Why WordPress Is Still The Best

WordPress is by far the most popular open source CMS (content management system) – around 60% of all websites use WordPress and for good reason. In fact, over 10 million websites use it, with 500 new ones added each day, As of July 15 2018.

According to the latest statistics. as of March 11, 2021 some 455,000,000 websites are using it right now!, which means that around 20% of all self-hosted websites use it, too.

It also holds a whopping 61.8% of the Content Management Software or CMS that market share eclipses all the rest combined, That’s Drupal Joomla, Wix, go ahead name one.

In this blog article, we’ll go through the reasons why you should choose WordPress over other CMS systems such as Shopify, Wix, Joomla or Drupal. if you were not paying attention please re-read the first paragraph. Here we go.

WordPress Is Still Easy to Use

It’s a simple system which you can use with only minimal coding or even no coding skills. It just takes a single click to install and it is ready to go.

Once installed, you can start creating and publishing pages to your specifications. It’s possible to customize colours, design, and even features of a WordPress theme.

If you still feel hard to use there are literally hundreds of tutorials out there for you to learn from.

WordPress Is Still Free and Open Source

As we mentioned, it is free to use, edit and redistribute. That’s why you can easily find its original source codes publicly available. Because it’s free it ensures there are plenty of options and support available if you need it.

There are no monthly or yearly fees from it – you just have to pay for a domain and hosting.

Create Any Website With WordPress, Still

Today, it has a lot of versatility and gives you full flexibility to create any type of website. It has a wide range of themes and plugins increase its functionality to a great extent, giving you the ultimate flexibility.

You can build anything from an infomercial site to an ecommerce website which you can use to sell your products online. WordPress gives you several powerful plugins like Woo Commerce and WP eCommerce that make it easy to handle shipping and taxes.

WordPress is also quite good for supporting membership website. For example, you can sell subscriptions of any premium service or digital products that you have.

Still Lots of Troubleshooting Help Available

WordPress has a massive community of active users and developers. Its well-maintained support forum contains millions of queries and solutions to troubleshoot problems. You can also search for your query to get the answer to your question.

Post your questions unhesitatingly, and you’ll get a solution almost immediately.
Apart from its official forum, there are a number of other WordPress dedicated forums run by developers where one can ask queries and get solutions if you have more complicated or specific problems.

WordPress Still Has High Security

It has a high-security standard which is extremely important for any business. If your site is down, you lose money, customers, and potentially data.

Since it is so popular it also makes sense that hackers are continuously trying to find loopholes to get into your backend. But not to worry. Regular updates provided by WordPress strongly protect you from this vulnerability.

You should also ensure you have regular backups just in case.

WordPress Is Still Easily Integrated With Any Application

Default WordPress has a lot of built-in functionality but you can even make it more powerful with plugins.

When you install Plugins, it will add extra functionality in your WP website. Some plugin and free and others are premium. There are around 41000+ plugins available at its repository.

WordPress Is Still The Most SEO Friendly

What’s the point of having an amazing, beautiful website if nobody can find it, right? Google and all search engines show and rank websites in search results on the basis of various predefined parameters.

The more parameters you fulfill, the better your website ranks in search results. And it also checks all those boxes. Things such as fast loading speed times, navigation, site maps, and social media integration are all things that are easy with it.

One advantage it has over other CMS’s is user experience. Of course, user experience is great for the individual user, but with Google concentrating on how flexible a CMS is, it gives WordPress an extra boost.

WordPress Sites Make Up 14.7% of the Top 100 Websites in the World

The most successful companies in the world prefer WordPress as their CMS, including: Sony, Microsoft, UPS, Disney, TED, NBC, CNN, TechCrunch, People magazine, the NFL, Best Buy, Facebook, and even Star Wars . These are just a few, powered by WordPress.

If you still need more help please call The Best SEO in Canada AJ Frey. He can Help you with some rad marketing and a rad website. Using WordPress of coarse. Call now 250-801-6588

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Thankfully there are tons of free ways you can check different SEO attributes and rankings which can save you both time and money. Here are some of our favourites at Rad websites.

1) Small SEO Tools (Free)

This site is one of the best Free SEO Tools out there because it has all types of free tools you can use in order to do keyword research, site analysis and even check your competition. A part from Google’s own tools, this is probably the best you can get without entering in your credit card information. While you can’t go as deep as some of the paid tools, Small SEO Tools is great for people who want to be able to fix some of the more common SEO issues without spending a ton of time and effort.

How To Use This Tool

Enter your website into any of the offered tools but I would recommend start with the SEO website checker, especially if you’re looking for some quick SEO wins. This tool will give you an idea of how you score and how you stack up against your competition. You can then dive deeper using some of the other tools.

2) Google Analytics (Free)

This is the tool you must definitely use on a weekly basis, even if you don’t really care about SEO. Google Analytics tracks all your traffic to your website and you can analysis which marketing channels are working and which aren’t. You can see what pages your clients are most gravitating towards and which ones need improvements.

How to Use This Tool

You need to sign in to your Analytics account to start using this tool. Once you have added your website, navigate to the Tracking code under the property column and copy the code. Paste the tracking code in your SEO plugin. We recommend either Yoast or All In One SEO.

You should get verification that you’ve done this correctly. It will take a little time to get used to navigating Google Analytics as there are so many different options and customizable features but once you do, you’ll see the power of it.

3) Google PageSpeed Insights (Free)

Google PageSpeed Insights is a tool that checks the speed of your site and provides suggestions to how to improve it. Page loading speed is one of the most important elements of a website. Better site speed leads to increased user satisfaction and higher rankings.

How to Use This Tool

Enter your website URL, click the “analyze” button, and the tool will automatically check the speed and overall user experience of your site and provide a score – for both desktop and mobile. You need to opt for a score above 90 to offer your users a better site experience and to increase your chances of ranking higher in the search results.

4) Google Search Console (Free)

Formally Google Webmaster, this is yet another Google tool that allows you to search for errors on your website that could potentially harm your SEO score. Primarily it allows you to check and submit a sitemap which is the overall architecture that Google views your site in.

How To Use This Tool

You’ll have to sign into your Google Search Console or create a new account if you don’t have one already. Once you are in you’re account you’ll have to attach it to your website. You can do this in a variety of ways including through domain access, your website code or a website plugin. Once you have hooked your website up, you’ll able to navigate with the bar on the left-hand site which will give you a variety of options.

5) Mobile-Friendly Test (Free)

Mobile-Friendly Test is a free tool that lets you check the responsiveness of your website on a mobile device. With Google’s emphasis on mobile-first search queries on mobile devices are at least 50% in your industry — and in many cases more. Therefore it’s important to optimize your site for mobile devices.

How to Use This Tool

Enter the URL of the site that you wish to test and then click the “run test” button. In just a few seconds, you will know if your website is mobile-friendly or not.

6) Ahrefs Backlink Checker (Freemium)

Ahrefs offers a free back-link checker that allows you to check the top 100 links pointing to any website. Back-links are important because they are one of the ways Google checks to see how popular your website is and whether the website provides useful information.

How to Use This Tool

Enter the URL that you want to analyze and the tool will not only show you your domain rating score.

7) Keyword.io (Free)

Keyword research is undoubtedly one of the most fundamental tasks that every SEO specialist needs to perform, but researching is a time-consuming process without access to the best tools. Keyword.io is an easy and free alternative to Google’s Keyword Planner and it offers lots of relevant keyword suggestions for every type of research.

How to Use This Tool

Enter your main keyword in the search box, click on the desired search engine or platform, and then select the targeted country from the drop-down list. Once you press search, a variety of options will appear.

8) Moz Local (Free)

Moz has a free tool called Moz Local which is great for local businesses that want to be found within a particular neighborhood. Moz Local offers a comprehensive view of a website’s profile and web presence. By analyzing the most popular online directory’s, it gives a score on how well you rank and where you can improve. A great thing about this tool is that you don’t need a paid Moz account in order to use it.

How to Use This Tool

Enter the company’s name and street address and click search. It will take up to 30 seconds to analyze and will display where that company is indexed and where you could add it for improved search results. It is particularly useful to create links from sites like Yelp, Facebook, and Foursquare which will increase your domain authority.

So, these are the best free SEO Tools, that you can use and get better website ranking on Search Engines. If you need our SEO Experts Help, Feel free to Contact Us.

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Myth #1 Link Building.

When Penguin 2.0 was released in 2013, it changed a lot of how ranking was done. In the past, building as many links as possible without analyzing the linking domain was how SEO typically worked. This practice was known as link stuffing, and by doing this, your website would rank higher on Google. Building links is still a very important part of SEO, however you need relevant links that actually are important to your reader.

Nowadays, it is important to focus on the quality of links you are obtaining, rather than the quantity. Sometimes less can be more if you know how exactly to build links the proper way.

Too often, when businesses hire someone to do link building, they focus on the quantity of links rather than their quality. But linking is not a numbers game anymore. You should focus on having relevant and diverse sources that link to relevant pages. Remember Google wants your content and information to be useful. If the links are useless and don’t add any value then your page will be devalued.

Myth #2 Keywords and Meta Tags

Meta descriptions are coding attributes that concisely explain the contents of web pages. In other words, they are keywords. SEO experts use them to help categorize your website and different web pages. You’ve probably seen them before on Google’s search engine results pages where they’re commonly used as page previews.

In 2009, Google announced that meta descriptions and keywords didn’t have bearing on search engine ranking. That’s not to say that these descriptions aren’t important for SEO, though.

On the contrary, in fact: Meta descriptions present a major opportunity to separate yourself from your competition and convince searchers that your page is worth navigating to.

In fact, last year Google announced that it would be increasing the length of meta descriptions to allow for more descriptive snippets.

Myth #3 Home Page Content

Have you ever come across a homepage filled with paragraphs and paragraphs of writing? A lot of people believe that the more writing you have on your homepage the better.

However, your homepage content should be long enough to clarify who you are, what you do, where you’re located, your value proposition, and what visitors should do next. If you can do all that in less words the better. Visitors should leave satisfied, not overwhelmed or underwhelmed – and certainly not confused. So, this is also one of the important SEO Myths, that you have to know.

Myth #4 Local Content

If you’re a local business, optimizing for local search won’t only help you get found, but it will help you get found by people who are nearby and more likely to buy from you, aka your ideal customers.

Google believes, (correctly for the most part) people want to find answers, things, or people that are local. A hairdresser in New Jersey is no good to you if you live in San Francisco. And because SEO search ranking is becoming that much more cutthroat, local is that much more important. Looking forward, Google will continue to take steps to curate the best local content to the surface of search results.

So, these are the SEO Myths you have to follow while creating your website. If you need some help determining the best SEO strategy for your business, talk to one of our strategists at Rad Websites. We’ll guide you through the difficulty help you define the best course of action going forward and create a plan that is sustainable and effective.

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1. Keyword Stuffing

This one is the most obvious on the list of SEO Tactics. “Keyword stuffing” refers to the practice of loading a webpage with too many irrelevant keywords so your content doesn’t make any sense. These keywords appear in a list or group, out of context, or repeated an inadequate number of times in an attempt to appear relevant to search engines.

What To Do Instead:

While mindlessly stuffing your content with keywords won’t do you any good, you can still take search engines into account and optimize your content effectively When analyzing your content for the intent behind it.

2. Creating Low Quality Content

Getting low quality content written in India for five or ten dollars isn’t going to cut it anymore. Nobody wants to read useless content and as a result Google will downgrade it. Writing high-quality articles for your website takes loads of time, money and effort.

What To Do Instead:

Check your website for low-quality content straight away, as it might be affecting your rankings. It’s better if you write fewer articles but of higher quality. Also consider writing longer articles with plenty of amazing graphics and infographics.

3. Creating Irrelevant Guest Posts

Since the early days of SEO, there has been loads of buzz around guest posting. People used to guest blog no matter how relevant the blog was or not. Guest blogging is not okay if you’re doing it solely for link building and is irrelevant. Google will sniff out irrelevant guest blogs and degrade your site.

What To Do Instead:

If most of known link building techniques are harmful and dangerous, what is there left to do in terms of improving your rankings with links? First you might have to remove some links for your rankings to go up. Second build links that actually add value to the viewer and give him or her more information on what they are seeking.

4. Heavily Using Anchor Text On Internal Links

An internal link is a link that points to another page on the same website. An anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink that often appears in blue.
Using internal links is essentially good for both the user and the search engines. It’s helpful because it allows the user to navigate a website and easily find the information for which they came to this website.

What To Do Instead:

The critical thing about internal linking is that your site structure should be shallow and logical, so focus on that instead of keyword-stuffing your links. Ideally, you should keep all your important pages not more than 3 clicks away from the homepage.

5. Creating Pages For Each Keyword Variation

Creating pages for each keyword variation was a tactic used years ago, when keywords, not intent, dominated the Google’s indexing methods. You’d want to have the maximum capacity to target each possible keyword individually.

What To Do Instead:

Throw your effort into creating well-structured, informative, and visually appealing landing pages for your products and services. Fit your keywords in a natural way into your content, headline, title. Here’re you can find the guide on how to build perfectly optimized landing pages.

Conclusion

Are you guilty of any of these SEO tactics? If you are that’s okay, most of us are. But it’s important to get updated on the latest tactics and stay in tune with Google. Google doesn’t tell you exactly how to increase rankings but they do give you important clues in what to do and what not to do.

Please reach out, we are happy to guide you through the entire process. The entire team here at Rad Websites wants to help make you stand out and be RAD!

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If you’re like a lot of businesses out there, you’re probably not getting the traction to your website that you want. You have a great-looking website, you have a great product or service yet you aren’t getting enough sales. What went wrong?

Well the first thing you need to do perform an SEO audit to see where you stand and what improvements need to be made.

What Is An SEO Audit?

As a business owner, you should know what a SEO Audit is, and why it is crucial for your online presence. You need to identify issues that could and would prevent your website from being ranked on any search engines.

SEO Audits gives you a precise and detailed perception that gives you an overview of your site’s online presence. Ignoring these identifying issues, and your efforts will be in vain.

In other words,  your hard work will be paid off once you regularly audit your site. Also, this will make sure it’s properly crawled and indexed.

Pro tip: To make your content stand out, discerning content-related issues, indexing, proper use of backlink analysis, learning site architecture, and social media engagement are important factors to use in your internet marketing.

These components when understood and practiced will be important in helping you to identify strengths, weaknesses, and your website’s potential in gaining traction online.

Keep in mind that when you lose out all on the traffic, your possible sales will go down the drain. Quite the opposite when you regularly audit your website.

SEO Tool List

So how does SEO Audit procedure go? Here are tools you need to know:

1. Moz Site Audit Tool
2. Google Analytics
3. Google Search Console
4. Google Page Speed Insight

Starting The SEO Audit

The Crawl: This procedure is so important that you need to run it first before you do the other steps. Why is this important? Because this is where you identify your website’s problems, i.e., duplicate contents, low word count, unlinked pagination pages, excess redirects.

Moz Site Audit Tool

1. Go to the tool and open application.
2. On the top right of the screen, click new site audit.
3. Create new project.
4. Then enter your domain name followed by your project name.

With the exception of the limited checked pages, there is no need to edit any settings. However, if the need arises, remove URL parameters, bypass restrictions, or allow or disallow some URLs.

1. On Page SEO Score.
2. Organic Monthly Traffic.
3. Organic Keywords.
4. Backlinks.

As you scroll down the page, ‘Top SEO Issues’ will appear. Click on any of the URL for more information on your website’s issues. This way, you can review the pages; decide whether you need additional content. It’s crucial that you’ll have an insight on how Googlebot is crawling your site. You’ll know when your site is ranking well by manually searching your site.

Other Aspects To Check

When looking for relevant search results, how many of your pages pop up after? Do they come up first in the list when searching your site? Do you see your site in the list of end results when giving assessments?

Keep in mind though that despite your page’s not being at the top rank, it doesn’t mean that your page is uncrawlable, it only suggests that you need to realize the problem and what needs to be done.

You need to do this procedure in order to know if your page’s variation is in the right arrangement, in combination with duplicates. How do you do this? Go to Google and run a “site:domain.com.”

This will list indexed URLs for your domain. If you have mix site versions, then you potentially need to addressed to it. It’s important to run site search in order to have a preview of any used subdomains.

Checking your site’s indexed URLs is another procedure, it’s like running the same procedure as the above. You’ll be surprised to see a few pages Google has indexed after doing this.

Are these the results that you expect after a search? Then if not, there’s an issue that needs to be fixed. (The main culprit is usually the faceted navigation needs to be indexed). However, if it’s less than what you expected, your site then is being crawled or indexed.

How To Use Search Console

Seeing a drop in your site’s ranking or failing to rank high as it should be is anticipated once your site has violated Google’s Webmaster Quality Guidelines; this is where Manual Penalty comes in. If your brand does not rank then your site will be deindexed.

You can avoid this by checking in to see whether a manual action has been issued against your site by using the Search Console; look for:

1. “Security and Manual Actions” tab down the left-hand side of the menu;
2. Look for the manual actions link.
3. Click, then you will be directed to your status.

You can relax if you see the result with a green check. On the other hand, if an issue appears in a list, then you need a Manual Actions Report.

It has been an important factor for Mobile Ranking for a long time. Remember that User Experience is prevalent in SEO success so site speed is important.

In fact, data shows that if there’s a significant bouncing from a user, this increases a slower page load. The faster the page loads, the better result from SEO and UX perspectives. Use SEMrush Site Audit report to see load time statistics and list of highlighted errors.

SEO Audits and SSL Certificates

Implementing an SSL certificate is important if your site runs on HTTP. Once you run https://www.domain.com in your browser and see that your site remains on the HTTP protocol you can relax and head on to the next step. On the other hand, you need to address this issue if you are redirected to an HTTP version.

Make sure to keep up with the trend of having a mobile-friendly site. UX is a must if you expect to reach the top. You can check this on Search Console, look for Enhancements tab in the Mobile Usability section for any issues.

SEO Audits and Indexation Issues

How to analyze and resolve indexation issues? You will see valid pages or ones that have warning, plus, excluded pages as well as coverage errors, if you go to the index tab of the Coverage page in Google Search Console.

Prevention of site from being crawled and indexed is expected if there are underlying issues. Address this ASAP! Underlying common errors include:

1. Pages that have a noindex attribute and that are submitted in a sitemap.
2. Pages blocked from being crawled in your robots.txt file but that are included in a sitemap.
3. 404 pages submitted in a sitemap.

Excluded URLs are pages that are not currently in Google’s index. This includes:

1. Pages excluded with a noindex attribute
2. Pages that redirect
3. Crawl anomalies
4. Canonicalization issues
5. Pages that are crawled but not indexed
6. Not found (404) errors
7. Pages blocked by your robots.txt file

Deeply analyze the report and only clean the areas of concern. Of course, these reports don’t need to always be cleaned up. Usually, there are specific reasons these exclusions happen, i.e., due to site migrations. Those are the best moment to clean those reports.

Page user experience is the main goal in Google’s future objectives. A combination of Core Web Vitals signals with Google’s for a better Search ranking which gives better metrics for page user experience is a feat.

Other Tips to Improve your SEO Audits

Be a social media butterfly. Use social media as your tool for your SEO efforts. Let the dynamics of this platform be a conduit for consistent backlinks and engagement. It has the power to increase the number of your backlinks.

Those who follow your content might be more likely to link to it. This increases your brand awareness through queries about your brand. Also, let us not forget the “mentions” and “tags” that social media can offer to your brand.

As we take everything into account, we have touched on some techniques on how to do SEO Audit. We have given tools and procedures on how to fix issues and deal with it to keep your site up to its rank.

Final Thoughts

Always bear in mind that search engine algorithms, best practices, market trends, and most especially your competitors are always keeping track. So make it a habit to keep your site up to date; address issues immediately after audit. Eliminate duplicates. Monitor your site analytics, and make sure you’re engaging in any social media platforms.

The more your presence you have in social media, the further you’ll push your relevant search terms. Be consistent, and your SEO ranking will soon reach the peak of success.

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If you are searching for a unique method that’s different than an ordinary blog to build backlinks from authoritative domains, infographics might be the solution for you.

What Makes Up A Good Infographic?

While there’s no secret formula to make a good infographic, there are some key aspects all share. These are three common elements good infographics all have:

1. If your infographic has an eye-catching and amazing design, you can get people to stop scrolling and pay attention.
2. A good infographic has to give useful and researched statistical data about an interesting topic.
3. Just like other content, simply by publishing your infograph, you won’t have much success unless you do your best to promote it on social media or through email.

Encourage Sharing of Your Infographics

Creating an infographic is just half the battle. Next you need to start promoting it. An easy way to do this if you make it easy to share your Infographics through social media platforms. You should provide social media sharing icons over your Infographics. So, if a reader holds the mouse over the Infographics, he or she is able is able to share it with one click.

Submit to Social Bookmarking Sites

The importance of Social Bookmarking Sites in the promotion of Infographics cannot be undermined. Sites such as Reddit, Quora, Stumbleupon, and Digg, and are popular visits with millions of daily users. Submission on such sites exposes your Infographics to a large audience and greaten the chance your infographic will go viral. They can like, vote, and share your Infographics.

Submit to Infographics Directories

You didn’t think these existed, did you? Submission on Infographics Directories can provide good backlinks for your website. A good example is Infographic Post which is a very authoritative Infographics directory site. It’s a very popular site, and you are likely to get a large number of views and shares for your Infographics once you submit on this site. While some of them require you to register, most of these sites are free to submit.

Email Popular Bloggers

You can promote your Infographics by emailing to bloggers who have active followers and publish on a regular schedule. If your Infographics is done brilliantly and interests other bloggers, they are likely to write about your Infographics and give backlink to your website.

Create an Embed Code for your Infographics

While this is somewhat technical, it’s a good technique to help spread the word. Once you have published your infographic on your website and shared it across your social media platforms, the next thing you need to do is to create an embed code for your Infographics.
It is a simple HTML code that boggers and others can use for easily sharing your Infographics. They simply need to put the embed code on their website which automatically posts your Infographics.

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What is Google My Business?

Google My Business helps business owners manage their business and help them rank. It is an essential tool to find out and adjust how your site shows in Google Maps, the Knowledge Graph, Google+ and organic search results.

You can manage your business listing by adding details such as opening hours, photos and keywords. In addition to that, it is possible to manage the reviews your customers leave behind.

Starting Your Google My Business Listing

Getting started with My Business is easy. You have to make an account and claim your business. Keep in mind that My Business is not the catch-all tool for your local SEO. It has to work in tandem with other SEO efforts.

For example, you won’t climb in results if your profile is inaccurate. But you also won’t reach the top without a well-optimized site and localized content.
If your business has been around for more than three years, it’s likely it already has a Google Business listing and you just need to claim it.

Once successfully claimed, you can manage the information just as if you started the Google My Business listing yourself years previous.

Verifying Your Google My Business Listing

Once you have submitted your business information, hours, and other service area, you’ll need to verify your listing.

Verification typically takes less than a week, in which Google will send you a verification code postcard that, once you receive, you verify with the enclosed code and your business will officially be live.

It’s probably easiest to verify your listing by postcard. This helps Google prevent false listings that will only misdirect users and derail the usefulness of Google Search and Maps, among other tools.

It’s important to know that Google won’t display your business until the business is verified. You also can’t access any page insights/analytical information or business reviews so watch out for that postcard.

Publishing Your Google My Business Listing

It’s important to use all resources GMB offers within its listing details to get the most out of your business locations and increase your SEO results.

Local search results favour the most relevant results for searches, and business offering the most detailed and accurate information will be easier to serve in search.

Don’t leave anything to be guessed or assumed; make sure your listing communicates with potential customers what your business does, where it is, and how they can acquire the good and/or services your business is offering.

How Customers Find Your Listing

While Google Business doesn’t have the best analytics, there are a few things you can learn from their insights.

“Direct” searches are for your business name or address versus a “Discovery” search. They searched for a category, product, or service that you offer, and your listing appeared.

Beside “Listing on Search” and “Listing on Maps,” you’ll see the number of views your listing received from each product in the timeframe you’ve selected. According to Google, “Views” are like “impressions” on other analytics platforms.

To see how many people found you on a particular product on a particular day, place your cursor over the appropriate segment of the graph on the day you’re interested in.

This part of Insights uses a map to show where people are that are requesting directions to your business.

Your business location is identified on the map and some of the most common spots that people request directions to your business from are shown. It even breaks the total number of direction requests down by city or neighbourhood.

Conclusion

It’s critical to remember Google Business is not a set it and forget it tool. Things change, your business changes and your Google Business should always reflect that. Keep everything active, monitor reviews and stay on top of things. If you have any questions about

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1. Your website isn’t showing up on search engines

This is the most obvious one and probably the one that is costing you the most business. It goes without saying, you should be easily found by search engines and ultimately your customers.
The goal of SEO is to make you rank very high for what you offer within your field. This is what makes SEO a powerhouse for a business of any size – you can easily scale your business. With SEO, it’s possible to be found as relevant by clients who never met you or your brand before. Your business can expand quickly without spending a ton of money to reach new clients using other, more traditional marketing methods.

Another thing to be aware of is a drastic loss of ranking. If you’ve read about any of the high-profile companies tumbling in Google rankings, you’ve probably figured out it can happen to anyone. Still, the effects can be devastating, all the more so when you don’t know the cause. Drops in ranking are a common occurrence after algorithm updates). Many websites also suddenly lose their position or are banned completely after incurring a penalty from Google, sometimes with site admin not even realizing they did anything wrong. So, this is one of the Signs You Need To Invest In Your SEO.

2. Your website is slow

This is another obvious one and just as important. Make sure your web pages and images on your site are optimized for loading speed. Amazon did a study and found that when their website loaded even a second slower than usual, they saw a drop in sales of millions of dollars. People are impatience and don’t’ want to wait
If your website isn’t performing well and you are in need of someone who just optimizes your website in such a way that all visitors find your website in a better way to understand and can quite easily navigate at your website, SEO Services is at your doorsteps.
Potential customers need to be able to find what they are looking for, and find it quickly. If someone gets ‘lost’ on your website and can’t find the information they need, they will move onto your competitors. Internal website linking is important. Having an organized and well laid out site, and menu structure is also a big part of an overall SEO strategy.

Once you add a page or post to your website, make sure to add some internal linking so that your site flows well, and also make sure that all important pages are easy to access.

3. You haven’t updated your website’s content

If your website have a blog function or updates, you need to take services of SEO. Having high quality SEO services not only improves the quality of content, but also optimize the contents based in keywords and thus in return gives you a better chance to rank high on Google.
With quality content, you can deliver your insights to the customers in a better way and can fulfill your goals to a great extent. Adding some interesting blog updates to educate your customer is a great addition, not only adding value to your customers but establishes yourself as a leader in your field.

4. Nobody can find your business in Google Maps

Google Maps is an amazing tool for businesses to get found and noticed online. With a shift toward more localized search in Google, the giant search engine has dramatically increased the importance of localized SEO.
Also, since Google grabs location data from a variety of sources, it’s possible for your business to appear in the wrong place on Google Maps. If your business isn’t showing up in the right place on Google Maps, it’s likely due to a lack of consistency in your name, address and phone number.

5. Your competitors are doing it

If you’re not showing up on Google it means your competition is doing a better job than you are.
As you’re probably well aware, the first page in a search engine means everything. In fact, in studies, it has been found that 92% of searchers don’t’ go past the first page. If you’re competition is ranking better than you, it’s definitely time to invest in some serious SEO. And gain some advantage back from them.

Conclusion

So, these are the Signs You Need To Invest In Your SEO. If you need some help determining the best SEO strategy for your business, talk to one of our strategists at Rad Websites. We’ll guide you through the difficultly help you define the best course of action going forward. And create a plan that is sustainable and effective.

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An SEO audit may not ring a bell for someone who does not consider himself a web design expert, but it is a task that anyone with basic SEO knowledge can perform. Ask anyone who knows a thing or two about how business websites should perform to succeed, and you will realize how critical a regular audit is.

A business or brand that is trying to achieve relevance through digital marketing must learn to embrace the competition. The only way to keep up is to create and run a website that brings in traffic and conversions. This is where the concept of search engine optimization comes in.

You may be able to build a website and apply an SEO strategy for it, but you do not expect your site to run on autopilot. In other words, you must have a clear understanding of how your website is performing based on the SEO strategies you are using. Hence, the sole purpose of an SEO audit is to figure out how well is your business website performing.

The audit will check the health of your website with an emphasis on the presence of spam. Doing SEO audits regularly makes sense because Google has this habit of altering its algorithms in ranking websites. Simply put, you are doing it to keep up with what is new.

SEO Audit Coverage

An SEO audit is likened to that of multiple-point car inspection. It examines your website to see how it functions and performs compared to the rest of the market. The audit essentially covers the following:

1. Keyword Use – You must know if the way you are using your keywords is on point. The keywords must bee optimized for them to help in directing traffic to your site.
2. LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) – LSI defined as the context of a search. It still has something to do with keywords, specifically long tail and secondary keywords.
3. Competition – You also would want to know how you perform against the competition, especially in the aspects of links, meta tags, keywords, and overall SEO ranking.
4. Organic Search Rank – Companies that need to keep the costs down may have to reconsider their PPC strategy. If you decide to focus on your website’s organic search rankings, you need to perform an SEO audit to see your chances.

Enough of the introduction, here are the components of a comprehensive SEO audit:

1 – Site Crawl

A site crawl is the most efficient method of assessing the state of your website in its current form. It also gives you a preview of the issues that may need to be resolved sooner than later. Site crawling essentially creates an outline for the entire SEO audit.

The site crawl will cover areas like the structure of your URL, content, meta descriptions, images, links, and the structure of your website. You ask questions like how well your content is formatted and if it is fresh. Do you have a unique meta description per page? Does your website have enough links per page and do all of them work?

Furthermore, site crawling should also include the analysis of your landing page and its relationship with the inner pages. The landing page is where your site builds an initial impression, so it needs to be user-friendly and intuitive.

2 – Page Speed Analysis

Page load speed plays a critical role in keeping your site visitors motivated in browsing your site further. 60% of users will find their way out of a website when it takes more than three seconds to load. So, if your website takes too long to load pages, it will have a negative impact on conversions and will increase bounce rates. In performing an SEO audit with an emphasis on page speed, you can use a handful of free tools, including Google’s Page Speed Insights and YSlow. It is crucial to learn about your page load speed since that is the only way to figure out if there is a need to fix some elements in the design.

3 – Site Architecture Assessment

Your website needs a solid structure for it to rank high in Google. It is merely about using the right keywords and relevant content. One aspect that you should focus on is user experience, and for you to ensure that prospective clients end up liking your site, you must improve its architecture.

So, how do you improve site architecture? As you have guessed it already, you must perform an SEO audit. The audit examines things like the sitemap and URL structure. The result of the audit will also tell you if your main webpages are listed and positioned correctly and if site visitors will not have a hard time navigating through the inner pages and links.

4 – Content

Content plays an indispensable role in the effectiveness and success of your website. The failure to refresh or update content will hurt your site’s rank, so it is not merely about inserting unique and relevant information. Even if on-page content is unique and relevant, it still needs to be updated regularly since Google looks at it with a critical eye. Hence, your SEO audit should include an examination of your content.

See to it that you are using the keywords in your content naturally. It also must be consistent since the objective is to prevent being labeled as spam.

Part of examining your content is taking a closer look at the tags. Check if title tags have two salient qualities – concise and descriptive. Be reminded that extra-long titles are never a good thing for search engines.

5 – Checking the Backlinks

You probably know by now that backlinks are a crucial element of SEO. Google will grade the quality of your website based on the quality of the sites that link to it. It was prevalent back in the day to exchange reciprocal links with other websites to improve SEO. It is no longer an effective practice today, but backlinks are still relevant. This time, backlinks are more about quality instead of quantity. Therefore, you should verify in your SEO audit if the websites that links to your site come from reputable domains.

Tools for SEO Audit

Like I said at the beginning of this post, SEO audit does not have to be an overwhelming task. You can do it with the help of a tool that is readily available online. All you must do is pick the right one based on your budget and specific needs.

The first and most sensible option is Google Analytics. As someone tasked to market your brand and optimize a website, this tool is a must-have. It does not only help you by providing critical indicators of SEO metrics but will also hand out a user-friendly guide in performing SEO.

Another option is Google Webmaster Tools. It is a platform that offers a handful of reasonably priced tools needed for an SEO audit. Its most notable advantage is that you can check your website’s SEO performance based on how Google sees it. Since you are hoping to have your site ranked on top of Google, then it makes sense to use this tool.

The post How To Perform an SEO Audit: Complete Guide appeared first on Responsive. Award-Winning. Dynamic. RAD. Canada's Best.

Following the release of Google Chrome, it became a dangerously common misconception that websites without an SSL certificate are unsafe, and should likely be avoided. Let’s read out below the importance of SSL Certificates & Website Safety.

And while this is true, we often struggle to communicate to our clients that even websites with an SSL certificate alone aren’t actually all that safe either.

SSL certificates fail to come in as a last line of defense for more complex security breaches. While your site certainly needs an SSL certificate- e-commerce or not- there are other safety protocols you have to consider if web safety is a top priority for you.

What is an SSL Certificate?

Secure sockets layer.

That’s what it stands for- a secure sockets layer.

Not a glamorous sounding addition to your website by any means, but these certificates play an important role in data encryption. They quickly became a best practice in website security, for good reason as well. SSL certificates establish an encrypted link between a web server and a browser.

If you don’t want the entire world knowing what you’re sending across the net, you sure do need an SSL certificate.

Where Did The “Not Secure” Warning Come From?

Google and Mozilla are pushing hard for webmasters and the like to adopt HTTPS.

(Don’t worry- we’ll cover HTTPS too.)

At the end of the day, the only way for these Internet mammoths to push HTTPS adoption is by flagging sites that don’t have SSL certificates.

Wait, Wait- HTTPS?

You’ll see the https extension in front of most websites these days.

The web can be a very unsafe place without proper safety protocols, and HTTPS offers the most robust combination of safety certifications to keep your website as secure as possible.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure was built off it’s older counterpart HTTP- Hypertext Transfer Protocol.

The difference between the two? HTTPS uses SSL certificates for data encryption. HTTPS makes online shopping and mobile banking possible- information passed over an HTTPS network is generally not compromised by outsiders.

HTTP speaks more to the way data is communicated between two parties over the Internet. It doesn’t necessarily address the safety of how that is done, just how it’s done in general.

HTTPS is the perfect combo of data communication and data encryption.

Google Will Flag Websites Without SSL Certificates

Rightfully so. Websites without SSL certificates aren’t secure.

Like we said, the world wide web isn’t a safe place these days and website security isn’t really optional anymore.

The proof is in the pudding. The cyber security industry is worth over 241 billion dollars and shows no sign of slowing down.

The “not secure warning” is totally legit.

But don’t assume that https websites are automatically safe- above SSL certificates, there are other security protocols your site really, really should have.

SSL certificates can’t protect a website from malware infections, viruses or the website than spreading that malware. Even the padlock in the address bar doesn’t necessarily indicate secure- it simply indicates that the info shared between that websites server and the browser is secure.

PSA- infected websites over an HTTPS network will actually continue to ensure the integrity of the malware or virus, all the way until it reaches the final victim- the websites visitors.

SSL Certificates and HTTPS Certificates STILL Don’t Equal Maximum Website Security

As easy as we would like to make this, there really is no “one size fits all” solution for website security.

Even if a website has had SSL & HTTPS forced upon it, it doesn’t actually mean the website is secure.

Without additional security measures, such as WAF (Website Application Firewall) or access controls, an HHTPS site can still be hacked and be dangerous to visitors. Data encryption is vital, yes, but it’s only piece of the web security puzzle.

You need to look at website security as a strategic, well planned conjunction of protection, detection, response and backups.

Our number one tip to get going, however?

Make sure you choose the right SSL certificate.

Domain Validated SSL Certificates

These SSL certificates show that a domain is registered, and that a site admin is running the URL.

It’s quite easy to obtain- this certificate authority can typically validate through email, DNS or HTTP.

It includes the owner proving they own and run the domain, and saving a text file in the public web root of their domain.

Organization Validated SSL Certificates

Building off domain validated SSL certificates, organization validated certificates not only prove ownership of a domain, but also proves the existence of an organization or company that stand behind the domain.

Your organization or company’s details are shown online, just like individual ownership ins domain validated SSL certificates.

Extended Validation SSL Certificates

Again, building on the above, extended certificates demand even more information and proof of ownership than domain or organization validation.

It signifies an even higher level of security and ownership, those these take longer to obtain.

Take a look at the domain bar when you look at PayPal; there is no doubt of the organization, ownership and their authenticity.

At the validation level, extended validation SSL Certificates are the most secure. If applicable, look to extended validation certificates as part of your end security game.

Single Name & Wildcard SSL Certificates

Single-name SSL certificates protect one subdomain.

Great for forgotten subdomains, or site evolution, there is always a place for single name SSl certificates.

Just be aware, however, that a certificate for one subdomain will only apply to that exact, specific domain- not even the branches of it.

A certificate for www.website.com won’t apply to mail.website.com.

On the other hand, wildcard SSL certificates secure a number of subdomains for just one single domain.

Again, we would love to make this easy for you, but wildcard SSL certificates only protect the subdomains of one single domain.

They don’t protect multiple domains, even if they are all related.

That’s where multidomain SSL certificates come into play.

Multidomain SSL Certificates

These giants provide security for several different domains, through one extension.

This extension is the SAN extension. (As if you wanted anymore acronyms thrown your way, we know.)

SAN extension= subject alternative name.

With multi domain SSL certificates, you can combine multiple hostnames even if they’re not from the same domain.

Complex? Yes. Many sites don’t need to go as far as multidomain SSL certificates, but they are there- and for those that need them, you NEED them.

So, I hope you understand everything about SSL Certificates & Website Safety. feel free to Contact us for any Consultation about web design, SEO, Marketing.

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