as a result of reading it.

One of the most important things about KPIs is that they give you a straightforward and unbiased way to measure performance.

This objective data shows you which content is performing well and which content needs a re-vamp. From here, you can develop marketing strategies to improve success.

Your goal should be to pick a few KPIs (not all of them) and stick with them over time so that any improvements become more obvious. 

Once you have your KPIs set up properly, you can use them regularly as part of your marketing strategy review process so you can constantly improve your efforts on each channel without having any gaps in data-collection.

Where Can I Track Social Media KPIs?

We recommend using either Google Analytics or Google Search Console. 

Our biggest tip is to choose one social media KPI tracking platform. This ensures that your data is consistent and you can track changes over time.

Types of Social Media KPIs

Let’s take a deep dive into each category.

Reach

Reach is a social media KPI that lets you know how many people you’re “reaching” with your content. 

It's important to know your reach because it tells you how many people are seeing your content. It can help inform which direction to take your content, and it's an important metric for any business or person who wants to connect with others.

This social media KPI has its limitation though. While reach lets you know whether or not your content has been seen, it doesn't tell you anything about engagement with the content. We’ll discuss engagement in the next section.

Engagement

Engagement is a social media KPI that looks at how often your audience interacts with your content and how likely they are to recommend it. 

It's a way of measuring how well you are doing at engaging with your audience, and it goes beyond just measuring clicks by looking at the time someone spends on your site and whether or not they come back for more.

Because engagement has been shown to have a direct correlation with retention rates—the longer someone stays engaged with your product/service, the more likely they are to buy it or continue using it.

Conversions

“Conversions” are visitors who took the action you wanted after viewing your content.

So if you have an e-commerce site, a conversion could mean someone buying an item. If you're running a blog, a conversion could mean someone subscribing.

This social media KPI provides important insight into how effective your content is at driving desired behaviour.

List of Social Media KPIs

Follower count

We've all seen it: the follower count. It's like a badge of honor, a sign to other people that you're worth their time and effort. And it definitely doesn't hurt to have more followers than your competition.

But what if we told you that this social media KPI is actually one of the least important ones?

Sure, seeing your follower count go up is a great feeling. But how many of your followers are engaging with your content? And how many followers are buying from your business?

So while it's great to increase your follower count, don't let that be your only metric for success—after all, quality beats quantity every time!

Impressions

Impressions are the number of times your content was shown to people over a given time period. 

It's a great metric for measuring the reach of your content on both Google and social media.

Measuring impressions can help you understand how many people are seeing your content and if they're engaging with it. This can help you make changes accordingly.

For example, if 70 people saw your content over the span of a week, but only 4 people engaged with it, then you may need to re-evaluate your content and target audience. This is because while your content was seen by 70 people, only 4 were influenced enough to click on it, like, comment, subscribe, etc.

Traffic 

Traffic refers to the number of visitors that come to your website from search engines, social media platforms, or other websites.

The traffic KPI helps you determine which content gets the most visitors and which one doesn’t. You can use this information when planning content strategy or developing new products or services for your business.

Traffic By Source

Traffic by source is a very useful KPI that measures where your audience is coming from. For example, did a specific user across your content through Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn?

This social media KPI can be used to monitor marketing efforts on specific social media platforms. For example, if you just launched a marketing campaign on Instagram, you can monitor how effective it is at directing new visitors to your content. 

Social share of voice

This social media KPI measures the number of times your brand was mentioned on social media compared to how many times your competitor’s brand was mentioned.

Clicks

Clicks measure the number of times someone clicks on your website from the Google search result page. 

To optimize this social media KPI, make sure your title and meta description is intriguing and encourages people to want to read more.

FAQs about Social Media KPIs

How do you measure social media success?

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The key to understanding social media success is figuring out what your KPIs are. 

Think about it: if you don't know what you're trying to accomplish, then how can you actually know whether or not you're succeeding? You need to be able to define what success looks like so that you can see whether or not your efforts are moving towards that goal.

Once you've got some ideas about what success could look like—like increasing sales by 10% or getting 500 new followers on Twitter—you'll need to start evaluating where your efforts are falling short. That's where KPIs come in handy: they let you measure progress towards those goals and show whether or not there's still room for improvement (or if things are working well enough).

How is social media growth measured?

The most important thing to remember about social media growth is that it's not just about getting more followers.

There are many other KPIs you should keep an eye on. For example: how many people clicked on your website from the social media post or the number of people who engaged with your social media post. 

The best way to measure social media growth is by tracking a set of KPIs every month. This will let you see where you need to increase efforts, and where you’re doing well.

An example of this is if you just launched a marketing campaign. After you launch, you can use KPIs to track the effects of the marketing campaign on business growth. This will provide you with solid, consistent data on what works for your business and what doesn’t.

KPI vs Metric

KPI vs Metric is a frequent question that gets asked.

While these terms are often used interchangeably, their uses are slightly different. 

All KPIs are metrics but not all metrics are KPIs.

We understand it can get confusing so we’ve put together a simple KPI vs Metric comparison chart with examples.

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Which social media KPI is most important

The most important social media KPI is engagement.

It's tempting to focus on things like total followers, but those numbers don't mean anything if your audience isn't interacting with your content. Engagement is the best indicator of whether or not your content is resonating with people.

We're Here to Help!

Choquer Creative has helped over 100 companies improve their digital presence and marketing. KPIs are an important part of our strategy. Contact us if you have any questions about KPIs and social media marketing!

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