Timothy Carter

The same old digital marketing methods won’t work any longer. Drawing up a well-rounded campaign now requires digital marketers to be more agile and customer-centric when promoting their brand’s offerings online. You need to know which marketing channels work for your business. According to Forrester, customer service interactions via digital avenues are projected to increase by 40%. Forrester also anticipates that, on average, the digital brand channels numbers will surge from 8 to 11. This makes it practically indispensable for companies to incorporate digital marketing in their marketing strategy. Here are some of the must-follow digital marketing trends to look out this year and beyond. Conversational Marketing With all that hype about chatbots, modern digital marketing trends have become all about clear and engaging conversations. Customers want it, and leading brands that deliver it win. When customers have a question or concern, 82% of them expect an “instant” response. Essentially, conversational digital marketing enables real-time, one-to-one, between customers and marketers. Unlike conventional tactics, this type of marketing is now leveraged by many brands and across multiple platforms. It allows them to interact with customers conveniently: on media, devices, and time schedules preferred by the customers and are best suited to them. Today, customers expect to instantly find their preferred products and want their queries to get answered quickly. And as businesses prepare for a digitalized future, they must find ways to be available and accessible and communicate the way their audience prefers to. Ultimately, the primary purpose of conversational marketing is to improve and enhance the overall user experience with a feedback-driven approach that fosters greater loyalty and higher engagement. ChatGPT and Other AI-Powered Chatbots and Large Language Models Chatbots, a software program, interact with site visitors and customers and a naturally sounding way in real time. This strategy can help businesses save significant recruiting people from communicating and engaging with the visitors on your website on an ad hoc basis. A chatbot is personable, unbiased, and informative. This, in turn, enables buyers to make faster and more informed decisions and ensures that users feel heard and are treated as individuals. If you are not leveraging chatbot applications, it’s well-advised to get onto it as the artificial intelligence trend will likely continue to rise in the future. 67% of the companies stated that deploying AI-enabled technology helped them create a better and unique experience for their customers. While the decision is also contingent on different factors, the increasing popularity of artificial intelligence will lead more companies to incorporate this digital marketing strategy trend. AI-powered software applications practically facilitate brands with a unique voice and enhance their interaction with customers. Companies like Swiggy and Amazon have levelled up their digital marketing game and, ultimately, their customer service by leveraging customized AI-powered chatbots. In addition to responding to the FAQs, these chatbots keep track of previous conversations and naturally interact with visitors. So, upgrading to AI-enabled chatbots is a requisite to ace your overall marketing game in 2021. Tangentially, and detrimentally for many digital marketers is the fact that link building for SEO will continue to diminish as AI becomes more prominently weighted in search algorithms as well. ChatGPT’s Impact on Digital Marketing The rise of ChatGPT has been legendary and it’s impact as a digital marketing trend cannot be understated. It is the fastest digital application to reach one million users. Content Generation: Automated Content Creation: ChatGPT can be utilized to generate high-quality and engaging content for websites, blogs, social media, and other marketing channels. This helps marketers save time and resources in content creation. Product Descriptions and Reviews: E-commerce businesses can use ChatGPT to generate product descriptions, reviews, and other content to enhance their online product listings. Customer Support: Chatbots: ChatGPT can power more advanced and natural language chatbots for customer support on websites. These chatbots can handle customer queries, provide information, and assist in problem resolution, improving overall customer experience. Social Media Engagement: Automated Social Media Posts: Marketers can employ ChatGPT to create social media posts, tweets, and other updates. This can help maintain a consistent posting schedule and engage with the audience on various platforms. Email Marketing: Content Creation for Email Campaigns: ChatGPT can be used to draft email content for marketing campaigns, newsletters, and promotional messages. This can aid in personalization and crafting compelling messages. Market Research: Data Analysis and Insights: ChatGPT can assist in analyzing large sets of data to extract valuable insights. This information can be used for market research, understanding consumer behavior, and refining marketing strategies. Personalization: Personalized Recommendations: By understanding user preferences and behaviors, ChatGPT can contribute to creating personalized recommendations for products or content, leading to more targeted marketing efforts. SEO Optimization: Content Optimization: ChatGPT can help marketers optimize website content for search engines by generating relevant and keyword-rich content, improving SEO performance. Training and Onboarding: Employee Training: ChatGPT can be used in training programs for marketing professionals, helping them stay updated on industry trends, learn new strategies, and enhance their skills. To help navigate this ever-changing landscape, I thought it would prove helpful to weave in the following graphic, which helps showcase best practices for using ChatGPT to ride the wave of LLMs (large language models) in all digital marketing trends: Video Marketing Video marketings is one of the most effective ways to inform customers about your products and services. And interestingly, it is by far the most preferred way customers wish to learn about a brand’s offerings. This is not merely restricted to YouTube. You can leverage the power of video marketings in several other ways to increase a higher engagement level. For example, you can make an entire video post or conduct a live broadcast session on social media. Additionally, if your website has more video contents, it will drive higher site traffic than text. This is because the audience finds video contents more compelling and visually appealing than simple text. As a result, Google push sites that comprise videos. Videos marketing is relatively more straightforward, too, as it just

Consider this digital marketing guide an overview of marketing and how all of the dozens of little puzzle pieces fit together to create a cohesive tapestry that reaches your ideal customers and convinces them to buy from you. Take what you learn in this digital marketing guide and apply just one thing right away. Then, as you build momentum in your digital marketing execution, you can add to it. And before you know it…well, you’ll be executing (as an expert) on your own digital marketing strategy. Digital marketing is so much more than just SEO and content. That’s one of the reasons, we have expanded our service offerings through the acquisition of Marketer.co and PPC.co, where we providing leading digital marketing agency services to some of the world’s most well-recognized online brands (shameless plug). As you read this guide, consider all the ways you can improve your digital marketing strategy this year and beyond! Let’s dive in. What is Digital Marketing? Let’s start with the very first question most people think, but are afraid to ask (for fear of looking foolish): What is digital marketing? If you ask a dozen people in the industry this question, you’ll get a dozen answers. And, to be honest, most of them are a little stuffy, academic, and vague. Take HubSpot, for example. Their definition goes like this: Digital marketing encompasses all digital marketing efforts that use an electronic device or the internet. Businesses leverage digital marketing channels such as search engines, social media, email, and other websites to connect with current and prospective customers. Okay, that gives us a little information, but it still leaves you thinking, so what? In short, digital marketing campaigns are: …any form of marketing products or services that involves electronic devices. That’s catchy and easy to remember, but still sounds like it was written for a Marketing 101 class in 2007. The American Marketing Association merely regurgitates what everyone else is already saying: Digital marketing is the use of the Internet, mobile devices, social media marketing, search engines, and other digital marketing channels to reach consumers. Some online marketing experts consider digital marketing to be an entirely new endeavor that requires a new way of approaching customers and new ways of understanding how potential customers behave compared to traditional online marketing. While there’s no such thing as a perfect definition – particularly for a field that’s evolving more than traditional marketing – we don’t feel as if any of these are fully indicative of what digital marketing is and why it matters. They aren’t compelling enough to acquaint people with the reality of what we’re doing. So while there are elements of truth to each of the definitions above, here’s the definition we’re going with: Digital marketing is the process of leveraging online mediums – such as websites, email, marketing automation and social media marketing- to strategically reach the right people at the right time with the right message, all in an effort to increase brand awareness and ultimately convert these individuals into customers who go on to become loyal and raving fans. A bit wordy? Yeah, probably so. But it cuts straight to the heart of what digital marketing is and why it matters. Digital marketing isn’t about using electronic devices to reach people. It’s about utilizing the power of the internet to deliver a cohesive message that moves people through a journey over time. And if you do that with consistency, you’ll win big in the business world. Why is Digital Marketing Important? We’ve already touched on this some in our definition of digital marketing, but let’s go even deeper. Here are a few specific reasons why digital marketing is so important for brands of all sizes: Digital marketing personifies your brand The first thing that digital marketing does is clarify and personify your brand. You already know what your company is about, but the marketplace does not. By investing in digital marketing, you’re able to share your story in a way that brings your brand to life. It makes you relatable and engaging. And in this sense, it magnetizes people to your brand. In the later stages of your digital marketing strategy, a personified brand can help you in many different ways. In addition to having more loyal fans and more engaged prospects, you’ll have an improved foundation you can use for customer support, social media channels, and other interactions with your base. Digital marketing creates brand awareness Speaking of magnetizing, digital marketing is all about creating awareness and understanding. Think of it as the PR arm of your business, reaching out to the marketplace and telling them, Hey…over here! Without digital marketing, you’re totally reliant on word of mouth marketing and other elements that are outside of your control. When internet users and even potential customers are more aware of your brand, and when they have a better understanding of your brand, they’ll be much more likely to turn to you when they have a need you can solve. Admittedly, building brand awareness can be a slow process. It’s hard to build brand recognition, and even harder to build familiarity and a good reputation, but the upfront effort is worth it if it means achieving a more dominant competitive position. Somebody is going to tell your story online. A digital marketing strategy makes sure it’s you (not the competition or misinformed customers) that’s telling that story across all online channels, including websites, news outlets and social media. Digital marketing streamlines the buyer journey We often think of a buyer’s journey as happening along a simple one-way continuum. But the truth is that today’s buyer’s journey with various digital marketing channels is more like a pile of spaghetti noodles. People zig and they zag. They get distracted and lost. For example, a potential customer may learn about the problem they’re facing, but refuse to take action on it. They might sit on the problem for months before delving into research on how to solve

Google advertisements have been around on the search engine since, well, Google itself, and businesses have been taking advantage of them in every iteration they’ve seen. From the off-hand ads that nobody clicked, to the yellow-denoted paid search results at the top of your list, to the carousel-like shopping results for products related to your search, Google is always tinkering with the way it processes and displays advertisements. For many marketers, these ads are a blessing—they’re a quick, relatively cheap way to increase online visibility on the most popular search engine on the planet. But there’s also a flip side for businesses looking to generate more attention organically. Dealing with prominently displayed ads means receiving less search traffic—even if you’re ranking first, organically. This can impact your local rankings. There are only two ways around this dilemma. One is to pay for your own set of ads on the search engine, but because so many businesses are competing for that ad space, costs have dramatically risen over the course of the past few years. The other solution is to go after more targeted, niche phrases that don’t carry advertisements, but those generate far less total web traffic. Both solutions only mitigate the problems that paid search ads present for organic search marketers. Now, Google is unleashing an entirely new type of advertising, to roll out immediately, that could disrupt the local SEO world and reshape strategies for improving local SEO metrics. If you’re involved in search engine optimization — specifically local search marketing — you need to know the specifics and start preparing for the inevitable changes to come. The Extent of the New Local Ads and Local SEO Tactics The local ads produced and managed by Google are a bit different than their older counterparts. Perhaps most notably, they’re only available on mobile devices. When a mobile user searches for certain keywords or phrases or performs location-based searches, he/she may now be subjected to these new “local” advertisements. However, on a desktop or laptop, only organic search results may appear. We know that “near me” searches for physical locations have more than doubled in the past year, further emphasizing the growing importance of local SEO for mobile users. With most of those queries being performed on a mobile device, it makes sense that Google would try to appeal to that growing demographic of local searchers. Google, as a search engine, is calling these mobile-specific ads the “nearby businesses” pack, which generates local search results based in part on proximity. This shift highlights the importance of aligning your paid advertising strategy with your local SEO efforts to maximize visibility. For certain queries, up to four separate local search results may appear—sometimes less, but never more. The paid ads themselves are quite similar to organic listings, featuring the name of the business in a functionally similar layout. However, as you might expect, paid ads are listed more prominently, and they feature not only the name of the business and a link to their site, but also hot buttons that encourage customers to call the business or get directions. The advertisements function within Google AdWords like any other paid Google ad. However, they are primarily driven by the optional location extensions that businesses can enable. Because it is a new feature, not much is known about the tricks and settings you can play with for the best possible results. Google will likely experiment with the ads further before becoming satisfied with the layout. How Nearby Business Ads Will Affect Local SEO Local SEO was once a relatively safe haven for businesses intimidated or frustrated by the level of competition in a national search. Optimizing your business for a local audience was faster, easier, cheaper, and ultimately more successful, especially if you only had a limited budget to work with. It was a space where any local business could conceivably rank at the top for at least one keyword phrase. Now, paid local ads are reshaping the competitive edge traditionally held by strong local SEO strategies. To maintain that edge, businesses must continuously refine their local SEO efforts to adapt to this new advertising model. Even in local-specific queries, users will first face a list of paid advertisers , meaning a top organic rank today won’t generate as much traffic as a top organic rank did a few weeks ago. However, that doesn’t mean that a local SEO strategy will no longer be effective. There are a couple of complicating factors that make local SEO still viable within search engine optimization, even in this new context. First, consider the fact that paid ads do generate substantial local traffic, but many users still see paid ads as white noise, skipping down to the organic search results because they know the businesses listing themselves have an ulterior motive to generate revenue. This means that, while paid ads will take away some of your organic visitors, they won’t take away a majority of them. You can strengthen your local SEO presence, despite the increased competition. Second, the competitive landscape for local ads will be less severe than the one for national ads, just like local SEO is less competitive than national SEO. This means that fewer businesses will be listing ads for the majority of search queries, leaving some of your territory completely untouched and other parts of it with one or two ads, rather than four. Finally, remember that paid ads are a good option for generating more traffic—it brings to mind the expression, “if you can’t beat them, join them.” Integrating paid ads with local SEO can enhance your visibility and overall marketing strategy. Nearby business ads will cost less than their national counterparts, and will guarantee you some level of traffic for your local SEO campaign. If working in conjunction with a traditional local SEO plan, your results could easily multiply. As of now, there is no indication that these new local advertisements will kill local SEO performance. On the contrary, they may

For busy Internet marketers, blogs long ago replaced any static news or information sources such as newsletters or books. With a blog you can access the latest information quickly, compare ideas and news from different sources, and ask questions and get answers directly from the source. This list of the top 50 Internet marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) blogs, websites, and social media accounts is in no particular order. It would be impossible to make an exact ranking when each resource offers its own brand of information, interaction, and general awesomeness. Suffice it to say every resource on this list rocks. Let’s dive in: Search Engine Land Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan was one of the first experts in SEO and is still widely considered to be among the best. He founded the website 11 years ago and has scaled the blog into one of the more successful resources on the web today. Now published by Third Door Media, Search Engine Land features news and opinions on SEO, search engine marketing (SEM), social media, local marketing, and other pertinent industry topics. It’s a great first stop for anything related to SEO, SEM or internet marketing. Social Media Examiner Social Media Examiner is the largest online social media magazine in the world. In addition to providing the latest news, information, and ideas on social media and social marketing, Social Media Examiner hosts the Social Media Marketing podcast and a couple of different industry-leading events/conferences throughout the year. Seth’s Blog Seth Godin is not strictly an online marketer and his blog not strictly about digital marketing. However, it’s arguably one of the single greatest resources for internet marketers like yourself. Godin is an incredibly talented writer with an extraordinary grasp of the psychology of marketing. You should read his blog on a regular basis. Most posts are fairly short, but they’ll make you think. Copyblogger When Brian Clark started Copyblogger, his intent was simply to start a blog for marketers that wasn’t like every other blog on the interent. He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Copyblogger is not just for copywriters, nor is it exclusively for bloggers. Rather it is a blog on how to use copywriting techniques to create amazing content. Any blogger who wants to increase traffic and earnings from one or more blogs can learn a great deal from this powerful resource. Likeable Blog Likeable Media is a marketing agency dedicated to helping clients develop stories and become “likeable.” The Likeable blog is filled with useful tips and information on social media marketing, digital content, and other related topics. It’s a refreshing blog that’s less focused on technical aspects and more dedicated to the creative side of the industry. The Moz Blog Moz, once SEOMoz, began as a consulting firm in 2004 and now provides SEO tools to millions of marketers. The Moz Blog offers information, valuable tips, and cutting-edge ideas to readers on a daily basis. Like Moz the company, The Moz Blog seeks to reflect the core values of the company: Transparent and authentic, generous, fun, empathetic and exceptional. Chris Brogan Chris Brogan is one of the most highly sought after keynote speakers in the industry. He’s a New York Times bestselling author with nine books to his name. He’s consulted with companies like Disney, Google, Microsoft, Sony, GM, and Coca-Cola – to name a few. His website is a powerful resource for anyone who wants to take a deep dive into content creation, storytelling, and the future of digital marketing. HubSpot Blog In addition to offering industry-leading digital marketing software, HubSpot’s blog is known for being one of the most innovative and resourceful in the industry. They publish practical content, rich case studies, interviews with thought leaders, and timely posts about topics covering a wide-range of topics, including marketing, sales, and customer service. Social Media Today Sometimes you need more than the latest news. You need analysis of that news. Social Media Today gives you that analysis for social media and social marketing. With columns on various topics from “the world’s best thinkers on social media,” Social Media Today tells you what’s happening, what you should know, and what you can do about it. TopRank Marketing Blog TopRank is a renowned online marketing consulting firm. Their blog is a widely-respected source of information related to digital marketing strategy, online public relations, social media marketing, business blogging, content marketing, and SEO. Buffer Blog The Buffer blog provides a constant stream of ideas from industry leading marketers and social thought leaders. It’s one of the most approachable marketing blogs on the internet and is helpful for generating new ideas and implementing practical tactics. The website, as a whole, is a fantastic resource for webinars and downloads. Duct Tape Marketing Blog As the name suggests, the Duct Tape Marketing blog prides itself on being able to provide small businesses with quick marketing solutions. It’s aimed at business owners and marketers who are short on time and don’t have formal backgrounds in digital marketing, social media, or content creation. There’s also a fantastic podcast by the same name. Cassandra Daily Whereas most digital marketing blogs touch on larger trends and broad topics, Cassandra Daily zooms in and focuses on precisely what’s happening in the moment. It’s an extremely relevant and timey blog – putting an emphasis on cultural trends, viral topics, and newsworthy moments. It focuses on everything from technology and media to food and entertainment, which makes it an awesome read for anyone who wants to stay current. Hootsuite Blog Hootsuite is known for being one of the foremost leaders in social media and digital marketing tools – but it has a pretty fantastic blog, too. The bulk of the content focuses on how to properly leverage networks like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and YouTube, but it’s also a good place to learn about productivity and big-picture digital strategy. Think With Google The Think With Google blog is one of the more unique resources on this list.

SEO is a duality – there’s good SEO and bad SEO. Bad SEO is considered “black hat” while good SEO is considered “white hat.” In general, what separates black hat tactics from white hat tactics is quality and longevity? Keep in mind, however, that the following “hacks” should only be implemented if first have a good solid foundation in the basics of SEO. What’s wrong with “Black Hat” SEO? Black hat SEO tactics are dead SEO tactics that don’t work over a long period of time and they tend to produce poor quality content and spammy links in the process –two things that will hurt your rankings and traffic the most. On the other hand, white hat SEO tactics will generate results over a long period of time and produce high-quality content and strong links in the process. And that’s exactly what you need for a successful SEO campaign. Are you wondering what SEO methods are still valid? Are you’re looking for some white hat SEO hacks to gain a competitive edge in your industry? If so, check out this list of 31 white hat SEO hacks for 2021. 1. Impeccable quality content creation Content has always been king. However, in 2021 and beyond only quality content will rank high. The machine learning algorithms that power the search engines have had years to learn the difference between low and high-quality content without human input. It’s not easy to fool a search engine algorithm in 2021. In the past, it was easy to rank poor quality content by keyword stuffing and buying mass quantities of backlinks that got published on spammy blog networks. Today, those tricks don’t work, at least not sustainably. You have to put in serious and genuine effort to rank your content in the search engines. Your content needs to be relevant and have context. Getting ranked high in the search engines all starts with creating high-quality content. What do search engines consider high-quality content? Everyone talks about “high-quality content,” but what does that actually mean? Contrary to what you might think, a 5,000-word article that covers 30 different angles on a given topic isn’t automatically considered high-quality. There are multiple factors that determine how search engines perceive the quality of content. Search engines look for these signals to determine if a piece of content is high-quality: Length of the article. People don’t agree on exactly how long articles should be, but there’s no debate about the fact that long content in the 1,500+ word range tends to rank higher than short content. Ideally, your content should be long, but only long enough to dive into your topic in-depth. If you’re filling in space just to expand your word count, your content is too long. The article’s topic. Search engines know the difference between content that explores a topic on the surface or in-depth. For example, say you write an informative article explaining that manufacturers produce lighters in bright colors with a list of all the colors and shades you’ve seen. That article won’t rank as high as an article discussing color psychology, why people are drawn to bright colors, and why bright colors are a fantastic marketing strategy. Keyword density. Keyword density is the number of times exact match and long tail keywords and phrases appear in an article. If your goal is to rank for a search term like “best digital marketing tips,” you want to repeat that phrase in your article several times. However, you don’t want to flood your article with too many instances of a phrase. SEO experts suggest using a target keyword phrase once for every 200 words of content. Sometimes that’s not possible if you want your content to be grammatically correct, flow, and be well-written. For example, after using your targeted phrase, you might need to begin the next sentence with your phrase (or part of it) to avoid writing a vague sentence. That should be fine as long as you don’t go overboard into what would be considered keyword stuffing. It’s easier to limit keyword density by using LSI keywords, long tail keywords and synonyms to ensure you have a variety of phrases in your article. Just make sure you don’t overdo any of the phrases you use. Links and anchor text. The quality of your links matter. Search engines know when content is full of links that lead to spammy sites. You always want to link to high authority websites over low-quality sites. Your anchor text should also be relevant to the content on the page being linked. However, you should avoid using exact match anchor text. Search engines view large quantities of exact match anchor text as a sign of manipulation since that was a popular black hat tactic years back. Instead, try using between 3-7 words that capture some kind of action or emotion. For example, instead of linking the words, “best marketing strategy,” link the words, “link building gets businesses phenomenal results.” You can still make “best marketing strategy” part of the sentence, but don’t make it part of your anchor text. Creating high-quality content with the right keyword density and varied anchor text is the ultimate white hat SEO strategy. 2. Outsourced content marketing Content marketing is a fantastic way to get high-quality backlinks from targeted publishers inside of content you create. With content marketing, you always have control over how your backlinks are presented and linked, and where they are published. Outsourced content marketing is a way to hand off the content writing and publishing to another company. You’ll still have a hand in how your content is created and will approve the final result before publication. However, you won’t have to do the work. Outsources content marketing is highly effective Content marketing is most effective when you can create content fast, regularly, and in large quantities. That sounds great, but most business owners and entrepreneurs just don’t have the time to crank out content on a regular basis. Even writing one

When it comes to content marketing, SEO, and link building, there are dozens of important elements in play. But some are more critical than others. Anchor text certainly falls into the critical category. But do you know how to leverage on-site and off-site anchor text to your advantage in SEO? The anchor text variations that you use when linking to your web page are a crucial component of any SEO strategy. This is because search engines will use the anchor text variation as one ranking factor in determining how relevant a link is to the content on your site. In this article, we’ll discuss everything there is to know about proper anchor text variation, including exact match anchor text and how it can impact the SEO of your website. What is Anchor Text? Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink. The anchor text can either be descriptive or generic, but it should always accurately reflect what the page being linked to contains. For example: “our company” vs. “click here”. Your website’s ranking on Google will depend largely upon how many links your site has and how relevant those links are when it comes to incoming traffic (i.e., whether they contain quality keyword phrases). The more high-quality backlinks you have pointing to your site, the higher likelihood that search engine rankings for your site content will improve over time – this is known as building an SEO foundation with link equity! On the HTML code side of things, it looks like this: On the user-facing side of things, it looks like this: Best SEO agency If it weren’t for anchor text, you’d have to write out the exact web address each time you wanted to link users to another linked page or resource. They would then need to copy and paste that link into their web browser. Anchor text provides a clickable shortcut that’s both aesthetically pleasing and convenient. But it goes far beyond looks. Anchor text is ultimately one of the top factors in the link building process. Why is Anchor Text Important for SEO? Anchor text is vitally important for SEO because it tells search engines what your website’s content is about. This ensures that your web pages will rank higher in SERPs (search engine result pages) as a result of the keywords you optimize them with and help provide more clarity to any potential visitor who lands on one of these web pages through organic or paid traffic channels. Ultimately, this all comes back to high-quality links. Higher quality anchors mean better rankings from authoritative sites – which means an ideal situation like higher click-through rates and conversion rates over time. Anchor text serves a variety of purposes and can be utilized in numerous ways, but the two biggest benefits – in terms of link building – are as follows: More link juice Google uses anchor text to help determine the relevancy of a link. So, while overly optimized keyword strings are no longer a best practice, keywords still matter to an extent – so long as they’re natural. The right anchor text can feed more link juice to the page being linked to. Some would even say it’s the single most important factor for backlinks (outside of the domain authority of the referring domain). Better clickability It’s not all about technical SEO. There’s also a practical aspect of anchor text. The right anchor text makes a link more attractive to human users and, as a result, more clickable. This drives traffic and engagement. (The benefits of which may include direct sales, but also enhanced SEO signals.) The Evolution of Anchor Text Anchor text has played a valuable role in SEO since, well, the origins of search engines. But that’s not to say things have stayed the same over the last couple of decades. Anchor text, much like every element of SEO, has undergone significant shifts over the past few years. Prior to 2011, keyword-rich anchor text was considered a best practice. If your keyword was “yummy chocolate brownies,” you were instructed to use anchor text like: Yummy chocolate brownies Buy yummy chocolate brownies Yummy chocolate brownies buy Buy yummy chocolate brownies online For more info on yummy chocolate brownies visit: yummychocolatebrownies.com Yummy chocolate brownies: yummychoclatebrownies.com Image link alt=yummychocolatebrownies The entire goal was to exploit the Google algorithm. There was nothing dishonest about this – it’s just the way the game worked back in those days. Some savvy SEO experts would find out what made the algorithm tick, and everyone would jump on. SEO was about manipulating the algorithm. Unfortunately, this came at the expense of user experience. It was possible to over-optimize with exact match anchor text and achieve impressive SERP rankings, yet have links that looked obnoxious, spammy, and out of place. Google saw webmasters manipulating anchor text and decided to make some major changes. In April 2012, the first Penguin update was released. And for anyone using the same keyword rich anchor text, rankings plummeted. And when rankings began to fall, so did traffic, and revenue. The whole cookie crumbled overnight. Ever since that first Penguin update, Google has continued to emphasize user experience, while implementing requirements that dissuade spammers from gaming the system. Anchor text is just as important today as it’s ever been – especially from an SEO perspective. It just looks a little different than it did 10 years ago. It includes ratios that are natural, including the surrounding text around the backlink and not just the anchor text in the link itself. What is Anchor Text Ratio? Anchor text ratio is the proportion of links on a website that uses any given keyword. This metric can be used to understand how prevalent keywords are in your SEO strategy and whether or not you need more content relating to those terms. The goal should always be an average anchor text ratio of about 20%. This means that for every 100 optimized pages, there will typically be about 20% with