Marketing & advertising Tips for Plumbing Business That Work

Dear plumbers, you guys are real superheroes! 

How? 

Because you are the one who saves water and brings convenience to mankind. 

You literally keep things flowing…eh! 😊

But like every business needs to be promoted, plumbers too need to do the same. Plumbing business is a well-known vertical, but the world is spoiled by choices and numbers. 

There are simply so many plumbing businesses out there ranging from large & established ones to small & newly started ventures, that your potential customers could choose any one of them instead of you!

Well, welcome to the world of competitive business!

It’s a well-known fact that advertisement forms the face of any business and is a basic requirement. Without proper advertising, chances of your customers coming to know about you and your business are very few, no matter how good you are at it.

In this post, we’re going to help you understand how to market your plumbing business both online and offline with special emphasis on the online mode. 

These plumbing marketing ideas should help you in chalking out some great plumbing marketing strategies for your business.

Online ways to promote & advertise plumbing business:

In the onset of digital mania, not every business was present online or had their footprints over the internet world however, from the year 2000, that model ceased to exist. 

Rather, in the current times every business needs to be present online and more than desire, it has become a necessity. 

By digital, it’s not just owning and running a website but it’s the requirement to be present across all online channels or platforms which people use. The tricky part comes with the ever-evolving scenarios of the social platforms. It’s not just Facebook that you need to master but also Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, Instagram and what not. 

This seems daunting, but the silver-lining is that now you get to tap on your potential user base on multiple platforms.

As a plumber or a plumbing business, if you are petrified by the idea of joining the online mode of doing business, then you need to hear this-

  1. You’re not alone
  2. “Rome was not built in a day” – Remember?
  3. You’re already halfway through this post!

Also, as a heads-up, you don’t need to spend huge dollars promoting your business online or to become a Marketing Ninja yourself.

This post is intended to help you perform all those online activities by yourself. 

Locked and loaded, now let’s fire it up!

Create a Website that can represent you online

It all starts from here. This is an essential building block for making your presence online. Your business website will act as your address and an important point of contact. Without a proper website your business is as good as anonymous!

However, having a website just for the namesake won’t bear the fruits you’re eager to taste. Here are some important pointers for your website:

1. Choose the right Domain Name: 

Choose a domain name which is relevant to what you do or at least people should be able to guess what the site is about. You could have a domain name which is easy to remember and easily clicks on to users’ minds. At the same time, try not to make it very lengthy.

Good Example: www.newyork-plumbers.com

Bad Example: www.hire-best-plumber-in-usa2020.com

2. Url structure should be reader friendly: 

Which of these URLs are easy to remember?

A: ww.facebook.com/myAccount

B: www.plumber.com/ashp7bds3mnHYgshdg

I’m sure your answer is Option A.

In that light, it is really crucial to have easy-to-read URLs for all your pages. Avoid random system generated alphanumeric gibberish names for your pages. 

Customers often lose confidence on the page they’re about to traverse.

3. Get a nice Hosting for fast and secure website: 

Choose your web hosting company wisely. There is no point in saving some bucks at the cost of the hosting quality. After all of the hard work, you wouldn’t want to face issues with server downtime and an offline website. 

With good hosting providers you can stay assured that they can manage your server load well and be always proactive in keeping your website up and running and support you whenever required.

4. Select an appealing theme/design : 

This is the aesthetic part. Although subjective in nature, your website should look lean, simple, user friendly with good design and color combinations. You also must make the page structure of your website very easy to navigate i.e. organized. 

Your users should never get confused with the page structure in your website. Just look at Amazon or Facebook and you’ll get to know what kind of designs they’ve deployed.

Question to you: Did you ever find yourself circling back and forth within a website unable to find some specific content? If ‘no’, then you’re just lucky and if you answered ‘yes’, then you know how stupid it appears and the pain you go through. It’s simply frustrating at times.

5. Start writing about you and everything related about you: 

Well, this is the real meat here. Good content is the quintessential part of any website. Often people are seen to get really annoyed with a site with poor content even if the design was out-of-the-world! 

By good content, I am referring to content which helps the users to understand your services better. Good content should help to ensure that your users get to find what they came here for. 

This means:

  1. Add Images, Videos to make sure your content doesn’t look boring.
  2. Don’t copy. Write fresh and describe yourself in the best possible manner.
  3. By point 2nd, I don’t mean you should write a novel. On the contrary, speak the language your customers speak.
  4. Talk about the problems (pain points) often faced by your competitors.

In short, the only parameters are that your content should be clean, contextual, relevant, resourceful and refreshing. In no way your content can be plagiarized or misleading else your customers would come once and return never. Importantly, your content should be SEO optimized. And that’s our next touch point.

Leverage the power of SEO

Recall your high school days. 

What happens if you don’t respond to your roll call? You’re marked as absent. But you were there present in the class, right?

Something similar happens on Google too. If you don’t showcase your visibility on the first page, you are considered absent (in the eyes of your customers, at least)!

That’s where Search Engine Optimization comes to your rescue!

In the concept of SEO, people search with some keywords or some phrases on Google or Bing (search engines) and some websites (business sites) get listed on the results page. 

The idea of SEO in the context of plumbing company marketing is that whenever people search with some keywords related to your business, your website should get listed on top of all the results right on the first page itself. 

Well, that’s the ideal position to achieve but there is a lot of competition for even the last rank on the first results page.

Now, before you ask, keywords are the terms people use to find businesses like you.

For example, if you offer your services in New York, your keywords can be “Plumbers in New York”, “Plumbing service in New York”, etc.

Back to point, in the SEO world, ranking at the top most position is a challenging task but not impossible. 

Here are some of the benefits of good rankings on Search Engine Result Page:

There are two broad types of SEO viz. On-page SEO and Off-page SEO.

1. On-page SEO for plumber advertising:

Let’s say, you are planning to open a grocery store. What would be your first priority?

For me, it would be to ensure I have products in place, I would hire an attendee who can respond to clients immediately plus many more.

Similarly, when you are planning to jump into the online world, you need to optimize your online store (Website) too.

With on-page or on site SEO, your responsibility is to optimize elements within your website. Here are some of the points you can start with:

2. Off Page SEO for plumber marketing:

This is the part where you start promoting your website via other websites of www. Here you need to optimize the factors which are outside of your website and are externally done.

Here is some off-page activities you can start with:

Start building Backlinks:

Backlinks are like “vote of confidence” from one site to another. Therefore more backlinks imply more recommendations too.

But again, recommendations are worthy only when they come from the right person.

Similarly, your backlinks are valuable only if they are coming from reputed sites or even from not-so-reputed sites, but with relevant content. 

Building links just for the sake of it won’t do any good to you, instead it can risk penalizing your site.

So no matter what you do, prioritize quality over quantity.

Start your own blog: 

As you are in the business for a long time, you are aware of the problems your customers might be facing.

So it’s high time you start writing about it. Blog about your services, your customers problems or anything that can help your customers. This will build an authority for your brand.

Leave comments on top industry blogs:

There are many blogs out there who are already blogging in the same industry. You can start adding valuable comments to these blogs.

Wondering how it may help you? Let me explain!

  1. Many blogs allow readers to mention their website while leaving a comment. Thus you get a backlink.
  2. Whenever somebody will read your comment, you will get a prospect visitor to your website.

But before you plan for it, please note that adding comments like “Great blog, thank you for sharing information” won’t be of any use to you.

Sounds interesting? Here’s the complete guide for you.

Start Guest posting:

Guest posting is the process of publishing an article to some other website. In this process, you will need to create a list of blogs relevant to your business. Make sure to include only those blogs which actually provide some value.

Once you have the list, you can start approaching them with some interesting topic ideas. The catch here is, you can add your website link in such articles. 

Guest posting is one of the most effective techniques of getting high quality backlinks. Know more about the benefits of guest posting here.

Get your hold on Local SEO: 

Since you’re a business operating within a certain geographic area, local SEO makes more sense. You can visit GoogleBusiness portal to register your business along with filling more information about your business such as your contact and address details, photos, reviews and hours of operations etc. 

This is a crucial step as it could help you reach out to customers right within your locality who need your service. The search result below is fetched from the Google business website. 

Wouldn’t you want your business on this page with your address on Google Map?

Noteworthy points with SEO are that:

Along with Google maps, there are many other websites, where you can list down your business. In SEO, this is called Business listing or Citations.

More on this in the later section.

SEM & PPC for plumbing marketing strategies

While SEO is organic and free, SEM or Search Engine Marketing is the paid version of marketing encompassing paid search, Pay-Per-Click (PPC), Display ads, Mobile marketing and Paid social media ads.

You can see the SEM ads on the Google search results page above.

Google AdWords is by far the most commonly used platform to do SEM for businesses. Other popular platforms being Yahoo ads and Bing Ads etc.

To do SEM for your plumbing marketing, once again you start with keyword research (because everything boils down to this) using tools like Google keyword planner and also explore more relevant keywords using Google Trends.

Once you identify and shortlist some of the keywords which are specific to your business and are not too broad, then decide on your geography where you want to show your ads. Targeting is important as you don’t want to pay Google for showing your ads to some other country, right? 

Post that, do yourself a favor by studying other ads involving your keywords, basically, competitive study. Else, how would you create an ad copy in your next step which stands out from the whole bunch of similar ads? 

Now, writing an ad copy for plumbing advertising is also a skilled job. Pro tip for ad writing is to get comfortable with adding humor to ads and to create an ad which cites a specific reason and then the promised solution. These ads are already making the rounds and the good thing is that your eyes won’t get bored of them.

So, that’s it. Go ahead and fix your budget and start bidding on the campaigns and get ready to see some traffic response.

Pitfall here is that unlike SEO, this strategy might also send some traffic which might not give you that dreamy conversion numbers every time, however, you’ll start getting results quicker than SEO. Just an FYI!

Classifieds and business listing sites for plumbing advertising

As a local business, it makes sense to get yourself registered on YellowPages and local business listing sites. This enhances your chance to get listed whenever a user starts searching for services that you provide. Some of the popular business sites where you should register your business are as follows:

Using Social for plumbing marketing

If you want to make it big then you just can’t ignore social media presence. Create an account on popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Instagram etc. and be ready to interact and engage with users. 

Once you’re able to identify the platform with most of your potential clients, start advertising for plumbers using the platform’s own advertising methods. 

Facebook has similar geo-targeting and demographic targeting like Google AdWords for you to fine-tune and optimize your ads. Facebook even allows you to customize your audience targeting based on interests, behavior and connection apart from general demographics as mentioned above.A Facebook report states that about 140 million businesses use the platform and its related apps (Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram). Also, it stated that around 58% of US citizens said that they were interested in a brand only after seeing it on Facebook.

Credit: Statista

The above data by Statista showed an incremental trend of social media marketing usage by US companies from 2013-2019.

Remember not to use such platforms just as an advertising tool rather consider it as a long-term engagement platform with your potential customers. So, share tips, address their concerns, share some videos of some DIY tricks and keep them engaged.

Have you ever come across ads such as below?

That’s right, the before and after pics. You could also share similar before and after pics of your work and share on such platforms. People love visuals. So just cash on it.

Email marketing to advertise plumbing business

Remember sending direct mail at homes? This is the online version wherein your email ends up right in their email inbox. 

Credit: Oberlo

But please note that email marketing can go wrong as well. Your email might end up in a spam folder. They could mark your email as spam as well! So, here are a few pointers to do email marketing in the proper way.

Offline plumbing advertising ideas:

These are traditional methods of advertising a plumbing business, in fact, any business. These methods have been out there for more than a decade and we have all seen those multiple times in our lifetime.

Direct mail

When you start seeing houses in your neighborhood as green dollars waving at you, it’s business on your mind! So how do you wave them back? 

Direct promotional mail. 

Start your plumber advertising with a direct mail campaign in the locality and send relevant promotional mails to all the homes in the block. 

One mail per home exposes your business to all the residents living in it, thus increasing your chance of getting recalled whenever there is a need. 

Just pray that the home-dog doesn’t receive your mail first 😅

Use your vehicles to promote

Old but gold! 

You could use your vehicle to paint your business details like contact information, tagline or slogan along with your business name and what you’re specialized in i.e. your niche. While your vehicle moves, your business would also get advertised wherever you go. 

That’s brand awareness & plumber marketing done right! 

The idea is simple. More they get to see, the more they get to remember and recall. 

However, ensure that you choose the right color combination (even for your business theme), right choice of font-size and family. Just make it easier for people to understand and register in their minds.

Company Logo and tagline

Logo and taglines help people to recall a business. If you don’t have either of these, you should create your company logo which is unique, relevant, self-explanatory, distinct and easy to recall. 

Also, please avoid plagiarizing or modifying someone else’s logo or be ready to face a lawsuit. 

With tools like Canva, you can create a logo within minutes. The best part, the tool is free. 

For the tagline, try to make it catchy and easy to remember while maintaining relevance as well. 

You could make it a little witty, humorous, relevant and crisp. 

Watch out on the tone of the slogan to avoid indirectly belittling any competitor or placing borderline derogatory or condescending stuff. That’s not good for your business identity.

Target residential apartments and offices

You can also send out a printed business brochure and promotional coupons to big apartments and offices in your locality. The coupons could help in attracting potential customers to your business and could also prove to be a long-lasting business relation. 

However, your quality of service would decide the fate of these customers as only offers alone can’t keep the show running for you.

Local press and media

Printing your business ad in a local newspaper or magazine publication can also help you gain the required exposure for your business. Adding your business flyers inside those newspapers is also a method that could work for you. 

You could also introduce offers specific to these channels to measure how much business are these pulling for you. Worth a try!

Radio and Television ads

Good to have however, not everybody can afford to publish their plumbing business ads on these channels. Radios are still fine, and you could experiment at once, but TV ads might quote a price which might not suit your bills. 

Also, I am not sure how many people sit with a pen and paper while tuning into a Radio station just to note down a business number unless it’s rhyming and very easy to remember.

Wrapping it up!

So that was all about how you can market your plumbing business using both offline and online plumbing marketing ideas. Use all these methods as checklists for your business and you should be in a good shape.

However, always try to treat your customers just the way you want to get treated by someone. Bad service experience will defy all your marketing efforts. Give them a taste of real good customer service so that they can share their positive experience with others because word-of-mouth can do wonders as well.

Now if you excuse me I have to search for a plumber for my broken flush! Yeah, irony! Agreed.

Anyway, best of luck for your plumbing business. 😊

Is Guest Posting Done and Dusted? 6 reasons that prove otherwise

  1. What is Guest posting?
  2. What went wrong?
  3. Should we continue guest blogging? 6 reasons which says you should
    1. Brand awareness
    2. Authentic guest post can’t go wrong
    3. Popular blogs fueled by guest posts
    4. Increased web traffic volume
    5. Domain Authority
    6. Backlink

It’s the year 2022. Driverless cars are a thing, coronavirus outbreak has changed the way we work, hyperloops are being worked upon, AI chatbots are in action, omnichannel marketing is compulsory, people are following memes to catch up with world news!

And here you are, in a fix and unsure whether guest posting still works or not?

Also, before reaching this blog, if you’ve read this statement, “So stick a fork in it: guest blogging is done”, then a consoling hug for you! 

guest posting

I am assuming that you’ve already read Matt Cutts’s blog about guest posting being completely dusted. About that, the digital world is already in a lot of chaos and his blog just fueled the fire. Digital marketers, online publishers and content writers started opposing guest posts on their blogs and even deleted older guest posts and completely went berserk after that fearing heavy penalty from Google.

Matt Cutts himself mentioned in his blog that “Guest posting used to be a respectable thing” and I agree to that. Rather, I would also refer to guest posting as the online version of ‘word-of-mouth’. 

But, did you observe the “used to be” from the above statement?

So, is it no more? 

HODOR! 

Before we conclude anything, let’s go through a layman explanation of what guest posting is.

What is Guest posting?

It is a content driven strategy of either writing blogs to be uploaded on somebody else’s website or inviting other bloggers and content writers to write for your website. In both the cases, the blog or the written content is not written by the website owners, hence, guest posts.

It is supposed to be a very organic and authentic way of reaching out to a wider audience who share similar interest in the industry or niche that the original website deals with. 

What went wrong?

Primary factors associated with guest posting that created the turbidity are as follows:

  1. Poor quality (wrong grammar, misspellings, irrelevant content)
  2. Length of content (<700 words, a poor strategy of ‘multiple shallow posts-multiple sites-multiple backlinks’)

google position

A study (ref #16) by backlinko stated that content with a word count around 2000 words are seen to rank higher.

  1. Plagiarized content written by self-proclaimed guest posters (read imposters!)
  2. Links from sites with poor domain authority
  3. Article spinning (create a spinoff of the same post just for placing it in numerous websites to get more and more backlinks)
  4. Posts with heavy keyword stuffing

However, most importantly, we shall be discussing in-depth on ‘backlinking’.

In the initial days, guest posting and guest blogging benefitted numerous websites to achieve their dream ranks in Google search page. Specifically, backlinking gained serious popularity and contributed to higher ranking on the SERP as well.

Backlinking was then a method to direct the readers to another website or another blog which had relevant content of similar nature that the user might like reading about. Linking relevant content that might add value to the users was the honest intent of backlinking. In addition, authors of those content could gain visibility themselves and help other genuine authors to get a piece of the pie as well.

With time, backlinking became one of the prime reasons to rank high in the SERP and this is where people started creating a business outta this. 

Heard about bartering? 

It is as simple as someone asking me to place their content on my blog and in return they want backlinks from my blog to their website. Here, I get new content (which is one of the many requirements for Google ranking) and in return I place a link to that other website on my user’s screen.

Where is the problem then? Well, we are after all humans and we are best at exploiting. Aren’t we?

As if pizza wasn’t enough, now we want pineapple on top of it!

bartering

So, people started trading backlinks and started linking random sites without even scrutinizing those websites in terms of content quality, relevance, context, domain authority etc. 

Do you remember the 7 sins? “Gluttony” is one of those and it states that, ‘too much of nothing is good’.

Businesses were introduced in the name of ‘pay-per-post’ which incentivize people to browse the internet and post content on their behalf to gain more and more backlinks!

In 2012, Google even penalized its Chrome browser for manipulating the pageRank of its own homepage. As a result, the overall pageRank for the Chrome browser homepage was demoted for 60 days and the rank went from 9 to 7 which made it disappear from the first page of the SERP for certain keywords.


In another incident, New York Times conducted an SEO investigation on popular retailing firm J.C.Penney on the grounds of manipulating page ranking by misusing backlinks. As a result, they had to start rigorous cleaning of such links and also had to fire their SEO firm SearchDex.

guest posting

This couldn’t go unnoticed for long and Google introduced their Panda and Penguin algorithms and ranked sites with genuinely good content and slammed sites involved in link farming. Also, it marked the end of pay-per-post.

Should we continue guest blogging? 6 reasons which says you should

guest blogging

Brand awareness

Guest posting has been a very effective and proven method to spread brand awareness for several years. If you believe that TV ads or Radio ads work, then you should also have faith in guest posts as it can help your blog gain the required exposure and publicity. Being able to post even one blog on a website with high domain authority could lead you to a bigger relevant audience.

Authentic guest post can’t go wrong

Ingenuity will always be held at a high position in every industry. Writing original, relevant and valuable content on other websites or placing such posts on your own website will always be a value add for the readers. No matter what Google might have in their algorithmic pipeline, authentic contents would never be attacked.

How do you react to a close friend who is stating his experience with a product he just bought? I would have believed him and might give that product a shot. That’s a ‘word-of-mouth’ way of advocating a product and it still works, provided it comes from an authentic source.

Popular blogs fueled by guest posts

Most of the popular blogs available to us with superior domain authority and web rank are powered by guest posts. For example, Huffington Post, Lifehacker, WikiHow, How Stuff Works etc. 

Such sites maintain a steady flow of fresh and frequent posts by leveraging guest posts which is also necessary for high SEO rankings.

Contributing to such websites is tad difficult as every post must go through multifold screenings and match certain criteria. Genuine guest post is a viable strategy to arrange fresh content for any website. These sites are also known to link contents and redirect users among other websites of the same stature containing similar posts.

A recent Hubspot post stated that companies receive 97% more backlinks to their websites with the help of blogging.

Increased web traffic volume

Another salient feature of guest posts is that it can bring in more visitors to the websites and increase the overall volume of web traffic. This means, more the number of traffic, better is the probability of conversion and obviously a bigger customer base. However, the sole condition remains the same i.e. Zero spam. 

Domain Authority

Quality content even in the form of guest posting can help in increasing your website’s domain authority. It increases your visibility and can make you famous in the vertical/niche that you deal with. 

google position

Having a good domain authority is one of the many factors that Google uses to place any website at a higher rank and here is a study (ref #52) by backlinko which verifies the same.

That’s right. Here we meet again! Did we come full circle? Not exactly. Like we already discussed, getting backlinks to your website is a good thing in terms of SEO provided the links are from a higher domain authority website. Also, providing backlinks from your content to other websites is a good thing in terms of SEO, collaboration and importantly, providing value and quality to your users. While you do so, please ensure that those sites provide genuine, relevant and spam free content whom you’re providing backlinks to. Whatever you do, please don’t buy or sell backlinks, ever!

Key takeaways from here are as follows:

  1. Never spam and do not allow backlinks to irrelevant sites with poor content to be placed within your site.
  2. Try to contribute to higher domain authority sites through guest posting with genuine valuable content
  3. Be specific with your expertise and choose your niche strategically to generate quality content. And if you find someone who claims to be an expert in all fields, simply ignore! You’ve met ‘Jack’, of all trades. So, just avoid it.

Hence, guest posting has benefitted many in the previous years and will continue to benefit genuine people. It's true when Mr. Cutts said that guest posting has gotten too spammy but now I hope you know how you can make it work. 

So, don’t stick a fork in it! At least not today!

How To Use Competitor Analysis To Build Powerful Backlinks

Building backlinks, along with having great on-page SEO can be an extremely powerful tool. But what many people don’t realise is, you can build a robust backlink profile by performing competitor analysis.

Keep reading to find out how valuable this strategy is and how you can implement it yourself.

Building backlinks is about getting someone to link from their site to yours. Each back link to your website works as a vote. The more votes your page has linking to it, the better.
Google will see that you’ve got great content that other people find valuable.

What this means is, the more votes your page has, the higher up the SERPs your site will be.

Powerful Backlink

Google introduced this way back in 1998, with the back link algorithm. When it first rolled out, it was flawed, to say the least. Google tended to side with sites with an extensive back link profile rather than a website that had quality links.

Luckily, Google has slowly rectified this, and now the quality of the link is held over the quantity. This update meant any site with bad backlinks got penalised.

Quantity VS Quality

This resulted in a lot of websites that were in the number one spot to tank.

Building your backlink profile doesn’t have to expensive, nor does it have to be challenging. But, before you think about building links, you first need to understand what makes a good backlink.

For a strong backlink, you need to consider:

But, that’s not the only thing you have to understand, you also need to know how to make the links look natural.

When you have too many links pointing to a page using the same anchor text, it sets Google’s alarm bells off. This factor could end up with your site getting penalised for manipulating links.

To ensure this doesn’t happen to you the best option is to use a mix of:

By understanding and implementing the above, you can start creating your own backlink profile. But this takes a lot of time, so instead of working harder, why not work smarter?

The competitors for your keywords all have something in common, and that’s their backlink profile. And the absolute best way of finding this out is by performing a competitor backlink analysis.

What is Competitor Backlink Analysis?

It involves you taking a close look at all of your competitors’ backlinks for a specific keyword. One thing you can count on is your competitors have spent a lot of time and money developing their backlink profile.

And if you haven’t got deep pockets, it can hard to compete against them. Or at least it can unless you start working smarter.

This means using their own backlink profile to help you beat them in the rankings. To do this, there are several tools to help you steal a backlink profile, which you can check out here.

For us, the best tool is Ahrefs, but people also like tools such as SEMrush.

Ahrefs allows you to enter a competitor’s page and find out which sites are linking to it. It will show you things like the DR of the website and what anchor text they used to link with.

How To Perform Backlink Analysis With Ahrefs?

Below I’m going to guide you through the process I use to perform a backlink analysis. By following the guide below, you’ll know precisely what backlinks your competitors are using, which ones are good, and how to win them for yourself.

Sound good?

Great!

1. List of your competitors

You only need to pick the top five sites that are ranking for the keyword you want to hit. You don’t have to worry about how big or small the site looks compared to yours. We only want to know what links they are using to place in the top spots.

It’s best to use the search console you like to rank with, all consoles have different ranking factors. So, if you want to rank on Google, then use that to find the competitors.

backlink analysis

And collect the top 5 organic URLs.

2. Find Their Backlinks Using Ahrefs

You’ll need to go to the Ahrefs site explorer page and search for your competitor’s page URL that you want to compete with.

backlink using Ahrefs

Once the search is complete, go to the left and click the link called ‘Backlinks’. This page will give you a list of all the in-links pointing to that page.

Now you need to export the list of URLs for each one of your competitors.

3. Analyse The Backlinks

This is the point where things start to get a little bit tricky and can take a bit of time. You need to look through each list and open every URL.

You’ll then need to look through each page and ask yourself a fundamental question:

What did my competitors do to win the link?

This question will give you a great feel of what you need to do to replicate it. I’m not going to lie this is time-consuming and at times feels like you’re hitting your head against the wall. But the results really do speak for themself.

4. Create Outstanding Content

If you’re trying to win a backlink, your content can’t be anything less than outstanding. I mean let’s be honest, you wouldn’t link to a bad page so why should someone else?

You need to make sure that your content offers value to the reader and the person linking to your page. This could be by solving a problem or providing relevant information.

Once the content is completed, you can start pitching the owners of the website.

5. Pitching Your Content

Creating outstanding content isn’t the only thing that needs to be perfect. Chances are the website owner receives hundreds of emails a week, all asking for the same thing.

Bad pitches end up in the trash; it really is that simple. A good pitch, on the other hand, catches their attention and gets them speaking to you.

You only get one chance to pitch your content, so you better make sure you do a good job.

Round-Up

An excellent backlink profile is one of the most critical factors for SEO performance. Before you start building a backlink profile, all of your on-page SEO must be on point. If it’s not, your linking efforts could be wasted.

Remember each backlink to your page acts as a vote of confidence, which Google will take into account when ranking your page. In essence, the more votes a page receives the more trust it gets from Google.

higher rankings

Make sure you understand what makes a good backlink and how to make it look natural. If you don’t, Google could penalise your site for spammy looking Wikipedia backlinks.

Finally, the most effective way of creating a winning backlink profile is by analysing what your competitors are doing.

They’ve already invested a lot of time and money in creating a linking profile that works; all you have to do is copy them.

[Ultimate List] of 130+ SEO Facts that Will Transform your Strategy in 2022

It is 2022, the pandemic still seems far from over, cryptocurrencies are rivaling against fiat, companies are getting comfortable with the work-from-home culture and technological advancements are witnessing greater heights. Amidst all such things happening around us, does investing in at least a decade-old technique like SEO still make sense?

The straightforward answer to an SEO strategy is, YES!

If you’re still being cynical about it, then keep reading. But remember, this post is NOT going to convince you to like SEO!

Rather, we will talk in the lines of DATA, the currency of modern industries. You’ll find a curated list of SEO-related stats and facts backed by data. These SEO stats were the outcome of a rigorous market study by reputed industry researchers. Hence, the primary objective of this post is to help you make a conscious decision regarding your SEO strategy 2022.

B2B SEO statistics

  1. B2B and B2C websites get 51% of the visitors by Organic search. (b2bdigitalmarketers)
  2. 42% of the total B2B buyers search on their mobile devices. (backlinko)
  3. Small businesses spend less than $1000 on SEO whereas more than $20,000 are spent by 45% of the enterprise-level companies. (b2bdigitalmarketers)
  4. 71% of Business to business researchers use google for research. (b2bdigitalmarketers)
  5. Before going to any websites the B2B buyers do 12 different searches. (backlinko)
  6. 62% of B2B marketers take SEO algorithms seriously and this is an important area for them. (contentmarketinginstitute)
b2b seo statistics
  1. Out of total B2B marketers, 61% have said that organic traffic and SEO generates more leads when compared to other marketing initiatives. (inter-growth)
  2. Bounce rate, time on site, website visit, and pages per session are the top ranking factors. (b2bdigitalmarketers)
  3. More than $10,000 is invested by 46% of businesses. (codementor)
  4. Self serve options are needed by 39% of the B2B buyers. (hubspot.com)

Off-page SEO statistics (backlinks)

  1. Out of all the pages available on the internet 66.31% of them have zero backlinks.(terakeet)
  2. Blogging gives companies 97% more backlinks to their sites.(backlinko)
  3. Long content gets over 77% more backlinks than shorter written articles.(terakeet)
  4. 55% of the websites don't get backlinks and that is why 91% of the websites do not attract any organic traffic. (cubeduel)
  5. More backlinks results in high organic traffic and higher search engine ranking.(terakeet)
  6. Google SERP results have 3.8 times more backlinks than the rest. (serpwatch)
  7. Ahrefs tool is used by 70% of digital marketers for link building. (codementor)
  8. The average paid guest post cost is $77.80. (codementor)
  9. The average word count of the articles in the first position is 2,416.(serpwatch)
off-page seo statistics
  1. 63% of the business and marketers outsource link building routines with third parties. (codementor)
  2. It is reported by 34% of marketers that Moz domain has authority of 40 or more than 40. (codementor)

Search Engine, SERP & SEO Statistics

  1. 91.9% shares of the search engine market are owned by Google. (Statcounter)
  2. According to stats of Jan, 2022, 80% of the desktop traffic comes from Google globally. (NetMarketShare)
  3. More than 200 factors are used by google to rank the websites (Backlinko)
  4. Currently google has 86.86% of the total search engine market. (Statista)
  5. 68% of online experience starts from search engines. (terakeet)
  6. First page loading time on Google is 1.65 seconds on an average. (serpwatch)
  7. The Top 10 pages that are ranking on google are 3 or more years old. (Backlinko)
Age of Pages
  1. 65% of the searches don't come from clicks. (terakeet.com)
  2. 53% of the US customers conduct a research before deciding whether to buy a product or not on a search engine. (terakeet.com)
  3. High ranking pages on search engines (SERPs) generate a 36% clickthrough rate. (backlinko)
  4. Improving organic presence and SEO on the website is the top most inbound marketing strategy of 61% of marketers. (HubSpot)
  5. By the year 2025, 75% of the users will only use mobile devices to access the internet. (CNBC)
  6. 810 SERP different and unique features are used by google. (hubspot.com)
  7. Google searches are 58% from mobile devices only. (hitwise)
  8. More than one search is clicked by 21% of searchers. (backlinko)
  9. URLs in the blog posts that have keywords accounts for 45% higher CTR. (onthemap)
  10. Meta descriptions are rewritten by google 62.78% of time. (onthemap)
  11. Questions that are phrased by searches are roughly 8% (backlinko)
  12. More than 60% of the population worldwide have access to the Internet. (getcredo)
  13. 51% of the website traffic are from Organic search where 5% comes from social media, 10% comes from paid search and the rest 34% comes from  other sources. (onlinemarketinggurus)
  14. Online reviews are personal recommendations of 79% of consumers. (inter-growth)
  15. Page that is ranked by google on the first page has an average of 1447 words. (backlinko)
  16. After reposting and updating the old articles organic traffic can grow by 106%. (serpwatch)
  17. Paid ads are ignored by 70-80% of internet users. (serpwatch)
  18. Out of all the searches 15% of the searches are never asked before and unique. (serpwatch)
  19. It is claimed by 65% of digital marketers that link building is challenging part of SEO.(codementor)

Local SEO statistics

  1. 45% of the global shoppers pick up the items from the store after purchasing it online. (terakeet.com)
  2. Store and product searches result in 28% of the purchase. (terakeet.com)
  3. Local information is searched by 46% of the people on google. (serpwatch)
  4. Over 76% of the people who search in their local area visit business in a day and out of that 28% purchase something. (getcredo)
  5. Google maps are used by 86% of users to find local business. (safaridigital)
  6. Near me keywords are searched often and increased 136% by last year. (safaridigital)
  7. Before choosing local services 88% of potential customers look for online reviews. (safaridigital)
  8. Google mobile searches are 30% related to location. (safaridigital)
  9. It is admitted by the companies that 70% of the videos improve brand awareness. (serpwatch)
  10. Small businesses failed to include the H1 tag on their websites 25% of time. (backlinko)
SMB sites
  1. Searches for keywords like where to find/where to buy and where to get have increased by 1.3 times. (getcredo)

Video SEO statistics

  1. Including video as a digital marketing strategy assists in faster revenue growth stated by 49% of the marketers. (terakeet.com)
  2. More than a billion hours are spent on YouTube everyday. (terakeet.com)
  3. Average length of first page videos is 14 minutes and 50 seconds. (backlinko)
  4. YouTube first page resulted in 68.2% of HD videos. (codementor)
  5. For all B2B marketers Video will be the top investment.(hubspot.com)
  6. Second most viewed website is YouTube on the internet. (codementor)
  7. The videos that get new subscribers acquire high rank on the YouTube platform. (klientboost.com)
  8. Out of total video marketers 87% says that video has maximised their traffic for websites. (hubspot.com)
  9. Online videos are considered by 55% of shoppers before shopping in store. (onthemap.com)
  10. Out of many online sources, youtube appears under top 10. (onthemap.com)
  11. Articles and posts that contain videos gain more backlinks and also get 157% boost in search traffic. (klientboost.com)
  12. Some engagement metrics like number of shares, comments, likes and views give higher video ranking. (codementor)

Mobile SEO statistics

  1. For mobile devices the cut off load time is 5 seconds.(safaridigital.com)
  2. Half of the website traffic is generated by mobile devices excluding the tablets. (hubspot.com)
  3. Poorly designed websites are not recommended by 57% of the users.(safaridigital.com)
  4. Search engines are used by 87% of smartphone users. (klientboost.com)
  5. People use Mobile voice searches 3 times more than text searches. (backlinko)
  6. 58% of the google searches come from mobile accounts. (backlinko)
  7. 51% of mobile users discovered various new products and companies by searching on their mobile device. (backlinko)
  8. Organic search results from desktop gets approx 19.3% of the clicks and from mobile devices gets 27.7% of clicks. (terakeet.com)
  9. Before visiting a store users make more than 30% mobile searches. (safaridigital.com)
  10. Organic CTR on desktop is 50% more than that of mobile. (backlinko)
  11. Site that is optimised for mobile search is trusted by 51% of the users. (safaridigital.com)
  12. 205 of the queries are generated by voice searches only. (backlinko)
  13. For driving traffic for shopping sites search engines are 10 times more effective than social media. (safaridigital)
  14. SEO generates more than 1000% of organic traffic than from social media. (terakeet.com)
  15. 85.8% more impressions are gained by mobile search on desktop. (onthemap.com)
  16. 5 to 6 hours are spent by Americans on their phone excluding work related use. (inter-growth)
  17. 62% of the google paid ads are due to Paid clicks. (codementor)
  18. 70.4% of voice search pages are due to HTTPS websites. (backlinko)
  19. Google search results get 1199 facebook shares and 44 tweets on an average. (codementor)
  20. Websites rank good by voice search if they are linked with strong link authority.  (backlinko)
  21. Search is conducted by 87% of users at least once a day on mobile. (codementor)
  22. Featured snippets drive 40.7% of answers which are delivered by voice searches. (codementor)

Keyword SEO Stats

  1. 40,000 keywords are searched every second followed by more than 3.5 billion searches in a day and 1.2 trillion searches in a year. (getcredo)
  2. Over 1.5 billion locations of business are searched by people which is related to keywords that they search on google search engines. (getcredo)
  3. Keywords that are searched on google comprise 16-20% of keywords that are not searched before. (getcredo)
  4. 59.2% of the google traffic comes from organic search. (backlinko)
  5. 200 algorithms are used by google to rank websites. (backlinko)
  6. On average the most of the backlinks of top ranking web pages comes from keywords. (getcredo)
  7. Searching keywords on search engines starts the online session 93% of time. (getcredo)
  8. More than 50% of the marketers say that organic traffic and keyword ranking is important to check the success of SEO strategies. (hubspot.com)
  9. 60.67% of searches are due to 0.16% of popular keywords. (codementor)
  10. Strategic keywords are the best strategy according to 71% of the marketers. (hubspot.com)
  11. Out of 13.5% keywords that consist of less than 10 searches have only one or two words. (codementor)

Content and Blogging SEO strategy

  1. 48% of companies provide blogs that have a content marketing strategy. (hubspot.com)
  2. Blogs are read by 77% of internet users. (ahrefs)
  3. 70% of marketers use and invest in content marketing.(hubspot.com)
  4. 54% decision makers review and read thought-leadership content and spend more than 1 hour on that. (hubspot.com)
  5. More than 53% website visitors don't stay on a website if it takes more than 3s to load. (inter-growth)
  6. Bloggers who post more than 10 images in post generate strong results. (ahrefs)
  7. Out of 1.9 Billion websites there are more than 600 million blogs in the world. (ahrefs)
  8. Organic traffic is increased by 111.3% simply by updating images and content. (codementor)
  9. Blog Posts four hour to write on an average. (ahrefs)
  10. It is said by 48% of website owners that they drop videos and animation to increase load time. (codementor)
  11. According to the past year more than 7 billion blogs were posted on each day. (getcredo)
  12. It is agreed by 57% of SEO experts that marketing and content creation drive best results. (codementor)
  13. 9/10 blog pages are not seen in search traffic. (serpwatch)
  14. Indexation rates are improved by 434% through content creation. (codementor)
  15. The conversion rate of any website falls by approx. 4.42% at every second of load time. (codementor)
  16. Long written headlines in blogs give better results than shorter headlines by 76.7%. (ahrefs). 
Words

Social Media SEO 

  1. For all the marketers facebook is the main content distribution channel. (hubspot.com)
  2.  98.3% of all facebook users use apps on smartphones. (hubspot.com)
  3. To maximise social shares the ideal content length is 1000-2000 words. (ahrefs)
  4. From the last 12 months more than 400 million users have increased on social media. (statusbrew)
  5. Currently Instagram has more than 500+ million active daily users. (hubspot.com)
  6. Social network accounts are used by 6 out of every 10 users. (statusbrew)
  7. Google smart speakers and Alexa are used by more than 47 million people in the US. (codementor)
  8. 10 hours on an average is spent by users on Instagram. (hubspot.com)
  9. Largest B2B display adviser in the US is LinkedIn at 32.3%. (hubspot.com)
  10. Website is the 2nd most used channel by marketers behind social media. (hubspot.com)
  11. 45% of the internet users review and research products on social media. (statusbrew)
  12. Short form videos are considered an effective strategy by 85% of marketers. (statusbrew)
  13. More than half of internet users stop viewing content when they encounter any problem or issue. (ahrefs)

Wikipedia Backlinks: How to make Wiki edits that get 100% approval

This post covers the following points:

“Wikipedia - Where the research begins and ends” 😎. 

Wikipedia! The big daddy for all students, scholars, researchers and also the marketers like us. God knows how I would have cleared my exams, if Wikipedia wasn’t there. Thanks Wikipedia 🙌

Talking about today, most of the search queries we type on Google, contain a Wikipedia link in the SERP. 

wikipedia backlinks
how to build a website

After all, there is a reason it is known as Encyclopedia of Internet.

No wonder, the site gets 20 billion page views per month. Huge 😮

Wait, here are some more numbers to surprise you.

the mighty wikipedia
Source

Since, it is a free encyclopedia of Internet maintained by its readers, anybody can create or edit the content on Wikipedia. Even if you don’t have an account, Wikipedia allows you to contribute from your IP address. 

benefits of building wikipedia backlinks
Although it is advisable to create an Account, you can also contribute privately without one. Your IP address will be logged and publicly visible

SEO Benefits of building Wikipedia Backlinks

Since most of you already know the huge benefits of building Wikipedia links, I am going to keep it short. Afterall, this is not the prime reason you are reading this post 😛

Being Google’s one of the favorite sites (because of the authority it has), Wikipedia has immense benefits from SEO point of view.

Having a wiki backlink means:

These four points are also the ultimate goal of any successful SEO strategy and having a Wikipedia backlink serves all of them. What else do you wish for? 

Note: FYI, Wiki links are nofollow and unless you are living under a rock, Nofollow links too add value to site and when it is from Wikipedia, a single link can bring drastic changes.

Before We Start

Wikipedia is a community for the people by the people. Do not think of it as a link farm. When creating backlinks from Wikipedia, always make sure to Be a giver, add value to whatever you contribute. 

What if a spammy content/ link added by you come through your son working for school project. You wouldn’t like your son to consume wrong information would you?

If you plan to add any irrelevant content for the sake of getting backlink, you must drop the idea. Wikipedia is the place for very high authority content.

If possible, pay Wikipedia back. After all, It’s a site run by donations. Be a humble part of their donation campaigns. Here is the link.

Warming Up your Wikipedia Account

Do you know a Wiki moderator or user has the authority to check the entire history/contributions of any other user?

Yes, they do. And if they find only bad edits, false claims and promotional links, further edits made from that account are never likely to get approved. 

That’s where this process of warming up your account steps in. The hack here is to offer value to the community first. Just like we do on Quora (or any other online community site), contribution comes before promotion. Wikipedia is no different.

It is all about Giving back to the community. 

Wiki moderators always welcome insightful content and citations that helps to grow the community. 

Hence once you have created an account on Wikipedia, don’t jump upon promoting your blog or webpage directly. Instead focus upon building authority first and that will happen only by posting valuable content without expecting anything back. 

Wondering how? Let me share how you can warm up your Wikipedia account:

Warming up your account this way gives it a good authority in the eyes of moderators. Populate your account with such edits before trying to add your promotional link. 

Here is a quick history of my account. 

Back to the community

Once your account is warmed up and you are all set to put your first attempt to get a wiki backlink, let’s jump to the real meat. 

There are three ways to acquire a backlink from Wikipedia:

  1. By identifying broken link opportunities
  2. By locating missing citations
  3. By enhancing the existing content

Let’s go through all of these processes one by one.

Just like any other website on the internet, Wikipedia too contains a lot of pages with broken links.Wondering what’s in there for you? Well, a great opportunity to replace this broken link with yours. Here’s how!

You would be surprised to know but Wiki moderators have made an archive for the Wikipedia pages having dead links inside. Isn’t it great? All you have to do is to check them one by one and see where your link suits best. Sounds easy, right? 

wiki pages with broken links

However, as opposed to being handy, it is rather a time consuming task to manually sift through all the pages in the find of a suitable one for you.

But, don’t worry, Google holds your hand here with its advanced search options. Let’s have a look, how Google does it.

There are some common footprints to be used with Google advanced search queries that help you with finding a Wikipedia page which is in need of editing. Some of these are: 

Type a Google search query in the following format and Google will fetch you a list of Wikipedia pages that need backlinks.

For example, here I have used the following search query for this post.

site:Wikipedia.org “marketing” “deadlink”
wikipedia.org

With an extensive list before you, the next step for you to do is to find the most relevant page that you can add your link to. 

For me, this page of “Negative Campaigning”  (highlighted in Blue) is a great opportunity for my edits. You are most likely to find deadlinks in the references below the main content. Just like I did! (Highlighted in Blue)

negative campaigning

When you find the one that looks fit, move ahead with the further process.

Since I am not a big fan of using tools here, I am not adding any. For me, tools tell only half of the story and I believe in complete execution. However, if you want, you can try WikiGrabber for the purpose.

The next step is to check the history of dead link. Because, without checking what the links was about, you can’t be sure of your relevancy, right?

Wayback Machine can help you with this. Use the Wayback Machine to extract the original content.

Simply type the dead URL into the Wayback machine to track its history. This is what I got when I checked for my dead link here.

cnnpolitics.com

Similarly, you too need to check the dead link for what it used to contain before it went dead. This is essential to get a clear idea of what information you should include in order to get a fast approval from moderators. It works as an overview for you.

Step 3: Recreate a valuable content on your site for that 404 page

Don’t write a content just for the sake of getting a backlink. I understand that no matter how much we deny, that’s our end goal but if you ignore quality, this link won’t stick around for long.

You need to make sure your link is backed by high quality content that aligns with your blog voice and theme. Be relevant and follow all the aspects that Wiki moderators are expecting from a content. Here’s how you can do that:

Be a giver:

As I have mentioned before, Wikipedia is a community by people, for people. If your sole purpose is to get a backlink, it won’t work out. Wikipedia is known for providing value, be a part of it. Do a value addition first and you will notice that getting a backlink isn’t that difficult.

Quality is never optional:

As they say, if your attention to quality is overlooked, things will soon start falling apart. Wikipedia is no different. Here’s how you can ensure quality:

Back it up with extensive research:

Wikipedia is known for having well researched content. To that end, if your plan is to add any fluff over there, I suggest you drop the idea. Here’s how you can present your content as the authoritative one: 

Step 4: Getting Wikipedia editing done:

The last and the final step is to edit the wiki page. I am doing it with my registered account here(you can pick any option here, the process remains same).

Notable examples
Negative campaigning

Since I am much more comfortable with visual editing, I prefer visual one. You can prefer whichever format you are comfortable with.

Next, you need to go to your desired text and click on the link you want to edit. 

This will open up the editing window, similar to this one.

Reference

Before saving the edits, Wikipedia asks for your description for the links you’ve made. You don’t get much space here, so be as clear and as direct as possible. This is where you can explain editors why the change is necessary.

Now leave everything to Wiki moderators. They take 24 to 48 hours to review your changes and approve them. Usually your edits get live right away and are moderated later on.  

Keep an eye on the pages for a few days and celebrate, if you find your edits there 🙂

After all, you achieved a milestone here.

Method 2. Locating missing citations

Another way you can get links from Wikipedia is by finding the “Relevant”Wikipedia pages that are in dire need of backlinks(read citations). 

Let’s see how.

Explore Wikipedia “all-articles-to-be-expanded” category:

Wiki moderators have made a separate archive which currently has 133,324 articles that needs expansion.  If we put it in another way, moderators want their readers to be a part of Wikipedia, contribute quality content and expand the knowledge shared on that topic.

Visit this link and you will find a list of contents that are further classified according to months. Take advantage of this huge data and be a part of an endless editing.  

all articles to be expanded

Once you have finalized a few pages that are in need of missing citations, follow the same process as mentioned above. To summarize,

  1. Create high quality content.
  2. Be a value giver( can’t say this enough)
  3. Get the wiki editing done.

Method 3. Enhancing the existing content

You are not the only one looking for wiki backlinks out there (These are SEOs who keep looking for such links day and night!) and therefore there are high chances that you are not able to find any dead links or missing citations. 

So should you leave the idea? Absolutely not!

No article is perfect. If you can find a Wiki page and add relevant content to it, it can also work as a great way to get you Wiki backlinks. Let’s get into the details to provide you a better idea.

Once you have a page and the content skeleton, go ahead and follow the previously Steps mentioned in “Method 1” above.

The best part about this approach is that you have more opportunities to get backlinks. All you have to do is to think about how you can enhance value in existing content and add value.

Take advantage of Regional subcommunities of Wikipedia 

how i get wikipedia links in minutes

Apart from serving unlimited information in your preferred language, these regional subcommunities of Wikipedia can also play a good role in enhancing your Wikipedia link building efforts.

Think of it this way.

Let’s say I search for a term “Backlinks” at en.Wikipedia.org. You are sure to find a full length description about Backlinks here. 

backlink

Now, just check the same term in your preferred language. I am searching “Backlinks” on https://pt.Wikipedia.org/ and this is what I found.

backlinks

See the difference, while the English Wiki page for Backlinks is already optimized, the portuguese page? Not so much!

Same goes with https://it.Wikipedia.org/ too!

Backlinks

While it’s quite challenging to edit the English Wiki Page of “Backlinks”, the “Portuguese” and “Italian” gives a lot of opportunities to not only add valuable content but also one can add enough resources here. 

Communities on Wikipedia maximise your scope of building wiki links. And I am sure you are less likely to find your competitors here. So why not take advantage of it, right?

What doesn’t work on Wikipedia?

Now that you are all set to put your first foot forward, let’s go through a few things that don’t work on Wikipedia:

Link building is tricky and time consuming. And when you talk about Wiki backlinks, the process requires effort and the right approach. Sometimes, we don’t have the right resources for the same and in such cases, getting expert help is actually a wise idea.

Wrapping it up!

Kudos, you are all set to build a Wiki backlink now. Though, it might be hard work initially, Wikipedia pays it off at the end. If you still have some doubts or queries, connect with us through comments. We are more than happy to be a helping hand.

How to Increase Traffic with NoFollow Backlinks? Tips Inside!

Earlier If someone had asked me to draft a thousand-word article on this topic, one could easily guess my reaction. 

nofollow backlinks

 

First, Who’d waste an effort to build them? 

And Second, Who’d write an article on this?

Yes, this would be my reaction back then 😛

But, here I am not only building links that we call no-follow but also writing about this unconventional, out-of-the league topic. 

Over time, we have been hearing a lot of debates around this topic “Which is better: DoFollow or NoFollow?” and no wonder most of them are overstating the value of Do-follow back-links in one way or another.

But is there any site who is ranking really well on the SERP with the help of do-follow back-links only? Well, I am afraid, you can not recall a single website here. 

However, having spent a good time in this ever-changing niche of SEO, I got this one thing very clear that links are links no matter do-follow or no-follow unless quality is not compromised. 

Links establish your presence on the internet.

So, I repeat my question. Are No-follow links really important?

During one of my all-time favorite meet-ups with SEO friends, I raised this never-ending debate again. However, this time the debate had some clear motives and some clear conclusions as well. And I am more than happy to discuss them over here. 

The main points of our debate were:

 Before moving forward, check out this ultimate guide to do blog comments here.

Now, let’s not beat the bush around and come straight to the point of our overall discussion.

First, comes first- 

What are Nofollow Backlinks?

In simpler terms, No-follow links give instruction to search engines to disregard the link so that it doesn’t pass any “link juice” to its targeted hyperlink.

Google’s official saying on No-follow links is: In General, We Don’t Follow Them. 

nofollow backlinks help SEO

However, an average user can not identify the difference between them.

Let’s try it:

I went to London Eye yesterday.

I went to London Eye Yesterday.

Can you tell me which one is no-follow and which is follow link here?

Yes, both look identical here and the difference is apparent only when one digs into their HTML code. The difference lies in the <rel> tag of HTML only.

This is how a no-follow link looks like:

londoneye

And a follow link:

london eye

Some even say that a No-follow link doesn’t even influence the search engine rankings of its destination URL. Does this mean they are not worthy to make?

Well, This gives me my second sub-heading here.

Yes, they certainly do. I mean if that isn’t the case, why am I writing this blog. Right 😉

Ahrefs made this helpful study for all of us showing a correlation between Google rankings and various back link attributes.

This is a summary of what they found:

rankings correlate with backlink metrics
Souce

When you look closely, you’ll find that the correlation for the number of “do follow” backlinks is a little less than the total number of backlinks. This means Google values some no-follow links as well. 

Tim, the CMO of Ahrefs also said,

tim soulo

Hence, In order to get the most out of your link building efforts, you need to maintain a healthy ratio of no-follow and do-follow links. 

No-follow backlinks do have a potential secondary value that only they can bring to any SEO campaign. Like:

Now let’s come to the main point of the article.

Enough of facts and theories, let’s move to the execution part. 

Yes, in this section of the post, I’ll let you know some techniques and some sites that will give you a no-follow back link in return of your efforts. 

Let’s dig in the details.

Social Media Sharing:

You post a blog on your site and then what?

Sharing it on a social media platform is probably the second step most of us generally perform. That’s the reason we have optimized Og Tags with our blog posts.

But do you know these high traffic generator websites give you a no-follow link in return?

Yes! Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube,  they all give you an NF Back link. But don’t forget they are generally the biggest sources of your referral traffic. 

Blog Commenting:

The most powerful yet the most underrated link building technique of SEO is Blog commenting. 

Why?

Just because it gives a no-follow link back in return, people think they add no value to their SEO campaigns. But as I have mentioned already in my previous blog, When done right, Blog commenting service can do wonders for your online identity. It is one of the best and easiest techniques to build no-follow backlinks.

I mean if it is not that useful, why big bloggers have all these comments on their blogs?

blog commenting

High-Quality Article Submission:

Article submission is one off-page SEO technique that every small or big SEO expert makes use of. 

However, most of the free article submission sites leverage you with Do-follow backlinks but there are some sites that don’t, yet we love to contribute on such sites, again and again, Thanks to the high authority they bring along with them.

Here are some sites where you can get a no-follow link back.

WebsiteDAPAFree/Paid
https://ezinearticles.com8772Free
https://medium.com 9579Free
https://www.buzzfeed.com9377Free
https://www.selfgrowth.com6563Free
https://www.sooperarticles.com5358Free
https://go2article.com3242Free
https://www.articlization.com2830Free
http://www.articleswrap.com3148Free

Forum Posting and Q&A Sites:

Forum posting and Q&A are one of the oldest SEO techniques where people get a chance to be a part of an online community to discuss their issues with real people. In short, here you tell people that you’re good in a certain niche( which the forum or a particular thread is about in the first place) and build trust and reputation for yourself.

When done correctly, these SEO techniques can:

Since anyone can register and post an answer to a thread, these Forums generally provide a no-follow link back.

Some high quality Forum posting sites for SEO

WebsiteDAPA
http://community.sitepoint.com 8655
https://forums.digitalpoint.com 7563
https://forums.majorgeeks.com8453
http://forum.siteground.com 8559
https://forums.guru3d.com8253

Quora:

Launched in 2009, Quora today has 300 million active monthly users on its site, and I would wonder if you are not a part of this huge community. 

No matter what industry you belong to, Quora is the best platform for all. It can be viewed as a “social” network that helps you to get high-quality traffic, boosts your authority and gives you more understanding about your audience. So if you haven’t started using Quora, now is the time.

Just look at the number of views this answer has 😲

quora

Reddit:

Reddit is another online discussion site with a massive number of the user base. By creating an account on Reddit you are putting your foot forward into the community of 330 million active monthly users and the numbers are growing. Hence, you can see “the front page of the Internet” can give you a lot of exposure if the content is newsworthy here. However, do not accept a do-follow backlink from here.

In exchange for an NF link back, they give you huge brand exposure and targeted traffic for your business.

Content Distribution: 

Through content distribution, people share and spread their valued content to their audiences and beyond. Some people confuse this term with social bookmarking, but these content distribution sites are way better than those old school bookmarking.

Although many SEO experts don’t entertain this technique very much, I personally like to do it because of the number of views I get in return.

Below are some content distribution platforms, I have in my hit list of getting high-quality no-follow backlinks.

WebsiteDAPA
https://www.scoop.it/ 9274
https://flipboard.com9169
https://mix.com/8256
https://triberr.com/ 5256

Citation Submissions:

The importance of business citations doesn’t need an explanation since they are Mandatory.  

Local business citations play a very crucial part in deciding your SERP positions by building a good link profile for your business. While most of the citation sites provide do-follow link backs, some sites are there providing no-follow in return. Well, this doesn’t mean we should not build a link on them.

URLDAPA
https://www.yelp.com9483
https://www.f6s.com7259
https://www.showmelocal.com/ 5157
https://ezlocal.com/ 5355
https://www.cylex.us.com 5147
https://www.merchantcircle.com/ 7365
Also Read our blog for free local business listing sites for USA.

Although No-Follow backlinks don’t give your ranks an immediate bump, they surely do improve your visibility and traffic which is the ultimate goal of marketing- Driving people to your website. 

So now, It’s your turn!

Build a natural link profile for your website and boost overall authority metrics by building No-Follow backlinks.

List Your Business For Free! Best Citation Sites Of Canada (2019)

Update: If you are looking for business listing sites in the USA, check out this article: Free Local Business Listing (USA)

In my previous article, I listed the best citation sites in the USA and I am glad I did. I got a good response from our marketer community and businesses. I think that the article surely has helped them to enlist their businesses!

Now, as I can see things rolling ahead, I would like to speak about the best citation sites in Canada. I hope this pays off well too.

“What is Citation?”

The citation is a process or you can say it is a mention of your business along with some details like your address, contact details, websites, etc. so that people can easily find you on the internet when they are searching for similar services and products that you are offering. Local Citation also known as business listing not only helps your business to reach out to people but also boosts up search engine ranking of your business website. But one should always keep in mind that the websites that are choosing being chosen for citation must be of high-quality.

Benefits of Citation:

Ingredients Needed For Citation:

After long research and practical implementation, I am happy to list down some of the best local citation sites of 2019 that I found helpful in improving search engine rankings, generating leads and making more profit. Here is the list:

1. CanadaOne: http://www.canadaone.com/

CanadaOne is one of the most trusted B2B websites for news, latest updates, trends, and support for Canadian Business today. You can submit your business for free. For better results, you can also list your business by just paying 47$ for a year. You can easily list your business after choosing your plan, filling up all the required details and verifying the confirmation email that is sent by CanadaOne to your business email. Customers can easily find your business by searching your business name on the search option.

2. Salesspider: http://www.salespider.com/

This is an online business listing website for store locations. It is one of the most famous online directories. The websites receive a good amount of customer traffic, thus improves the probability of getting more clicks.

Adding business to Salespider is very easy,  just go through the link mentioned above and you will see an option of free sign-up on the very right top corner of the screen.  After sign-up, click on the verification email sent by Salespider and log in again to add your business to one of the most searchable lists.

3. Discovercloud: https://www.discovercloud.com/

Discovercloud is an easy to discover free business citation website. If your business is listed on this website then the customer can easily find you only by searching your business name in the search section.

You can add your business after signing-up on the website. After verifying your email, log in again to the website and select the “Advertise with us” column. You will find an option of starting now, click on it and fill all the details that are necessary for a business listing.

Once you complete the form, click the submit button and wait for the confirmation that would be sent by the Discovercloud team after verification.

4. Showmelocal: http://ca.showmelocal.com/

It is an excellent local business listing site for Canada. If you wish to post any job, add your business or want to offer some deals then it is one of the best websites for you.

After clicking on “New business signup”, you can create your account for further login and submit your business to the list of business directories. You will receive an activation link on your registered email. After clicking on that particular link you can activate your business on Showmelocal’s directory.

5. Akama: http://www.akama.com/

AKama is a business directory website where you can add your company profile, along with the products,  and get customers reviews from all over the globe. You can add your business to the list without paying a single dollar. Akama gets great amount of traffic, thus there is a high chance of getting more attention. This results in more leads and sales.

You can add your business by registering yourself to the website first and then by selecting the option of “Add Company”, you can fill the details of your business. At last, you will get an activation link on your registered email for activating your listing.

6. Brownbook: http://www.brownbook.net/

Brownbook is a free global business listing website. You can add your business, review other businesses and also update them. You can list your business, and enrich your listing by adding photos, videos, reviews and you also get alert whenever someone reviews your business.

It is trusted by InfoUSA, Acxiom, Uberall and much more. You need to sign up first and then register your business by selecting the “Add Your Business” section.

7. MisterWhat: http://ca.misterwhat.com/

MisterWhat is also a free business listing site where one can add companies, shops, services, and businesses. By listing your business locally, it will improve your online presence. It helps in generating high-quality leads and making new customers.

To list your business with MisterWhat, select “sign up” option and then fill the required details. Once you have registered your business with MisterWhat, wait for the confirmation email.

8. Cylex: http://www.cylex.ca/  

It is an online business directory that is presented in more than 35 countries. You can add your business and your customers can make a review and write quotes.

9. Foundlocally: http://foundlocally.com/  

It covers more than 30 Canadian Communities including events, calendars, professional services, and other businesses. Customers can easily find your business here thanks to the classification it provides.

You just need to go to “Add a Free Listing” and select your specific region where your business is actually situated. After submitting the form, click the confirmation mail that is sent by the FoundLocally team to activate your business campaign.

10. Fyple: http://www.fyple.ca/

With more than 1 million companies registered, Fyple is one of the biggest business listing websites in Canada. You can simply add your business to the directory and be ready to get a number of leads.

11. Hotfrog: http://www.hotfrog.ca/

Hotfrog is a multinational business directory. It is present in 38 countries and serving more than 69 million businesses to reach out to their potential customers across the globe.  Over 50 businesses are added daily on Hotfrog.

12. Myhuckleberry: http://www.myhuckleberry.com/

Myhuckleberry is a great online destination to get information about any company and service globally. It helps customers to find out the best local businesses by using its powerful search algorithms. Therefore, adding your business to Myhuckleberry is very beneficial for you to reach out to more customers.

13. n49: https://www.n49.com/

It is also a free business listing website. After submitting your website to the business directory of n49, you have to wait for some days. Your submission is first reviewed by the n49 team then after they list your business in their directory.

14. OurBis: http://www.ourbis.ca/en

It is a business directory that helps your businesses to be found locally.

15. Profile Canada: http://www.profilecanada.com/

It is an all in one business directory that helps your business to grow. It improves businesses ranking on search engines. It connects millions of customers to local businesses every month.

16. YelloYello:

YelloYello is another important business directory that helps your customers to find your business easily. By just typing your business name on the search section, they can reach out to you. The traffic on the website is very high, which also improves your business’s online presence.

17.  KnowEm: http://knowem.com/

KnowEm is an interesting business listing directory. By allowing users to check about your business name, contact details, brand etc. on more than 500 popular social media websites.

18. SmallBizPages:

It is a free business listing website for Canada. It will help your business to reach out to more people locally. You can also post ads, classifieds, event listings and also press releases.

19. YellowBot: http://www.yellowbot.com/

YellowBot is an interesting business web directory that manages your web presence by improving business reach. It helps to attract customers and users from professional business websites. It also interacts and monitors customers on social media networks.

20. 2findlocal: http://www.2findlocal.com/

It is a great business listing website. You can also post free ads on this. Divided into many categories, it helps customers to locate your business very easily.

21. Opendi: https://www.opendi.ca

931.413 listings, 18.952 Businesses with detailed information and around 1829 reviews. You surely wouldn’t want to miss this website when listing down your Canadian website. Citation to this listing website is absolutely free and quick.

23. Canadian Planet: https://www.canadianplanet.net

Canadian planet is an important platform where one can post free ads, websites, blogs, and businesses at free of cost. You can easily find “Post a free ad” button at the extreme top of the right corner. Click on the button and fills the required details along with the email address. Once you are done with the form, you will receive an activation link on your registered email address.

24. Local Store: https://www.localstore.ca/

Local store is an effective business listing platform that helps customers to connect with retailers and businesses. To expose your business on Localstore, all you need to is create an account with full information about it. Click on the “Add My Listing” button and provide the necessary details with the most suitable category.

So, this is the list of best citation sites that helped me to improve my business’s online presence, reach out to more customers and make more profit. At last, I need some help from your side. Here is a short list of things on which I love your input on:

So why wait? Gather your business details and start building high quality citation links for your Canada based businesses.

An Ultimate Guide To Blog Commenting For SEO

I believe blog commenting is one of the most underrated link building techniques available in SEO. Trust me, if done right, blog commenting for SEO can do wonders to any site irrespective of the niche. In this guide, I will explain step by step process to do blog commenting and making sure your comments get noticed by the blogger.

Why so many bloggers hate blog commenting?

I see many bloggers frowning their eyes when I talk about using blog commenting for backlinks. 

There is a long history of blog comments being SPAMMED. I have seen bloggers struggling with something like 30K pending comments on their blog (most of them were automated). 

Not necessary to mention but many SEOs use automated link building tools to get comments in bulk!


This is what bloggers deal with!

Look at these blog comments we receive on our blog almost daily. Are they relevant at all?

Many bloggers disabled comments or completely stopped auto-approval. Also, many of the SEOs stopped doing commenting terming it a SPAM activity, which it is not!

Well, this article will break a lot of myths on how to do blog commenting for SEO to get the ranks your website deserves.

But first, what is blog commenting?

The word blog commenting is derived from two words “Blog” + “Commenting”. It is a way to express your opinion/observation in a written form on the blogs you read.

Let’s say you read a blog post about “Outreach techniques”. And, in the blog, you may or may not agree with some content written in it. You can then express your thoughts in the comments option below.

Another great example of commenting is YouTube videos. Out of billions of videos on YouTube, almost 50% of them have comments. If you have watched any popular YouTube video, there are high chances you have gone through comments section as well.

Commenting, whether it is on a blog, a video platform or a Q&A site like Quora are a great medium to state your opinion. 

But, there is a lot more than expressing your opinion when it comes to blog commenting. Let’s see how they can help businesses to get more sales.

Why SEOs hesitate in doing blog commenting:

A lot of SEOs ignore blog commenting mainly because of 3 reasons.

1. No-follow links

Nofollow links, the most underrated thing by SEO guys out there! But what if I tell you, guys at Teknicks were able to increase one of their client’s traffic by 288% within one and a half year with the help of 89% Nofollow backlinks? Don’t believe me? Check out the case-study yourself! 

Regardless of what you think, I can kind of assure you that Nofollow Links work. 

Off Page SEO is all about keeping a balance. Here are some of the tips I keep hearing

But when it comes to dofollow backlinks, we often ignore our own advice!

Don't you think it would be fishy if a site has only dofollow backlinks in its profile? 

You can test this yourself too! Just choose a few keywords and analyse the backlink profile of top ranking urls for those keywords. I am sure you will find around 25-40% nofollow links.

Also, Rand from moz clearly stated in this article that Nofollow links not only help in link profile, they also help in ranking! Do check this study from semrush as well.

Nofollow links are a very important part of any off page campaign and blog commenting is the best way to acquire them.

Update: [Many of you suggested to add a list of techniques which can help in gaining NF backlinks, we are in the process of creating a piece of content regarding that soon]

2. It is hard to find blogs to leave comments.

Well, this one I can relate to.

With so-called SEO guys out there spamming almost each and every blog, many of the blog owners have completely disabled the commenting option.

And therefore, many of us find it very hard to find relevant blogs which are active as well. Don’t worry, I have added a complete section on how you can easily find blogs in no time.

3. They get very less approval rate.


Let's say you found a blog on which you want to comment. You went through the content and wrote a well crafted comment and wait for it to get approved. Then starts a long wait to get the comment approved.

But despite of writing a great comment, there are chances your comment might not get approved. 

That’s the story of our lives! Literally!

Putting effort into writing a comment and then waiting forever to get it approved, is really frustrating. 

Rest assured, in this article I will be sharing with you some easy hacks to get the work done. I will explain how can you check in advance to ensure your comments gets approved before even reading the blog. This way, you can make sure your efforts don’t go in to vain 😀

But why they should Do it?

It is obvious to wonder if blog commenting link building techniques is even worth it? With so many challenges and less approval rate, it seems normal for people to avoid this precious technique.

Well, let’s discuss some real benefits a blog commenting service can bring along:

Balances Your Backlink Profile

As mentioned previously, the right SEO approach is all about making your efforts look natural. Having only dofollow backlinks makes search engines suspicious, and you surely don’t want that.

Having a balanced amount of Nofollow backlinks is essential for a healthy SEO strategy. 

Drives Referral Traffic

While some of us may try it for building links, blog commenting can be a great traffic source too. A lot of readers go through comments in order to consume opinions and extra nuggets of information. 

If your comment adds value to the blog and is worth a read, chances are you might get targeted referral traffic from that blog. Such referral traffic is highly valuable and adds up to sales most of the time. So blog commenting for traffic can also be done. 

Connects you with like-minded people

Similar to social media, commenting on blogs also help you meet like minded people. We have connected with a lot of fellow bloggers by commenting on their blog posts. If you want to expose yourself and your business to leaders in your segment, COMMENT 😀 

Now that you are pretty much convinced on the effectiveness of this link building technique, let’s provide you some hacks on how to do it right. 

Finding Blog commenting sites that approve comments:

Finding sites that approve blog comments might seem complicated but trust me it’s not. 

There are 3 ways to find relevant blogs.

Make use of common blog commenting footprints

There are custom queries which you can use to fetch a list of blogs commenting sites. Below is the list of popular blog commenting footprints.

Use Ahrefs to find blogs for commenting in no time

This is an amazing hack. For this technique to work, all that you need is a backlink checker tool. In this article, I am using Ahrefs.

Find top 10-15 or more competitors in your Industry. Enter their domain into Ahrefs dashboard and click on “Backlinks”. Let’s try it for https://www.viralchilly.com/

Now click on “Link type” button, and select “Nofollow” backlinks.

Now you have the list of nofollow backlinks that your competitors have got. All that you need to do is to replicate these backlinks and you are good to go!

Bonus tip: Sort the backlinks based on “DR (Domain Rating). You don’t want to replicate low quality backlinks, do you?

I have personally tried this hack and trust me, the results have been more than amazing. You already know that these sites are approving comments, thereby ensuring your efforts don’t go into vain.

Subscribe to RSS feed of the top Industry blogs:

There are some popular blogs where a lot of readers leave their comments. Such blog posts have 100s of live comments. This makes them a perfect site for blog commenting. 

But TBH, even if your comment is live, will it bring any value? It will be lost in a sea of other ones and nobody will even read it. 

Here is what you need to do in order to work it out:

  1. Make a list of popular blogs in your niche. Let’s say, I am looking for Digital marketing blogs for a company that provides SEO services. To find such blogs I will lookout for https://blog.feedspot.com/seo_blogs/ to make a list of such bloggers.
  2. Once you have the list, ensure that the all blogs in list are actively accepting comments. You can also weed out low DA or low traffic sites depending on your goals.
  3. Subscribe to feeds of the blogs activate notifications. I use this great Chrome extension for feeds.
  4. Once you are subscribed, you will get a notification whenever a new post is published on these blogs.  
  5. Now you have a fresh blog post from an active blogger with 0 live comments on it. 
  6. Go ahead and be the first to leave a valuable comment. Since Top comments tend to get most attention and traffic, you will get referral traffic plus link value in a one shot. WIN WIN!

Sure shot way to make sure the blogger approves the comment.

We can actually predict whether the comment will be live 😉

You may laugh on this, but actually it is true. I will tell you how.

These are the number of checks you need in order to predict approvals. I am assuming you already have a list of blog posts you want to comment on.

How to write great blog comments?

Just like other link building techniques, blog commenting for SEO also requires you to put efforts. Comments like these don’t work anymore! They have zero chances of getting approved.

And if a blog approves comments like these, it is not your ideal blog so leave that site and move on to the next one!

Let’s find out what makes a comment “Great”! A comment that is compelling enough definitely grabs attention of the editor and thus has higher chances of getting approved.

Here are some ingredients that make a comment “great”!

1. They have Gravatar associated with it:

Be it guest posting or blog commenting, the idea is to be as humanly as possible. Comments that have no profile picture give idea of a spammer.

To avoid that, make sure to add Gravatar to the mail id you are using to make the comment. Comments like these have more chances of getting approved as they imply a real person.

2. What is in the name?

As I said previously, the idea is to look as genuine as possible. Leaving comments with the names like Jennifer Aniston or Paul Wesley won’t work. Because of course, Jennifer Aniston won’t be commenting on an SEO blog 😛. So pick real names.

Additionally, make sure that your image and name is aligned. You can’t use an Indian name with the image of a American guy or vice versa. I have heard many people say, what’s in a name?

I would say, a lot!! Specially when you are doing blog commenting.

3. Be a giver, offer value!

Now this one seems obvious, but you would be surprised to know how rarely people follow this advice. The first step is to actually read the article. 

I am not asking you to read the article word for word, but having a thorough read on the headings and introduction will help you get the gist and thus your comment will have more weightage. 

Another thing that you need to ensure is to not being pushy. Your goal is to build a brand, so leaving comments that are nothing but a way to get backlinks can actually hurt your business. Don’t leave a comment that completely misses the main point of the article and therefore giving the article a thorough read is a must.

Some blog comments examples that are amazing

Now that you know what makes a great comment, let’s analyze some great comments that are really worth reading.

1. Check out this comment by Ana Hoffman, the founder of Traffic Generation Café.

Why this comment is great:

2. Another amazing blog comment by Sanjay Shanoy, a popular digital marketer.

Here’s what I liked about this comment:

3. Comment by Tanishq Jain from HellBoundGamers

 

Things that make this comment good:

Blog commenting tools that can save your day

This one is really an important part of our guide to blog commenting for SEO.

Blog authority checker

You don’t want to comment on any random blog. To check whether the blog you’re posing comment to is actually worth it, you need to check the blog metrics like DA, PA, Traffic, etc. Having a tool like Ahrefs, SEMRush or Moz will ensure your efforts are going in the right direction.

Posting comments is one thing but checking it daily to see if your comment has been approved is a real headache. There are many blog commenting tools in the market which can do regular checks to see if your comments are live thus saving you huge time.

Competitor analysis tool

If you are planning to implement the hack provided by me in competitor analysis, you will need a tool that can check the backlinks of your competitors. I have been using Ahrefs for this.

How our blog commenting service can help?

The key while doing blog commenting is to become a giver, not a taker. Managed SEO is done keeping your reputation in mind. The goal is to write comments that get approved. We spend time reading out the blog to ensure what we write is aligned with what’s already written.

Every comment we write with our blog commenting service, is done by real people, on real blogs to get your website the rank it deserves. 

Lastly, whichever link building technique you are going to try, make sure every link is backed by great content. Be a giver and backlinks will follow!

An Ultimate Guide To Use GIFs For Your Marketing Strategy!

Animated GIFs! Are they only for the internet geeks? I mean who doesn’t love good gifs?

Remember those Harry Potter newspapers from your childhood and trendy Tumblr posts of your favorite bloggers? All those moving creatures by default grab your interest in a way that you can’t leave them in half way. So you can see things get better when in motion like a ferris wheel or an athlete. And especially marketer and bloggers should keep this thing in mind that only words are not enough to make such effect on audience which these flickering images create.

Ohh, Don’t relate these moving images with videos. Videos are so different and here I am talking about the latest in trend animated GIFs.

Yes, GIFs. They are everywhere today and have populated the whole internet to a great extent. That’s why whatever you search on internet, you find clips of TV shows, movies and other videos expressing your thoughts. So when something is this much viral on internet how can our marketing and blogging community ignore it for a long time.Since marketers are the ones who always crave for latest trends that audience loves to interact with.

Marketers today are including these mesmerizing GIF in emails, in tweets and also in slack channels to make team announcements. In short wherever there is a message, there is a chance of GIF being used. Animated GIFs in email is the latest trick that marketers use in their transactional emails.

Now that we are on the same page let’s start our learning on how to create a GIF. Let’s understand where and when one can share them. Sit tight and see what I have for you in this comprehensive guide. Here I am going to cover all these topics one by one:

  1. A brief introduction to What is GIF?
  2. Why to use GIF images?
  3. How you can use GIFs for interactive blog posts.
  4. Do’s and don’ts of using GIFs?
  5. Tools you will need to create GIFs

What is GIF?

Among many meaningless debates on its pronunciation with your co-workers,  many of us never get the clear idea of what actually a GIF is. Well don’t worry, this three letter word is not too complex to explain!

GIF is the acronym for graphics interchange format which is a file format that incorporates both static and animated images. GIFs are no sound condensed image formats that seems like a short video clip. Laymenly, it is just a running series of still image frames encoded into a single file and continues to play without any pause button in a loop session. These moving images are capable of conveying emotions and information in a way that no other platform can do.

You will be shocked after knowing that GIF is not at all a new phenomenon and is going to celebrate its 32nd anniversary in year 2019. So, don’t get confuse and try your hands on this old yet new technique.

Why you should use GIF images?

From the entertainment viewpoint, GIFs don’t have any competition but from the business point of view it is difficult to see the values. Ultimately it depends upon the imagination of creator. A creative mind can bring the ideas that rise like a Phoenix from the ashes. If you are looking at the GIFs from marketing point of view, I would like to add some points that no doubt strengthen your thought of adding GIFs to your marketing efforts.

gif image

  1. With the use of GIFs, your audience can easily understand the message that you want to convey.
  2. Use of GIFs show that you embrace latest things in your strategies and believe in work with fun ideology.
  3. Use of GIFs gracefully add more context to your blog posts, tweets and other illustrations.
  4. With GIFs you can bring laughter, inspiration, knowledge and information to your audience and let them feel and understand it.
  5. GIFs are sharable in comparison to other formats.
  6. You don’t have to worry about the fumbling in your words because Gifs can communicate with your fans directly.
  7. If used in emails, GIFs are valuable to increase your click through rate.

So have a GIF attached to whatever you want to present in front of people. And let’s find out when and where we can use this attention grabbing methodology!

When and where to use GIFs🤔?

“The biggest benefit of GIFs is that they load, they run, there’s no pressing play and there’s no waiting for buffering,” Caldwell says. “For the most part, they’re pretty straightforward and simple.”

Let see where a marketer can take advantage of these awesome GIF animations.

With GIFs you can enhance your product illustrations!

where to use gif

Videos might not be a feasible choice to illustrate your product qualities in detail. After all, how many videos you can include at one place? two? three? Or hardly four? Gifs at their place can make things simpler for you. If you own a true 3D product then this GIF thing is certainly a fantastic idea but it is not wise to showcase a T-Shirt or a poster via animations. And yes one more thing to count is avoiding usage of messy or extra flashy animation. Instead, use seamless and faded images to attract customers.

Provide visual instructions with animated GIFs!

visual instruction

Gone are the days when every product was accompanied by a “How-to-do” video! Today, no one has patience to stick to a single video to learn how things work. Rather than  making a 5-6 minutes video or more, embedding a looping GIF would serve the purpose. People are smart enough to understand the procedure.

With GIFs you can create a tiny story!

tiny story

Do you really think a GIF is too short to get to the point? No, if it is developed with a perfect mindset! In fact, GIFs are best in storytelling. You can merge many images together to frame a pleasing story.

Use GIFs to animate your data!

gif to animate your data

This is really an awesome way to depict your statistics in an animated form. You need to go along with the fact that no-one likes to analyze those big data charts with boring statistics even though they are important. So make use of GIFs to add color to these dull statistics.

Make use of GIFs to offer a sneak peek!

gif to offer a sneak peak

Now you don’t need to make a full video just to brief your next big announcement. GIF also takes your burden here and you can create an amazing teaser of your next offering that en-roots further curiosity among your audience.

Make use of GIF to share pretty things!

It’s always not necessary to use GIFs to convert your not so entertaining data into one but you can always share some cool stuff  on your social media platforms just to entertain your audience. In fact,for marketers and bloggers it is really a good practice to stay connected with their visitors.

Do’s and Don’ts of using GIFs!!

With the grand comeback of GIFs, we have also welcomed some new issues along with it. Today these GIFs are popping up everywhere and almost every social media platform is using them as its favorite way of communication. But, it can result into over-exposure and no one likes too much of anything. People get easily exhausted when something becomes ubiquitous.

So wisely decide the right amount of spice to add in your marketing recipe to make it more delicious as excessive use of these spices may cause a risk of ruining the dish. Hence to let you know what is appropriate, I have put together some points for guidance.

The Do’s for GIFs!

Make use of relevant GIFs:

use of relevant gif

Just for the sake of adding a moving image, don’t include it. If you really want your image to have an impact then get a pop culture test in your motion pictures. For example a facial expression, a dialogue from famous TV shows or your favorite cartoon characters are undoubtedly the best way to centralize your audience attention and use them in a way that they can relate it to what you want to say.

Use GIFs to make your story more entertaining:

Think of novels that have graphics! Amazing books they are! Yes, Art is obviously the best way to cement a scene in mind that author want to describe. And these GIF artworks are like a cherry on the cake. Trust me, GIFs make your content more accessible.

Have a look at what others are doing:

It is always good to know what others are doing in order to get maximum visibility in the market. This competitor analysis benefits you in many ways. Keep a sight on how they are going on with latest trends and what is there that you still have not adopted.

The Don’ts For GIFs!!

Don’t overuse animated GIFs:

As it was said earlier that too much of anything exhaust people, so to maintain the proper impact of the post make use of GIFs sparsely rather than using them in a row. Moreover, adding too many graphics also slow down the page loading speed which could be another reason people don’t want to approach you.

Don’t replace written content with GIFs:

Do remember that people come to you because you have something valuable to offer. That is why it is foolish to replace all your content with the graphics in a hope that people will love it. Text has its own importance and graphics has their own. So use them in a way that they compliment each other.

Don’t be too fluky:

Frankly trying to be too much cool is probably the most uncool thing in the world. When someone not so much technical recites the movie quotes and cartoon character then it’s perfect but for a brand who is extremely technical and adds too much memes then it’s time to see off the internet.

Whoa, you know almost everything to start the chapter of creating a captivating GIF 😛 .So let’s start our learning to create one with this long list of different tools for creating online GIFs.

Different Tools to create an awesome GIF!

Well there are a lot of ways to create a GIF and you can take advantage of any of the method. It is always better to switch between methods to bring out the  creativity.

For the ease of learning I have separated these different methods into three main categories and they are named as:

  1. How to create a GIF from video?
  2. How to create a GIF by sticking images together?
  3. How to create a Screen cast GIF?

Creating a GIF is not that much difficult. All you need is a little bit guidance and you are right on the track. You can make your own GIFs using Photoshop also, certainly a good news for Photoshop lovers.  

How to create a GIF from video??

  1. GIFs.com: If you are looking for options to create a GIF from your favorite youtube videos and Instagram posts then most certainly GIFs. com should be your first choice. With this Free tool you only need to paste the URL of the video you want to convert into GIF. You can also manually upload your desired video to crop it into an animated GIF. This online tool has a range of features to offer that contribute to make a marvellous GIF video such as add caption tool, editing tool, crop tools.You can also add effects like padding and blur effect to your GIF.
  2. Promo: With Promo meme maker, users are able to create and optimize their memes for all social media platforms,
    add different kinds of font styles, colors, sizes, making sure your memes look their best no matter what platform you share them with.
    Choose from Promo's video library or upload your own photos and videos to create a meme.As for the subscription plan, you will get a business plan subscription with over 200 clips of video templates.
  3. Giphy GIF Maker: Giphy is perhaps the biggest hub of online GIF creations.Here you can create your GIF as the way you want either by using videos or by combining images together. For this category, to create GIfs from videos, Giphy has Giphy maker tool to use that will cost nothing. Creating a GIF using this tool is extremely easy as all you need to drag your video file or paste your URl and  you are all set to go. Once you did upload your video on GIPHY maker, It’s “easy to use” UI will let you edit your GIF as per the way you want it to be and when you are done with your editing you can save it and share it across multiple platforms.

How to create Gifs by sticking images together??

  1. Giphy SlideShow: With this Option provided by GIPHY, you can enable motion in your still images and frame a dynamic GIF. First, you need to upload all your still images or GIFs for its union with other images. The order and the duration of each image in the slideshow can be decided after the upload. You can access this tool from here.  
  2. Gifmaker.me:
    This is a free tool that allows you to create animated GIFs with no registration required. With this amazing tool, you can combine all your favorite images and shape them into an interesting GIF which can be accompanied with an audio. You can also resize a gif, reverse a gif and moreover can combine two different gifs into one gif online or can split a single gif into two separate parts. Seems interesting isn’t it? So try your hands on this tool to share multiple screenshots in one URL or your precious life moments with your friends online.

How to create a Screencast GIF?

Now, it’s all over to you!

Creating GIFs is a huge ground to play and I think you find this guide useful. But yes there is a lot to learn still and I am looking forward to learn from you as well.

Please share your experiences while creating and using GIFs in the comments below. It’d be great to hear from you.

Thank You!!

16 Best Writing Tools and Software For A Creative Blogger

Say you have an excellent idea to write upon. But do you think  only writing skills are enough to make it noticeable when there are 4 million blogs getting published on the Internet everyday? Chances of getting lost is very high. Don’t you agree?

Then, what makes you win the battle?

Creating, publishing and promoting are three different stages of a content life-cycle. And, for each stage you need to pick up some innovative ways to ensure your audience receives an elite content.

Trust me, You can not do it on your own. There are some advanced tools to help you with your blogging efforts.

Text editors or Word processors can only help you to generate words on the blank page but curating a valuable content that gets reads is kind of a hard nut. However, the task can become simpler if you have got the right blogging tools in your arsenal.

Whether you are a beginner in using writing softwares or a pro trying the best writing tools in the market, the article is worth your attention.

Here is a list of some essential online writing tools which can help you to generate attention grabbing content.

Lucky you 😛

But before moving ahead, we need to discuss what sort of help does a writer need from his software.

What should you check in blogging tools for writers?

Your tools do not need to invent the wheel. They are just there refining your content. So, don’t go frenzy over an extensive list of technical specifications and features. Because those features will seldom matter if you do not use them. Just choose a software that suits your writing style.

Here, I have classified the necessary attributes of the software in three categories:-

Readily Usable

Who doesn’t love an easy to use software? Even though every writing software is specialized for creative writing, writers will feel much relaxed if their software is effortless.

Advanced Features to edit your work

Editing is a very necessary process of content generation, and there is a huge difference between ‘being grammatically incorrect’ and your articles “being ready” to be published. Word processors can correct you when you are grammatically incorrect, but only a writing software can notify you about the use of recurring phrases, over-description, and passive verbs.

When it comes to creative writing, you need to have a astute outlook at your articles, or you may lose your readers.

Some Additional Features

These additional features will depend upon your writing style as not every feature is made for you. These features may include a word thesaurus, a twist generator or a character creator may be. Again, don’t get confused over features. Be aware of your requirements and then choose one.

When you know what needs to considered, let’s have a look at some tools according to various categories every writer falls in:-

Blog Title Generator tools

Hubspot’s blog topic generator

This blog title generator from Hubspot is very efficient. You just need to provide it three keywords (even one can work too). Depending upon your inputs, this free tool helps you to find topics you can start to write upon. So if you are struggling with the content ideas (As I suppose many of you are), Hubspot’s blog topic generator is the right tool for you.

TweakYourBiz Title Generator

Just like the above line from the text box says “just enter your topic and go”, using this tool is insanely easy. The title generator also breaks your given ideas into various categories such as ‘problems,’ ‘motivation’ and ‘how to’s.’ Tweak Your Biz Title Generator is definitely worth a try.

Portent’s Content Idea Generator

This great tool on my favorite list is very easy to use. You just need to enter your idea and Portent’s Content Idea Generator will provide you with a great title for your post. And if you don’t like the title, refresh your subject, and it will give you a different title instantly.

Content research tools

Google keyword planner

Google keyword planner is a valuable chunk from the Google AdWords program. The tool is completely free and is used to figure out and discuss keywords to develop a actionable SEO and pay per click strategy. Just type a keyword in the search bar and check the competition for your keywords along with other related keyword phrases. Moreover, you can find out things like:-

Buzzsumo

Although the tool starts with a $99 pro plan per month, you can quickly catch industry-wise content using broad keywords at Buzzsumo. Filters like guest posts, videos, and infographics are available in the tool.

Image editing tools

Canva

canva image editing tool

It is my most favorite tool for graphics generation. This easy to use tool helps you to create engaging graphics that can get shared easily. Moreover, Canva has a massive database of templates which keeps on growing regularly. Sign in for free, pick your favorite layouts for multiple social profiles and craft your masterpiece right away. The drag-drop feature in canva with an extensive list of professional designs (mostly free or cost you just an ace) will provide you outstanding graphics.

Infogr.am

If you want to present your technical content in a fun way, use Infogr.am. Infographics are a great way to attract readers to your posts. So, Sign in and get your data loaded into your favorite theme and boom. Well, you may not be able to customize much with the tool like Canva, and you don’t get a blank option in Infogr.am but it may be a lifesaver tool when you want to create a detailed infographic.

Giphy

Animated Gifs is the latest trend in the marketing. One of the most sought GIF maker Giphy is here to make insanely rocking GIFs. This tool will help you to create a happier GIF making experience. You can make and share GIFs easily and simultaneously in Giphy. Get a video from Vine, Vimeo or Youtube and select your portion from the video which you want to convert into a GIF. The option for adding captions is also available in Giphy.

You can also turn a group of images into a GIF or edit an existing GIF on a website. In a nutshell, if you are a GIF fan (we all love GIFs), you will love this tool.

Bonus tip: Here is a detailed guide on how one can use Gifs in marketing strategy. Read it Here!

Readability test tools

Readability score of your article helps you to know how well your readers understand your post. Because senseless information and too much complex language is not useful. That’s the reason I have included these blogging tools here. Below are two of my favorite readability checkers to check your readability score.

The Readability Test Tool

Readability test tool

You can use this online readability test tool to check your article’s readability score. You can insert your piece of writing through an URL, text or you can add a link to the source material. However, there is also another form to introduce your articles which are a browser bookmarklet form. The readability indicators are Automated Readability Index, Coleman Liau Index, Gunning Fog Score, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, and Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease.

Readable.com

redable

This user-friendly tool expertly examines your article for a perfect readability score. You can import your piece of writing through text or URL at Readable.com. Other amazing features of the tool include integration with your Slack app or Dropbox. It also has features like readability alerts or keyword density alerts (premium users only). These features can be helpful when you need to get alerts related to less search engine friendliness of your website or high readability scores for your site content.

Readable.com is a free tool when you use it occasionally. To move to advanced features, you can select any of its premium plans.

Some Other useful blogging tools for beginners

Grammarly

grammarly

When it comes to blogging tools for beginners, Grammarly definitely shows up. Grammarly is an effective tool which can improve your language skills. It can find typo errors and grammatically incorrect sentences. Just enter your text in the Grammarly web app and the Grammarly editor will proofread your blog post.

Grammarly is free but there is a premium version available for this app. It is available in three plans- monthly, quarterly and annually.

Copyscape- The Free Plagiarism Checker

Plagiarism checker is an essential tool for writers and no other name could come to my mind other than Copyscape. Copyscape is free and can be used to check whether your content has any duplicacy. Enter the URL of your post and get results about your article.

Some Apps for writers (Mobile and Desktop)

So, if you are more convenient using apps than desktop browsers, here are some goodies in this list on online writing tools for your more productive blogging.

Hemingway App

Hemingway App work wonders when it comes to rectifying your content. It increases clarity in your writing. Thought, it was introduced as a web app, later it evolved as one of the best desktop apps for writers. The app edits your content, comes with distraction free mode feature, exports PDFs and does much more.

Evernote

Evernote is a free tool that can be your best friend when you like to store media, information or ideas. Devices can easily integrate with the content stored in Evernote which make materials more accessible. You can share your content on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or just your content’s URL to clipboard.

Tomighty Pomodoro timer

Tomighty is my personal favorite Pomodoro timer. It is a small desktop app which can help you stay productive during your working hours. The free app uses Pomodoro technique to keep you focused throughout the day while allowing you to relax properly at regular intervals.

As you have gained a lot of information, now it’s your turn to practice with these free blogging tools. Use some of them you find exciting and spread the word with others. From searching engaging topics to generating and sharing high quality contents, these writing tools can help you secretly build your article.

Do you think these are the best writing tools that can mold your story? Which is your personal favorite from the league? Please add up your comments and suggestions below.