Creating a powerful headline is important — maybe even more important than you think. According to recent research, 80 percent of people will read a headline on a website, but only 20 percent of these people will actually read the article. The quality of the headline can make a big difference between the articles that are read versus the ones that aren’t.

So what makes a compelling headline? The team behind eVisible content writing services knows that there’s no “magic bullet” to assure that headlines will grab your readers’ attention. You’ll need quite a bit of trial and error to discover the type of headlines that will resonate with your target audience but doing it properly can pay significant dividends.

Don’t Be Afraid to Get Creative: A boring headline — even if factually accurate — isn’t going to drive people to your content. Any fears about using clever or “cute” headlines to draw in readers have been proven to be outdated with the rise of viral sites that get huge click-through and page view numbers with creative and witty headlines.

Consider Your Target Audience: It’s important to think about who you want to read your stories and what you want them to do when crafting a headline. If you are looking at closing sales, you need a headline that calls the reader to action. If you are simply looking to increase page views, you need to focus on grabbing their attention with the promise of something unique in the story text.

The Medium Matters as Well: You need to consider who your readers will engage with the headline when creating it. Sites such as Facebook allow you to use an image and, possibly, some additional “teaser” text as a sub-headline to attract a potential reader’s attention. Make sure you take advantage of these opportunities when you can.

Remember That People Are Curious By Nature: There are several types of headlines that have become popular in recent years:

• Lists
• Questions
• How-Tos
• Directly Addressing the Reader

But one of the most popular recent trends has been in headlines that use shocking language, over-the-top statements or emotional responses to get readers hooked. This is particularly true of viral news sites, which often use headlines such as “This Picture Shows Why Our Education System is Doomed” or “You Won’t Believe Why This Woman Was Sent to Prison for 20 Years.” They present bits of information that connect with people’s emotions and lead them on to want — and almost need — to click through to find out more. It’s powerful, effective and is a method that can make your articles go viral.

It’s easy to think that SEO work — whether it’s doing the work yourself or working with an SEO agency — will result in a boost in search engine rankings immediately. The truth is far different, as solid SEO work does not happen overnight. Effective search engine optimization strategy is a process that involves multiple steps; each of these steps needs to be executed flawlessly in order for real improvements in search engine rankings to occur.

A cornerstone of much of this early work will be the “under the hood” work that goes into ensuring that a site is ready to be indexed by search engines such as Google and Bing. This infrastructure work is far from sexy and it won’t lead to immediate results but making sure that issues such as broken links, site maps and redirects are in place are critical if any future progress is going to be made in implementing an SEO campaign.

If you are doing your own SEO work on your site, there’s a good chance that you’ll be overwhelmed at some point with the sheer amount of behind the scenes work that needs to go into getting a website completely ready for search engine optimization. In many cases, it makes sense to work with an SEO agency like eVisible, which has helped countless companies get through the initial steps needed to launch an SEO campaign. SEO firms understand the challenges of improving a website’s infrastructure and working with one from the start can help you to avoid some of the common pitfalls that can delay positive ranking results.

If you have made the decision to work with an SEO agency, it’s important to have patience through the early steps of the campaign as the firm deals with the infrastructure of your site. The changes that need to be made in order to make a site SEO friendly often can’t happen in a few weeks. It may take several weeks or even months before it’s time to develop content that will improve your search engine ranking. Having a plan in place from the start with your SEO firm that has a timeline with set deadlines will help you make sure your agency is staying on track while alleviating your concerns.

One of the easiest ways to make more money from your online business is to improve the flow of your eCommerce checkout system. You need to make it as easy as possible for people who are browsing for products on your site to make a purchase. There are many ways to improve this flow rate, but even a slight improvement in conversion rate optimization can lead to a significant increase in profits.

The specifics of how to improve your conversion rate will be unique to your website. You’ll need to do conversion testing and reporting to fully understand what it means for your site. But what motivates a person to decide to make a purchase from a website is universal. Roughly stated, a person makes a purchase because they are motivated to buy a product, have the immediate ability to make a purchase and have been “triggered” to buy.

Getting people motivated and triggered to make a purchase can be as simple as sending out an email and having them click through to your product page. But it takes professional website development in order to give a customer the easiest path to purchase. One secret is to make sure that a customer gets an item into their shopping cart as quickly as possible. This gets them out of the mindset of “just browsing” since they are now officially “shopping.”

It’s important to make it as easy as possible for a person to add something to their shopping cart. The purchase button should be as big and obvious as possible. Once a person adds something to the shopping cart, it should be clear that they have something in the cart. And you need to make sure that the customer can see how to go to the shopping cart to enter in their payment information and complete the purchase at any time.

From a web design standpoint, you also need to consider what happens when a customer gets ready to make a purchase. One consideration is whether or not you require customers to register before buying anything. As a general rule, forcing customers to register creates a barrier that could very easily lead to them not making a purchase. You’ll also want to make sure that you don’t ask for credit card information until the last step in the process. Get all of the shipping and personal information first so that the credit card information is easy to get.

These are just a few of the things that you’ll want to do when you think about your eCommerce set-up. eVisible can help you design an eCommerce system that is right for your industry and business.

The world of SEO is changing. Changes in the algorithms used by major search engines such as Google have redefined how a business can improve its page rankings. It’s no longer enough to have a standalone SEO campaign; today, you need to integrate your SEO tactics with other aspects of your online marketing if you want to find success and your social media presence is a big part of this.

The reality is that SEO by itself simply doesn’t work anymore. Combining your social media and SEO tactics is not just a good idea — it’s something that’s a must. A strong social media presence won’t directly increase your page rankings for your main site. However, it can help to spread the word about your brand and links to your site. If other people share these links, that will only help your overall SEO. This is the type of effective link building that works in the new world of SEO.

Small businesses also need to refine their focus on their target audience in order to succeed. More specifically, businesses need to understand the type of online content that customers are looking for in order to deliver this content to them. High quality content not only helps to attract customers but will help with Google rankings.

One way that businesses can help to improve their SEO presence is by utilizing the small business SEO services offered by eVisible. Our site has several free and premium tools available that let small business owners to do some basic but critical SEO work themselves. This can include keyword research, tracking social media involvement and monitoring the readability of content on a site.

Doing this kind of basic SEO work on your own can be extremely valuable for a small business. However, there are still likely to be many aspects of SEO that a business owner won’t be able to do on their own.  One of the most common SEO questions for small local businesses is how they can fit SEO into their (likely very limited) budget. The good news is that eVisible can help businesses of any size improve their online marketing with tactics that include search engine optimization. For a relatively small expenditure, a small business can positively impact their online presence.

Google strikes a careful balance between wanting to provide users a place to find the best information for free and being a platform for advertisers to reach potential customers. So while the search engine giant has been investing in initiatives such as Knowledge Graph, In-Depth Articles and Hummingbird, they’ve also been attempting to drive more people to click on their paid search results.

The result is that while organic search is still very important, much of the best real estate on Google’s search pages has been given to paid search results. You might think that this means you should consider focusing more — or all — of your efforts on paid search and abandon organic SEO. Think again. eVisible firmly believes that organic search results are very powerful and we make them a key component of the online marketing agency services we provide for businesses of any size.

The reality is while the real estate on a Google search result is shrinking for organic text links, there are additional opportunities for organic SEO elsewhere. Here are just a few of the many different search result items that are prominent on Google’s SERP and that help you to boost your visibility:

Knowledge Graph

This is Google’s attempt to bring together the major information on a search item in one place. It pulls information from Google+ along with from recognized information sites such as Wikipedia. Make sure the information on these sites are correct and verified along with adding it to the Freebase.com database.

Image Search Results

You can increase your chances for having an image of one of your products come up in a search by describing the image with keywords in the “alt text” attribute and saving the file with a relevant name. You should also create an image XML sitemap and ensure that a robots.txt isn’t blocking your image directory.

Reviews

You can make sure that reviews of your business — particularly popular reviews — come up in search results several ways, including using a mark-up tool and verifying it with Google’s Structured Testing Tool or using Google’s Data Highlighter.

Authorship

When an article you have written comes up in a Google search, you can have your image and bio also appear by verifying yourself as a Google+ contributor. This is done by linking your web page to your Google profile and then adding a link to the page on your “Contributor To” field in your profile.

In-Depth Articles

While the majority of in-depth articles that are featured in Google search results come from larger publishers, you can increase the odds of your article being highlighted by making sure your Google authorship is verified and making sure specific attributes such as headlines, alternative headlines, images, descriptions and more are marked up to be read by Google.

Video Clips

Having YouTube videos linked to your Google+ account gives you a chance for them to come up as snippets in searches. You can also self-host these videos and make sure that they have attributes like descriptions and titles properly filled in.

In order to make the most of your web-presence, you need more than just a site that has an SEO friendly design for desktop users. More people than ever are using their mobile devices to get online and make purchases. In order to reach these customers, you need to think of your mobile SEO and desktop SEO as two separate but interrelated strategies.

Here are five key things to think about as you develop an independent mobile SEO strategy:

The User Experience Drives Everything: The number one factor that drives a successful mobile SEO strategy is giving the user a positive experience. Not only has Google signaled that this plays a factor when you want to improve a search engine ranking, but it also helps to generate conversions.

Make Your Site Mobile Friendly: Mobile sites can be responsive to adapt to readers on mobile devices, or you can create your own dedicated site for mobile users. There are pros and cons to each approach, but it’s important that you have a dedicated way for mobile users to access your site. Doing so will greatly increase your potential for conversions from mobile users.

Have a Clean Design: Having a website design with lots of graphics and other design elements can create major problems for mobile users. With limited screen sizes, clutter can keep people from seeing the most important information on your site. It can also make pages slow to load and make mobile users quickly decide to leave your page and go somewhere else.

Consider How Mobile Users Search: A mobile user likely won’t type in a search with your city name; they’ll almost always type (or speak) a search that says to find something “near” them. Because of this, making sure that your business’ location is part of your SEO strategy and not just a city name can pay dividends.

Grasp User Intent: Mobile users are more likely to be looking for something near them. This means that making sure your location, hours and phone number are easily accessible on the site and through Google+ is critical.

The start of the year is a great time to review your content marketing strategy. Whether your plans just need some simple tune-ups or you need to start doing content marketing, you can always benefit from a fresh approach. In the coming year, content will continue to be one of the driving forces of search engine optimization but how this content is delivered to readers and the correct type of content to create is always evolving.

With this in mind, here are four pieces of advice for your content marketing moving forward:

Have an Overriding Plan You Can Measure: Your content strategy needs to be part of your overall SEO and online marketing campaign and not just operate as its own entity. You can hire a provider of website content writing services to create killer content, but if it’s not helping you to drive visitors to your site or close sales, what is its purpose? You also need to make sure that you have metrics in place to see the patterns of your content’s readers and if the content is effective in spurring action.

Plan for Mobile Reading: A recent Pew Research study showed that 63 percent of all people with a cell phone use their device to go online. This represents a huge amount of people who are potentially reading your content on a phone along with other people using tablets and other non-phone mobile devices. Make sure you are using responsive design to ensure that the content works well on smaller screens.

Personalize Your Content: Whether you are drafting email newsletters, blog posts or guest articles on another site, it’s important that you make sure that readers feel like they are reading something unique and different. Speak directly to your audience and try to personalize your contact with them wherever you can. If you are the owner or CEO of your company, take the time to share your personality with your customers through your content. If readers feel a connection to you, they are more like to open emails and read your articles.

Make Your Content Informative and Useful: These have been two of the biggest buzzwords to come out of Google’s algorithm changes in recent years. While link building and higher search engine rankings might be a by-product of your content, you need to create this content in a way that provides readers with helpful information that is relevant to your industry. If you are working with an outside provider of content writing services, make sure they know your business well before they start writing on your behalf.

Google’s recent move to restrict access to keyword information was blow to many online advertisers and marketers. For many people, Google’s keyword suggestion tool was the main way that they researched potential keywords to use in SEO and PPC campaigns. But savvy advertising and marketing experts were already using other keyword tools to augment their research. Here are 11 tools to consider when looking for a keyword suggestion tool.

Wikipedia: Going to Wikipedia pages related to topics that are related to your business is already a great way to discover keyword phrases. When you use the SEOQuake Toolbar while on Wikipedia, you can quickly see the words and phrases most commonly used on these pages.

Amazon.com: Amazon has provided users with free access to a wonderful SEO resource: books related to their subject. Search for books and look for “Look Inside” books with free previews. Many keywords can be found in the chapter or section titles. Another way to use Amazon for SEO purposes is to just start a search on products related to your category. Amazon’s Auto Correct feature will suggest lots of related phrases and versions of your keyword.

Press Release Sites: Visit press release distribution sites like PR.com or Yahoo News to get a sense of what companies in your space are saying about themselves. Browse through industry categories and search press releases to find frequently used words and phrases by your competitors.

Soovle and Ubersuggest: Soovle will help you by automatically creating lists of keyword suggestions across multiple search engines (such as Bing, Amazon, Yahoo and YouTube). Ubersuggest takes a longtail approach by getting keywords from regular searches along with specific searches like News, Shopping or Videos.

eVisible’s Keyword Suggestion Tool: Our own free tool gives you a large list of potential keywords based on words or phrases that you provide. It’s fast, easy to use and gives you plenty of great keywords to use. You can find the Keyword Suggestion Tool at https://www.evisible.co/tools/keyword-suggestion/.

Followerwonk: Using Followerwonk to determine the influential social media experts in your space gives you several avenues of keyword research. You can scrape these people’s Tweets using a service like AllMyTweets and then feed the content into a word cloud generator like Wordle to find frequently-mentioned terms. You can also export title tags using Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider into Wordle.

Prismatic: When you are searching for SEO keywords specifically for social media, Prismatic is a great tool. You can follow topics by category and browse social media updates to find frequently-used keywords.

Google Correlate: Google hasn’t completely dried up as a source of keyword research. You can use its Google Correlate product to search for the most frequently searched for terms within a given time frame. You can compare search rates on a weekly or monthly basis or across different time frames to see when the right time to use a keyword might be.