Growth Kolony Blog

Mar 01

Local SEO Tips: How To Get More Online Reviews And Improve SEO Ranking

By Growth Marketing Toronto Growth Hacking, Growth Kolony Blog, Local SEO

It’s no secret that online reviews help improve SEO ranking.

On top of that, positive online reviews can increase conversion rates by as high as 270%.

With 90% of consumers reading online reviews before visiting a business, it’s never been more important for businesses today to have an online reviews strategy.

Below we highlight why online reviews are important and helpful tips that’ll take you from online reviews zero to hero.

Let’s get into it.

Why Are Online Reviews Important For Your Business

Most customers are social creatures.

They need validation from their peer group and the general public.

So when they don’t know what to buy, they go online and look for social proof and consult with an online community for social validation.

And online reviews play a big role in today’s digital world.

It’s commonplace to read and write one.

According to Search Engine Land, 70% of customers will fill out a review when asked.

Yet, there are a lot of business owners today who are hesitant to ask for reviews.

Search Engines Love Online Reviews

The more customer reviews your company gets, the more Google loves you.

Search engines show users the most relevant and most credible content for each search query.

If a company is receiving a lot of love online, then you are more likely to show up on page one.

Online Reviews Serves Fresh Content

One of Google’s many algorithms is fresh content.

It often ranks websites by how relevant and up-to-date they are.

Google reviews also show users that your business is still in business and fresh and available and up-to-date.

While encouraging customers to leave a review, another great way to keep your website fresh is to update pages or blog regularly.

Online Reviews Gets You On The Local Pack

Google’s Local Pack are the businesses that show up under Google Ads.

Google will generally show the top 3 local businesses for each query.

It features contact information and their ratings.

For example, if you searched for a local service or product in a particular region like, “cafe near me” or in this particular case, “growth marketing toronto”, Google will show you the top 3 businesses in their Local Pack.

Online Reviews Make You Trustworthy

In today’s world, customers have more options than ever before.

So when they visit a store they generally have already done some homework online.

This is where online reviews help your business drive more foot traffic and convert more leads.

When your business has online reviews from real customers, it shows that your business is legitimate and has been validated and trusted by previous customers.

Online Review Tips And Tricks

1. Sign Up For A Google My Business Account

The first thing you want to do to increase your business reviews is to first make sure you can receive them in the first place.

For Google Reviews to be possible, your business needs to create a Google My Business account.

The process is simple.

Google even provides a guide to make sure any business owner – tech-savvy or not – can manage it.

Once your business account is verified, any customer that is looking for your business will find all the information they need. Like the following:

What you offer
Service options
The address
Opening hours
Menu
Website
Phone number
Reviews

It’s also worth noting that the number of online reviews and your current star rating is shown directly under your business name in the search results.

2. Encourage Customer Reviews

Most customers are aware of online reviews and that they can review businesses online; be it through Google, or another platform like Yelp.

But most of the time, customers are not incentivized to write an online review or prompted to do so. Don’t feel ashamed to remind people that the option is there.

It’s important not to make people feel pressured into leaving a review, but, planting the idea can be all that it takes.

As they leave your store, or after they make an online purchase, you can say something as simple as, “thanks for your purchase, and if you’re happy with it, feel free to leave a Google Review.” See? Not complicated, not pushy, but can ultimately lead to more sales and a higher ranking.

3. Don’t Be Discouraged By Negative Reviews

The reality is, many people are going to look up your business with the sole intention of leaving an online review if they are not happy with their experience.

That’s the nature of the beast.

However, your aim should be to make sure the number of positive reviews is higher than the number of negative ones.

Don’t be discouraged by disgruntled customers.

Instead, use them as a learning opportunity to improve your products and services so you can prevent their issue from being one in the future.

You can also reply to negative reviews as well, share your side of the story and give readers context.

4. Don’t Be Fooled by All Positive Reviews

If you’ve been looking at your competition, frustrated at how they managed to achieve a perfect star rating across hundreds of reviews, then don’t be concerned.

According to research, a perfect score can actually decrease the trust of a business.

It sounds strange, but with the prevalence of fake reviews, having an average score of between 4.5 to 4.7 can make your business seem more trustworthy than one that achieves a perfect 5-star rating.

5. Reply To Google Reviews

A Harvard Business Review study found that if business owners respond to a customer review (be it a positive or negative one), they can see a rating increase.

Remember, you can learn a lot from all reviews that customers leave, so engaging with them on a public platform can have more of a positive impact than you might think.

Be transparent about any mistakes you may have made, and, thank them for taking the time to leave the review.

Ask questions if the information is unclear, and offer a solution to their problem.

You can even humanize the response by putting your name at the bottom of it.

Responding promptly is also quite important, for it shows your customer that you respect the decision they made to come forward and value what they have said.

6. Advertise That You Have A Reviewing Platform

If you’re struggling to drum up reviews for your Google My Business account, try positioning or marketing to your audience that your business has a reviews page.

You don’t have to take out a full-page ad in the newspaper, but small, discrete links in emails and on your website can often be enough.

Remember, you’re not trying to drum up a positive review, but a review in general.

By providing a link for people to click, you’re making it easy for customers to leave an online review.

Feb 22

Love0

Top 21 SEO Keyword Suggestion Tools That’ll Boost Your Keyword Ranking

By Growth Marketing Toronto Growth Hacking, Growth Kolony Blog, SEO, Tools

Top 21 Keyword Suggestion Tools For SEO
By: Growth Kolony

Today we are going to highlight keyword research tools that’ll help you with SEO keyword research.

The entire world of SEO is filled with plenty of different techniques but when they are used in the correct way, they can make up for the perfect assistant to improving your keyword ranking.

Let’s get right into this.

1. Wordtracker

WordTracker is a white hat keyword research tool that helps in finding the most relevant and accurate words to use on your website.

The keyword tool is trusted by SEO professionals worldwide, as it provides industry-standard data for SEO projects.

It has a freemium version that’s available for anyone to use.

2. Google Keyword Planner

Keyword Planner is a free tool from Google that is typically the first keyword research tool SEO professionals usually start with and a go-to keyword tool that helps you with keyword research.

Their white-hat analysis shows how frequent, competitive, and expensive specific words are when searched and what their searches have looked like over time, which can assist in narrowing down the list of keywords for your campaign or website.

3. Keyword Tool

This specific tool offers quite a nice alternative to the Google keyword planner.

It’s a powerful SEO tool and with its free version can prepare more than 700 keywords within seconds.

It does not scrape keywords from Google Keyword Planner but finds keywords using a source called Google Autocomplete.

3. WordStream

This is a free keyword tool that can assist in optimizing the content all while abiding by Google’s rules and regulations.

It makes organic and paid traffic research easy and effective.

Wordstream provides some incredible keywords taken from Google’s most recent data that serve you tailored and well-advertised suggestions.

4. UberSuggest

Ubersuggest offers a robust keyword research suggestion tool.

It provides you with a list of keywords that both you and your competitors use on Google and what people search too.

It’ll cost you 12 USD per month.

5. MOZ

Moz is an SEO audit tool.

However, its keyword search tool has over 500 million keywords and can assist you in optimizing your website.

It’ll cut your keyword research time by a lot.

You will receive some high-impact suggestions based on the generated keywords.

6. AHREF

This tool uses its own search bar when it comes to keywords, and it is called keyword explorer.

Ahrefs is considered to be one of the most successful tools on the market.

Even though this is a paid plan that can start from $99 USD per month, it is a database that is continuously being updated.

The extensive database can assist you in generating perfect keywords.

7. Jaaxy

Another very well laid out paid plan for a keyword research tool.

This one starts at $49 USD per month but contains a search engine that actually includes Google, Yahoo etc.

8. SEMRush

If you want assistance in boosting your traffic, this is the way to do it!

This tool provides you with a keyword tool that will allow you to delve a bit deeper into a number of results like keyword difficulty, search volume, CPC, SERP features, variants, competitor analytics, and more.

If you are interested in using the premium features of this keyword tool, it’ll cost $119 USD per month.

9. Wincher

This is another incredible SEO tool that holds a keyword search function that can assist you if you’re looking for lucrative keywords.

What you can do with this tool is track, research, and rank all of your keywords.

It goes for $24 USD per month.

10. RankIQ

This is an incredible site that actually can assist you if you want to have your website ranked organically.

Other than offering suggestions with keywords in order to assist you (such as something that would optimize your title or just offer some topic suggestions), they have some other incredible tools that put their focus on content creation.

The AI tool is also a must-mention here because it’s amazing.

Their entire plan costs $29 USD a month.

11. SurferSEO

One of the best sites that offer a white hat keyword research tool is SurferSEO.

Their keyword research tool is actually an extension that you can install on your computer free of charge.

It provides you with a volume of the monthly search, cost per click, and the full number of words for that particular content. It also has Datasets all around the globe.

12. SEOScout

SEOScout features its own tool for keyword research that is named Scout Suggest.

Their keyword research tool offers plenty of suggestions such as questions, categories, groups, phrases and even some text lists.

Some of these lists can even provide some CSV files that you can download.

The only downside to all of this is that it does not contain a feature to check for any search traffic and it does not contain a cost per click option.

13. Long Tail Pro

This tool is easy to use. Just plug in a keyword and it’ll be able to generate a waterfall of long-tail keywords.

What this tool also manages to provide as a service is providing you with the research of the competitors by managing to dig up all of the keywords that they are optimizing too.

This incredible tool costs $208 USD on a yearly basis.

14. SpyFu

SpyFu is able to provide you with a keyword research tool that poses as an alternative for the keyword search that Google uses.

They can also provide you with this keyword research that will blow your mind because it is aimed at your competitors!

What you can do is try using the SpyFu for free, without any charges, just by entering the URL of your competitor and it is able to analyze and provide you with an insight of various categories.

For now they have an incredible paid plan that costs $8 USD on a monthly basis.

15. Growth Bar

This is another keyword research tool that is available for you to use, and it even comes with an incredible plug-in for your browser.

The tool is considered to be pretty strong, since it contains an extensive database and is able to give you a long list of keywords that can be used as a suggestion, long-tail words, and even for difficulty scores.

They of course, also have a paid plan, and it begins at $29 USD per month.

16. SEOBook

The SEOBook can provide you with a free meta-tagging tool that’ll help you assist with your keyword research.

Also, SEOBook serves up a video guide that is very detailed and explains how to fully take advantage of their tool and options.

17. Metatags

As a website, the Metatags is one that can provide you with some free generators for your meta tags.

What they have managed to do is create an easier path towards obtaining a free meta tag generator or wizard.

You would be able to maintain incredible meta tags that would be provided to you by a code generator wizard.

18. Site Checker

This one has managed to provide a white hat tool that is able to generate some meta tags for the website.

What is of absolute importance is the creation of meta tags when it comes to your website.

The information you can find from the Site Checker is free, and the tool is pretty easy to use

19. Search Engine Reports

What this site offers is a generating tool that provides some meta tags, and it is absolutely free!

The higher ranked search engine rating is what every company is looking for and striving towards when being an owner of a website.

The meta tag generator is something that any web developer should use as their tool since they might be unable to generate and find out the exact meta tags with which they would be able to properly describe the website.

20. Dupli Checker

The last but not least free incredible SEO tool that you are able to use is the Dupli Checker.

It can provide you with an online meta tag generator that is very simple to use.

These particular types of keywords are the ones that are appearing in the HTML of any particular web page and give you some information on the search engine of the main topic of the page you are looking at.

If you have any questions about web design and growth marketing feel free to call us at 1888.593.4159 or chat with us in near real-time on Instagram.

Nov 28

Love0

15 Growth Hacking Tools That’ll Help Small Businesses Increase Traffic & Improve Productivity

By Growth Marketing Toronto Growth Hacking, Growth Kolony Blog, Tools

Growth marketing tools make a huge difference in daily workflow. They make the seemingly impossible, possible and our daily routine would be a chaotic disaster without them.

In this article you will find digital marketing tools that will help you with the following:

Curate influencer content
Manage and measure scheduled email campaigns
Manage and measure schedule social media campaigns
Create and manage A/B split tests for conversion optimization
Create infographics without learning how to design
Measure and report digital marketing efforts
Create video marketing material
Curate and instantly blog user-generated content on social media
Find the most lucrative keywords in the world for any industry
SEO audit any crawlable site
Create and curate GIFs
Identify the font on any website
Scrape the meta data of any website
Find the most shared content across all social media channels for any topic

FEEDLY

This easy-to-use news curation tool and aggregation site allow you to organize and bookmark any website RSS feed. You’ll get to view every post published from each site you bookmark in real-time from one screen.

MAILCHIMP

Automate your email marketing with MailChimp. Its drag and drop dashboard allows for you to design and send ebooks and other email list building assets.

MailChimp also allows you to schedule custom email blasts ahead of time as well. You’ll also get a free campaign tracker, which provides you campaign insights that help continually improve your email click-through rates.

HOOTSUITE

The world of social media marketing isn’t as noisy, cumbersome and chaotic as it looks. Hootsuite offers an all-in-one dashboard that lets you publish and post both scheduled and near real-time custom status updates from one tool.

Hootsuite also features pre-post scheduling options, feed organizing features for niche-list building and also offers analytical insights – a convenient social media marketing tool that quickly sends out professional looking reports.

UNBOUNCE

The design-impaired now have an easy way to A/B split test different landing page layouts.

With Unbounce, marketers can change the design of each landing page without IT support or software and choose from over 85 free templates.

VISUAL.LY

visuallyscrenshot

Design professional-looking infographics with Visual.ly’s simple drag and drop process.

This digital marketing tool is great for users who understand the value of data visualization. Visual.ly offers a freemium program featuring free templates that users can use to publish content.

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

Google Analytics

If you’re in digital marketing, you’ll need a tool that measures all the chaos.

With Google Analytics, you’ll be able to track user behaviour in near-real time and also automate the painstaking reporting process.

From tracking user behaviour to tracking goal conversions to sending out custom dashboards and more, Google Analytics gives you the power to track anything and everything on your website for free.

WISTIA

Video is the future that’s already here. With more content creators using micro-videos and long-form video content to reach their audience, Wistia offers a video marketing tool that helps brands produce branded videos.

Better yet, it also offers insights on how users engage your content, helping everyone figure out how to turn views into sales.

GOOGLE KEYWORD PLANNER

google keyword planner

Google keyword planner is a must-use digital marketing tool that instantly gives you an advantage over competitors.

You’ll learn how often your target keyphrases are typed into Google each month, the level of competition per keyphrase, and the minimum cost per click per keyphrase, to name a few fields.

You’ll also get free campaign forecasts, which provides you with traffic estimations, accompanied with price and estimated conversion rates. Google Keyword Planner also lets you export data directly to a separate spreadsheet as well.

SEO DETECTIVE

seo detective logo

SEO Detective is a quick and easy way to grade any crawlable website.

The website grader will show you basic website insights, ranging from basic metadata, tech flaws, social media insights, backlinks and more.

SEMRUSH

This tool is often hailed as the best SEO marketing tool in the world.

It provides incredible domain insights that help users compare and contrast competitor websites, keywords, backlink profiles and so much more. It’s not free but it’s definitely advantages are worth more than it’s weight in gold.

GIPHY

If you love GIFs than you’ll love Giphy. You can upload target URLs or create custom GIFs for the web. Giphy is the YouTube of the GIF world.

You can search and find the world’s most popular GIFs and animated stickers, ranging from reaction GIFs to funny GIFs and more.

WHATFONT

whatfontapp

WhatFont is a great design tool that helps you discover new fonts (or the closest font) on any target site.

The free chrome extension is popular among web developers and web designers who are always adding new fonts to their database. It’s great if you deal with clients who expect consistency across existing marketing materials.

CANVA

Canva offers a fast and free photo editing option. You can use Canva to quickly edit photos, and it’s a great digital marketing tool for blogs, articles and social media updates.

Despite Canva tools lacking the sophisticated of Adobe Photoshop, it gets the job done, it’s fast and works better than Paint.

SCREAMING FROG

Free up to 500 pages, Screaming Frog crawls through any domain and fetches valuable meta data information.

With it, you’ll be able to crawl pages like a search engine, retrieve insights on how well each site is optimized for SEO, and export it all on a spreadsheet.

BUZZSUMO

This digital marketing tool is a must-have for content marketers.

It acts as a search engine for the world’s most popular articles shared on social media. You’ll be able to know insights on the most viral titles on social media and help you develop your own content strategy.

SUMMARY

Growth hacking tools separate the great from the mediocre. They come in all shapes, sizes and prices.

From email marketing tools that help you design email blasts to social media marketing tools that automate the distribution and reporting process to digital marketing tools that make you look like a professional web designer, the digital marketing tools above without question will make you a better marketer.

If you think our list is missing an honourable mention, feel free to share it with us in our comments section below.

If you need help setting up a growth marketing strategy for your business and interested in driving more qualified leads to your site each month, contact us at info@growthkolony.com.