SEO Archives - Page 9 of 31

Can you imagine life without Google? The brand has become such an important part of our everyday internet use as the number one search engine. More recently, its increasing array of products have made themselves comfortable on our computers; GoogleDrive, GoogleMaps, etc. And like a true friend, it doesn’t mind if we fire the odd joke in its direction.

Hope that gave you a few laughs.

Which of these Google jokes tickled you the most?

Contributed By :

James Reynolds is the founder of Veravo. which consists of two search engine marketing agencies; SEO Sherpa and Click Jam. He is also the host of the Traffic Jam Podcast. James is fanatical about all things search, social and content on the web. He is a contributor to several leading publications and mentors start up companies in his free time.

Google has always been focusing on the fact that only the User is important to them . As the users are shifting to mobile devices in large numbers Google also has started giving highlighting in the search results if a website is mobile friendly.This currently is information for the user who is searching on mobile devices. But this mention is surely effect the click thru rate of websites listed in search results on mobile devices. It is simple logic that why would a user click on a site which is not mobile friendly when he is searching using a mobile device.

This change will be rolling out globally over the next few weeks. According to Google a site is mobile friendly when it :

Author : Bharati Ahuja

With the increase of eCommerce sites and a phenomenal increase in the usage of the hand held devices like smart phones and tablets the mindset of the people in accepting email updates is becoming more positive.

I think the curated content in the inbox regarding any topic, product or service is being welcomed by the users. Especially from companies who have a good overall web presence. When the user receives an email from a brand which he has come across on search engines and social media platforms , he is more likely to read the email content rather than mark it as spam.

But there are some dos and donts when you start with the Email Campaigns. I would rather call it Email Info Campaigns rather that Email Marketing Campaigns. If you are continuously emailing sales messages then the chances of that email being marked as spam is very high. But, if you create the content of the email with a purpose of informing the reader and educating the reader regarding a topic then it more accepted.

Some Basic Dos and Donts.

1. Don’t buy email lists. Create them by adding genuine email ids collected by you over a period of time (Ids of customers, enquiries, etc)

2. Focus on informative content.

3. Recycle informative blog content as email content.

4. Make it easy to unsubscribe.

5. Ask for permission before adding the email id to the subscription list.

6. Don’t send only sales oriented emails.

7. Have a link to the web version of the newsletter in the email.

8. Add the company logo and the contact details in the newsletter.

9. Keep mobile devices in mind. one out of every three clicks occurs on a mobile device today.

10. The right colour combo and font size is very important.

Email is one-to-one communication and is more welcomed by people especially from brands they already familiar with. Hence it is an effective tool for retention marketing. However to keep the ROI high one needs to follow some dos and donts. The main misconception is that email marketing is very cheap and sending emails in bulk is the solution but that is incorrect. Having a well planned email campaign and measuring the ROI requires a well planned strategy with a focus on content and the outreach. This requires a sizable amount of investment.

Author : Bharati Ahuja

Recently many companies though convinced about investing in the online presence are hesitant about sanctioning budgets for SEO, Social Media, Content Writing, Email Marketing and other online presence campaigns. The reason being, the top management need the facts, figures and futuristic growth assurances before sanctioning these budgets.

The earned and owned media help in establishing online reputation and also help in building a brand. Focusing on earned and owned media i.e SEO, Social Media, Content and Email Marketing a business can sow the seeds of web presence which in the long run can help in branching out to the world wide web and gain the targeted traffic to their website and increase the outreach on the social media platform.

In order to achieve this of course a well planned strategy and a holistic approach is needed. Every media has got a different purpose but eventually leads to a common goal i.e quality online presence.

Just as a balanced diet is needed to keep oneself healthy an integrated approach or a healthy marketing mix is essential for an overall web presence which leads to the online growth of the business.

We shall focus on :

· SEO

· Social Media

· Content

· Email Marketing

SEO

SEO is at the root of the earned and owned media campaigns. Only when the website will be indexed and crawled properly and will get correctly correlated to the relevant search queries the targeted traffic from the search engines will be accessed.

SEO Campaigns work on the On-Page factors, Off-Page Factors and the Technical factors of the website to see that all the pages of the website are getting crawled and indexed regularly.
SEO also monitors that the relevance of the search queries for which the website is getting correlated to.
Moreover, SEO also checks whether the traffic is coming from the targeted geo locations.
More pages becoming the landing pages for relevant and targeted search queries is also one of the goals of the SEO Campaigns.
Increase in non-branded search queries over a period of time is also a positive offshoot of an SEO Campaigns.

SEO ROI can be easily calculated by the data available from Google analytics and from the in-house sales team.

A simplest SEO ROI calculation would be attained by answering these following questions:

How many visits received from search engines?

Let us denote this as – a

How many enquiries received via the website form or calls received from visitors after visiting the site which they found via search engines?

Let us denote this as - b

The no of enquiries thus received got converted to sales?

Let us denote this as – c

The amount of profit from these invoices drawn?

Let us denote this as – d

The cost of SEO monthly / annually depends on what basis you are calculating ?

Let us denote this as – e

I suggest the ROI to be calculated half yearly or annually as this gives a clear idea.

Hence , (assuming you keep the period of the calculation the same for all the metrics)

SEO ROI = (d – e) / e * 100

Basically,

ROI = ( Annual Profit from the sales which were achieved via the Enquires from search engines – The annual cost of SEO for the website) divide upon (The annual cost of SEO for the website) multiplied by 100

There can be many permutations and combinations that can be worked out in order to get various performance data as per your requirement. For example if you want to measure the conversion ratio of your sales department keeping in mind the online enquiries received then it can be done as follows:

Conversion Ratio = c/ b * 100

This can become as a KPP (Key Performance Parameter) for your sales team which can be monitored on a periodic basis to have a direction and guidance for chalking out the sales plans for the next period with a targeted approach and also the reasons for the low or high ratio can be discussed and therby helping to find the strengths and weaknesses in the system .

Social Media:

Measuring the ROI for social-media marketing can be a lot more challenging since its results involve such intangibles as engagement, audience reach, and “buzz.”

Social Media may or may not be an engine for direct sales but it surely helps in reaching out to the existing and potential online customers by creating a communication platform where both the parties have a equal chance to voice their say.

Usually people focus on the no. Of likes, followers, +1s and other such quantifiable metrics to calculate the ROI from social media but it does not limit to these metrics only. Social media ROI is much more it is the online reputation and brand awareness that gets generated as a result of the engagement on social media platforms which is the real ROI from social media presence.

Social Media is the platform where the word of mouth goes viral. Hence it reflects not only the plus points of the products and business but also the drawbacks get a chance to get highlighted. The challenge lies in how the criticism is faced and handled to turn the tables in your favour. The social media is a place where you interact with your existing customers and the potential customers in one place which can be tricky but can help sales too as your satisfied customer can be your best evangelist.

Content

Content is at the core of any online marketing activity. As a result the term “Content Marketing” has surfaced as a new wave online. But, we need to understand that “Content Marketing” does not mean marketing the content , but using content to market the product or service which your business offers. Just adding blog posts written by any third party regularly does not achieve the purpose of content marketing.

Regular fresh content can trigger the conversation and engagement on social media as managing social media for business is not like personal social media . Content Marketing adds more footprints on the web for web presence but also becomes the crux of connecting to people on the web which in the long run help share the word of mouth which is the basis on which decisions are taken by online buyers. As in real life we are what are thoughts are and we share our thoughts via discussions, seminars, exhibitions, road shows , etc. on the internet we need to share our thoughts via blogs, social media sites, videos, comments, reviews, etc. And establish the thought leadership.

Email Marketing

In 2011, the Direct Marketing Association estimated that email marketing typically returns £40 for every £1 invested. A number of sources have suggested that this is better than any other platform.

Email is an easy and inexpensive way of establishing early and long-lasting relationships by sending newsletters, promotions, new service announcements or event invitations we can remain connected .

Via email the receivers receive curated content about your company and industry and are kept informed. The recent trend is that people want to be informed about the latest without searching for it and email is the best platform that any business can use for this purpose.

With email, everything can be tracked and you can see who clicked on certain links and much more

Email marketing is 20 times more cost-effective than traditional media it's six to 12 times less expensive to sell to an existing customer than to a new one.

The fact is that just one platform in particular and singularly is not going to reap the desired benefit and the ROI needed. Only when all the above mentioned media are implemented together a certain online reputation can be created.

When your potential customer sees your website ranking for the searches he made on the search engine and then also checks the social media for the buzz and finds the presence of your business and reads what his contacts had to say and also get an email from you in his inbox giving more information it surely going to register in his mind and will surely consider when he takes a decision related to the products and services you have to offer.

An accurate ROI of any one media may not be possible but the real ROI is generated when each of these activities supplement each other and make the web presence of the business stronger and boost the online reputation so that the people can trust you online. Gaining trust online should be the long term goal for any web presence activity. (Read more about the Trust Factor on What Influences The Trust Factor Online ?)Eventually , If Content Is King Then Context Is Queen And The Trust Factor Is The Royal Crown.

If you have been blogging for a while then I am sure , there must be a long list of blog posts which must be informative and timeless. These blog posts can be of great use and can be recycled for email marketing as newsletters.

The How, When, Where, Why Of Recycling Old Blog Content As Newsletters:

1. By using it as content for newsletters which will be emailed you do not have worry about the Duplicate Content issue.

2. When you send the content as newsletter and link it to the the past post for the web version of the content , the reader gets an idea of how timeless your content is and how long you have been having a firm view about the topic which proves your experience in the field.

3. If you don’t wish to reveal the date of the blog post then one can easily remove the date stamp from the blog post and make it timeless.

4. One can even create a series of newsletters where you can divide a long blog post in parts and email it as Part 1 , Part 2, etc. to make the reader more curious so that every newsletter is welcomed by the receiver.

5. One can convert old content into a video, PPT, Infographic, Slideshow, PDF, Podcast, etc and share it via newsletter as per the relevant audience and requirement.

6. Make a round up post of all important posts topic wise and share the links via newsletter along with a snippet of the post. This shares various ideas you have regarding a topic in one single email. This can be done quarterly, monthly or yearly as the case maybe.

7. When you reread old content and try to organize it you get ideas for new content (The Eureka Moments) which can be used for blog content or newsletters.

8. You can make old content more purposeful and relevant by adding latest case studies, statistics, anecdotes, narratives, tutorials .

9. Old content is a digital asset which reaps dividend if used wisely.

10. Responses from readers can be shared on social media for further discussions.

11. If you want to focus on the writers and introduce them as your team then this can be an ideal platform to do so.

12. Such newsletters can become a communication platform with existing clients with whom you want to share ideas and communicate but due to lack of time such conversations always get postponed.

Whenever you have a 'Writer’s Block' and cannot think of topics and ideas this can be a boon and in this era of content marketing old informative posts can prove the statement “Old Is Gold” to be true. All the old content is a gold mine and can be helpful in enriching your online presence in various ways.

Author : Bharati Ahuja

Trust is the topmost layer of the semantic web. It is like the cherry on the top of the cake which makes the cake look appealing. People do business with those that they like, know, and trust. If a consumer believes that a specific brand produces quality products or services then such a customer is most likey to become an online brand ambassador.

Trust is the end result of many factors in action. Trust is the emotional and logical aspect of the users decision to refer and recommend the site and content if he has been getting valuable information from the site.Trust cannot be purchased, it has to be earned over a period of time via continuous and consistent efforts and reliable actions.

Potential online customers critically evaluate a site before finalizing the call to action on the web page.Some of the factors the online customer may scrutinize and critically evaluate are:

A good updated and a functional website: A website which is regularly updated with the latest stock and offers is more trusted than the rest. A consistent logo displayed on an overall web presence on across all platforms builds brand value and also helps customers have a better recall value. Being genuine and avoiding any over the top announcements and claims also adds to the trust factor.

A blog that is regularly updated: A blog is a platform where you can share any news about the industry or about your company. Please do not make your blog a sales platform and avoid spreading sales messages. A blog is a place where you can establish the foundation for your online ‘Thought Leadership’. By offering information and by sharing your knowledge you show that you care and are willing to help your readers / customers / visitors. A person landing on any page of your blog via search engines or social media or via any media should get information about what he was searching for. This encourages repeat visits which lead to recommendations to others. A blog can also become a communication platform via comments.

Social media activity: Social media is the best platform where your satisfied readers and customers are going to share their experiences. This same platform offers you also the option for sharing the content of your website and blog. Social media is not about likes, followers and the no. of people in your circle but about what people are writing about your business/ blog or products and how it is being further shared. Social Media signals in the long run are the main source which help establish the online reputation of a business.

Reviews And Ratings: Reviews and Ratings where people have to login to express them have a better trust factor than the ones posted on the site by the website owners on the website. Though there is a lot of spam involved with this and this factor has to be taken with a pinch of salt it adds to the trust factor in a limited way.

Testimonials: Testimonials from authority people of your industry and from satisfied clients who have a good online reputation does add to the trust factor and influence the user positively.

Good Search Presence: Search engines are the place where all your potential buyers start from . If you have optimized your blog and website and are found by the searcher for more than 3-4 search queries made by him , it will surely sow the seed of trust in his mind and as he goes further and searches on social media and other platforms and again he finds the same presence it goes on adding up and develops an interest and curiosity to know more about your business and products.

Secure Payment Gateway: A secure site where the user can share his personal details and credit card details securely without any fear surely again gains more trust.

Quick response to the inquiry form filled by the user: An online buyer wants quick answers to his queries as he has multiple options available online. If you delay in providing the answers he is surely going to move on to the next option.

Brand search results: Ranking for relevant search queries surely gets you the targeted traffic but when these potential customers want to know more about your company, they expect you to rank for brand search queries too. If your website does not rank for brand search queries then it has a negative impact on the searcher. Hence, ranking for brand search queries is equally important.

Contact Page: A detailed contact page which explicitly has the address and contact numbers adds to the trust factor. If you do not share contact nos. and address and only have a form then it may be detrimental to the trust factor. Why should they share their contact information when you cannot share yours? Openness, genuineness and the willingness to offer answers will surely win the trust vote for your online presence. In this case being found on local search results of Google with all the details too helps in winning the trust of the online visitor.

About us page: Last but not the least, though people are buying the products online they always are curious to know the humans behind the front end and feel confident when the ‘About us’ page has the details of the team offering the facility online. After checking out the products people may also check out the management and other team members online especially when the amounts to be online are substantial.

Just like in real life it takes time before your friends or customers can trust you , online too it takes time to build trust and then retain it. It may range between 2 – 5 years to build the initial trust and then to retain it is a constant exercise and is a continuous effort in proving them that their trust in you is not a wrong decision made by them.

Author : Bharati Ahuja

Deciding how to sell online becomes more difficult than deciding what to sell online. There are multiple options available that tend to confuse a newbie in the online business. An online marketplace (or online e-commerce marketplace) is a type of e-commerce site where product and inventory information is provided by multiple third parties, whereas transactions are processed by the marketplace operator.

Examples of online marketplaces are eBay, Snapdeal, Flipkart, and Amazon

Lately I have observed that many people after working on their eCommerce sites soon lose patience and start focusing on online marketing places and neglect their own eCommerce websites.

No doubt online marketplace is a much easier way of setting up an online store, you don't need any technical assistance, you don't have to brainstorm about the design and you don't have to bother about sales transactions; basically everything is spoon fed. All you need to do is list your products, receive traffic without much effort and pay a commission or fee to your marketplace. A very tempting and convenient 'short cut' to selling online.

This according to me is taking the shortcut to online success which in the long run may not be beneficial, as instead of working on your website you rent out a space to showcase your goods to win the online race. I correlate this to the story of the “Hare And The Tortoise” where the hare plans to take a nap as it thought that the tortoise is too slow and will be able to manage to cross the finish line and win the race even at the last moment .

I think winning the online race is not only about how much profit you are making currently but also about establishing your brand and also about having an owned presence which in the long run proves to be a digital asset which has a potential of an increasing ROI.

Just focusing on the online marketing places is like constructing a building without a firm foundation.

But, yes to start off online and gain quality web and search presence to drive traffic to your website is a daunting task and requires regular investment of time and money, which many times make the website owners shift to already established online market places like Amazon and eBay. But we need to understand that these websites too had to go a long waiting period and a period of constant struggle and patience to reach where they are today.

When you opt for the already established online market or bidding sites you do gain an immediate presence and you may be in business from day one but on the other hand you lose out on establishing your own brand and website (Owned Presence) which you may need to fall back on if your presence on the other rented sites gets adversely affected. This can happen due to various reasons like, fluctuations in the market, the market site losing popularity, gets adversely affected by the Google algorithm updates and loses search presence, etc.

The best option I think is the optimum utilization of resources to establish a presence on both the platforms. Establishing your own eCommerce site and having a presence on the online market sites are equally important. Else it is like having a good presence at the real time exhibitions and conferences but not having your own shop or office. Online marketplaces, are a great way of understanding how e-commerce works. But if you want your business to flourish as per your rules, with a brand identity and with long term plans, then there is no other way than having your own website.

In general, because marketplaces aggregate products from a wide array of providers, selection is usually more wide, availability is higher, and prices are more competitive than in vendor-specific online retail stores. As many marketplaces cross-promote the items of other merchants along side of your items. In many cases, they even compare prices. Therefore, if your competitor is offering the same item at a lower price, they may end up making what was supposed to be your sale.

Author : Bharati Ahuja

There are many businesses which majorly cater to the local market and would like to focus on targeting the local traffic on the search engines. For such businesses even on organic search the search queries with a local intent are the priority for their search presence.

Google also takes local search very seriously and since a long time has been improving the quality of local search results in terms of display, listing management and also trying to measure the public opinion in terms of reviews for these listings.

The recent development being discussed is the Pigeon Algorithm (A name given by Search Engine Land after Google discussed about an upcoming algorithm for local search with Danny Sullivan)

The update has been pushed out to U.S. English based search results and the update impacts both the organic local listings within Google Map Search and Google Web Search.

SEL shared that Google has also informed Danny Sullivan that the new local search algorithm ties deeper into their web search capabilities, including the hundreds of ranking signals they use in web search along with search features such as Knowledge Graph, spelling correction, synonyms and more. Furthermore, Google has not commented on the percent of queries impacted by this algorithm update, nor if certain web spam algorithms were deployed in this update.

Many websites serve users from around the world with content translated or targeted to users in a certain region. Google uses the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" attributes to serve the correct language or regional URL in Search results.

This annotation enables Google and other search engines to serve the correct language or regional version of pages to searchers, which can lead to increased user satisfaction.

The Language Targeting section in the International Targeting in Google Webmaster Tools feature enables you to identify two of the most common issues with hreflang annotations:

Missing return links: annotations must be confirmed from the pages they are pointing to. If page A links to page B, page B must link back to page A, otherwise the annotations may not be interpreted correctly.

Incorrect hreflang values: The value of the hreflang attribute must either be a language code in ISO 639-1 format such as "es", or a combination of language and country code such as "es-AR", where the country code is in ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format.

Google has also moved the geographic targeting setting to this part of Webmaster Tools, so that all information relevant to international and multilingual targeting can be found in the same place.

Google Webmaster Tools - Geographic Targeting

The robots.txt file is the file which directly affects the crawling and indexing of the URLs on the site. It is the first file the bots like to read while crawling any site.Google WMT had a Block URLs section which showed the robots.txt file but now If Google isn't crawling a page , the robots.txt tester (Known as Blocked URLs earlier) , located under the Crawl section of Google Webmaster Tools, will let you test whether there's an issue in your file that's blocking Google.

According to an update on http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2014/07/testing-robotstxt-files-made-easier.html :

In the robots.txt testing tool in Webmaster Tools you'll see

The current robots.txt tester, and can test new URLs to see whether they're being crawled or disallowed.
Guide your way through complicated directives, it will highlight the specific one that led to the final decision.
You can make changes in the file and test those too.
Be able to review older versions of your robots.txt file, and see when access issues block crawling. For example, if Googlebot sees a 500 server error for the robots.txt file, we'll generally pause further crawling of the website.
Since there may be some errors or warnings shown for your existing sites, we recommend double-checking their robots.txt files.
You can also combine it with other parts of Webmaster Tools: for example, you might use the updated Fetch as Google tool in WMT to render and submit important pages on your website.
If any blocked URLs are reported, you can use this robots.txt tester to find the directive that's blocking them, and, of course, then improve that.
A common problem we've seen comes from old robots.txt files that block CSS, JavaScript, or mobile content — fixing that is often trivial once you've seen it.