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SEO in 2025 – How to Maximize Search Visibility, Organic Traffic & Returns on Investment

Posted on August 29, 2024 - 3:41 AM by

SEO is changing rapidly with evolution in generative AI, evolving algorithms & new search features that are propelling search engines, such as Google & Bing, to improve their search results in order to be more meaningful and personalized for their users. In such times, what should your SEO agency be doing to get you high page visibility?

While affordable SEO services are an important consideration for most businesses looking to boost their search visibility, you should look for an SEO agency that is ready to adapt to search changes in search engine optimization.

How will Generative AI Impact SEO in 2025?

AI Overviews –

AI Overviews, earlier known as search generative experiences or SGE, is one such big change due to search results being triggered by generative search. 

We have now seen how Google Search produces an AI overview to provide an AI-generated summary at the top of the search page for many searches. For instance, if I type in ‘transactional or commercial search keywords and zero click searches’ and I see an AI overview right on top, which gives me a pretty good overview of the impact of AI Overview on transactional or commercial keywords:

Notice how there are ‘links cards’ to the right which allow users to dig deeper into the topic. These are the websites that provide specific guidance on this topic, which is one piece of search real estate that websites can aim to occupy. More on this later.

An important note here; AI overview in its current form is new, but Google’s attempt to provide relevant and summarized information has existed for a long time, in the form of People Also Ask (PAA), featured snippets, and Knowledge Graphs.

These are all attempts to show the most relevant and useful information in search results and AI Overview is another feature that is propelled by Generative AI. One big difference between these other features and AI Overview is that AI Overview is getting SEO teams flustered over the potential zero click searches, which we will discuss next.

Zero click Searches – 

A much-feared implication of AI overview in the SEO community is that people will reduce the number of clicks to websites in response to the AI-generated overview as the overview will provide a concise and useful answer to the user’s query, thereby reducing the need for open web clicks.

In reality, how has this panned out?

Well, a well-sourced study by Rand Fishkin of SparkToro has found that about 69.1% of Google searches resulted in zero clicks to the open web (meaning, web platforms beyond Google.com). For more information, caveats and data limitations, visit Spark Toro’s blog on zero click searches: 

While this appears apocalyptic, in reality there are nuances that we as SEO experts need to be aware of. 

  • Zero click searches will likely affect top-funnel or informational / educational searches.
  • For transactional or commercial searches, most will click to an open web click. This is because users have a purchase intent and would need to click to a website in order to initiate the purchase or gather more information.
  • While AI Overview provides a summary that is intended to meet the search intent of the user, it also provides link cards which allow users to dig deeper into the topic by clicking through to the open web.
  • Not all users will be satisfied with the AI overview and some will go into deeper searches. IN SparkToro’s study, we see 21.4% of users went on to another  search.
  • Finally, as SEO professionals, our aim should be to develop content that can get featured in search features other than organic (website) listing. Getting content impressions on AI overview, link cards, featured snippets, knowledge graphs or PAA boxes are all ways to improve brand recognition and increasing market share.

Should I Be Thinking of CHERP? 

CHERP or chat experience results page/position is the new kid on the block. CHERP refers to getting mentions on chatbots, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Co-Pilot or many of the gen AI chatbots on the market. 

With regards to Google search, CHERP is synonymous with AI Overview. The question we are asking is how can we get mentioned in AI Overview (or other CHERPs) if our audience is searching for us?

Or, if we are not visible in the chat experience results page, where are we appearing in search results? We know that for local searches, 42% of searches click on a local pack result, which is the 3-pack Google Maps result. If you are a local business that is relying purely on organic SERP optimization, you have to consider that 50% of Google users click on their results within 9 seconds of searching. 

Which means that if AI Overview, Local Service Ads, Paid Ads and Local 3-pack are dominating the top 50% of search real estate, how likely are users to click on your website link if it’s placed down below in the premium real estate of SERPs? Remember, only 9% of Google searchers make it to the bottom of the first page of the search results. 

This means, for SEO in 2025, it is not enough to appear on page 1 of search results, At the very least, if you are a local business, you have to aim for the local 3-pack, which means optimizing your Google Business Profile (GBP) and aiming for the coveted top 3 positions in organic search results.

How to Navigate the New SEO Space in 2025?

As Generative AI changes the nature of search results and as Google updates its algorithms to be more meaningful and useful for searchers’ intent, what can an SEO agency do to play in the new landscape?

  1. A good foundational content strategy – A good current SEO base will be your defensive strategy in 2025. This means authoritative content that projects experience, expertise, authority, & trustworthiness (E.E.A.T.) should still be your foundational strategy! Good content allows helps you in multiple ways, including:
    1. Good content allows your article or multimedia to be indexed by search engines and drive high value traffic to your website or channel. At Webtage, we have seen at least one-third of our organic traffic generated through high-quality informational blogs that we create that bring together our E.E.A.T. as trustworthy & dependable digital marketing partners for our clients.
    2. Great content also helps build great backlinks from authoritative sources in your industry. In 2025, go beyond creating non contextualized backlinks from generic content sites. Instead, use great content that reflects principles of E.E.A.T. to reach out to high authority niche content sites. These backlinks appear to be naturally placed in a piece of content that is authoritative, trustworthy and denotes expertise, which makes these links much more valuable for your organic SERPs.
    3. The more often you create and publish good content on your website, the more frequently search bots will crawl your website and this will increase the chances of your content being shown on search results.
    4. Good content that is useful for your audience also increases the chances of higher engagement rates and lower bounce rates. The longer your visitors spend time on your website, the more likely your website will rank as an authoritative source of information and higher up in search results
  1. Content that is easy to digest, aligned to user intent, and displays first-person experiences – aka ranch-style SEO content– AI Overview, in particular and CHERPs in general, favors readability. Look at your readability score and summarize your page info into simple sentence structures followed by a clear call to action. This means presenting your information on a page in a clear and easy-to-understand language.

Second, instead of creating a skyscraper SEO strategy that relies on deep, in-depth pillar content, generative AI favors ranch style SEO that breaks down comprehensive pillar content into digestible bits of information that is mapped to varying search intent of a user’s journey. 

Third, a critical component of ranch style SEO strategy is creating content that conveys first-hand experience, deep expertise, pointers, evaluation & refinement to make the output useful. This is exactly the kind of content that chatbots cannot spit out. And this is the type of content that you should aim to produce in 2025 that will likely get included in AI Overview, link cards, and other SERP features.

The days of spitting out large volumes of shallow content or AI-generated content is long gone. Even Google’s recent Useful Content update prioritizes websites with content that serve people’s needs and penalizes content that is produced primarily for ranking high on search engines.

  1. Aim for SERP Features – A related offense strategy, that is relevant not only for AI Overview but also other SERP features, such as featured snippets and PAA boxes is the creation of content mapped to user intent, careful selection of keywords,  and developing high authority backlinks to appear as search feature. 

To aim for featured snippets or PAA boxes, for instance, use a tool such as SEMrush’s keyword magic tool to filter most relevant keywords for your business that have associated featured snippets of PAA appearing in search results.

Once you have the keywords narrowed down, focus on creating content that precisely and concisely answers questions being asked in SERP features. AIOSEO suggests “includes simple elements like using question-based heading tags immediately followed by an answer containing the keyword in the question.” Other suggestions include answering those questions as short and concise paragraphs, creating a list of steps in the form of how-to tutorials, compressing large amounts of data as tables, and adding table of content to your posts and pages that allow for easy to generate list-style featured snippet or PAA answers.

Finally, think about adding schema markups, also known as structured data, to your webpages, especially those pages with frequently-asked questions, user-generatetd content, such as reviews, how-to content pieces and product and service details. These allow search engines to better understand your content and context to allow for better generation of SERP features.

SEO in 2025 will mean more competition and more work for Visibility, Traffic & ROI

While affordability remains an important factor in a company’s decision while selecting SEO vendors, remember in 2025, you want an SEO agency that is ready to unlearn many facets of SEO over the years. No longer a numbers game, the SEO of the future will in many ways support the foundations of good SEO along with the quality and relevance of your content that needs to be concise and easily digestible for your users.

Also important is creative ways of content creation that would increase the chances of getting featured on SERP features through list-style, clear, concise and super organized text.

This means your SEO agency has to stay ahead of the curve and explore creative ways to get you featured prominently on the highly-competitive real estate of search results. 

If you are looking for a digital marketing partner with a relentless focus on excellence and a proven track record of success, Webtage is the trusted partner of choice for businesses seeking to dominate their digital landscape and achieve unparalleled growth through SEO. Contact us at 630-277-9521 today!

Seven Best Practices for B2B Lead Generation Campaigns in 2025

Posted on August 15, 2024 - 4:56 PM by

A key B2B marketing goal is to generate a pipeline of qualified leads that can then be handed over to sales to be followed upon. Other marketing goals are brand awareness & reputation building, customer upsell & cross sell, and building brand advocates – this completes the lifecycle revenue marketing model. More on this later.

As a B2B Advertising Agency in Chicago, our B2B lead generation is usually done through a two-pronged strategy: an inbound, content-led strategy or an B2B outbound search or social media advertising, including account-based campaigns. This article will focus on one such outbound strategy: Google Search Ads.

The Power of B2B Lead Generation with Proven Google Ads Strategies

Google Ads is an excellent outbound strategy that works well to drive sales qualified traffic, assuming you have a well-positioned & credible brand and a clear set of solutions that you can either demo or provide a quote for (the two scenarios will dictate the clear call to action in your Google Ads). 

Let’s start with the well established best practices of B2B lead generation through Google Ads

Create Your B2B Lead Generation Google Ads Strategy

B2B sales cycles are long, ranging from an average of 2 months to 6 months & more. B2B buyers go through stages of awareness, consideration and decision making. Google Ads can work well to target buyers when they are still in their awareness stage. Marketing can target buyers through advertising content-led informative pieces such as white papers and industry trend write-ups. Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) who consume top-of-the-funnel content pieces can then be nurtured deeper into the funnel through marketing automation and drip marketing.

However, for sales qualified lead generation, it is best to target mid-funnel and bottom-funnel buyers who are actively looking for solutions and are in the process of shortlisting candidates for their final decision making. This is the sweet spot that you can target via Google Ads.

You can create clear calls to action to drive demo, consultations or requests for quotes.

Identify Your Ideal B2B Customer with Precise Targeting

Before you look into targeting on Google Ads platform, you should create buyer profiles. In order to do so, list your customers characteristics , including geographies you are targeting, their things they like (interests), things they value (value system), job profiles (targeted job titles, industries, company revenue range etc.), and demographics (age, sex, marital status, presence of children, etc.).

Based on your buyer profile, you can now set targeting options on Google Ads. Google Ads allow for rich targeting options, including locations, audience targeting via inbuilt Google Segments (such as affinity or in-market audiences) or search-term intent segments. You can also upload customer lists or create retargeting lists based on criteria you set and develop similar audience segments to make your targeting laser sharp (more on this later).

Assuming you have identified the best keywords for your campaigns, define your campaigns and ad groups strategically aligned with your business goals. Remember, similar solutions or products typically should be placed under one campaign unless you want to allocate different budgets or goals (for instance, Solution A advertised in two different locations), in which case you may want to create separate campaigns for each location. Once you create campaigns, you can use ad groups within each campaign with common themes or targets to control bid strategies, placements, audience targeting etc.

Do Your Keyword Research & Add Negative Keywords Diligently

Just like identifying ‘high-traction’ keywords that signal commercial or transactional intent for SEO, B2B Google ad campaigns’ success also rests on identifying mid-funnel commercial or transactional keywords. If you are targeting top funnel audiences, you may also decide to include informational- or educational-intent keywords.

Google ads allow for broad match keywords, phrase match keywords or exact-match keywords. When starting with a brand new ad campaign, it may be worthwhile to start with broad match campaigns if you want to cast a wider net. As you collect more data on search keywords, you may want to switch to or add phrase match keywords. Remember, you may want phrase match or exact match keywords to increase the probability of a good match but the volume for those keywords may be low or the cost per click may be higher.

B2B lead generation via Google Ads requires very tight monitoring of keywords in the initial phases to ensure you are neither paying for irrelevant clicks nor do you want to pay exorbitant prices for keywords that spiral your ad budget out of control.

We find adding negative keywords is an especially important step, especially if you’re starting out with broad match keywords. Mixing in broad match keywords with phrase match or even exact match keywords over time is a great strategy that brings in the greatest ROI as that casts the widest net but also builds high-intent keywords through phrase and exact match. However, regular monitoring is a must anytime you work with broad match keywords.

Crafting Irresistible B2B Ad Copy, Offers & Landing Pages

As a B2B marketer, you know the importance of standing out in a crowded landscape. Your ad copy and offers need to be compelling enough to capture the attention of your target audience and inspire them to take action. But how do you achieve that?

The key lies in understanding your buyers’ pain points and crafting a value proposition that speaks directly to their needs. Your ad copy should clearly communicate the unique benefits of your product or service, while your offers should provide tangible value that your prospects can’t resist.

Whether it’s an informative lead magnet, a limited-time discount, or a free consultation, your B2B offers must be tailored to your audience and designed to drive conversions. By focusing on the specific challenges your buyers face and how your solutions can solve them, you can create ad copy and offers that are truly irresistible.

Add Ad Assets

Are you looking for an easy way to improve your Adwords performance? We highly encourage you to consider ad extensions to improve your ad performance. Ad assets (previously known as extensions) are hyperlinks you see below the main text ad. Having visible and relevant hyperlinks along with the main ad is likely to increase your click-through-rate (CTR).

Amongst the ad assets we recommend for B2B lead generation ads are:

  1. Sitelink – Sitelink ad extensions are hyperlinks that are deep linked to relevant pages on your website. You could consider adding sitelink extensions to your product/service specific landing pages, for example.
  2. Callout – Callout extensions allow you to display additional text along with your ad that highlights what makes your business unique. Note that callouts are set up at the account level and are not clickable.
  3. Call – This is a must for your on-the-go mobile audience! By enabling the call extension, you are allowing users to simply click on your phone number displayed in the ad, reducing the number of clicks required for conversion.
  4. Price – If you offer competitive pricing, you may want to use price extensions to display those under your ads for differentiation and improved conversions.
  5. Promo – If you are running promotions or discounts, you may want to use these extensions to highlight them in your ads. You can select dates to show these extensions and use either flat rate or percentage discounts.
  6. Lead Form – Lead forms are especially useful for B2B lead generation as they eliminate the need for a click to your landing pages. Users can provide required information directly through Google Ads.

There are other ad assets provided by Google Ads, such as location, seller ratings, app, image, affiliate locations and structured snippet assets that can also use, if they make sense for your business.

Optimizing Your B2B Google Ads Bidding for Maximum Conversions

Now that you’ve created your ad strategy, defined your buyer profiles, researched and refined your high traction keywords and created outstanding ad, offers and landing pages,the next step is to define your bidding strategy.

Most B2B lead generation campaigns benefit from maximize conversion, maximize conversion value, or Target Return on Ad Spend (tROAS) bidding strategies. 

A word of caution here – do not set a maximize cost per click (CPC), a maximize cost per acquisition (CPA) or a target ROAS percentage without collecting 6-12 weeks of data. We have seen that low CPCs, in an attempt to control ad budgets, can generate low-quality leads. Similarly setting very low cost per acquisition can also skew the results towards low-quality B2B leads.

 

Leverage Retargeting Ads to Nurture B2B Leads

It’s a well-known marketing rule that a prospect needs at least seven touch points before they will consider your call to action and act upon it. For B2B sales, you may require even more touch points than that. In addition, there may be multiple decision makers that you need to convince in  order to drive a consideration or a sale.

This is where retargeting platforms come in handy. Consider setting up retargeting lists of website visitors who have exhibited an interest in your services or product on Google Ads, LinkedIn or even Facebook / Instagram.

You can target not only the visitors to your website through more personalized ads on other platforms, but you can also build a lookalike audience segment and target similar profiles through targeted ads. 

The multiple touchpoints will only strengthen your chances of being considered as a vendor for the solutions your prospects are looking for.

Conclusion: Dominate Your B2B Market with the Power of Google Ads

If you’re serious about growing your B2B business, you can’t afford to ignore the power of Google Ads. By leveraging the unparalleled reach and targeting capabilities of this platform, you’ll be able to connect with your ideal customers at the exact moment they’re searching for your products or services.

Crafting a high-performing B2B Google Ads strategy requires a deep understanding of your target audience, their pain points, and the buyer’s journey. But when executed correctly, it can deliver a consistent flow of qualified leads and skyrocket your revenue.

You can use other social media ad platforms complimentary to Google Ads to run retargeting campaigns. However, Google Ads is one of the most powerful outbound campaign platform that we have seen in driving sales qualified B2B leads, if executed well.  

Dominate your industry and reach new heights of success with the help of this proven digital marketing powerhouse.

Contact Webtage, a premiere B2B brand and performance marketing agency in Chicagoland to discuss your B2B sales pipeline generation needs.

 

How to Choose an SEO Agency that will Provide Solid & Sustainable Results

Posted on August 6, 2024 - 1:24 AM by

Ever since the rise of the internet and search engines, companies have looked to expand into the online market by increasing their visibility on the internet. One of the most effective ways of increasing visibility online is having a Search Engine Optimization(SEO) strategy that puts your company and its work at the top of search engines. Therefore, it is important to hire an SEO agency that can provide solid and sustainable results. 

The web & digital marketing industry is an unregulated industry and clients are unable to differentiate effectively between vendors. As an SEO agency with 12 years of experience, we have unfortunately seen many ‘black-hat SEO techniques’ being adopted that bring clients sub-optimal and unsustainable results. These include poor quality, automated, paid backlinking strategy, chat GPT-generated website content and poor user experience. Usually, these services are offered at dirt-cheap prices and many clients fall for these scammy practices since it’s hard to differentiate a good SEO partner from a scammy one.

So how should you go about choosing an SEO partner? 

There are three pillars of a successful SEO strategy and a reputable SEO agency should particularly focus on technical SEO, superior content generation, and solid backlinking. Let’s go through these one-by-one.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO focuses on the functional aspects of a website in order to increase visibility online. This is about creating a good user experience for your website. Why does user experience matter? The main reason for this is that visitors will engage better and spend more time on your website. This tells Google that the website is useful for the visitor and hence your website ranks higher on Google’s algorithm. 

A good SEO agency will look for three things in particular to focus on: Largest Contentful Paint(LCP), this measures the loading speed of your website, Interaction to the Next Paint(INP), which measures how interactive your website is to user interactions such as downloads or add to carts, and Cumulative Layout Shift(CLS), which measures how visually stable your website is. 

A good SEO agency must also have certain strategies for creating great user experience. Some of the strategies they would look at would be:

Good Load Speed:

An example of a good user experience would be to have the website load quickly instead of it taking time to load. Having a website that takes a while to load on a mobile device or computer could potentially lead to website abandonment and lead to lower engagement. All of this would hurt your search engine rankings. 

A word of caution here – be careful of low-performance SEO companies which use page speed as a hook to grab clients. Page speed alone is not enough to vet an SEO partner. Let’s proceed.

Mobile Friendly Site:

Having a website that is also able to fit and operate on a small screen is increasingly important for good SEO. With a large percentage of mobile traffic originating from mobile devices, this step is key to rank high on the search algorithm for Google. 

Use Breadcrumb Navigation:

Having breadcrumb navigation allows users to keep track of where they are within a specific website. It increases the chance of your content being discovered, reduces bounce rate, and improves engagement with the website’s content. 

Use a Solid On-page keyword strategy:

Each page should have 1-2  primary focus keyphrases that it is optimized for along with 5-10 Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords, that are conceptually related to the primary keywords. Mapping your target keywords to pages on your website through this strategy is immensely useful in ranking n search engines. Ensure all target keywords are efficiently mapped to pages and there are no keyword cannibalization, that is, two or more pages are not competing for the same keywords. 

Superior Content Generation

This is perhaps the most obvious quality to look for in an SEO agency – do they create great content that will be favorable to people online? However, this warrants a further look.

What are some of the ways in which a good SEO agency goes about creating high quality content?

Creating Relevant Content:

Creating content that is relevant will be more appealing to users. This starts with having some expertise on the topic or being able to do deep research. Then, it helps to research what topics are already written about online and find any topics people haven’t talked about. If the topic being written about is relevant, then you can dive deep into the content and have contextual material to make an article or a video. 

Satisfy User Intent:

Google is capable of categorizing content based on what the content is about. It can be classified as people, organizations, concepts, etc. Using these classifications, Google then separates them into one of four categories: informational, navigational, transactional, and commercial. This is important for content creation because the specific key words used in articles and the content purpose should be aligned so that when the user searches the key word, the content of the article matches what the user wanted to read about.

Create Original Content:

An agency’s commitment to using original content for articles is key to high SEO. In the age of ChatGPT, high quality content that is taken from an individual’s perspective and expertise is highly valuable these days. 

While ChatGPT can be used, we believe it should mainly be used to create outlines, generate ideas & summarize existing literature on the topic.

Solid Backlinking

Backlinking is incredibly important in order to get high search engine rankings. Having these backlinks exist on other websites are a signal to Google and other search engines about the authority and relevance of your website and how highly your website should rank on their search engines.

Finding High Authority Websites for Backlinking:

Finding high authority websites to put in backlinks can be of great help to a website. Tools such as SEMrush help in this endeavor. SEMrush has a backlink audit tool which helps you identify high quality websites. When you identify what websites you want to have backlinks on, there is a wide variety of ways you can have backlinks on the website such as through guest blogs, forum interactions, etc. This strategy is difficult as it involves contacting the owners of the website and requesting to create any content that can have backlinks on them. 

This is one of the primary differentiators between a reputable SEO company which spends the time and effort to generate valuable backlinks and backs those backlinks with superior content vs a low-quality SEO company that builds hundreds of backlinks each month but automates the process and relies on creating backlinks from a limited set of domains.

Local Citations:

Finding niche and local directories and posting backlinks on there is an effective strategy for local businesses. Having backlinks on various local and niche directories help improve local SEO. They also help build implicit endorsements if these backlinks are on directories such as Google Business Profile or Bing Places, search engines consider sites like these quite valuable. 

If you are looking for a digital marketing company in Naperville that can provide great results for your website, talk to Webtage, a premiere digital marketing agency in Naperville that provides the best SEO service in Naperville for expanding your search visibility. 

SEO Agency in Naperville

Generative AI-Led Search in 2024: How Healthcare Organizations Should Refine Their Strategies for Improved Search Visibility

Posted on December 14, 2023 - 10:30 AM by
generative AI led healthcare

We are a lead generation company with specialized expertise in organic search and paid search for healthcare and B2B verticals.

We are seeing some significant changes in search results, especially for healthcare, led by generative AI, propelling search engines, such as Google & Bing, to improve their search results in order to be more meaningful and personalized for their users. 

In this article, we focus on competitive search strategies for healthcare organizations in the age of generative AI.

What are some of these search trends and how will they affect your ability to attract patients?

Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) – Google (and Bing) are working to bring generative AI capabilities into their search engines. Generative AI is poised to change the way search engines work and is the biggest search technology breakthrough in 25 years! 

Google says: “With new breakthroughs in generative AI, we’re again reimagining what a search engine can do. With this powerful new technology, we can unlock entirely new types of questions you never thought Search could answer, and transform the way information is organized, to help you sort through and make sense of what’s out there.”

Google is not the only search engine experimenting with gen AI in search models. The new Bing, powered by ChatGPT, is already in business.

What does Gen AI-led Search mean for you as a healthcare business?

Earlier, if you typed in ‘how do I find a doctor who truly cares in Santa Clara, CA’ Google would provide you with the ten best sites and would expect you to sift through the websites to find the best doctor for you.

Gen AI-led search

With SGE, Google will save you the trouble of sifting through results. Instead, it will rely on real-time information and Large Language Model-led AI analysis to provide search results so “you’ll be able to understand a topic faster, uncover new viewpoints and insights, and get things done more easily.”

Let’s see what an SGE will produce for the same search: ‘how do I find a doctor who truly cares in Santa Clara, CA.’

SGE

As you can see, Google’s SGE has done an analysis of content and produced a compilation of results to provide you with guidance on:

  1. Ways to find a doctor who truly cares in your location. There are websites that Google considers important and lists them. You want to appear here!
  2. A carousel of the top 3 websites that provide specific guidance on this topic, with the ability to click right on the carousel to see more websites. Another real estate on SGE that you would want to target.
  3. Google SGE also offers ‘Perspectives’ which allows user-generated content (UGC) from forums and discussions, including social media,  to appear on SGE results. This, interestingly, is also a growing feature Google search currently. We expect perspectives to gain more importance in the coming months. 
  4. Finally, with SGE, you can have a follow-up conversation with generative AI by typing in a follow-up question.

How do you go about appearing in Google’s SGE? 

If you truly consider the impact of Google’s SGE, it is a paradigm shift in search. With generative AI capabilities, powered by Med-Palm 2, Google’s large language model trained to provide high-quality answers to medical questions, Google search for healthcare will be positioned to provide many healthcare-related informational questions on Google search itself, without the need to directly visit your website.

However, this does not mean that you cannot attract high-quality transactional search-led traffic to your website. Here are steps you can take to position your website high on generative AI-led search engines in the near future:

  1. A good foundational SEO strategy – First of all, you need to ensure that you appear high on organic search results currently. In that sense, a good current SEO base is your defensive strategy. This means authoritative content  and the E.A.T. strategy should still be your foundational strategy!

Let’s talk about your offensive strategy next.

    2. Clear content that is easy to read – SGE favors readability. Look at your readability score and summarize your page info into simple sentence structures followed by a clear call to action. This means presenting your information in a clear and easy-to-understand language.

    3. Well-researched, current, and well-sourced content – Additionally, since healthcare websites fall in the ‘ Your Life, Your Money’ (YLYM) category, it becomes acutely important to put forward well-researched and well-sourced content on your website. This is because search engines are particularly demanding of the trustworthiness of your content if you provide advice regarding money or health. The more current, well-sourced, and trustworthy the content (as in quoted by a reliable healthcare site), the more likely it is to appear on SGE results.

    4. Featured Snippets – A related offensive strategy, that is relevant not only for SGE but also current organic search results, is the creation of deep content and developing high authority backlinks to appear as a featured snippet on search.

This begs the question – What are featured snippets? 

Featured snippets are valuable answers to search queries that are displayed at the top of search results. Featured snippets aim to provide quick and direct answers to questions being asked. SGE, in that sense, is an extended featured snippet with a summary of the most important information taken from a variety of sources, as opposed to a single source, as in the current featured snippet.

So, how do you go about being featured in the current Featured Snippet or the extended SGE of tomorrow?

 Create deep content. What do I mean by deep content? In short, I mean content that meets professional compliance requirements and is medically vetted, so readers get valuable, up-to-date, and factually correct  information. It also means creating dynamic and real-time content as far as possible. This is because Google favors “fresh and recent information sources.”

  • Further steps include getting valuable links from reliable sources in the healthcare industry. To this end, a few things we do for our clients is to have a digital PR strategy for them by getting their content published in high authority industry sites, joining sites like HARO and Qwoted to get them published in reputed journalistic pieces, and building backlinks from local organizations, such as the Chambers of Commerce, professional associations, and local media. 
  • Focus on adding structured data that enables Google to easily parse markup data on your site & brand authority. For healthcare sites, make sure you include frequently asked questions (FAQs) related to healthcare services, article bylines & author schema markups.  

  5. Digital Reputation – As early versions of SGE become available for personal use, our experience shows that your digital reputation will be paramount in getting links within SGE. 

While most healthcare practices think this means getting high ratings and laudatory reviews on Google Business Profile, Healthgrades, Yelp etc. digital reputation is a bigger goal than just getting good reviews. 

Digital reputation can be built by combining good reviews with authorship. Ensure your practitioners are authoring articles, appearing on podcasts, and being quoted by reputable local and industry sites.

What Hasn’t Changed

As generative AI-led search becomes prevalent, foundational search strategies remain the same. 

  1. E.A.T. Still reigns Supreme – Use content to build brand authority and authorship. Gen AI is even more likely to look at expertise, authority, and trustworthiness to decide which content links to include in its SGE search results.
  1. Local SEO Remains Important – Most healthcare organizations have a local focus. They tend to serve individuals in a certain locality. Building a strong local SEO strategy that includes building high authority local citations, will continue to be important for your business.
  1. Good technical SEO Still Matters – Using a crisp site structure that follows a clean and intuitive navigation structure. Use structured data to mark up the content of your website. For healthcare organizations, we strongly recommend healthcare service FAQs, medical organizations, and authorship markups. Maintain easy readability scores and summarize the information on your pages at the top in clear and concise language, followed by a call to action.

In conclusion, make sure you work with a forward-thinking marketing team that stays ahead of their domain curve, so you don’t have to. 

Here are two examples of strong digital reputation management for our clients that have led them to appear prominently in Google’s SGE:

google reputation management

reputation management

In that sense, some things never change. Search engine optimization (SEO) has never been about tricking Google through paid links or keeping up with algorithm changes. It is about improving user experience (UX) and providing value to your users – if users and influencers find your website relevant and useful they will keep coming back and Google will notice! And that’s the reason we don’t lose page rankings to algorithm changes.

Learn more about our healthcare patient generation services and our other digital solutions for healthcare organizations.

Healthcare Digital Agency

Why You Should Consider a Virtual Outsourced Agency for Your Marketing Needs?

Posted on October 6, 2023 - 2:09 PM by
Contract Marketing Services in Chicago

Forrester Data indicates that B2B organizations “have really expanded their in-house agency, their centers of excellence, but that trend has really peaked in 2020.”

Reason? In times of downturn, companies are finding it hard to justify the costs of maintaining large, in-house marketing teams.

Downturn or not, experienced and vetted outsourced agencies are an excellent option for companies looking to step up their revenue and build a better-known brand. In the aftermath of COVID, where work-from-home has become more acceptable, there has been a rise of outsourced ‘virtual’ agency, which offers additional benefits when compared to a traditional outsourced marketing agencies.

What is an Outsourced ‘Virtual’ Agency and Why It Works so Well for B2B & Other Clients?

An outsourced, virtual agency is boutique agency comprised of partnered professionals and full-time staff. This means full engagement from experienced team members which continues beyond initial few months of the project. Unlike traditional, brick-and-mortar marketing agencies, our partners and employees work from their own spaces. And unlike many big name agencies, we do not hand-off work to juniors and are fully accountable to our clients’ needs at all times.

Looking for an analogy? At Webtage, we consider ourselves a digital version of George Cloney’s ‘Ocean Eleven.’ Instead of specialist conmen, we are a group of specialist digital experts who are on top of their game.

What does this mean to you, the client?

Stable network – Unlike agencies with high turnovers and high costs, a virtual agency works lean and works well because we have a shared work history, deep trust, and common work ethic that enables us to regularly & successfully work together. Many of us work full time on your marketing campaigns, while “our partners” join us for specific project needs.

For instance, you may need a specialized motion graphic production team for an sales-enablement video. We’ve got you covered with our partners. Need a ad strategist who specializes in Demand Side Platforms (DSPs)? We’ve got you covered as well!

Whether your outsources team consists of our employees or partners, you can always be assured of professional work process, non-disclosures, timely deliverables, and world-class services.

Highly vetted & Highly Experienced – Our network consists of experienced and highly specialized experts and you never have to worry about your project being handed  over to a junior staff at a traditional agency.

We have a very rigorous process of vetting our partners and employees. Just like you have full control over your recruitment process and do your due diligence, so do we.

Our global team is comprised of creative, fun, passionate, and analytical minds and we love the work that we do. Our work is world-class, out of the box, and has always succeeded in moving the business needle. Along the way, we’ve won the admiration of our industry peers and deep appreciation from our clients.

Amongst the adjectives our clients and partners have used for us: professional, prompt, effective, polished, delightful, patient, gracious, skills nonpareil, amazing, dedicated, sharp, attentive, responsive, knowledgeable, the best and we could go on but here is the more important part. We have more years of combined work experience than we would like to acknowledge, lest we feel ancient!

A globally distributed team with deep agency experience and a keen ability to assess business situations and create out-of-the-box hooks to capture the imagination of the audience, you can be assured that only the very experienced and brilliant minds will work on your projects. We work lean and work passionately.

Flexible and scalable – Our extended network of fraternity members allows us the ability to scale up and down.

During downturns, we can scale back our operations to support your operational continuity. We also switch from a retainer model to a project or hour-based invoicing, if a situation so demands.

Cost Savings – here’s our value proposition: for the cost of one full-time employee (FTE), you have the skills and services of an entire marketing team working for you!

How do we do this?

  • Well, to begin with, we work lean. We work out of our own spaces, eliminating the real-estate and utilities costs associated with having a physical location.
  • We also rely on cost-differentials between different teams spread across the globe. That being said, we always are fair to the expectations of our employees and partners. We are a highly ethical and empathetic organization and we believe in a win-win situation.
  • Finally, we distribute our time between multiple clients, while compromising on none. This means, we work hard and we deliver, every single time.

Long-term Revenue Growth – We analyze marketing strategies, marketing operations, and marketing returns through the lens of revenue generation.

Due to our lean process, lean pricing structure, smart strategies, impeccable execution and tight project management, we are consistenly able to bring multi-fold returns on marketing investment. We love to show the results via our clean and interactive marketing dashboards as well as deeper insights by providing lead intelligence and lead reports.

So How Do We Keep Up With Our Clients’ Internal Teams & Develop a Nuanced Marketing Strategy?

We understand that clients may have a sense of unease about bringing in an outside team to manage their marketing efforts. However, we have perfected a process that allows us to become an integral part of your organization. This process involves:

    1. DISCOVERY SESSION

      This is where we define your marketing objectives (i.e., establish thought leadership, increase prospect database, raise awareness about a particular solution, promote an event etc), identify buyer personas (what are their needs and motivations) and buyer journeys.  This helps us craft a strategy that is closely aligned with your business needs, your competitive market and buyer persona.

    2. SUBJECT MATTER KNOWLEDGE EXTRACTION

      We follow a knowledge extraction process where we interview Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) on a regular basis, identify influencers, study hashtags and develop fluency in topics of interest, conversation nuances, industry jargon, as well as gaps in conversation.

      And we do this through weekly, bi-monthly or monthly meetings. We also work closely with our clients’ sales team to ensure there is common ground and mutual understanding between marketing & sales.

    3. INVENTORY & AUDIT

      We perform a quantitative and qualitative assessment of your existing marketing campaigns, content pieces & collateral that you already own. We evaluate the current state of affairs, returns on investment and compare it to your business goals. How are the campaigns performing? Are they generating engagement and conversions? We conduct trend analysis of assets that are performing well & poorly.

      This process allows to work in a contextualized space.

    4. GAP ANALYSIS & CONTENT STRATEGY

      Based on the discovery, knowledge extraction, and audits, we create a core strategy that will be the grounding point that all stakeholders will agree upon. Then we will create hooks and themes, followed by a marketing plan mapped to objectives and buyer’s journey.

    5. CRAFT & MARKET

      Here is where we craft your content, marketing collateral and your campaigns, lending to them the levers required to strike a chord with your audience, build your thought leadership, and compel them to engage with your brand.

    6. REGULAR CHECK-INS –

We practice a well-thought out, modular process that helps you get the maximum returns on your investment. There is always scope to omit certain areas if you already developed those in-house. Conversely, we may want to dive deeper in certain other areas, if that’s seen necessary by all stakeholders.

Regular check-ins via regularly scheduled virtual meetings, email and phone conversations always keep us looped in and available for our clients’ needs.

Still on the Fence?

See many of Webtage’s outsourced web technologies & marketing success stories here. Read our testimonials, see the awards we have won, and see the industries we service.

Our digital build & market experience spans multiple industries, but our strongest strengths are B2B/technology, education, healthcare, B2C, and professional services. Our clients achieve sustained visibility because we conduct online campaigns the solid way. We are here to build a relationship with your business and work with you as your creative, marketing & technology partner.

Digital Marketing Agency in Naperville

Local SEO Vs National SEO

Posted on May 16, 2023 - 7:55 AM by
local seo vs national seo

In a competitive digital world, businesses now need to focus on their online presence more than ever before. A digital presence builds trust and relationships with your customers and allows you to be found easily online.

There are many strategies and tactics that you need to consider when building and promoting your business online.

To reach more people online, the Search Engine Optimization process plays a major role. SEO boosts your content online, making your website rank higher in search engines, and increasing qualified traffic to the website. Within SEO, there are two categories: National SEO and Local SEO. The two seem similar, there are different reasons for undertaking them and different strategies to help promote your organization on search engines.

Local SEO Vs National SEO

When it comes to marketing a business online, several different strategies and tactics can be used. However, one of the most important is search engine optimization (SEO)—and, within that, national SEO and local SEO. Local SEO is a strategy that helps to get more visibility for local search-specific keywords. National SEO is aimed at companies with a nationwide reach. It’s the strategy that focuses on promoting your business to rank for broad, highly searched keywords. 

What is the Difference Between Local SEO and National SEO?

There are some distinct differences between the Loacl SEO and Nationa SEO strategies.

Key Differentiation 1: Target Audience

Businesses that engage in National SEO generally target a broader audience. National SEO is best suited for businesses with a national or global target audience. If your target audience is national or international, then ensure that you optimize all the pages on your site with the right titles, meta descriptions, headings, and content that’s suited to the needs of your audience.

Local SEO businesses’ websites are designed to attract customers in a specific area. Optimizing your website for local searches is an important step to increasing location. Make sure that all your locations are listed correctly on your website so that customers can find your business easily.

Key Differentiation 2: Keywords & Targeted Search Real Estate

National SEO campaigns target various keywords and phrases that relate to the product and services without any geography. Important Search Engine Ranking Position (SERP) features include organic listings, People Also Ask (PAA) boxes, and featured snippets. 

In order to get featured on search engines, optimize the website content with broad keywords and long tail keywords. If ‘running tights’ is a broad keyword, ‘best breathable running tights’ would be a long-tail keyword. 

Broad keywords are highly competitive and may be harder to gain visibility for. Try to target long-tail keywords that use a different strategy. These phrases are longer and more specific than broad keywords and therefore may allow you to gain visibility for highly relevant keywords faster. 

Second, use semantic keywords (words or phrases that are related to each other conceptually) properly to get visibility for organic listings, PAA boxes, and featured snippets. For example, if we were to speak about “digital marketing,” a semantically related keyword might be “SERP” or “SEO.”

A PAA box includes similar questions that people have asked on the topic that the user is seeking more information on and appears like this on search engines:

people also askYou might find more PAA questions about your brand or related to your industry. Make sure to answer all of those questions on your FAQs page on your website. In order to rank in a PAA box, your content must include the most relevant answer for your target query.

A featured snippet, on the other hand, is a reversal of typical search results where the descriptive snippet appears first, followed by the website link:

featured snippetThe content that appears inside of a Featured Snippet is automatically pulled from web pages in Google’s index. Optimize the content on your webpage so Google chooses to use your content in the Featured Snippet. The key to scaling this up is to add lots of definitions, ordered lists, tables, and other formats that Google loves to put into Featured Snippets on your page.

Local SEO Campaigns, on the other hand, are best suited to target location-specific similar keywords and terms that individuals are likely to be searching in their local areas. 

Important SERP features that businesses can get visibility on include the local map pack, Google My Business cards (that show photos and other information about your business), and organic listings. To start, you need to conduct some research on local search engines and understand what types of queries people are using in your geographic area. You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner or Ahrefs Keywords Explorer to get an idea of what keywords people are searching for in your area. Once you have a list of all relevant target keywords, you can start optimizing your website for them. 

A local map pack is a great real estate to appear in on search engines for local businesses as that’s what appears right under paid search results.

local packIf you’re looking to appear on positions 1-3 of Local Pack listings, work on optimizing your Google My Business listing as that provides more than 25% of ranking success in Google Local Pack. Pay attention to your Google My Business listing by verifying it first and optimizing it. 

Key Differentiation 3: Content

In National SEO, top-of-the-funnel content should be emphasized. 

  • Your content should be of unique and high quality and should be able to solve user problems. For instance, awareness stage keywords, such as ‘WordPress vs Drupal,’ where the user is trying to figure out a problem, is a great keyword strategy to adopt when creating a content strategy for a National SEO. 
  • Consider submitting your content on niche or industry-specific lists for higher quality and relevant links.
  • National SEO strategies rely mostly on high-quality content creation, including blog posts, white papers, and product, industry, and location pages. An important consideration here is whether to leave your white paper ungated to allow search engines to index the content or gate it for valuable lead information.
  • Ensure your website has a proper structure so you can easily access your important pages with as few clicks as possible. This allows people to navigate to your page easily and also signals to search engine bots that the page is valuable when it is not deep inside a complex navigational hierarchy.
  • Remember to create attractive and useful content that can engage maximum users as Google refers to user engagement and signals as determinants of web page relevancy. 
  • The main content marketing goal should be Traffic × Conversions = Sales.

Location-based content is emphasized in Local SEO. You should create content that is targeted toward local customers. 

  • These could be blog posts about events or attractions in the area or reviews of local businesses and services. 
  • Additionally, make sure that all of your content is optimized for local SEO by including location-specific keywords throughout.
  • Ensure that the Name, Address, and Phone (NAP) usage is consistent across owned, paid, and earned channels. This is referred to as NAP Consistency.
  • Ensure that you optimize location-specific pages.
  • Build backlinks from niche or location-specific citations.

In general, you should let content fuel your SEO strategy. 

Key Differentiation 4: Backlinks

Both Local and National SEO campaigns can benefit from having effective high-quality backlinks, which could be built using content marketing, niche blog postings, link building, and guest blogging. 

  • While building backlinks for National SEO, invest time in building trustworthy links from genuine websites in your niche. Moz Pro SEO, SEMRush, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Tag Manager, and WordPress CMS are a few important platforms that help in improving National SEO. These platforms help analyze traffic, backlinks analysis, competitor analysis, and visibility of websites in the search results.
  • An important aspect of local SEO is claiming and managing profiles on directories like Google My Business, Yext, and Yelp. These profiles help customers discover your business online and provide an opportunity for you to manage the information about your business that appears in search results. Make sure all the information listed is accurate and up-to-date, as this will help improve your ranking in search results.

Citations

  • Creating local citations won’t help national SEO campaigns at all. Instead, focus on creating and optimizing informative and valuable content, which helps in boosting the domain authority of the website. 
  • Maintaining NAP consistency throughout the citations is very important in Local SEO Campaigns. Any inconsistency can lead to dropping the keyword positions in the local search results. Include a map with directions or contact information on each page of your website so potential customers can find their way to your location easily.

Competition

  • National SEO has a lot of competition, and it is expensive to build top search visibility. If your website has informative and valuable content, it can attract high-quality inbound links that will boost the domain authority of the website and drive search engine ranking positions. To gain traction in search engines create high authority content (focuses on building your brand’s credentials in an industry), ebooks, how-to content (videos, blogs, infographics), and standout opinion pieces(platforms like Medium and Huffington Post have made it easy for thought leaders to share their ideas), original research pieces (whitepapers, case studies, interviews), and more. 
  • Generally speaking, local SEO has less competition compared to businesses looking for national search visibility, but the approach to building local search visibility relies on building local citations, getting content published in local, industry-specific directories, maintaining NAP consistency, and creating content that is useful, relevant, and local. You can improve your website’s visibility and reach new potential customers organically by creating a city-specific landing page, FAQ pages, hosting local events, and more.

Key Differentiation 5: Reasons to Choose National vs Local 

Reasons to Choose National SEO

  • Target Market: National SEO is an excellent technique for enhancing your brand recognition across locations and positioning yourself in the crowded marketplace.
  • Established Expertise: If you have a national SEO campaign in place, establish your brand expertise by developing thought leadership articles.
  • National Level Brands: If you have become big enough on a national level, national SEO can help you penetrate even the international market.

Reasons to Choose Local SEO

  • Local Area Focus: If your company is relatively new in the business and targets local clientele, it’s better to target local customers.
  • Local Competition: If you are only competing against local businesses that offer the same products and services as you do, then go for local SEO.
  • Nature of Business: Local SEO can definitely improve your chances of attracting people who might need your business in your area.

Conclusion

Having a solid SEO foundation should be a priority for your business. Every business is unique and requires a unique approach to marketing its campaign online.

The key ranking factors for local SEO are quality local backlinks, google my business optimization with high-quality images, frequency of listings, business updates listings, and review quality and quantity.

While a high-quality result for National SEO primarily depends on the authority, expertise, and reliability of the content.

With the right SEO strategies, you can increase your website’s visibility and rankings, as well as boost your keyword’s searchability and annual revenue. The best SEO company in Chicago can help in developing and implementing SEO campaigns for your business. 

SEO Agency in Naperville

How to Increase Traffic to Your Website in 2023 Using A Results-Driven SEO Strategy

Posted on February 24, 2023 - 10:54 AM by
seo strategy

Are you looking for an SEO strategy that will help boost your rankings and visibility in 2023? If so, then this blog post is for you.

SEO is one of the key pillars of all marketing strategies. 2023 brings with it a rapidly evolving SEO landscape. If you want to reach out to potential customers, you must be in sync with users’ search behaviors and continually develop your SEO strategy and efforts.  

Here are the biggest 2023 SEO trends that you need to know as it’ll help you change the way you strategize and develop an action plan this year. 

  1. Embrace Chaos

Expect lots of chaos and dynamism as SEO undergoes a major overhaul this year. We’ve been seeing traces of this trend last year with Google rolling out even more updates than it ever did. 

Google will continue to roll and finish fresh updates as the year progresses. It’s wise to stay on top of these search updates. It might seem chaotic at the outset, but it’s what will precisely bring the much-needed order to the SEO landscape. 

At Webtage, we’d like to add the caveat that while it is our job to stay on top of search algorithm updates and Google’s guidance, great SEO is about improving user experience – if users find your website relevant and useful they will keep coming back and Google will notice! And that’s the reason we don’t lose page rankings to algorithm changes.

  1. Get Acquainted With ChatGPT

​​Talking of Google, ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), the new AI-powered chatbot, has revolutionized search engine optimization. 

The potential of ChatGPT is huge with its easy, human-like conversational interface with users that answers all their queries. It’s no surprise that Google has recently announced its product Bard to compete with ChatGPT.

If you’re an SEO professional who’s not using ChatGPT, we highly recommend using it for your business’ benefit. From keyword research, writing meta descriptions, and using it as a search assistant, to a generic brainstorming tool.  

At Webtage, we use ChatGPT to consolidate research on topics, create meta tags for search engine visibility, and boost our copy creation process for blogs, ads, and the web. However, we strongly advise against using ChatGPT to create content without bringing in your first-hand experience, deep expertise, pointers, evaluation & refinement to make the output useful.

But you can use it to aid you for insights and even outline your content marketing strategy with a bird’s eye view of tactics for content related to your niche. However, if your competition is also using ChatGPT for their content strategy, then they would follow the same thing and create similar content like you. 

Google search engine’s stance on AI-generated content continues to evolve with time. Initially, Google was against any kind of AI-generated content. Now Google’s stance has been that it will penalize any “spammy automatically-generated content.”

Curious if the content you generate can trigger a spam (read “fake content”) alert? Check it here: https://openai-openai-detector.hf.space/

  1. Create Content For People, Not Robots And Spiders

Google released its first “helpful content update” in 2022, urging marketers to create web content that prioritizes people and offers users with a meaningful experience. Google prefers content created for people by people and it views AI-generated spammy content a violation of the company’s guidelines. It states you can use AI for insights and optimization, not long-form content such as articles. 

In 2023, Google is going to favor unique, fresh, relevant, purposeful, and user-centric content. The search engine algorithms are highly sophisticated, quickly spotting content that doesn’t satisfy the readers and has been spun by automated tools. Don’t go that route as there are high chances of getting penalized. 

Google also made an addition to its popular EAT (Expertise, Authority, Trust) acronym in December 2022. The updated acronym reads EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust). This makes sense in a digital world where there’s an influx of AI-generated content. Showcasing the experience of the author or creator builds trust and credibility that it’s written by humans for humans. So, create content that projects your expertise in your subject area. Display an author bio with their detailed experience, a separate author page with a list of all their articles or content, and social profiles. But it’s not just the experience of the author or creator that counts, but also topics of their content should be related to their experience.

With Google’s new guidelines showing a clear preference for long-form resourceful content, fix pages and posts with thin content. For example, product pages can have more details such as dropdown menus, FAQs, and testimonials apart from descriptions.

Focus on quality and not quantity with content creation in 2023. 

  1. Focus on Technical SEO  

In 2023, companies that focus on the improvement of the technical aspects of their websites will grow significantly. Google is incentivizing sites with better user experiences. Better user experience (UX) means higher ranking on the search engine results pages (SERPs). 

There are other key SEO metrics that mean more than ranking and that’s organic traffic via Google Analytics and lead conversions (Leads / Revenue). Unless ranking is affecting a company’s bottom line, it’s not the most important SEO metric to report to your clients. So, organic traffic and lead conversions are standard go-to SEO metrics to focus on. Other factors to measure your SEO performance include indexability, search visibility, time spent on the site, and the bounce rate. 

However, which SEO metrics to measure depends on your marketing goals. Have a bigger picture when analyzing SEO metrics and track a few related ones only. For example, a long time spent on the site might look impressive at the outset, but if it’s not leading to conversions, you’re probably attracting the wrong audience.

Keep an eye on and stay on top of Google’s Page Experience Update, Core Web Vitals, and Link Best Practices to fix technical SEO issues regularly within a certain time threshold. These include monitoring the page loading speed, browser response time, and content stability during loading for a seamless user experience. 

Like content, you’ll see many SEO automation tools and platforms that you can use to perform routine tasks and track technical SEO metrics. 

  1. The Rise Of Visual Or Multisearch

With the increased popularity of TikTok and Instagram, people are steering towards visual content. 

Multisearch was announced in April 2022 to help people view images and text at the same time when they search for something online. Multisearch, powered by Google Lens, allows people to use their phones to search images and text, and get the most relevant results. We can expect more advancements in Google’s AI development and Multitask Unified Model (MUM), a modern technology for answering complex questions that don’t have direct answers. It will provide users with a rich, interactive, and engaging experience as graphic cards of imagery and auto-complete features are directly tied into every search result.

You’ll need to balance the content, i.e. text with images and videos. Also, focus on the mobile optimization of these visual elements as it will become the norm in 2023.

  1. Shoot More Videos

There’s an increased amount of attention to video results when searching for something online. 

2023 will be the year of videos and if you haven’t included it in your SEO strategy, we urge you to do so this year.

The best part is that you don’t need fancy equipment to shoot your videos. Videos taken from your mobile also perform as well as professionally shot videos. The focus is more on the content of the video than the production quality. 

Conclusion

We’ve shared our SEO predictions and insights for 2023. To apply this SEO knowledge to yield results, you’ll need a dedicated SEO expert team, either in-house or by hiring an agency. 

At Webtage, the best SEO Company in Chicago IL, we excel in delivering one of the most comprehensive, realistic, and proven SEO strategies plans with an excellent and consistent track record of implementing the SEO requirements to help our clients achieve their desired results.

Best SEO Services in Naperville

Top 5 Reasons Your B2B Company Should Consider LinkedIn Marketing

Posted on July 15, 2022 - 2:52 AM by

LinkedIn has come a long way from being just a portal for job seekers. LinkedIn started as a job search engine. But it has now grown into a powerful and integral tool for B2B marketing. 

B2B marketing or Business-to-Business marketing, like the name suggests, refers to marketing products and services to another business, instead of consumers.

Why Is LinkedIn A Crucial Platform for B2B Marketing? 

Let’s explore LinkedIn marketing for B2B businesses and what makes it the perfect social platform for B2B marketing. 

We explore LinkedIn marketing for B2B businesses, and also share our top reasons why you must consider LinkedIn for your B2B marketing. 

  1. LinkedIn Is A Gold Mine Of Business Professionals 

If your B2B company is not on LinkedIn, you’re missing out on enormous opportunities. 

What makes LinkedIn different from the other social platforms is the context. While platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have social leanings towards family, friends, and casual connections, LinkedIn is built for business connections only.

Consider this! There are 750+ million users on LinkedIn across 200 countries at the rate of 3 new members every second and counting. 

As per LinkedIn, 71% of professionals use the platform to convey their business decisions. That should convince you how active business professionals are on the platform, promoting their brands. 

It is smart marketing to meet up with other businesses on the platform where they are the most active. If you’re a B2B company, LinkedIn is the place to be. 

So, if you’re not on LinkedIn yet, we strongly suggest you set up your company page at the earliest. You could meet your next business client, partner, employees, influencers and whoever you want to target for your business.  

  1. Social Media For B2B Is Unlike B2C companies 

Unlike B2C or Business-to-Consumer businesses that are aimed at attracting a wider audience of consumers, B2B businesses have a niche audience of other businesses. 

A typical B2C marketing requires a lot of visibility, where the emphasis is geared towards the awareness phase of the buyer’s journey. We measure B2C marketing success more in terms of metrics, such as followers, likes, comments, shares, etc. 

However, B2B marketing runs deeper than just being known to your target audience. There is emphasis on not just brand building, but also on business networking because: 

  • B2B audience spans multiple departments: strategic, financial and operational decision 
  • B2B sales cycles are much longer, so regular communication to provide value for decision makers is critical.

Building a powerful brand gives your B2B business a competitive advantage. Brand building should be a strategic priority to speed up business growth. 

B2B Marketing should be distinct and authentic since there is a demand for purpose-driven brands that fosters trust in the long run among the target audience. Any brand that’s inauthentic and skewed more towards commercialization instead of purpose may not sustain for long. 

Competition is out, and collaboration is in. Brands that are authentic, purposeful, and collaborative are on the right track. 

However, this is easier than done, as most B2B businesses today are blindly following the B2C marketing template. This lack of creativity is damaging to your B2B brand’s success. At Webtage, our approach is to balance brand building and business networking. We carve our clients’ distinct brand personality, and convey it creatively to their audience, building trust, empathy, differentiation, and loyalty.

LinkedIn provides many useful business networking and lead generation tools, including LinkedIn Sales Navigator and LinkedIn Advertising that allow for deep targeting of your audience for best business networking opportunities.

When you’re on LinkedIn, think of the relationships as less as connections and more like collaborative business partnerships. LinkedIn B2B marketing is about building long-lasting partnerships with your relevant target customers.

  1. LinkedIn Is The Most Effective Platform For B2B Marketing 

There are several substantial reasons LinkedIn is so popular with B2B marketers. 

LinkedIn is an excellent place for businesses to promote their products and services and gain relevant business leads. Research has backed the claim of LinkedIn being an effective lead generation platform. An overwhelming 97% of business leads from social media platforms come from LinkedIn. 

Clearly, LinkedIn out beats other social platforms and works for B2B lead generation. When you dig further and look at the reasons backed by research findings, you’ll find that it all makes perfect sense. 

It’s highly likely that you will be in direct contact with high-level decision-makers of the companies you are targeting on LinkedIn. LinkedIn B2B marketing is a faster way to reach your targeted audiences and gain high-quality leads. 

Another reason that makes LinkedIn a popular choice for B2B marketers is that it is viewed as a trusted platform. 

  1. LinkedIn B2B Marketing Helps In Building Thought Leadership

As per a recent study by the Content Marketing Institute, 

  • 97% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for their content marketing. 
  • 78% of B2B marketers say LinkedIn is an effective tool for content marketing.

So, LinkedIn is not just a networking place for business professionals, it’s also an active community that’s sharing relevant content. Consider these statistics by LinkedIn internal data:

  • There are nine billion content impressions on LinkedIn each week (LinkedIn study). 
  • Around 45% of LinkedIn article readers are in upper-level positions, such as managers, VPs, Directors, and C-level positions. 

So, as a business brand, you can build thought leadership with your LinkedIn short form posts, videos, and long form articles. There are high chances that the decision makers of your target audience will read them, and even approach you if they are original, high-quality, and well-written. 

  1. LinkedIn is A B2B Centric Platform 

While this might come across as stating the obvious, what most people don’t realize is how LinkedIn is built for B2B marketing. Whether it’s building business relationships, developing your brand, or doing business, LinkedIn is the place to be.

We can use precise and virtually limitless targeting tools and options provided by LinkedIn to reach your audiences. We also use strategic testing to determine which of your audiences and targeting parameter combinations can generate the optimal results.

There are several strategic actions we can take to improve your LinkedIn B2B marketing efforts. For example, we add the LinkedIn Insight Tag to our client’s website so that we can re-target the website visitors with relevant content in the future. 

We Can Help You Gain Leads With Our LinkedIn B2B2 Marketing Services 

LinkedIn is the platform to be on if you have a B2B business. Whether it is to attract relevant, high-quality leads, influencers to promote your products and services, or employees to join your workforce, LinkedIn is the strong dark horse of social media platforms. 

Our article has you covered all the benefits that LinkedIn offers for your B2B business. If you want to know more about how we can help leverage LinkedIn for your business, get in touch with Best Marketing Agency in Naperville & Chicago area.

B2B Marketing Services in Naperville

How B2B Social Media Marketing Can Take Your Business To The Next Level

Posted on June 2, 2022 - 11:36 AM by

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is typically seen as beneficial for B2C companies. But this couldn’t be far from the truth. 

If you don’t have a social media plan for your B2B business, you are missing out on huge benefits. Social media is the top distribution method for B2B marketers, with 89% using social tools.

We break down how social media is a fantastic platform to promote your B2B company and when done right, it can have multifold benefits. 

What is B2B Social Media Marketing And How Is It Different? 

While B2C companies use social media marketing to reach out to their audience and influence purchases,  the social media marketing goals for B2B is to sell their products and services to other businesses. 

B2B social media marketing entails strategizing, drafting, promoting, and analyzing content to engage your target audience on social platforms. 

While it might look simple at the outset, there are several nuanced factors including staying abreast of rapidly evolving social platforms and features that make it both challenging and exciting.  

The social media marketing approach for B2B differs from B2C companies. Typically, B2B social media marketing tends to be more strategic to influence business founders and decision makers. It involves relatively more nurturing of business relationships to influence large order purchases. Even the nature of content mix will look different for B2B social media marketing. For example, insightful, and informational videos, case studies, reports, white papers. 

Also, consider these statistics to understand how different the B2B buyer from the B2C customer: 

  • B2B customers spend 27% of their purchase consideration time conducting independent research online.
  • 44% of millennial B2B customers prefer not to interact with a sales rep at all.

B2B buyers are more proactive in their research and enjoy more autonomy in their purchasing decisions. It’s vital that your digital presence and social media marketing are strong for astute B2B buyers.  

[mk_padding_divider size=”100″][highlight_box style=”fade2″ height=”200″ textsize=”20″ iconsize=”18″ icon=”fas fa-search-location” text=”“Social platforms are no longer add-ons to a business’s communication budget; they should be central to its marketing strategy, and used in coordination with other marketing efforts.”
~ Richard Branson” clr=”#000000″ bgclr=”#66cccc” hoverbg=”#aac3c0″][mk_padding_divider size=”100″]

Top 3 Ways  Your B2B company should utilize social media marketing for maximum benefits

B2B social media marketing is one of the best ways to build a strong brand presence and customer loyalty. 

Here are the top benefits of B2B social media marketing. 

  1. Build And Boost Brand Awareness And Repute 

Leverage your company’s social profiles to provide useful information about what your B2B company has to offer for your clients.

Publishing relevant and high-quality content consistently on social media and engaging with your audience via comments and messages helps in improving brand awareness and trust with your customers. 

Sharing your industry expertise and insights by leveraging social platforms establishes you as a thought-leader and helps you stand out from your competition by attracting qualified partners. We are already seeing the benefits of employee branding, especially the increasing digital presence of C-suite leaders, such as the improved trustworthiness of your B2B company. 

  1. Create An Engaged Community And Improve Customer Experience 

Social platforms help you tap into a ‘mostly online’ audience to gain their trust and improve customer experience.  

Your business clients are on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, making it easier for you to build connections and collaborations with them. 

You can interact and help answer your clients’ queries, solve their problems, or thank them for their reviews online whenever possible. It shows them that you’re paying attention to them and are invested in their growth. It makes your brand more humane, approachable and authentic. 

  1. Drive Traffic, Generates Leads, And Increases Sales 

Social media marketing helps achieve your search engine optimization (SEO) goals. Being active on social platforms can improve your company’s positioning in Google’s organic search results, and can help in improving your ranking indirectly. 

“Social platforms are no longer add-ons to a business’s communication budget; they should be central to its marketing strategy, and used in coordination with other marketing efforts.” 

– Richard Branson 

Social media marketing helps drive the relevant traffic to your website, generate qualified leads and increase sales. 

The ultimate goal of all marketing efforts is to promote sales. Social media marketing entails identifying potential clients, positioning their products and services to the targeted prospects, building relationships and trust with them, and nurturing leads. 

It’s Time To Get Social

Social media marketing is a powerful marketing channel for enabling brand authenticity, trust, community and sales. 

As much as it presents a massive opportunity, it is also getting increasingly competitive. 

Looking to improve or initiate social media strategy for your B2B organization? Follow the streamlined 1-2-3-4-5 foundational steps to start your social media marketing on a solid footing!

Contact us to learn more about how Webtage can help you with our innovative and focused approach to social media marketing that can help you stand out from a sea of competitors. 

Social Media Marketing Company in Naperville

Top 5 Questions to Ask Your SEO Agency

Posted on May 11, 2022 - 10:28 AM by

Deciding to hire an SEO agency is easy. The tricky part is to skim the chaff and find the best SEO agency that helps achieve your business goals and outcomes. 

The global search engine optimization service providers’ industry is expected to grow from $63.19 billion in 2022 to $134.26 billion in 2026. It’s not surprising to see anyone with a computer become an entrepreneur today and start an agency offering their SEO services. But unfortunately, many don’t have the expertise to grow your business. 

This article is to save you the heartache and money from choosing the wrong SEO agency. We list some basic but crucial questions that will help you see through the bells and whistles that agencies offer to bait you. 

What is SEO And Why Is It Important For Your Business? 

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a critical digital marketing pillar for getting traffic organically from search engines. 

However, it is difficult to get your company showing up at the top of the search engine’s front page listings. It takes time, effort, and patience to achieve the desired SEO results. 

Most companies make the mistake of underestimating the importance of having a solid SEO strategy and action plan. 

Some of the main SEO benefits include: 

  • Improves your site ranking on search engine results 
  • Generates organic web traffic without having to pay for each lead 
  • Improves brand awareness, loyalty and advocacy. 

It helps make things easier for Google to find, index, analyze and rank your site. Not investing time in SEO activities can slow down your marketing efforts and hence, lead generation and revenue. 

SEO is a broad umbrella that includes:

  • SEO Audit
  • Link building
  • Keyword Research and Strategy
  • SEO-optimized content marketing
  • Local SEO
  • Voice SEO
  • Technical SEO
  • eCommerce SEO

No one SEO professional can handle the above tasks. Any reputed agency should have a credible SEO team of experts in the respective domains. 

If you have diverse SEO needs and scope of work, then you must consider an agency instead of hiring a freelancer or several freelancers. Hiring an agency will give you a holistic, streamlined, and effective SEO campaign instead of outsourcing the work to several freelancers and ending up with a disjointed campaign. At the worst, hiring several freelancers can hurt your marketing efforts and business.

What You Should Consider Before Hiring An SEO Agency 

You should tread with caution before hiring any SEO agency. Just as an agency has the power to spike your business’ marketing efforts and revenues, it could also ruin your business’ reputation and hurt the bottom-line. 

There are so many unfortunate stories of businesses crashing even before they take off, because of the wrong choice of an agency which scammed them. 

While there will be many agencies that will promise the moon to you at a fraction of the cost, there could be a catch to it. Like adopting black-hat techniques or strategies that go against the platform’s guidelines, or getting tons of irrelevant traffic with badly researched keyword strategies. 

[mk_padding_divider size=”100″][highlight_box style=”fade2″ height=”200″ textsize=”20″ iconsize=”18″ icon=”fas fa-search-location” text=”At Webtage, our primary SEO focus has been on producing high-value content or content that’s original, well-researched, and resourceful for our clients’ target audience. This approach not only builds our clientele’s social repute but also boosts their brand identity with thought-leadership content and creates very valuable backlinks that help with their ongoing SEO efforts.” clr=”#000000″ bgclr=”#66cccc” hoverbg=”#aac3c0″][mk_padding_divider size=”100″]
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Before you place your trust and hire any SEO agency, I want you to pause and reflect upon the following questions.  

  1. Do You Know Your Goals and Outcomes?

No SEO agency can help you determine your goals and determined outcomes, however good it is. 

There are many SEO agencies with distinct core strengths and specializations. If there is a mismatch in your goals and expectations and their expertise, then it’s a sheer waste of time, money, and effort. 

If your goal is for your website to rank on the search engines’ 1st page for specific keywords relevant to your business that your target audience searches for, then you’ll need an agency whose core strengths include SEO-optimized content marketing. Your strategy will be to attract your audience and educate them with compelling content and pull them into your sales funnels. 

Maybe your goal is to improve the domain authority of your site as you’re losing out ranking for your target keywords despite excellent content because your competitors have higher domain authority sites. You’ll need to find an agency whose core strengths include link building. 

Maybe you’ve noticed that your organic traffic has dropped despite publishing more content. This could mean several problems including a bad robots.txt file or bloated site with duplicate content or something more serious. In that case, you’ll need an agency whose core strengths include technical SEO. 

Maybe you’re a local business that caters only to local customers and needs leads/inquiries from certain locations. In that case, you’ll need an agency whose core strengths include local SEO. 

Knowing your goals and outcomes will help you shortlist the relevant agencies tailored to your needs. Agencies will also prefer to work with clients who are looking specifically for their expertise as they know they can serve them better. 

Based on your goals, desired results, and budget, you can choose an agency that has a specialist focus where it’s focused only on one or few aspects of SEO like technical SEO or a generalist focus where they offer a bouquet of SEO services. 

  1. Does The Agency Have A Defined SEO Process? 

A credible agency will have a unique and holistic SEO process that’s based on its vast experience with diverse clients. They have the experience of going through the ‘trial-and-error’ process in SEO to map out their process on what works to deliver the results every time. 

At Webtage, one of the top Chicago Digital Marketing Companies, our process follows the below 9 unique steps:

  1. Business Understanding & Website Audit

2. Competitor Analysis, including:

  • Backlink research
  • Content research
  • Keyword Focus

3. Keyword Research & Analysis

  • Conversion-ready keyword research
  • Monthly Search Volume
  • Competition Index
  • YoY changes

4. Tag Development & Optimization

  • Title Optimization
  • Description Optimization
  • Heading Optimization
  • Image Optimization
  • Content Optimization
  • Navigation Optimization

5. Technical SEO Analysis

  • Add Sitemaps(XML & HTML)
  • Add Robots.txt file
  • Internal Linking to create topic clusters
  • Structured Data set up correctly
  • HTML & CSS Error Resolution

6.Blog / Article Content Creation

  • High-quality, industry-standard content creation for backlinks and PR

7.Link Building/Promotional Strategies

  • Domain & Page Authority strategies
  • Percentage of Links Building Across Different Platforms Types, including:
    • Guest article publication
    • Local Listing /Business Listing Creation
    • Directory Submissions
    • Classifieds
    • Asset (presentation & video submissions)
    • Q&A activities
  • Spam Score policy

8.Tracking & Reporting

9. Google My Business profile Optimization

A good agency will not simply fix your SEO issues, but have a solid strategy and plan for growing your organic traffic in the long-term. They will have regular goals to achieve over a period to grow your SEO traffic and site every year.  

An agency with a clear and proven SEO process with deep expertise across the various pillars of SEO will grow your business sustainably. 

  1. Does The Agency Have A Knowledgeable And Experienced SEO Team?

There is a lot that happens in SEO and it takes specialized skills and in-depth expertise to be successful in this field. 

Check the credentials of the SEO team of the agency. Most reputed agencies list their team members on their website with their expertise. 

Ideally, the team should have experienced members with their unique strengths. They should have deep industry expertise after working with diverse clients. 

They should not only be able to manage amidst Google’s ever-changing algorithms but also stay ahead of the curve by spotting the future trends and patterns. 

An agency’s SEO team should also be able to give suggestions and recommendations for improvement, such as starting and growing on social channels, launching an optimized content marketing plan, starting a blog, improving the content on your website or the site speed. 

Instead of viewing your SEO partner as being sales-driven, it would do you well to listen to the recommendations and opt for the suggested SEO services that should grow your business. 

It should worry you if the team has no suggestions for improvements as it can tell poorly of their expertise, and it could also be a red flag of dubious SEO tactics to grow your business. 

  1. Does The SEO Agency Produce High-Value Content? 

A common mistake most SEO agencies make is to focus primarily on more mundane SEO-focused tasks, such as building backlinks. They neglect content, which is the major currency of SEO.

Search engines are getting so advanced and sophisticated that a lot of SEO tasks that were necessary a few years back are redundant today. Review the content on the agency’s website, and ask them for the content they’ve created for their client’s websites, social platforms, and other content assets. You should be able to gauge the worth of an SEO agency by the content they create. 

At Webtage, our primary SEO focus has been on producing high-value content or content that’s original, well-researched, and resourceful for our clients’ target audience. This approach not only builds our clientele’s social repute but also boosts their brand identity with thought-leadership content and creates very valuable backlinks that help with their ongoing SEO efforts.

We are cognizant of the audience’s preferences and platform’s best practices to produce both long-form (above 1200 words) and short-form content (below 800-1200 words). Long-form content works best for in-depth blogs, how-to-guides, case studies, and white papers. Short-form content works well on all social platforms, snackable blogs, news articles, infographics, sales copies.

We have led several successful SEO and PR campaigns publishing high-quality content on high DA third-party sites and building the brand reputation of our clients. 

  1. What Is Their Social Proof And Reputation? 

A good agency will be proud to display their client portfolio and testimonials as social proof. They will also showcase their industry-specific thought leadership in the form of in-depth blogs, research papers, and social posts, which reveal how they are the top of the latest SEO trends. Have they published their findings in a report from their exclusive company research and surveys? 

A reputed agency will be happy to share their list of clients, case studies, work samples, testimonials, and references. You can also check their online reviews, and especially the negative ones, to see if there are any red flags that you need to watch out for. Do they have the skills and experience to handle outreach, partnerships, and content promotion with journalists and publications? 

Their website should also be a good indication of how they perform in the SEO domain. If they are doing their SEO well, they can undoubtedly do the same for your business. However, some agencies focus their complete attention on serving their clients, and so you can ask them specifically for their recent client work or a case study.  

  1. What Is Their Company Culture Like? 

While this might seem like an odd question to ask, it is crucial before you sign the final deal. 

If you think about it, an agency is an extension of your business. What are your core business values and company culture? Check if you share a similar culture and values. This will make a fruitful, long-term relationship possible with them. 

You would not want to work with agencies with a toxic culture and environment. Are they realistic and transparent in their communication process? Or do they set unrealistic expectations such as promising you #1 rankings in a record-breaking time? Are they too focused on vanity metrics instead of showing you monthly organic progress on deliverables and reasoning behind their strategy and results? 

If they hide their SEO techniques under the pretext of confidentiality, you may have to think twice about proceeding ahead with them as the chances of a scam are high. 

Why Consider Webtage For Your Business? 

At Webtage, a Digital Marketing Agency in Naperville IL, we excel in delivering one of the most comprehensive, realistic, and proven SEO strategy plans with an excellent and consistent track record of implementing the SEO requirements to help our clients achieve their desired results. 

SEO Agency in Naperville