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Your Rankings Have Dropped – 10 Things to Do Now

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Myrtle Beach SEO

Whether your organic search rankings are in free fall or you observe a minor position loss on a secondary keyword, no one likes to see a drop.

Though fluctuations are inevitable, especially in the face of Google’s rolling real-time algorithm updates, it’s never good news when your search rankings start trending in the wrong direction.

How can you keep a dip from becoming a nosedive into organic search obscurity?

Proactive, attentive troubleshooting can help rescue your rankings and get the needle moving in the right direction.

This 10-step process will help you identify the source of any issues so you can resolve them and get your SEO back on track.

Step 1: Check the ABCs of Your Site

In deploying and monitoring keyword performance, it can be all too easy to focus on advanced strategies while underestimating the importance of the ABCs of on-page SEO.

Why stress about anchor text ratio, link velocity, or citation optimization, when the answer to your rankings problem could be an easy fix directly on your site?

Does your site return a 200 status code?

200-series status codes indicate that your site can be communicated with successfully. The standard 200 OK status code indicates a successful HTTP request.

Use a free tool like HTTP Status Code Checker to confirm that your site is returning a successful request. If not, you can troubleshoot based on the failed status code, like 404 (page not found) or 410 (page permanently removed).

Can bots crawl your site?

Robots.txt is a text file located in the top-level directory of your web server that instructs bots on how to interact with your website. Within the file, you can set inclusions and exclusions to your heart’s content, for instance disallowing bots from crawling a dev site or indexing duplicate pages.

Have you accidentally set the restrictions too tightly, preventing search bots from crawling any of your main pages? Double check the robots.txt file using Google’s free Robots Testing Tool – if you spot anything amiss, upload a more permissive file to the server.

Step 2: Check SEO Basics

While basic SEO elements are declining in importance as a search engine ranking factor, they still have an influence. Check that basics like title tags, meta descriptions, and headings aren’t holding back your rankings.

Do you have optimized home page title and meta tags, and do they display correctly in search results?

Your home page’s title tag represents a massive yet simple opportunity to tell search bots what your page is about. If it’s generic, or if it’s failing to pull properly, it can affect your rankings.

While its companion meta description doesn’t directly affect SEO, a relevant, persuasive meta can improve click-through rates.

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11 Web Design Principles that Will Boost Your Conversion Rate

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how to increase website conversion metrics

Do you want to boost conversions on your website? As smart marketers know, your design can make all the difference. In this post, we’ll share 11 web design principles that will boost your conversion rate.

Many marketers harp on the importance of SEO, social media, creating lead magnets that convert and the like, yet having an excellent website design to start with is so often overlooked. While all of these components do matter, your web design isn’t just a “pretty face”: it can actually make or break your conversion rates.

According to research from Stanford University, 46.1% of people say a website’s design is the top criteria for deciding if a company is credible or not. So it’s extremely important that your design looks professional.

Whether or not your website is aesthetically pleasing also plays a big role in conversion rate optimization. Given 15 minutes to consume content, two-thirds of people would rather read something beautifully designed than something plain (according to this study by Adobe). So if you want people to read your blog posts, they need to look attractive.

But that’s not all. If your website is unattractive, people will actually leave your site altogether. 38% of people, to be exact. That’s a whole lot of lost leads!

So regardless of whether or not design is your forte, you can’t afford to overlook it. Learn web design, hire a freelancer, employ a designer, or do whatever it takes!

To start with, here are a handful of important design principles that will give you an immediate and sustainable boost in conversions… Read Full Article Here

6 Social Media Trends to Prepare for in 2018

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social media marketing

When it comes to reaching audiences, effectively distributing your content, and building a following around your brand, social media offers a wealth of possibilities. It’s where your audiences already live and engage with content, which makes it a convenient platform for brands. Its built-in analytics allow you to track and improve your efforts over time. Plus, all the free social-media tools make it easy to use and maintain an active presence.

As you look ahead to 2018 and begin planning for ways to strengthen your social strategy, it’s important to keep a pulse on trends. To help, here are six social-media trends you need to prepare for if you want to hit the ground running in 2018:
1. More robust social analytics signal more opportunity for content personalization.

Nobody likes content that’s irrelevant to one’s needs. This is especially true when you’re interacting with a brand you know and love — the last thing you want is a piece of generic content that doesn’t offer anything unique to you as a member of that audience. In fact, nearly three out of four of us get frustrated when content isn’t relevant to our interests.

Improved personalization for audiences is a major trend in content marketing, and it extends to social media, too. As social platforms evolve, their analytics tools and business-specific features will become more detailed and valuable to brands.

This kind of data means marketers will have the insights to craft better and more personalized content for their audiences. It’s past time for marketers to be creating and distributing content that truly speaks to and engages audiences on a personal level; social media will help make that easier.
2. Platform feature overlap means you’ll have to be more selective.

Both Snapchat and Instagram feature timed videos and visual content, so the main points of differentiation are audience and reach. Instagram Stories has a significantly wider reach and receives more engagement; Instagram influencers see up to 10 percent of their audience members open their Instagram Stories on a daily basis, which is more than can be said for Snapchat. On the other hand, Snapchat continues to dominate among members of younger demographics.

As more platforms continue to offer overlapping features, brands and marketers will have to be increasingly selective about which ones they invest in. Take advantage of analytics and reporting features to identify which platforms could offer you the best return, and start there.
3. Social listening will give brands an edge to their messaging online.

Instead of just tracking what kind of content your competitors are developing or what they’re sharing on social media, you should also monitor their mentions and what people are saying — and use it as a metric to compare your performance.

“Using web monitoring, we can collect an enormous amount of data on our company and our competitors that can be used in our marketing strategy. At Brand24, our research showed that in one month, 14,000 online searches started with ‘Can anyone recommend?’ and about 30,000 searches started with ‘Where can I buy?’ About 60 percent of these questions never received responses from companies; this is a huge opportunity,” says Magdalena Urbaniak, global communications manager at Brand24.

Urbaniak says monitoring these social mentions can show you what people in your shared audience like and don’t like, which can give you insight into where your brand can improve. Social listening can give you valuable information about your competitors’ performance and your own audience that you can use to your advantage in your content strategy.
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8 Emerging User Interface Designs to Watch for in 2018

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Every year, new trends develop in user interface design that literally changes the face of the Internet for years to come. Some of these trends are just starting to emerge in 2017, while others grow more popular each year.

As 2017 enters its second half, and 2018 comes into view, we’ll look at some of the current trends, followed by our predictions for what will shine in 2018.
Current UI trends

With a shift towards creating user experiences, rather than just selling, 2016 introduced some great new ideas into UI design. Perhaps the biggest change happened after apps such as Pokémon Go blurred the line between reality and screens. With this now a possibility, how we interact with those screens is even more critical than it once was.

In 2017, designers were tasked with creating designs that were more time-saving and personalized while delivering deeper metrics than ever before.
Upcoming UI Trends

These 8 trends not only align with these goals, but they are also most likely to drive the design of websites in 2018.
Long Form Content

The demand for more written content (for a variety of reasons) has led to web pages that require scrolling. While great for search engine optimization, content that extends ‘below the fold’ pose a unique challenge for UI design. Expect to see more UI design trends addressing this issue in 2018. CLICK HERE TO READ FULL ARTICLE

The 100 Best Android Apps of 2017

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These are the essential Android apps you need, whether you’re outfitting the latest Pixel phone or plugging along with a much older device.

I’ve come to think of the Google Play app store a little like a galaxy. From a distance, the sheer number of apps is staggering, making it hard to taken in all at once. But zoom in on any one of those apps, and the distance between them, in terms of quality and what they offer, is vast. Consider: If you looked at an app from Google Play every second, without stopping, it would take more than 23 days to see them all. That’s hardly a good use of time. So instead I present this list, the 100 essential apps that you need, whether you’re on the best and newest Android phone or still plodding along on a dusty tablet.

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