seo – 5 Horizons

How to Create a Successful Landing Page

December 23, 2024

Landing pages can be useful for a variety of reasons in any industry. Maybe your business is looking to generate leads or improve conversion rates––a landing page can focus your efforts on a single call to action and avoid distractions. Or maybe you’re promoting an event or new business location––a landing page can assist you in targeting the right audience and improve your local search traffic.

Whatever your goal may be, here are our top tips for creating a successful landing page:

Approach your landing page with a goal and audience in mind––what is your main message and what action do you want visitors to take?
Make your call to action very clear––what do you want a site visitor to do when they arrive at your landing page?
Prioritize your headlines for skimmable reading––put the most valuable information in your headlines and at the top of the page.
Focus on a clear design and brand voice––even if your landing page is not linked to the main site or accessible through the main navigation, you want your brand to be recognizable and inline with your main site.
Make sure your landing page is mobile friendly––a large majority of users engage with advertising and websites via mobile device, so a clean mobile experience is paramount for success.
Utilize SEO language and meta data to boost your visibility––landing pages rely heavily on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to target the correct audiences.
Plan your promotional campaign to drive traffic––when you’re ready to launch your landing page, having a strong promotional campaign in place is key to reaching your target audience and achieving your goal.

If you’re looking to create a high-ranking landing page, let’s talk! Our team can assist you in strategy, design, and implementation, guaranteed to get you the results your business needs.

How to Establish a Successful SEO Strategy

May 9, 2024

Over the course of our Demystifying Search Engine Optimization (SEO) blog series, we learned about the different steps you can take to improve your SEO efforts. If you’re still wondering what the best SEO strategy is for 2024 and beyond, here are the main takeaways from the series.

1. Make technical SEO a priority

In the abundance of content, it’s easy to shift your focus from the foundation of any successful SEO strategy—technical SEO. It’s integral for you to keep your website architecture, internal linking, structured data mockups, and site loading speeds in check, ensuring a positive user experience and readability for Googlebots.

2. Set concrete goals

A successful SEO strategy is personalized to your brand or organization, so consider asking yourself: what are my SEO goals for this year? From optimizing your on-page SEO to centering your efforts around local SEO, take the steps that will directly help you achieve your personalized goals rather than a broader definition of SEO success.

3. Stay on top of SEO trends

SEO strategy is a continuous journey. While today marketers are preoccupied with the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in SEO, tomorrow might bring a new trend that will make everyone pivot their SEO efforts. Keeping up with SEO updates and best practices is essential, as long as you also continue making evergreen SEO strides, such as producing high-quality content and working toward specific SEO goals (e.g., increasing return site visitors).

Remember: you don’t have to do everything all at once. The internet is full of numerous “musts” when it comes to SEO, that’s why it’s vital to hold awareness and curiosity when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. Consider implementing bite-sized steps toward improving your SEO strategy and come back to our Demystifying SEO series whenever you need a refresher on SEO basics. For more expert tips and exceptional SEO services, contact 5 Horizons today.

The Future of SEO: 2024 SEO Trends & Beyond

April 25, 2024

As our series on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes to an end, it’s important to look ahead. While SEO is constantly evolving and changing, here are the latest predictions on what might be on the horizon for SEO in 2024 and beyond.

1. Increased Emphasis on Artificial Intelligence (AI)

In our previous blog on how AI and SEO interact, we mentioned that AI is not going to take over SEO. However, AI’s influence on future SEO trends is undeniable. With predictive analysis getting further developed as a feature, AI can identify emerging trends and topics before they become mainstream. This would allow businesses to use AI not only for keyword research but also for content recommendations and generation, as AI gets trained to better identify the user intent behind each search. AI’s growing capabilities and accuracy would help businesses stay ahead of the popularity curve, producing unique content that can become relevant in the near future.

2. Changes in Search Result Layout

Expanding on the topic of AI, the use of AI-powered chatbots for search will likely continue to grow. With an increased use of software such as ChatGPT and Bing’s Copilot to perform searches, Google is continuously optimizing a chatbot of their own—Search Generative Experience (SGE). SGE lets users ask direct questions and displays results in a different format compared to the classic list we are accustomed to seeing on search engine results pages (SERPs). SGE presents results in complete sentences and provides users with examples, getting rid of the need to click through multiple links with information.

This trend is a double-edged sword: on the one hand, brands who aren’t able to rank highly in SERPs now get a chance to have their content displayed on SGE; on the other hand, there’s an assumption that SGE will reduce organic traffic for many short-tailed keywords because users will be able to get a complete AI-generated answer as their search result. As Google rolls out SGE updates in the future, some businesses might consider adjusting their SEO strategies to account for AI chatbots.

3. The Reign of Zero-Click Searches and Featured Snippets

With SGE chatbot’s potential to disrupt the current list format of search results and Google continuously favoring quick how-to lists and direct, short answers to the users’ questions, businesses should start optimizing their content for featured snippets. Known as zero-click searches, this type of content appears in featured placements or “People Also Ask” section of SERPs, allowing users to find the information they were looking for without clicking on any external links. As harmful as they are to website traffic, featured snippets aren’t going anywhere, and we predict they will only keep getting expanded. For that reason, brands should aim to secure visibility in these prime search positions and provide concise, valuable information that satisfies user queries upfront.

4. Continuous Prioritizing of Search Intent Clusters

Over the last few years, SEO has been centering the individual search intent. With long-tailed keywords getting more traffic than short-tailed keywords, Google has been prioritizing search intent clusters—groups of related queries that indicate specific user intents or needs. Search results will continue getting hyper-personalized for consumers’ behaviors, preferences, and context. Moving forward, SEO strategies should hone in on thoroughly understanding each brand’s target audience and create highly tailored content and user experiences.

5. Augmented Reality (AR) and Visual Search Optimization

With AR technology on the rise, it’s only a matter of time before SEO practices will need to pivot and adapt. We expect that businesses will have to enhance their online presence by optimizing images and other visual content for search engines. Because Google crawlers notoriously need help understanding the content of each webpage, businesses will need to provide explicit clues about the meaning of their pages, the process known as implementing structured data markup. This step will become essential in providing context for AR experiences. Additionally, as Google has been optimizing its search results for voice assistants, the same approach may extend to visual queries, requiring SEO practitioners to consider factors such as image recognition and object detection.

If you’re wondering whether SEO is still relevant in 2024, rest assured that it is and will continue to stay so while adapting to shifting consumer needs. For businesses aiming to maintain online visibility and engagement, it’s vital to stay in tune with the changes in user behavior, especially when it comes to their target audience. By anticipating and promptly adapting to emerging trends and innovations, businesses can position themselves for success in 2024 and beyond. To further stand out amid the competitive digital marketing landscape, contact 5 Horizons to discuss how we can help bring your SEO strategy to a new level of excellence. You can also read the blogs in our Demystifying SEO series to better understand and learn the ins and outs of SEO.

How AI and SEO Interact

April 11, 2024

Artificial intelligence (AI) is here to stay, but what role does it play in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? With Google recommending writing content for people and then optimizing it for search engines, what room is left for AI?

These questions are on the minds of many marketers and internet users, as AI has been changing our digital search landscape. Search results are now highly customized, as they’re being influenced by the user’s intent, past behaviors, devices, locations, and other factors. While the increasing popularity of generative AI such as Chat GPT or Google Bard has once again confirmed that SEO is an ongoing process, it’s crucial to keep up with the ways AI and SEO interact.

How do you use AI for SEO?

So, how does SEO work with AI? The best way to answer this question is to rephrase it and give yourself more agency: How can you use AI to improve your SEO strategy? This way, it becomes clear that AI is here to help you enhance your SEO efforts and not do them for you. For instance, instead of misguidedly prompting generative AI to write all of your content, consider incorporating the following alternative ways of using AI for SEO.

User Experience (UX) and Content Optimization

Since user experience is a priority when it comes to an SEO strategy, you can use AI to analyze user behavior and the type of content you publish. AI can then provide you with insight and suggestions on the areas that need improvement. Implementing this recommendation is a great way of using AI to make your content SEO-friendly and diversifying it to improve your UX, which will result in better SEO rankings.

Virtual Assistants Implementation

Both voice search assistants and chatbots can benefit your UX, but they go a step further. Chatbots are a form of AI that provides instant help to your website’s visitors, increasing customer satisfaction, return site visitors, and engagement rates.

With the popularity of AI voice assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, voice search inquiries have significantly increased. Since SEO is always evolving, it’s important to consider voice search when building your strategy. Optimizing your content using long-tailed keywords can be an essential step, as it accounts for users speaking in complete sentences when searching the web for content.

Keyword Research

AI tools can increase your productivity and SEO performance by finding, analyzing, and implementing keywords into your strategy. Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool or Copilot can provide insights into keyword opportunities and adjustments, as well as suggestions for keywords to use in your content.

Is AI going to take over SEO?

The short answer is no, AI is not going to take over SEO. Even though generative AI offers an opportunity to create content that’s optimized for SEO, search engines still prioritize content that’s written for users. The human touch is essential to current SEO practices, even while AI continues to influence and change the SEO process.

Keeping this in mind, it’s important to acknowledge that AI has already substantially transformed SEO and digital marketing with predictive search, enhanced result accuracy, and a constant stream of information. Understanding AI’s continuous influence on SEO will provide businesses and organizations with a necessary competitive advantage.

Staying up-to-date on technological advancements and their impact on SEO is one of our many talents. Contact 5 Horizons today to discuss conducting an SEO audit to help your organization thrive, or follow our Demystifying SEO series to learn more.

Get to Know the Googlebot

April 2, 2024

If you work in digital marketing or have ever tried marketing your products or services, you have most likely heard one of the phrases “Google crawlers,” “Google spiders,” or “Googlebot.” But what exactly do they mean?

Google crawler (sometimes referred to as a spider) is a generic term for any program used to automatically discover and scan websites by following links from one web page to another. Googlebot is the main crawler used for Google Search.

What does a Googlebot do?

The data Googlebots find as they crawl from link to link gets stored in a collective index. This is the index that online search results get pulled from, which makes it one of the biggest reasons you should care about Google crawlers. Due to the nature of the Googlebot software, the way your website uses text links becomes significantly important. Streamlining the process that allows Googlebots to crawl from page to page will help your website rank accurately on the search engine result pages (SERPs). This means that a good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy always keeps Google spiders in mind to help them easily digest your website’s relevant pages.

How many Googlebots are there?

While Google has 16 types of crawlers designed for various purposes, there are two most relevant types:

Googlebot Smartphone: a mobile crawler that simulates a user on a mobile device.
Googlebot Desktop: a desktop crawler that simulates a user on a desktop.

Both of these crawler types attempt to understand and experience websites the way humans do, which is why it’s vital to keep user experience in mind when optimizing your website.

How do you improve your website for Googlebots?

The main thing you need to do to optimize your website for Googlebots is making sure your image links, navbar, anchor text, and any other links are working properly. The easier it is for this software to sift through your content, the higher your website’s crawlability.

When you can’t guarantee successful crawlability yourself, 5 Horizons can help. We make sure that the most important pages on your website do not get blocked, and that Googlebots have the most streamlined path of crawling your website through site maps, fresh content, and internal linking.

Here at 5 Horizons, we keep Google spiders in mind when building or helping you with your websites. Contact us today to learn more about our offerings.

Bite-Sized SEO for a Limited Budget

March 21, 2024

Since Search Engine Optimization (SEO) isn’t a one-and-done process, it can easily overwhelm an organization’s resources. SEO is so much more than keyword research and content generation, and there are bite-sized efforts anyone can take to enhance their organic search results. Here is what the experts on our team recommend:

1. Focus on Local SEO

Local SEO is one of the higher-impact, lower-cost items. If you have a brick-and-mortar location and set business hours, this is a must. At its most basic, this step involves reviewing Google’s guidelines for local SEO and making sure your Google Business Profile, as well as Meta, Bing, and other platforms where your listing appears, are accurate, complete, and kept up to date. Consistency is important, so this is a place where you might consider paying the small monthly fee for a service that monitors and manages your listings to ensure your company information matches across all directories. Read one of our previous blogs in this SEO series to learn more about putting your business on the map with Google Business Profile and other tips on implementing a local SEO strategy.

2. Reframe Your Approach to Content

Quality content is important for SEO rankings and creating an engaged user experience. Focus on leveraging your team for ideas. Encourage them to track questions that clients and customers ask, as those can become topics for future content pieces. For those with the resources to generate relevant content themselves, 5 Horizons offers site reviews, competitor gap analysis, keyword research, and creative brief development to inform your content creation. Tip: If you don’t have the resources to write new content yourself or hire somebody to do it, try featuring your social feed on your website. This may require some up-front development work, but as long as your social channels are updated frequently, this can provide fresh content to encourage audience engagement.

3. Monitor Technical SEO and Website Performance

It’s vital for you to continuously look at and promptly adjust your website’s technical performance. Technical SEO can be monitored in Google Search Console, which will give you insights into major technical issues, such as broken links (404 pages). Page Speed Insights is a great resource that looks at Core Web Vitals, which are important web page performance metrics that can help you identify problems such as slow loading speeds and poor mobile performance. These services don’t cost anything and can help you significantly optimize your website.

Even when resources are limited, SEO is an important part of your web presence. Applying even a few additional steps to your existing SEO efforts could increase your search engine rankings and help you connect with your target audience. At 5 Horizons, we work with different SEO budgets and customize our approach for each client. Contact us to discuss how we can help your business grow, and read other blogs in our Demystifying SEO series.

Unlocking SEO Potential at MozCon

January 25, 2024

A Look Back at MozCon 2023 as We Prepare for the 2024 Conference

In August 2023, our technology team attended MozCon 2023 in Seattle and spent two full days learning, talking, and exploring innovative ways to implement Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and all of the facets that surround best SEO practices.

Our team arrived back on the east coast ready to share all of their ideas with the full company and begin implementing everything they learned. After spending some time putting their new education into practice, they have highlighted the greatest takeaways from last year’s conference.

Here are the top three topics that our team highlighted as most important after MozCon 2023:

1. Google is a Digital Ecosystem

Google is only one search engine among many, but it stands out from all the rest because of its broad expanse of offerings. Google is now a social network, a business directory, a place to shop, a place to image search, an aggregator, and a personal assistant––all rolled into one.

Thinking of Google as a digital ecosystem encouraged our team to incorporate all Google had to offer into our strategy and web presence going forward. SEO is equally interconnected and needs to be woven into all layers of content, campaigns, websites, and ads from start to finish. Google is currently the expert on users’ motivations for search and data collection, making Google the key to connecting with targeted audiences.

How our team is using Google differently in 2024:

Not thinking of Google solely as a search engine
Not getting sucked into the algorithm-thinking SEO practices
Using Google’s offerings to find and retain target audiences
Exploring content beyond just web pages––especially indexed YouTube video
Focusing on identifying local link opportunities in addition to traditional backlinks

2. GA4 Offers Privacy Conscious User Data

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is a customizable tool our technology team uses to measure traffic and engagement across the websites that we create, optimize, monitor traffic, and study user behavior. In order to address privacy concerns, Google moved away from Universal Analytics (UA) and implemented the GA4 data structure to collect, store, and use data in a way that is compliant with privacy regulations in different countries/states while focusing on events rather than sessions. It uses modeling to estimate conversion data that can’t be observed directly without identifying users. GA4 aims to collect user web and app data in a privacy conscious manner while preparing for a cookieless browsing future.

How our team is leveraging GA4 in 2024:

We are using GA4 to track user behavior and sources of traffic
We are using the funnel report builder to analyze flows and track conversions
We are customizing our team’s navigation for easy access to useful reports
We are building custom audiences and using them for remarketing in Google Ads
We are using GA4 to measure the impact of our paid media efforts
We are using GA4 to create custom reports to extract key insights for decision making

3. AI and the Rise of Large Language Models

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not new, but universal accessibility to it is. Like many, our team regards AI with equal parts skepticism and curiosity. While at MozCon our team approached new information about AI with an open mind and challenged their own beliefs to embrace experimentation.

ChatGPT is a natural language processing tool developed by OpenAI to generate human-like text based on input. OpenAI trained ChapGPT on a massive amount of text data from the internet, using a machine learning model known as a large language model (LLM). ChapGPT “learns” by identifying patterns in the data and uses them to make predictions.

After Open AI launched ChatGPT, many companies such as Microsoft and Google started to integrate ChatGPT into their search engines or created their own LLMs, such as LaMDA/Bard and Bing Chat.

How our team is leveraging AI in 2024:

Increasing efficiency as a digital partner and personal assistant
Solving problems and expanding research
Learning better skills for prompting AI
Integrating ChatGPT functionality into other applications
Increasing transparency when using AI and sharing it’s benefits with each other
Continuing to explore all that AI has to offer our company workflow

Our technology team was thrilled to learn all they could from MozCon in 2023 and are very excited to gain even more exposure to new technologies at MozCon in 2024.

Education is at the heart of everything we do. If you are looking for a partner who is constantly exploring and learning new technology, we are ready to share our knowledge with you and solve your digital marketing problems. Let’s connect!

Celebrating Our 2023 Wins + Planning for Our 2024 Successes

January 12, 2024

2023 brought 12 months of growth for our team. We welcomed four new employees and five new clients, putting in hundreds of hours building up our offerings.

As always, education and professional development are at the forefront of our company culture. Our team attended three conferences and exhibited at two, networking with new connections and expanding our skills in design and technology.

2023 was a website heavy year––our team built over 43 websites, spending over 1,000 hours writing, designing, constructing, and testing. We created nearly 500 digital ads and worked on 228 unique projects of varying complexities. Our data and tech team completed three extensive SEO audits and got the ball rolling on six more. We also launched two new Marketing Automation systems in Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud.

As we move into 2024, we are excited for the new opportunities on the horizon––including clients, design techniques, and innovative strategic methods––all delivered with the same quality and care we’ve prioritized for the last 11 years.

Visit our website for fresh ideas and upcoming trends on our Insights page, and take a look behind the curtain under Projects to see how we handled different client challenges. Follow us on social media for day-to-day updates or reach out through our contact form to chat with us directly.

At 5 Horizons we solve problems using creativity, technology, and data to help our partners grow. We look forward to being your partner in 2024.

– Pat Riley & Ben Sandman

Co-Founders, 5 Horizons

How to Increase Return Site Visitors

January 4, 2024

As we mentioned in the previous blog, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) isn’t one and done and needs to be frequently updated to maintain your website’s credibility and ranking. Search engines view repeat site visitors as a sign that your site provides valuable, trustworthy information. So, how do you increase return visitors to your website?

Identify Why People Should Come to Your Website

Answering the question of why people should come back to your site will help you pinpoint the site’s features you can enhance or move directly to your home page for easier navigation. At 5 Horizons, we work with clients from a variety of industries but want to provide a few examples for some of our most prominent ones.

Senior Living

People visiting the websites of senior living communities are most likely interested in the services and resources the community provides, as well as interacting with chatbots, reviewing the updated activities and events schedule, and searching for contact information.

Higher Education

Similarly, visitors tend to go to higher education websites to find resources for current, future, or returning students, look for upcoming events and contact information for various departments and offices.

Other

As the examples above indicate, the visitors’ intent is frequently similar throughout various industries. Some other reasons why people might visit your website include making a purchase, leaving a review, and using features such as a customer portal or an FAQ page.

Four Ways to Increase Return Site Visitors

With the reasons people come to your website in mind, consider implementing the following four steps into your online presence.

1. Optimize Your Visitors’ Favorite Landing Pages

This includes improving the user experience by putting the most important information on each page front and center, making the page layout intuitive and efficient, and the content easy to follow and understand. Optimizing your entire website’s navigation can also increase visits—utilize your menu bar to funnel visitors to the most important areas of your site.

2. Start an Email Newsletter

Email is a great way of engaging with your audience and connecting them to more of your content. The newsletter can link to website blogs and social media content, allowing you to repurpose the already existing content into micro-content shared across platforms.

3. Create a Customer Loyalty Program

Customer Loyalty Programs are a great way of encouraging loyal visitors to return to your website again and again. By offering an incentive in the form of discounts or other perks, you make people feel appreciated and motivate them to not only come back to your site but also to spread the word about your services.

4. Retargeting Ads

Running retargeting ads can help remind the people who previously interacted with your website to visit it again. This type of advertising also works by displaying ads to someone who engaged with your social media pages, watched a video, or connected with your brand at some point in time. You can place these ads through Google or Facebook, using them as reminders for your visitors.

There are more strategies for increasing your site visitors out there, but these four offer a solid starting point for any community, school, or business.

Follow our Demystifying SEO series to learn how SEO is more than just content, how it requires a thorough strategy and involves intent-focused keyword research. Or contact us to discuss conducting an SEO audit to help your business thrive.

Why SEO Isn’t One-and-Done

December 12, 2023

There isn’t a single person in marketing who hasn’t heard of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or taken steps to implement an SEO strategy into their organization’s or business’ efforts. However, most people get stuck thinking that SEO is an item you can check off your to-do list. Instead, SEO is an ongoing process––a strategy that requires continuous attention, tweaking, and improvement.

What Makes SEO an Ongoing Process?

Changes in User Behavior

In the past, it was challenging to keep up with the most popular keywords or keyword phrases. Now, that task is made even harder by Google, which is not just looking for keywords anymore—it is also reviewing the intent behind the search by compiling a user profile. Understanding the “why” behind your audience’s search is a long process but one that will tremendously help your SEO results.

Evolving Marketplace

New technology, products, media, trends, etc. are constantly entering the marketplace, shifting the trajectory of the audience’s interests, hobbies, and likes. Anticipating these changes is difficult, but you can learn to adapt, pivot, or enhance your strategy and language in accordance with the market demands.

Algorithm Updates

To avoid search engine results page (SERP) manipulation, search engines frequently update the way they evaluate and rank websites when it comes to search results. These updates can have an immediate effect on your strategy’s performance, heightening the importance of promptly incorporating the current best SEO practices into your efforts.

How to Keep Up with SEO Over Time

Generate High-Quality Content

Populating your website with content that is relevant to your audience requires constant content generation. Uploading a few blogs to your site when implementing an SEO strategy and never writing another one again will make you rank lower on the SERP and prevent people from engaging with your website. That’s why it’s necessary to keep creating content that your prospective customers, clients, or students would want to interact with on a regular basis.

Maintain Your Website

On-page SEO is easy to keep in mind when you start optimizing your website. But as time goes by and you create new pages, you might forget to write meta titles and descriptions, making it harder for search engines to index your content. Continuously keeping your site organized will help your page rank higher.

Monitor Trends and Competition

Staying in the know of the new approaches search engines and your competitors take when it comes to SEO will help you adjust your own strategy if needed. Learning from the victories and mistakes of others is just as important as learning from your own, and it will help you stay afloat when search engines inevitably release updates that can affect your rankings.

It is vital to keep your SEO fluid and flexible to help your operations thrive and gather as many viable leads as possible. At 5 Horizons, we offer continuous SEO services that ensure your organization, business, or school reaches your target audience. Contact us today to learn more and follow along on our Demystifying SEO journey.