Archive for year: 2018
I just came across this great infographic about Apple. I hope you like it. Source: The Watch Strap.
Courtesy of: The Watch Strap Co
Take a look at this great infografhic about how psychology of color can boost your webiste conversions. Really great inspiration right?
Source: Designadvisor
I just found this great infographic about how to create clickable social cards in a few seconds. Have a look at it. Source: Anyimage
Most business houses jump into the world of social media however they do not know how to play the game. The result is they sink into oblivion in no time. Social media platforms do seem simple in the beginning. However, if you wish to boost social media presence for your business site, it is high time for you to chalk out a plan.
Social media and search engine optimization
Many business owners ask themselves this question- does social media have an impact on search engine optimization? Experts in the field say that social media itself does not impact your search engine optimization directly. However, it does play a vital role in boosting the visibility of your business site. For instance, if you have a social media business page for your product or service, you can promote your business page on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. More and more people will share your page if you share engaging and informative content. The more shares, likes and comments you get for your social media posts will boost your brand. In this way, people will click on your site’s URL. The traffic flow to your website will increase!
Before you create a social media marketing plan, know what your marketing goals are
Before creating any social media marketing plan, you must know what your marketing goals are. It is easy for you to enter the competition. However, you should be aware of what your destination is. When you are working with customers and clients, you first need to establish what your goals are. How are you willing to expose the face of your business? Are you searching for better sales leads? These are just some of the questions that you will ask yourself. There are more questions for you to create and ask. Once you have thought about these questions, list all of them on paper. It is prudent to have a written list of questions to help you.
A better understanding of the goals you wish to achieve
Once you have listed the goals you have for your business on paper, you get a better understanding of them, and the destination becomes clearer. The next step is to know who your targeted audience is. For this, you need to research well. You need to know who you wish to target selling your goods and services. You have to know what their tastes and preferences are. Knowing the needs and the interests of your customers help you in a large way to target your goods and services to the right audience. Hire a qualified and professional social media manager to help you.
The importance of a content strategy
It is vital for you to engage your customer. This can be done with the help of a content strategy. You need to engage your customer in such a way that is meaningful. This is where a content strategy comes in useful. Here, you can know what your customers are looking for. What are they interested in? You should know the features of your product they really like. How can you innovate them so that your customer becomes delighted? The content strategy for your business needs to keep the above considerations in mind.
Once the content strategy is developed, the next step is to create a content plan. This step needs more time and research, so here you need to be tactical. The content plan is a framework that will give you the actual structure of what your tweets, shares, and posts should be to attract the targeted audience.
Insert a call-to-action in all your social media posts
With each of your posts, you need to create a call-to-action that will invoke your customers to bring in more business value to your company. This call-to-action will ask your customers to either buy the product, share information, provide feedback, etc to your business. When you are creating a social media post, you should keep the call-to-action in mind.
Execute and evaluate the posts and the results you receive
This might seem like a tedious task however it is worth it. You need to incorporate the social media plan for your business and wait for results. Here, you should execute and review the posts that are shared with your fans and followers. Always remember that every post might not work as expected for your business so do not get disappointed.
Therefore, with the above tips, you can incorporate a successful social media plan for the success of your business. In this way, you effectively can connect and reach out to your targeted audience without hassles at all. Experiment and evaluate the social media marketing goals, strategies, and posts you create for your targeted audience. This will pave the way to success and largely help you to get the brand presence for your goods and services as expected!
Written by Charlie Brown
Agree or not, lead generation is a form of art. Creating a steady flow of leads is not easy: we already know about Outbound and Outreach marketing and how effective they can be, but when it comes to generating organic leads, we face some issues.
So what’s the problem?
Outbound marketing was great and cheap back in the early 2000s, and is still a solid choice if you need to build a strong and less expensive marketing strategy. But today cold emailing, media buys and email spam aren’t as effective. People learned how to distinguish spam from mail, and so did software systems. US Government took a step further and passed the CAN-Spam Act, which restricted spam usage in e-commerce.
Outreach marketing is the new mainstream method, taking a more personalized approach to lead generation. We went back to our roots, focusing not on quantity, but on quality. But it comes at a price. Outreach is simply too expensive, both time and money wise. Building your marketing purely on outreach would inevitably limit your targeting scope.
And while the two methods above are still relevant and can be used for lead generation, creating a stream of organic leads requires a completely different approach.
Here comes SEO.
Part I: SEO or How To Tame Google
SEO (aka Search Engine Optimization) is a process of increasing traffic by optimizing keywords used in search engines on your platform. Every online marketer has probably already worked with search engine optimization, but in case you haven’t, let’s see how it works:
- Search engine optimization allows you to rank up your platform in the search results by using business keywords related to your targeted audience.
- Prospects will use those keywords to search for an interest and will be offered your platform in the search results, leading to a natural stream of customers.
- If customers find value in your content or product, they may consider becoming your true sales.
With SEO the only thing you need to care about is the end quality of the content and the solutions you are offering.
Other approaches will demand a lot of your time and money, which, if you’re a small business, you simply do not have. SEO opens up multiple doors:
- Quality Assurance – search engines promote quality content, which will allow your platform to rank up in the search results.
- Low-cost promotion – SEO is cheap and requires one specialist at best to get your platform promoted.
- Credibility – unlike emails, people fully trust Google and other search engines when it comes to offering them solutions. Anyone who’s ever used Google knows – if it’s at the top of Google’s search results, it’s trustworthy.
SEO turns your web-platform into an instrument in itself, meaning the more you invest into the platform, the more leads you’ll get. That’s the beauty of search optimization – you don’t need to create email campaigns or buy hundreds of ads. Simply focus on your product and the content for your users. These leads will be much more receptive.
SEO vs Ads
The problem with ads is they tend to hurt user experience or even block the content with annoying pop-ups. Lead generation though ads is on its way out.
Just look at the stats – 70% of ads are getting ignored by visitors. That, with added poor user experience leads to low return rates on the platform.
Another problem is people started installing more ad blocking extensions, and new browsers like Brave started appearing to combat privacy violating ads. According to researchers, ad block usage in 2017 grew by 30%.
Ads are losing their effectiveness in modern marketing, and SEO is pushing towards creating both quality content and generating healthy leads.
Part II: Precise Audience Targeting
The first thing to understand about SEO is it’s not about mass marketing. You won’t be marketing towards everyone, instead, your strategy must be specific.
You will need to build a profile of your ideal sale. This profile should include:
Key information (for keyword building)
- Basic characteristics (first and last name, gender)
- Geographical location (country, city, address)
Optional statistics
- Behavioral statistics (preferences, dislikes, habits)
- Company information (name, position, experience)
Depending on the type of businesses you’re dealing with, you can collect statistics to target a specific type:
Business-to-Business (B2B) – collect data like Company Information in order to precisely target the desired businesses.
Business-to-Customer (B2C) – consumer type relations rely heavily on Behavioral statistics, showing us what consumers expect from our product/content and what their dislikes are.
Targeting your audience requires significant effort, but in the end it will help you and make it easier to start building your keywords. Targeting will also lead to a much better experience for your users content-wise.
Part III: Who Is Your Lead?
Not everyone who enters your page is automatically your lead. To identify your lead, you should first establish what exactly a person must do to become one. This is best done by creating a list of actions:
- Fills in the Sign-up form on your platform
- Goes to a specific page
- Interacts with certain features
To measure the statistics from the above actions, use analytics tools. The most popular analytics tool is Google Analytics. It tracks all data related to your platform from Google search. You can also try other tools:
- New Relic
- Piwik
- comScore
These tools come as plugins that you can integrate into your platform. If you are using WordPress, you can easily customize your analytics tool. Custom build platforms will require a developer to implement them.
In most cases, Google Analytics gives you enough data to work with. But if want to conduct a much deeper research, try one of the tools suggested above.
Once you’ve identified your leads using the data you got from your page, you can start optimizing the content on your website to fit the needs of the core audience.
However, optimizing content won’t help if clients can’t find you in the search. And so we come to the most important part of SEO.
Part IV: Building Core Keywords
Keywords are used both in the content and inside the landing page code. The content on your page can be split into two categories: generated and core content.
Core content is what your landing page consist of: general information about the product or services you are offering, title referring to the name of your solution and your company. Basically, general information, which stays unchangeable for a long time.
Generated content is various written or promotional material. Creating new content boosts your platform in the search results. Generated content is delivered in a form of:
- Blog posts (an announcement or a piece of news regarding your product or service)
- Articles (tend to cover other fields related directly or indirectly to your solution)
- Guest posts (written by a third party as a promotion for them, done if you need to generate more content and don’t mind third party involvement)
- Long Reads (fully cover a topic regarding your field, consist of several subtopics, structuring the main topic)
Core content is the foundation of your platform, you should invest enough effort to make it associate with your solution. Without it you won’t be placed correctly in the Google search feed.
Besides content, you need to focus on the very heart of your platform – the HTML code. In order for Google to understand what your platform is about, it parses the HTML code, specifically the <head> part of it.
The head tag contains meta tags, which directly affect your platform’s presence in the search results. You need to take care of the meta tags with description and keywords attribute. In the description give a brief explanation of what your solution is about. In the keywords attribute insert the keywords related to your platform, that you’ve created based on the data gathered by your analytics tool. Please note: don’t try to abuse this attribute, or your platform can be banned from Google’s search results forever.
What if I want to generate some leads right now?
If you need to generate some targeted leads within minutes, we have another suggestion for you. You may have heard about Snovio, but not many people are aware of the multiple marketing tools this platform has to offer.
A goldmine for any marketer, Snovio offers the following tools:
- Domain Search
- Company Profile Search
- Emails from Names
- Technology Checker
- Email Finder
- Email Verifier
- Email Tracker
- Drip Campaigns and many more.
This platform is a one-stop-shop with multiple Chrome extensions. Collect highly targeted leads from any website, enrich your leads, and start your drip campaign – all on one page, in less than an hour. Give Snovio a try, but don’t forget about SEO. It’s by combining the two that you will get the best results.
Conclusion
Search engine optimization doesn’t stop at keywords. You should constantly generate new content to push your platform up in the search results. Don’t forget to optimize your existing content, so when Google parses your page, you get ranked higher than your competitors. This will attract organic leads and save you money.
Author: Yaroslav Panyok
When it comes to improving your ranking on search pages, then you must have the comprehensive and thought-out SEO strategy. Through implementing the effective strategies, you can improve your website’s visibility, this gaining traffic and revenue.
Yes, off-page tactics such as link building are crucial. However, on-page SEO is just as important, with search engines now focusing on both authority and the quality of content you provide on the website, as well as its relevance, structure, and the user-friendliness. That’s why it’s essential to take care of these aspects, which will have you succeed.
Before, SEO tags have had a significant impact on one’s ranking. But today, these SEO tags are a controversial aspect when talking about on-page SEO. It has many wonder: Which tags are crucial and which ones should you not mind?
To help you learn more about SEO tags, I show you all the tags one uses in SEO and which are important to still use.
Here are the variety of tags and its importance on SEO:
1. Title Tags
The title tag is found on the header section, which would specify the webpage’s title. It’s the clickable headline on search engine results pages and would show up on browsers and social networks.
Title tags provide the clear idea of what the web page’s content will be about. Well-written titles can provide the higher rankings, as it’s the first thing searchers would see, deciding if it’s the page they’re looking for.
Good titles would increase traffic and clicks, which in turn, can bring a bit of impact on your rankings. Search engines don’t require having your exact match keyword anymore though, so you can see that they are becoming smarter in understanding your page’s content rather than just the keywords alone.
So yes, title tags are still important and should be catchy. To do this, you can follow these tips:
•Give all your pages a unique title which describes your page’s content accurately
•Keep your titles 50 to 60 characters long to avoid it getting truncated in search engine pages
•Put the important keywords first and in a natural manner
•If possible, make use of the webpage’s brand-name when creating the title
2. Meta Description Tags
Meta descriptions are found underneath your title tag and also underneath the header of a webpage. It’s usually displayed as a snippet on the search engine results page, along with your title and the webpage URL.
The reason why meta descriptions exist is to reflect the content of your page, providing more details compared to the title tag. However, meta descriptions aren’t the official ranking factor on SEO for almost ten years.
But just because it isn’t as important as other tags doesn’t mean it won’t make an impact. Your meta description would occupy a large part of the search engine results page snippet. It will invite different searchers to click on your page because of it.
Because the description can impact the number of clicks your page gets, it will be able to improve your CTO while decreasing bounce rates.
Meta descriptions can be as long as you want. However, Google would usually show just about 160 characters in search engine results pages. To have good SEO practices in terms of meta descriptions, follow these tips:
•Have unique descriptions for each page which reflects your content’s value
•Keep your descriptions between 150 to 160 characters long
•Include keywords, but avoid stuffing them. Write for your target audience with a call-to-action to make it more inviting
3. Heading Tags
These are HTML tags which identify headings or subheadings in your content. There are different types of headings, from H1 to H6, which are enumerated in a sense of how “important” they are.
H1 is a main heading on your page, which has the prominent tag that shows what your page is all about. H2 to H6 are simply optional tags which organize content, which makes it readable and easier to navigate for your readers.
There is some debate on the importance of heading tags to SEO. While the H2 to H6 tags aren’t as important to search engines, the H1 tag is emphasized in various studies. Also, using H1s inappropriately may risk your chance of having a major ranking and traffic.
In the end, using heading tags can help add to your content’s architecture. It’s easier to read and understand compared to crawling through content with structural issues. Also, it’s easier for readers to take in your content. Both of these factors can raise your optimization.
To utilize your headings, follow these tips:
•Each page should have a unique H1 tag, which reflects what topics your page covers. Use your primary keyword on H1 tags
•Use your H2 to H6 tags whenever appropriate, using secondary keywords in each paragraph. Usually, you don’t need to go more than H3
•Avoid overusing tags and keywords, making it readable
4. Italic or Bold Tags
Italic and bold tags are used when highlighting crucial parts of your content, adding emphasis on specific words. Bots would appreciate these tweaks but they won’t care as much as they would with other tags. It helps with readability and user experience, though!
5. Meta Keywords Tags
Image Alt Attributes are added to image tags, which describes the contents. They are essential in on-page optimization because alt text is displayed to visitors if images can’t be loaded. Also, alt attributes give context to bots as search engines can’t “see” photos.
Wrapping It Up
When you want to get to most for your on-page SEO strategies, make sure that you take care of all the details which will add up to the big picture. Yes, some SEO tags are still vital, making up the taxonomy of the website. And while others aren’t as important, they can still keep you ahead of your competition that doesn’t bother with it.
I hope that these important tags to use in SEO gave you an idea on what to change for your website. So don’t wait any longer and begin understanding your website better for search engines to discover today.
If you have any questions or want to share your experiences on search engine optimization, then comment below. I would love to hear what you have to think.
Every website owner knows for a fact that in order to grow a business in this crowded online world, one needs to pick the best of everything be it a domain name, a website building platform or a hosting. These three are the basic foundation that will help boost your business and earn you greater revenue. Thus, one needs to put in time and effort and pick the best resources for their website.
However, it gets tricky for most new businesses to pick a good web hosting for their website. The reason for this is the wide range of web hosting options that are available today. This makes it a challenge to find the right web host based on your business needs and requirements, which, in turn, can lead to a host of problems later on when running SEO, Social media and PPC campaigns.
Choosing the best web hosting is of utmost importance if you want to run a fully functional and high-performing website. Thus, in order to help you make a right decision, here is a comprehensive infographic that has listed the 21 common signs of a terrible hosting service provider.
As mentioned above, a wrong web host could lead to a number issues, the top being lower traffic and ranking. It could also hurt your brand’s image, making your business look unprofessional. Worse yet, it could compromise your website’s security which could lead to the loss of valuable data and information.
One can’t be a tightwad when it comes to picking the best web hosting for their business as this could cost your much more than just a financial loss. Thus, check out the below infographic to make an informed choice and to know more read this complete hosting warning signs article for in-depth information.
21 Warnings That Indicate It’s Time to (Switch) Your Web Hosting Right Away[Infographic] by the team at Hostgatorcouponcode.in
With paid and social media marketing increasing the cost and effort needed to reach the right audiences, search engine optimization (SEO) is becoming more of a focus to drive traffic. SEO comes with a variety of challenges, and in general, a lot of outside of an SEO manager’s control.
One of the areas of SEO that continues to come up as difficult to master is link building. Gone are the days when you could buy links–Google caught on quickly to that one. Now you have to earn links through unique strategies. We’ll go over some of our top tips and tricks to include in your link building strategy to achieve success in this difficult digital space.
Tip #1: Focus on Quality
This tip is important in two areas. First, make sure you’re creating quality content on your blog that will make publishers want to link to you. Asking for links will be much easier if you have something that people actually want to link to and share.
Create engaging content by making use of content marketing tools like Outgrow and GoAnimate. Second, make sure you’re reaching out to high-quality websites that will pass along a stronger signal. The value of a link from one site with a high DA is much greater than the value of multiple links from sites with low DA.
Tip #2: Set the Right Goals
Of course your main goal is to get more links to your site, but with this as a goal, you may get stuck in a trap of never really being able to achieve your goal. Think about the overall business impact that your links will have, and set a goal based on that. One common goal is to move up from below the fold for a specific SERP.
While other SEO strategies (and competitors’ actions) can impact this as well, it’s a good way to determine if your backlinking strategy has helped you achieve something that will increase your bottom line. Use an SEO tool to track both backlinks and rankings. SEMRush and Ahrefs are two of the industry leaders, but there are others that can do one or the other as well.
Tip #3: Focus on Personal Outreach
You can use outreach tools like Buzzsumo to reach out to influencers, bloggers, and publishers. Outreach tools make it easy for multiple team members to keep track of where the conversation is at.
No matter how you tackle your outreach though, you should always make sure you’re keeping things personal. It takes a lot more time and effort, but especially when you’re going after high-quality links on high authority websites, it’s important to put 100% effort into the outreach. Take the time to find the right contact, consider using Twitter to build a relationship with contacts, and make sure to share only relevant content that publishers’ audiences will actually want to read.
There’s a lot that goes into a link building campaign, and these three tips and five tools mentioned will help you take the right first steps to find success in earning backlinks.
Written by Kelsey Reaves. Kelsey Reaves is a content-focused Marketing Manager at TrustRadius, a trusted site for B2B software reviews. When she’s not sharing her knowledge on the latest trends in software and B2B news, she nurtures her passion for travel by exploring new cities and binge watching Anthony Bourdain.