Category: SEO

15 Actionable Insights From Our Webinar On Digital Marketing Mistakes in 2018

January 11, 2019

We collaborated with DigitalMarketingUniversity.com to organise an insightful session with Aji Issac Mathew, CEO | Indus Net TechShu on the topic “Mistakes that may have hurt your Digital Marketing Campaigns in 2018”. We listed down 15 actionable insights from the session, these tips will definitely help business owners, marketing managers and even people who are into execution. Visit our Facebook page to get access to the entire session video. You can also take a look at the Aji’s presentation on SlideShare. Tip#1: Businesses need to first define the purpose of hiring a #DigitalMarketing agency before investing.   Tip#2: Don’t judge an agency based on your past working experience with a different agency, dynamics change!   Tip#3: Develop a yearlong roadmap in terms of execution and review every quarter.   Tip#4: Identify people responsible for short and long term success and keep a track on the progress.   Tip#5: Don’t invest all the budget on branding, keep part of it for the follow-up campaign to support sales.   Tip#6: Don’t take decisions based on opinions, it should be backed by competition data, complementary products, markets, trends and customer behaviour.   Tip#7: Keep a track of your marketing campaigns every week and brainstorm with the execution team to optimise it at all levels – design, copy, audience selection, channels and budget.   Tip#8: Team structure is key for the best results in #DigitalMarketing   Tip#9: If you are confused in terms of choosing the right channel. Invest the budget in all primary channels and check where you get the best results. Based on the output, plan the budget accordingly going forward.   Tip#10: Spend time in positioning your product/service for the identified customer segment. While you do this, involve your operations team as they have more insights from the real customer data.   Tip#11: Talk about the vision and what the company stands for in front of the customers. Digital allows you to connect with your customers at every juncture.   Tip#12: Invest in the market/channel which is giving you the best results, however, keep experimenting with other channels and see if tweaking the communication is adding value. Tip#13: Don’t create “global content” for the “local audience”. Develop the messaging based on the need of the customer, also in 2019 focus less on creating fresh content but more on consolidating content.   Tip#14: Facebook is a great platform for B2B lead generation, however combining the behaviour with interest always give good results.   Tip#15: Desktop is more popular when it comes to B2B customers, however for B2C it is observed that more visits come from Mobile. Bonus Tip   Digital Marketing University recently announced a Digital Marketing Strategy course for business owners and marketing professionals in India. If you wish to know more about the outcomes you may expect from the course, click here.

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Are You Wasting Your Marketing Budget on SEO or PPC

June 26, 2018

Every business learns that investing in marketing is the only way to scale a business and to keep the bottom-line healthy. While most businesses are right to keep aside a large percentage of their marketing spend on SEO and PPC ads, it is quite likely that a lot of it being wasted due to the adoption of the wrong strategy. Businesses make a number of mistakes while running SEO and PPC campaigns, but fortunately, adoption of the right strategy can eliminate missed opportunities, unwise spending, and poor performing campaigns. In this article, let us take a look at some of the common SEO and PPC strategy mistakes that cause businesses to lose a lot of money. In the second section of the article, we suggest tips and tricks that help you to optimise your marketing spend and strategy, so that you get the results you need and deserve. Wrong choice of keywords A number of surveys point out to the fact that businesses often run their PPC campaigns around irrelevant keywords. Just because a keyword seems relevant doesn’t mean it is going to fetch you leads or business. Instead, it might help competitors to gain ground in places where you have missed out. For this reason, keyword research is a very important aspect of PPC campaigns. Typically, SEO and PPC teams should work together to identify strategic keywords that help in directing traffic that matters. haphazard choice of keywords in content and ad copy results in poor marketing campaigns, and wasteful spending. Targeting the wrong demographic Without adequate data insight, it is easy to keep launching campaigns after campaigns targeted at a wrong demographic. Many businesses notice that clicks from outside their target demographic results in wasteful PPC spending. A similar problem occurs with SEO campaigns too. Not strategising content around the right demographic and not setting the right tone results in wasteful content management strategy. Data insight helps businesses to discover who their target audience really are, and ensure that both PPC and SEO campaigns are tied around audiences that actually matter. Improving visibility by enhancing brand awareness and running coordinated PPC and SEO campaigns helps in ensuring clicks from the right target audience as well. Low ad scores Marketers often notice that conversion rates are lower than they expected, even when they spent quite well. Here lies an important lesson to learn, for spending too much doesn’t necessarily mean good ad scores. Good ad scores depend on a number of metrics, and focusing on each of these metrics before a campaign is launched is crucial for its success. Mere creativity without a solid basis in analytics will not fetch the kind of ad scores that are typical of optimal ad relevancy. Again, having a strategy in place and using the right analytical tools are important to enhance ad scores and conversion rates. Inefficient handling of campaigns Running a PPC or SEO campaign has dramatically become more complex in recent years. Not only has the technology changed, but psychographic and behavioral metrics have changed too, necessitating an approach that involves data analytics. Without adequate expertise or knowledge, complex PPC and SEO campaigns cannot fetch the results they claim to. Unfortunately, many businesses work with teams that are subpar and thus miss out on advanced data insight. In addition, an agile approach to marketing campaigns is very important for both PPC and SEO campaign success. Agile marketing is based on agile framework and methodology and provides consistent results across marketing processes. A strategy that helps you spend less To make the most of your marketing budget, begin to develop a strategy that works for you. Adopt a strategy that has been tried and tested by agencies across the world. Such a strategy depends on successful implementation of data analytics, improving landing pages, enhancing content, and focusing on mobile environments. Let us take a quick look at these four pillars that help build a solid marketing strategy. Getting data right The world has changed radically since the advent of artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, and data analytics. Data analytics is single-handedly helping IoT and AI to move further, resulting in the insight that has far-reaching marketing implications. User-behaviour can now be scrutinised to intimate levels, but how one uses all this insight depends on the kind of team you work with. When you choose the right data analytics team and use insight to fuel your SEO and PPC campaigns, you will begin to see that you need to spend less on your campaigns. Optimising landing pages Most landing pages are not optimised for SEO or PPC campaigns, and they are directed to generic pages that do not fetch results. To enhance conversion rates and ad scores, landing pages need to be optimised on multiple fronts. The focus should be given to CTAs, graphics, and also to mobile optimisation of landing pages. Most people visit landing pages after clicking on ads displayed on their mobile devices, and optimising landing pages is an important task. Landing pages also have an important SEO function, and that is to help your services and solutions appear in organic results. Enhance content Existing content needs to be enhanced with specific keywords to help build your SEO. This step does not require fresh content to be written and can help your website in multiple ways. In addition, using data insight to create content that actually matters to your target audience will help you to fetch better results. Most marketing companies build their content strategy around irrelevant keywords, and that is only going to result in ill-advised marketing expenditure. Focus on mobile environments It doesn’t need to be reiterated that web traffic today mostly depends on mobile usage. Yet, a lot of PPC and SEO campaigns are centered around desktop devices and are not optimized for mobile devices. This results in wasteful expenditure, especially when it comes to PPC campaigns. Make sure to hire a team that is well versed with mobile optimisation of PPC campaigns, so that

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How to Optimize Landing Pages for SEO

July 29, 2015

Landing pages are very important tools in marketing your products or services or calling your prospects to take action. In fact, most landing pages ask a visitor to take some kind of action. It could be subscribing to a newsletter, reading a message, sharing a link or even going ahead and making a purchase. Landing pages gained popularity simply because they are akin to main websites but have a specific function – call to action. Thus, the importance of landing pages is only growing across the world. With their increasing importance, there also comes the need to design them in a better and more accessible manner. This involves building landing pages according to the changing needs of SEO. As we all know, SEO is something that continuously changes over a period of time. In this article, let us take a look at how you can optimize your landing pages for better SEO and ultimately, get more people to respond to your call to action. 1. Focus on your URL When it comes to landing pages, we often think it is not important to focus on the URL. The idea is, the URL of a landing page is unimportant because one just has to link it from an external website where no one will actually see the actual URL. They would either click on a banner, an image or some sort of textual matter. However, it is very important to have a unique URL for your landing page. It is important to have a custom tail end, which is not only descriptive but also specific. Of course, you need not be stuffing your landing page’s URL with keywords though it helps to keep it descriptive. If it is a Twitter campaign, you could have a /twitter-campaign as your custom tail end. If you have a number of such landing pages, it makes sense to organize all your landing pages with custom URLs so that you can identify your landing pages in a clearer way. It is important to install Google Analytics script on every landing page so that you can measure and track your progress as it happens. A number of people overlook the importance of custom URLs in landing pages but now it is quite clear that they are important. 2. Maintain brand uniformity There are a number of companies, which fail to realize the importance of brand uniformity. They have landing pages designed by someone else in a completely different manner because they fancied a new design. They are making a fatal error. A landing page is a subsidiary of the main page, even if it is able to stand on its own. Thus, you need to ensure that your landing page has the same design, color scheme, font and format as your main page or any other online property. In fact, you can use your landing page to get people to visit your main website. When your website looks completely different from your landing page, the visitor might find it jarring. Even psychologically, it creates a sense of disconnect, which you don’t want to let happen. A landing page needs to, thus, have your core message and core branding factors inscribed into it. Always ensure that you keep your landing page’s design in sync with your regular branding. This helps to keep your landing pages, your website, your blogs and just about anything else in a cohesive fashion, tying everything to the company you are eventually trying to promote. 3. Focus on your content Your copy need not be verbose and professorial. Nobody has the time to read through a lot of statistics and figures when they visit your landing page. Your landing page’s copy is either persuasive or it is not. If it is not, people will simply not spend more time on your landing page, leave alone responding to your call to action. The trick is to write copy that is simple, minimalist and effective. It need not be concise and you need to hire experienced copywriters in order to achieve the intended result. You need not ever stuff your content with keywords and you need not use complex jargons. In fact, we can say that your landing page copy need to be similar to your web copy, albeit much more minimalist and simpler. Do not copy and paste all your landing page content from some other page of yours. This will affect not only your visitor’s perception but also a search engine’s idea of how unique your website is. Write copy in a persuasive way, which answers the questions you probably had asked when a prospect had clicked on the link. Ensure that your landing page answers the questions for which the prospects arrived on the page to begin with. 4. Keep the design minimalist While it is true that your landing page needs to look similar to your main website, it need not also have the same amount of images, texts and other content, which might distract the visitor from the main purpose – call to action. It is very important to keep the landing page plain and simple. This helps to keep the attention of visitors focused. Your landing page need not end up becoming a platform for you to brag, boast or promote aspects of your company that is not related with the actual purpose of the landing page. The design needs to be similar to the main website but it needs to be a stripped down version of it. Also, make sure that you do not ask too many questions to the prospect. Just asking them to fill out their first name, last name and email address would be sufficient. If you ask for too many pieces of information, they will simply close the page and move on to the next website. It is very important to not distract the visitor and ensure that they respond to your call to action. For this, you will need to keep the design as minimalistic and simplistic

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Growing Your Blog Audience Is Not A Rocket Science

June 23, 2015

Whether it’s blogging about leaders or blogging about your favorite food joints, writing great stories and publishing them in your blog does not carry any value until they are exposed to the outer world. Do you know blogging can do a lot of your marketing effort? It can drive traffic to your website and help you capture leads. Provided you know the right ways, it can expand your reach to an extended network of individuals. Your blog can help you connect with people without spending any additional marketing dollars. All you need is a right strategy and not luck as many believe. Today’s blog post aims at focusing on your efforts to gain attention of people and help you to grow your blog. Quality is the King A blog post may contain 2,000 words or 4,000 words. Well, that’s quite a lot of text. To add to this, it should also have screenshots and images. However, only if the content has valuable information to impart, you’re bound to get traffic on a consistent basis. Most importantly, consider writing the hot topic of discussion in an extremely detailed manner so that no one dares to copy you. But of course, editing remains a crucial part. Conversational Tone of Writing By making your blog post sound like conversation, instead of an essay, you’re actually inviting more audience to read your content and encouraging them to comment naturally. The simple ways to bring in a conversational tone is by: Using ‘you’ and ‘I’ within your content Keeping the paragraphs short and to the point Using common words Asking questions in your blog post and solving readers’ problems Respond and Build a Fan Base If you’re thinking that why would anyone want to be your fan, you need to immediately stop thinking that way. Reciprocate and build your blog fan base. How often do you reply back to the comments on your blog? Comments are a great way to increase your readers’ loyalty. If people comment on your blog on a consistent basis, it means they’re reading your content and they’re more likely to share it via social platforms. Also when your readers email you, are you taking out the time to email them back? If not, it’s high time you start caring about your readers and help them as far as possible. They’ll certainly come back. Syndicate Your Content to Third Party Publications Third party sites are usually cited by a variety of people quite frequently. Therefore, syndicating your content to these sites will have a higher likelihood of getting more social shares. These sites can better expose your company, links, name and thought leadership to a wider spectrum of audience and turn steer more people back to your own site. However, you need to find sites that have high traffic and social sharing numbers and whose subject matter is relevant to your brand and content strategy. Promote Your Content The best way to grow your blog audience is to promote your content through different channels. Do not stick only to social media to share your post. You may email your list and reach out to influencers in your niche or pin the shares of your post either in your Facebook page or Twitter profile. You can also use social media advertising to promote shares of your blog post. Content Publication on a Consistent Basis Writing one or two content a month can never increase your fan base. It is important to write and publish content on a consistent basis. One blog post should get published at least once a week. If your readers are expecting a new article every week, don’t disappoint them. Give them the confidence that if they visit your blog, they’ll be greeted with a new content. Use Forums Forum like Quora is an effective way to drive relevant and targeted traffic to your blog. Search for questions and topics relevant to the subject matters you had covered and answer them with valuable information. If possible, add a link back to your appropriate blog post. Remember not to include a link forcefully. This helps establish you and your blog as a trustworthy and useful source of information. Link Other Relevant Sites to Your Own Post Readers, bloggers and even search engines appreciate valuable links. When your own material in-content are referred in such a way that is not manipulative, you automatically draw visitors to your content. Besides, it is always valuable to refer content of others, especially, the high quality sites and great content. When the site owners get to see that you’ve linked to their content, they’ll also reciprocate in the future. Guest Blogging Another best way to get your name or company’s name in front of a broader section of audience is through guest blogging. Make a list of relevant blogs who have the best crossover with the audience that you’d like to connect with. Now, start reaching out to the bloggers or editors who are most willing to accept high quality, free content on their site. Pitch in the specific blog topic ideas in your first inquiry email. Send a brief synopsis of what you’d write about. However, make sure you write all original content for any guest posting you do. Build a Strong Social Media Profile There are tons of social media networks that you could potentially use to market your blog. Most of the social media channels also have paid options that allow you to market to targeted individuals. Promote the best work through paid amplification including PPC, influencer outreach, social ads and different social networks. Community building is an art, what works for one community may not work for another one. Therefore keep engaging and optimizing your social efforts for the best outcomes. There is no rocket science behind growing your blog traffic. A few simple strategies should be able to get you visitors more than you expect in a month. So, why not give it a shot?

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The SEO Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization

June 8, 2015

Companies which previously invested a lot of money in Search Engine Optimization have come to realize the importance of content marketing as an additional tool. This is because of the recent updates made to Google’s algorithms and the fact that content has become important not only for SEO but also for increasing conversion rates. With that in mind, a number of SEO professionals have begun to feel that if one is to desire increasing conversion rates, they would also have to focus on content marketing. Other than content marketing, there are a number of other ways with which one can increase conversion rates. This starts with fixing the website, making it load faster and also ensuring there are no error pages or confusing content that could leave your visitors distracted. In this article, we need to take a look at some of the ways in which SEO can be used to optimize conversion rates. Fix the website One of the most important functions of Search Engine Optimization is to fix websites. While you might believe this is the job of a web developer, SEO works in a different way. It helps a website to be found by search engine bots and convey information about the website to them. This helps search engines to index the websites correctly and help people to find your website when they enter search queries in Google, Yahoo! and Bing. If you wish to increase conversions, ensure that there are no broken links, 404 error pages, missing tags, missing meta data and other issues, which websites, usually, experience. When all these problems are fixed, a website naturally starts to get indexed more often and this results in more footfalls. That is very important to optimize conversion rates. Build better content Search engine optimization is all about building better content. Google made it clear that websites that have better content will be given priority over those with inferior level of content. This means, websites need to pay attention to grammar, semantics, meaning, context and profoundness of content. Writing great content is not just a matter of marketing but also search engine optimization. Invariably, great content impresses prospects and leads when they visit your website. This helps directly in boosting conversion rates. Well-written content not only helps improve your SEO but it will also fetch targeted traffic, which has a higher chance of converting. Use search engine marketing techniques SEO is not just about fixing broken links or concentrating on which keyword we need to focus on. It also involves marketing techniques that utilize PPC ads, CPC, CPL and other forms of online advertisements. These advertisements are crucial in bringing back important traffic. This traffic has the potential to convert and help you achieve sales. It is important to focus on online marketing from an SEO perspective because a lot of people still find websites with the help of banner ads and text ads that are powered by Google, Yahoo! and other search engines. This tendency is not going to change very soon. Investing money in Search Engine Marketing is a very good idea as that will help to convert more leads. Build your authority with backlinks Search engine optimization is not complete without mentioning backlinks. Backlinks help you to prove not only to search engines that you are important but also to regular visitors. If people find that an authoritative website has linked to you and if they come from that source, they are more likely to believe in your products and services because you were listed on that website. Backlinks need to be generated organically and using unethical means will never help you in any way. This brings the focus back to good content, PR skills, marketing and having a reliable product inventory. This will help you to achieve the kind of authority you deserve and the kind of authority that will help you to increase your conversion rates. Final thoughts It is important to integrate SEO with conversion increment plans because ultimately, both are inter-connected and they aid one another with SEO, usually, helping to increase conversions than the other way around. SEO is a great tool that will not only help you to have a good online presence and be found by search engines but is also an important tool in increasing conversions.

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What You Need to Know Before Hiring an SEO Professional

May 11, 2015

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO as we all know it, is not the same anymore. It is continuously evolving and is becoming more entwined with content marketing, design and public relations. With that in mind, do you really want to hire just about anyone who calls himself or herself an SEO professional? You will need to give this issue a thought before jumping into making decisions. If an SEO professional does not understand the way mobile and content systems have taken over the Internet, you probably need not be dealing with that person anyway. There are several parameters you need to consider before hiring an SEO agency or professional. With so many of them around, making the right choice can become somewhat difficult. In this article, let us take a look at what is required of an SEO agency or professional and we shall also take a look at which kinds of SEO agencies you need to avoid & which questions you need to ask before hiring them. After all, if you know and understand the murky waters you are wading through, you will be able to reach the other side of the shore much more easily. 1. Do they follow outdated SEO practices? There are many outdated SEO practices, which simply do not have a place in today’s world. Two of them are purchasing backlinks and talking a lot about SEO copywriting. Backlinks, as a matter of fact, need not be purchased. You need to get those links from various websites because of your amazing content, services and products. Unless your SEO agency helps you to understand this, they probably do not know it themselves. A few years ago, it was perfectly OK to purchase backlinks in order to deceive search engines into thinking that a particular website is probably more worthy than it is supposed to be. Thankfully, Google has put an end to all that and has continued to launch new updates in order to weed out such malpractices. Another question you need to ask yourself is whether the SEO agency or professional is speaking a lot about SEO copywriting. What this basically means is they are discussing keyword stuffing, writing content specifically for search engines and trying to play hide & seek with search engine algorithms. You really need not be experimenting with SEO agencies and professionals who discuss these things. Instead, look for an agency that helps you to achieve your goals with the help of organically driven campaigns that will take you back to the basics of marketing and advertising. 2. Are they promising too much? A number of SEO agencies and professionals are known to use their bravado to attract clients. A lot of clients fall for this kind of charm and end up in situations they wish they were not in. One of such situations is falling for promises and fast results. SEO is not something that can turn your low traffic website into a multi-million visitor drawing website overnight. It takes a lot of time and effort to see improvements & expectations need to be realistic. If the SEO agency promises you something that makes you feel really good, stop for a minute and think. Just the fact that you are feeling really good shows that it might be something unrealistic that is being sold to you. Carefully analyze your own situation and how much success you expect from an SEO contract. Chances are, you already know what you can expect and have realistic goals. Any SEO agency worth its salt will tell you that you need to be realistic in order to actually achieve success. SEO would certainly help you to make your mark online and it is important to change the way you market yourself online as the Internet evolves. However, falling for big promises and bravado will only land you into trouble. 3. Do they have references or are they very new? Another question you need to ask yourself is how long they have been around in the business. There are some SEO professionals who are still looking for their first client. You probably wouldn’t want to be their first client and endure all the experiments they will subject you to in the name of building your SEO ranking. Try and choose an agency that has been around for a while and that which has a list of clients. When you see that list, make sure that you seek permission to speak to those clients or references. References are a great source of information not because of what they say about your SEO agency or professional but also because who they really are. A lot of time, we can use the quality of the references themselves in order to judge the vendor. This requires a little expertise in the form of assessing business needs, why the references say what they really say and also to assess if the references provided are legitimate enough. When you are armed with this kind of information, you will find it easier to choose an SEO agency that will help you to achieve success. 4. Do they speak as if things are very easy? When you interview an SEO agency or professional, you might feel that they offer very easy solutions. They might behave as if success is very easy and it is guaranteed. They might also provide you with packages, which actually is doublespeak for “one size fits all”. You need to be wary of these professionals. They might lack the enthusiasm and creativity to take on complex challenges & might offer packages that will eventually land in trouble. Each client is unique and comes with a different set of requirements. We need to remember that SEO is no longer just about fixing metatags and working around keywords but it is a completely different ball game. We need to remember that SEO entails content marketing, PR and advertising in order to achieve its goals. An SEO professional who is not aware

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How Can You Protect Your Website Against Negative SEO?

May 1, 2015

With a lot of focus on black hat SEO techniques, people often forget that there is another threat lurking around the corner. Negative SEO has turned out to be one of the most formidable forces against good link building and site administration. A number of companies and individuals have lately become victims of negative SEO, which is a term used to describe unethical practices meant to bring down competitor’s SEO rankings. If black hat SEO techniques are meant to increase search engine rankings unethically, negative SEO aims to bring down genuine websites’ SEO rankings by attacking them with spammy links, copying the website’s content and posting it all over the web so that Google thinks it is duplicating content & also crippling a website’s speed by sending across thousands of requests each second to your server. It can also mean that a potential negative SEO crook contacts of other websites who have linked to you and ask them to remove those links by impersonating you. Having a website and damaging someone’s reputation on social media also is related to negative SEO. What could be done to protect a website against negative SEO? In this article, let us take a look at a few steps that are intended to help you protect your own website: 1. Set up Google Webmaster Tool alerts First, you need to turn on the Google Webmaster Tool alerts, which will notify you if Googlebot cannot access your website or if something else goes wrong. However, by this time, the damage would have already been done to your website. Thus, it is important to keep other options in hand. It is not possible to simply rely on Google Webmaster Tool alerts. 2. Keep checking your backlinks The best way to safeguard yourself against negative SEO is to check your backlinks often. You need to create a system that will help you to track all your inbound links with the help of tools like Link Research Tools, Google Webmaster Tools or Open Site Explorer. CognitiveSEO helps you to automate this process. If you see an unusual number of low quality backlinks, there is something wrong going on. 3. Demand for bad links to be taken off Sometimes, you can directly ask those who have been troubling you to take off those links that bother you. It might not work but it is always a good idea to be proactive and search everything in our toolbox. You can also request Google to intervene when things go out of hand. At least, you will have proof that you contacted those who were linking your website with spammy links to remove them. 4. Ask Google to remove suspicious backlinks You can request Google to disavow backlinks that seem spammy. If you are not able to do so, you can try and update your disavow.txt file. You can make a list of links that you don’t want to link to your website and you can upload it to Google. Another way to do this is by using the Spam Report Form that will help Google to know which site is spammy and which isn’t. It is not clear if this trick will work but it is worth trying. 5. Engage a reputation management agency At times, it is a good idea to contact a reputation management agency, if there are a lot of unfair and negative comments about your company on social media. Sometimes, competitors leave behind nasty comments so that your company’s reputation goes down on social media. You could seek the services of a reputation management company to sort this problem out. Looking forward If you are unable to do anything at all about negative SEO, you can seek professional help. One of the other ways to tackle negative SEO is to build a website that is so awesome that no amount of unfair and unethical SEO practices would harm you. If you write content that is so authoritative and formidable that every other important site links to your website, the effect that spammers would have on you will drastically reduce. It is important to bear all these tricks in mind and protect oneself against negative SEO. It is a real threat and it is wise to contact professionals when things go too far.

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Social Media Myths to Overcome in 2015

April 15, 2015

Social media is seen in different perspectives by marketers. Some take it too seriously while others consider it a time waste. It is a fact that social media carries a lot of weight and plays a significant role in influencing customer decision making process. But before you choose any particular social media service, you must know if your audience is present there or not. Do you have a plan in place or you are just entering for the sake of it. How much time can you afford to spend in maintaining your social media profile? What is the source of your content generation? Are you able to connect with decision-makers and influencers in your industry? Social media is a relatively new platform for businesses. Both the network owners and business owners have realized how to exploit this potential. Networks are becoming more user-friendly and business-friendly. The most awaited launch of “Facebook for Business” in 2015, says it all. Such initiatives come for a reason. This article is written to bust the most popular myths and take a new approach on how marketers see this. 1. You don’t need a plan It is a fact that social media is easy to use and helps you to interact with your customers but for a business, one needs comprehensive planning to pursue your goals of social networking. Quite often, interaction is high in the beginning and slowly comes down to negligible. Such a pursuit is better not attempted. For instance, the reason is people join your Facebook page with the hope of learning something new but if you don’t meet their expectations, they will soon unfollow you. Determine your goals and objectives for each social network profile you have. What is the follower growth rate you have projected? How many queries do you respond every day? (This is significant when businesses start receiving a number of queries but are never answered.) Criticism spreads like fire on social media. How do you plan to handle it? All these questions need to be a part of your social media strategy. 2. Complacency about the size of your target audience Unquestionably, size of your target audience does matter and it helps you to allocate your marketing budget. But to take advantage of target audience on social media, you need a focused approach. If your focus is just on to increase the number of followers of your social media profile, without wanting to, you will fail miserably. In the end, it is not the number that matters but quality interaction with a small group of people. You can’t expect to engage in quality interaction with all your followers. Identify the ones who show more interest and curiosity than others and take it from there. If you are able to satisfy a small group, word-of-mouth will start paying you. Moreover, running a huge social media campaign requires time and resources (money and man power). For a small business that might be naïve in running a social media page, it is always safe to start at a small scale. Quality engagement with a smaller group helps you to understand your target audience better and prepare yourself for a bigger battle. 3. You need to be present on all the leading social networks It is not necessary to have a profile on every leading social network. Choose the number and the ones that you are comfortable and determined to work on for a long term. Every network has unique features and capability. There are various supporting tools and tactics to enhance the capability of every network. Why not explore one network acutely rather than dirtying your hands in all and get nothing. For instance, tools used by marketers on Twitter include Bitly, Buffer etc. Bitly allows you to shorten the length of the URL being shared and you can share the links on multiple Twitter accounts. You can also see the stats for Bitly links on your dashboard. Similarly, Buffer allows you to schedule your tweets throughout the day. 4. Use every post to talk about your business This is one of the biggest myths that need riddance in 2015. It is true that you wish to educate your target audience about your business so that they become your customers. But you can’t bore them with marketing pitch on every encounter that they have with your post. Talk about anything but business. Look for the relevant issues or trending topics that intrigues your audience. You have to look for the right opportunity to talk about business. Sense the mood of the audience before you start a discussion. Ask about their preferences and likings. Ideally speaking, social media is a place where people are relaxed and expressive about how & what they feel. Audience need not ever get an impression that you have come with an agenda to sell on social media. 5. It is okay to commit grammatical or spelling errors There has been an exponential growth in using creative spellings and very little attention to grammar by users on social media & instant messaging services. Though there is nothing wrong in doing so but such practice makes today’s generation vulnerable. However, marketers should keep away from such a practice as it does not look professional. You might be talking about casual topics that interests the audience but your audience will not take you seriously if you start a similar practice. As a marketer, you have to lead by keeping your communication professional. Casual spellings carry a risk of non-seriousness. In your effort to tune with the audience, you lose out to your competitors. 6. It’s just interaction, why measure it? It might look unimportant at first glance but measuring the statistics associated with your social media audience helps you to know your audience profile. With what they read, like, share and tag, you can design your product & marketing communication. Your content can be more focused. You can analyze audience demographics and study the differences among different groups.

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Link Building in 2015: The Game Has Changed

April 8, 2015

SEO professionals often find it difficult to explain to their clients that link building is as important as it ever has been. Most clients often point out to the fact that link building exercises have a bad reputation and that Google has often penalized websites which engage in link building. This is only partly true. Google has consistently updated its algorithms in order to ensure that malpractices are not encouraged and that every website has a fair opportunity to be displayed in search results. Which is why, when Google senses that something is amiss and that a company is aggressively building links, it penalizes that particular website. Google has found a number of ways to detect websites that engage in such SEO malpractices. What most people will not tell you is that Google encourages web administrators to build links and to connect with each other. Google just wants web admins to play it fair and safe. With that in mind, ethical SEO professionals will tell you that link building is not the problem but unethical means of building links is the problem. On that note, SEO professionals understand that link building is an effective exercise to bring websites together and to create information that is compelling & worthwhile. Further, Google just wants website owners to link to websites that are relevant and eventually help in putting all information on the Internet together. With this in mind, let us take a look at how link building will fare in 2015 and what you need to know about building links this year ahead. 1. Understand what link building is One of the most important tasks is to understand what link building is. In 2015, if you believe that link building is an enigmatic exercise, which involves various SEO professionals messing with bots and algorithms, you probably have got it wrong. When we speak about link building, the goal is rather clear – we try to get desirable websites to link back to our websites and when we write compelling content, we link to authoritative & desirable websites. While it is easy for us to link to desirable websites, getting those websites to link back to us is difficult. In order to get backlinks, you need to define what your link building strategy is. If you are planning to get a backlink from The New York Times, you probably will not succeed. However, it might be possible to get a write-up published in a magazine or a newspaper where your business is located. This involves having a good PR professional or a publicist who will make your case. In fact, SEO is more about public relations today than it was a few years ago. The trick is to figure out how to get those desirable websites to link back to your content in a fair and ethical way. 2. Understand the project Whether you are building links for your own website or for your client, you need to understand the project in hand. It will take a while to understand what you are trying to do and how it actually needs to be done. You need to understand the website’s quirks, its niche, readers, visitors, clients and the target audience. Then comes the part, which involves understanding the psychographics and demographics of various entities involved. You also need to understand and analyze the unique selling proposition of the website & how it affects the way you market your own products and services. All these need to be tracked, analyzed and even measured along the way. It will take some time to get a grip over these factors but eventually you will know that link building also involves understanding the project in a deep and profound manner, as described in this paragraph. In fact, link building solely depends on understanding a given project from the grassroots. This will help SEO professionals to look for those sites, which are particularly helpful when it comes to seeking backlinks. 3. Understand the importance of content A few years ago, SEO professionals did not pay much attention to content. Content marketing was either unheard of or was in its initial stages of growth. With the content boom taking place a few years ago, blogs, social media, e-books, whitepapers and other forms of content have become very important. Whether a website will link to you or not depends on the kind of content strategy that you follow. In order to ensure that your SEO campaign goes well, you will have to probably take your content marketing plan more seriously. You will need to come up with ways to ensure that your content is worth paying for and that it is not written mechanically. Incidentally, content writing needs to be a lot more organic than SEO professionals would like to believe. In 2015, we will continue to see an upsurge in the growth of content marketing and SEO will involve understanding how to market and distribute content that is created & then, attract backlinks that are of value to the company. Thus, we can say that link building involves a lot of content marketing as well. 4. More companies are online Link building is going to be a lot more important in 2015 than it used to be in previous years. The reason for this is, a lot more companies are online and the need for building effective links to ensure visibility is much more important today. The coming months will see many more companies trying to create a space for themselves online and this will involve content marketing and SEO. If you want to survive or make your presence felt, you will have to have a very consistent and different link building strategy. It is simply not enough to write blog posts and get people to link. You will need to function as a PR team to get authoritative websites to link back and thus, help you to achieve the success you have always wanted. It is not

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The Best SEO Practices for eCommerce Industry

March 27, 2015

With eCommerce stores mushrooming and people gradually making a shift of paradigm when it comes to making purchases, it is becoming increasingly important to focus on the search engine optimization factor of eCommerce websites. With the kind of growth that we have seen in online stores and with people preferring to choose ordering products on their phones, tablets and desktops & laptops, we need to ensure that the content on our eCommerce websites are properly indexed and made available for search engines to index. It may take a while to get a grip over all the rules that dictate SEO for eCommerce but it is not difficult to understand or practice. In this article, let us take a look at some of the best practices which help in optimizing SEO for eCommerce websites. 1. Avoid black hat techniques and plagiarism When it comes to SEO best practice, it is quite similar to what you follow on other websites. Strictly speaking, avoid all kinds of black hat SEO. ensure that you follow only white hat methods and do not indulge in backlinks purchases and other unethical means to reach success. Google will only penalize you for it. Secondly, do not copy and paste product descriptions from the manufacturers. Google considers this plagiarism and that you are duplicating content. Instead, build a healthy social environment and ask people to leave comments, user-generated opinions about the product and so on and so forth. This should take care of keeping your SEO practice clean and tidy. 2. Focus on buyer personas When you create content on your eCommerce website, write for your buyer personas. Understand where they are coming from and what they need. When you feature products in the side bar or on the home page, understand what is driving traffic to your website. If it is the Christmas time and you deal with books, ensure that Christmas or church-related books appear on the front page. It goes without saying that you need to know what is happening and you must feature products that are in demand at that particular time. Also, focus on building your social media pages, engage in email marketing and purchase display ads. All the three sources are great ways to build and increase traffic to your website. 3. Create content that is relevant and fix error pages Websites do not exist in islands. They need to be accessible from various search engines. If you have outdated products or products that are no longer in supply, weed out those pages, instead of having “not available” page. IT is important to hire people who write product descriptions that are different from what the manufacturer has given you. This ensures that the content on your website is unique and that you will rank higher in Google search results. As you may already know, duplicate content will attract penalties. If you want to improve your SEO, try and build a community of sort which will help people to leave comments and thus add to the content ecosystem within your website. 4. Category pages and alt tags Make sure that all your products are listed under appropriate categories. You must develop deep links from your category pages that lead to product pages. This will help users to experience a sense of cohesion and unity. Moreover, it also helps you to build internal linking, which is important in SEO. Alternate text or alt tags are important to ensure that your photos are optimized for SEO as well. If you have a number of images for the same product, tag those photos with alt tags and ensure that people get what they want even by looking at images and hovering their cursors over the image. This helps to build a good level of SEO as well and is good for traffic in the long term. Final thoughts Most of the eCommerce websites today either have incomplete product pages, duplicate product descriptions, just images in place of text, products that are no longer in stock still being displayed and a host of other problems. With these issues in mind, it is becoming clear that we all need to follow certain SEO best practices, when it comes to the eCommerce industry. If you follow the best practices listed above, you will ensure that your ecommerce website is SEO optimized.

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