Ideas To Take Full Advantage Of Your Online Promotion

Whether you’re just starting out in business or already have a website and social pages, below are some tips to help you get the best from your digital marketing. Note, in pretty much all cases outsourcing these agency services to a professional SEO firm will see substantially better results in a fraction of the time it might take to do these tasks yourself.

#1 Make sure your website is the best it can be: It should go without saying, but rule 101 in terms of building a strong online presence is making sure you have a professional, easy-to-use website that conveys your message in the best way possible. In truth, if you have a substandard site (particularly compared to your competitors), you’ll run the risk of alienating clients or, in the worst-case scenario, driving them away completely.

#2 Work at your SEO: As mentioned above, around 70% of all consumer transactions start with a search – both B2B and B2C transactions. Good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is essential if you’re to successfully capitalize on the multiple opportunities offered by search engines to build traffic and generate new business. Bottom line – you could have the best, most attractive website but, if your site isn’t seen, it won’t be providing you with an adequate Return on Investment (ROI).

#3 Don’t discount the value of social media: Modern consumers have come to expect firms to have a presence on the major social platforms. As a rule, you should have pages on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram – and perhaps YouTube if you have enough video content. Also, don’t overlook the value of smaller social platforms that might work for your particular niche. For example, if your firm supplies female-oriented goods, you could reap substantial benefits by publishing on Pinterest (the platform has around 77% bias of female users). The channel is also particularly well-suited to visually appealing content and now even features an advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) image search function, which might expose your content to new audiences.

#4 Make sure your site is responsive to scale adequately to different devices: In recent years, the web has gone increasingly mobile and recent stats show that at least 50% of all web traffic is made on mobile devices (some sources claim that figure could be as high as 70%). To tap into this shift away from traditional desktop/laptop access, you need to ensure your site works across all devices, regardless of screen size. As a web user yourself, you’re likely more than aware of how frustrating it can be to visit a site that doesn’t scale properly to your cell phone.

The post Tips To Improve Your Firm’s Online Profile appeared first on Proven SEO Blog.

SEO is a complicated process. You spend endless hours researching your keywords, indexing your web pages, and creating meaningful content. You only breathe a sigh of relief when your efforts yield results and your website starts appearing prominently in SERPs. However, reaching the top and staying on top of SERPs are two entirely different things.

What happens when you notice a sudden drop in your search engine rankings? You can either allow panic to take over or you can take a deep breath and figure out why it happened. If you notice a dramatic fall in search engine traffic, here’s what you can do to investigate the cause.

1) Check Your Website

The first thing you should do is check for technical glitches on your website. Try to visit your website from a few different devices, including smartphones and tablets. If you are getting HTTP 503 (Service Unavailable) or 404 (Not Found) errors, it’s time to reach out to your website developer. Fixing the errors will most likely improve your search engine rankings.

Get Your Indexing Right
Technical problems with your website can cause your rankings to drop only when they have persisted for a long time. If this is not the case, then it is likely that there is a problem with the indexing of your website. One way to check this is to use the Google Search Console^[1] tool.

Under the Google Index section, check for Index Status. The graph will display the number of pages of your website that are indexed at present versus previous months. A sudden drop indicates that Google has stopped indexing certain pages of your website.

Get your indexing right with the help of google search console tool. Image via seroundtable.com

This could be due to an error in the robot.txt files of those particular pages. In this case, getting the files fixed should resolve the problem.

Another reason could be that you have removed many web pages at once without creating any 301 redirects. If you did the removal on purpose, then it’s time for you to create those URL redirects.

2) Manual Penalty

Once you have ruled out technical errors and indexing issues, it is time to determine if your website was penalized. Human reviewers at Google can impose a manual penalty if certain pages of your website violate Google’s guidelines^[2]. Once again, you can use the Google Search Console to identify any such manual penalties.

Protect & recover your site from manual penalties. Image via link-assistant.com

If you notice such a warning in the Manual Actions section, start investigating what could have triggered the penalty.

User-Generated Spam
Examine all pages on your site that allow user-generated content (guest posts, blog posts, comments, etc.). Look for content such as advertisements and irrelevant links. Once you have removed them, make sure you block any spammers from your website. Take a look at Google’s guidelines on how to prevent user-generated spam^[3].

Thin or Duplicate Content
One of the primary rules of SEO is to always upload unique and meaningful content. Whenever you violate this guideline, your website could be penalized and your search engine rankings will go down. If this is the case, then you need to identify all pages on your website that contain duplicate content. You can use tools such as Copyscape^[4] for this purpose.

You should also watch out for web pages with affiliate links or auto-generated content. Once you have identified these pages, remove all duplicate and thin content from your website. Replace it with fresh and unique content.

Cloaking Redirects
A cloaking redirect means the content of your website appears differently to search engines and human users. You can use the Fetch as Google^[5] tool to compare the content seen by Google and a visitor on your site. Check for any discrepancies and fix them to ensure that both human users and search engines read the same content.

Harmful Inbound Links
Another major cause of a manual penalty is when your website is flooded with toxic backlinks. This can happen due to multiple reasons. You may have hired an inexperienced person or agency that created these unhealthy inbound links. It is also possible that you have been a victim of a negative SEO attack by a competitor.

It is difficult to pinpoint the exact cause of a poor inbound link profile. You need to find a way to tell the search engines that these links are not to be associated with your website. For instance, you can check the link profile of your website using Google Search Console. Identify the problematic backlinks and disavow them using Google’s Disavow Links tool^[6].

3) A Competitor on the Rise

Every time a website achieves a higher search engine rank, it’s bound to push some of its competitors’ websites down. This might be the case with your website. It is always advisable to keep a close eye competitors’ progress in terms of SEO. Anytime you notice a drop in your search engine traffic, check if you have been outranked by a competitor.

If this is the case, you can run a thorough on-page and off-page audit on your competitor’s website. This will help you identify the key areas in which you lost ground. The only way to correct this is to improve your SEO strategies^[7] and outrank your competitor in the future.

4) Algorithm Updates

Whenever a search engine releases a new or majorly updated ranking algorithm, it can take a toll on your ranking. The good thing is you are probably not the only one affected by the change. Connect with the SEO community^[8] on the Internet to learn about any recent changes. Dig deep and find out everything you need to do in order to compensate for the updated algorithm.

You should also watch out for the periodic refreshes of existing search engine algorithms. For instance, Google’s Penguin algorithm^[9] went live in 2016. Therefore, you need to be extra careful while building inbound links. Harmful backlinks will have an immediate impact on your rankings.

5) Website Redesign or Migration

If your rankings have dropped after a major website update, it is likely that something went wrong during the process. A website update could mean a complete redesign, a platform shift, or a migration to HTTPS.

Log in to your Google Search Console and check for Crawl Errors under the Crawl section. If there is a significant spike in the error graphs after your website redesign, it calls for your attention.

Use google search console to fix crawl errors. Image via link-assistant.com

Read Next: Rank Tracking – What Is It & How To Track Search Engine Rankings

Conclusion

A fall in search engine rankings is every website owner’s worst nightmare. However, if you are ever a victim of this kind of SEO apocalypse, don’t be disheartened. Take a look at the data and statistics to identify the root cause of the drop. Then take the necessary corrective measures to improve your search engine traffic.

As a rule, run regular audits (both on-page and off-page) to identify any issues that might be plaguing your website.

Do you have any other strategies for overcoming a sudden drop in search results? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

The post How To Analyze the Results of a Dramatic Drop in Search Results appeared first on Proven SEO Blog.

Now, you might be wondering why link building is so important over here. Well, some points might answer your question.

• Google loves to weighs link back to online site from the quality sites in niche. The more you end up with inbound links Google will start recognizing your site as the most trustworthy one. Your site will then be put closer to top of the current keyword searches.
• The easiest and quick way to get these quality sites to link back to online source is by adding some free, valuable and informative content. These contents should be able to offer tips, advice, ideas and suggestions within niche that others fail to produce. You can increase SEO with some help from link backs. It will also provide valuable information to be shared across web for earning trust with some new customers, before they purchase anything from your side.
• As you get to build that trust in content, you will start to create network of some influencers, ready to trust your work. They are all set to work with you and understand your current needs and goals. These folks will then link back to you more readily and will recommend your items over others. This step helps in contributing bottom line revenue through some of the word of mouth based marketing.

Ways to Generate Inbound Links to E-Commerce Source

First of all, let’s be clear on one thing. Not all available options are suitable for all the e-commerce sources. Some are designed to work better than other options.

But for the best link building, you have to create network and talk to some people. You have to work with them for building value and show expertise and share the same with world.

Get Hands on Specified Links from Suppliers

In case you are managing any e-commerce website, there are high chances that you have multiple items in shore and from different brands. You might have already witness good business relationships with the current producers.

There are some people associated with third party distributors. If you do have some content, ask them to link back to your site. These companies have dedicated pages for suppliers. So, it won’t be that difficult to include your site name in the list.

Catch Up with Complementary Services or Products

You have to think about products you are currently selling and get to think about the ways in which other companies are selling their version of complementary items for enhancing yours.

Try reaching out to those manufacturers and ask them to collaborate. You can try exchanging links with producers or shops, known to sell complementary items or publish articles and blog posts.

Focus to Get Inbound Links through Some Content Marketing

There are multiple e-commerce websites, relying completely on the items they sell. However, if you are planning to attract some more customers, try giving them something back.

One such perfect marketing tool is content marketing. It is not just cheap but in some cases, it is free and quite effective.

You have to tart create blog on same domain name as online shop and then start publishing some valuable write-ups and articles for readers. It means your brand is offering quality and free advices on your niche through the articles.

Creating Perfect Infographics and Publish the Same Online

Infographics are designed to be effective only if you succeed to be adding something valuable to share. Moreover, you need skills and some visual artistic help to make the services look rather attractive to jump right into!

There are multiple online resources where you get head towards designers to build infographic, quite specified to the said brands.

Visual content is always a perfect way to attract visitors and procure some inbound links. With YouTube, Pinterest and Instagram growing at fast pace, people are migrating more towards text based websites to some of the visual content websites.

Trying to Use Power of Instagram and Facebook

Social media, especially Facebook often proves to be major source of inbound links. It is only possible if you engage constantly in open dialogue with customers.

You need to offer something like valuable and free content or any information about great product.

You can try to add pictures of dogs or cats and even an occasional quote from any historical figure. But for attracting more customers, you need to think from their perspectives and not like any other vendor.

Research for your Competitors

Try taking some time to find about the competitors and other local firms, which are active in complementary firms and start researching about inbound links.

For that, you need to first create excel document and writing down about website links and export the same document as .csv file. Later, you can check those people who are linking back the sites through some online tools.

Procure Some Profile Links

There are multiple websites and some communities, which are currently available online. Here, you can easily sign up and get to create some profile pages, which will link back to e-commerce store of your creation.

Some of those sources will be of practically no use, by providing you with no-follow links. You need to find those communities and groups relating to your firm.

If you can get hands on powerful community, you can procure valuable inbound links^[1] from those areas. If you ever get any niche group, you can easily start by creating profile on such directories with same profiles.

Read Next: 5 Powerful SEO Hacks That Will Rank You Higher In Search Engines

Following these points can easily help you generate some inbound links, which in turn, can help in the proficient growth of e-commerce stores, for the washington city crowd. Just ensure to check each step twice before following to address rewarding results in the end.

The post 7 Tactics to Generate Inbound Links for E-Commerce Stores appeared first on Proven SEO Blog.

At this point, many of us – content marketers have already made plans for the coming year as to how to implement and carry out our content marketing campaigns.

About this time last year many predictions were made as to the trends that will shape 2017. We’ve seen many of those trends come to reality with amazing results.

Some of the trends that were predicted for 2017 are still trending and will continue way into 2018 and beyond.

However, as a content marketer, some questions you need to take to heart are:

• Have you filled out your content marketing calendar for 2018?
• Have you planned out your content task for the coming year?

Before you put together your content marketing plan and fill out your calendar for 2018, please take into consideration the trends that will dominate content marketing in 2018.

What Are The Trends That Will Shape Content Marketing In 2018?

Here are 5 trends that will dominate the 2018 and beyond.

1.Utilize User Generated Content (UGC)

User generated content is a great way to get to the hearts of your readers, because they’re the ones creating the contents.

All you do in the process is to refine or modify the contents according to their needs and present it to them on your blog in a more interesting and informative format.

What Is User Generated Content?

Simply put, user generated content is any type of content produced or contributed by consumers to your site or social media channels.

An article by Christie Barakat^[1] shows that millennial are spending 5 hours each day engaged with UGC, because they trust it 50? more than other contents, and find it to be 35? more memorable.

Furthermore, Adweek^[2] also revealed that 85? of consumers say they trust UGC than others. As you may already know, trust & credibility are most important to your marketing success.

If your audience and customers trust you, they will keep coming back for more of your content, product or services.

How Can You Get User Generated Content?

There are many ways to get UGC. You can do this by:

• Auditing your fan contents
• Searching relevant hashtags
• Identifying consumer trends in your niche
• Host events
• Leverage industry influencers, etc,.

2.Do You Have a Content Calendar?

We understand that content marketing is the primary marketing campaign for 90 percent of B2B marketers. And 52 percent of marketers who are not using content marketing in their efforts to grow their business, say they will employ content marketing to their marketing campaigns in the next few months.

It means that, before 2017 runs out, content marketing will be the main marketing strategy for more than 95% of B2B marketers.

Content Marketing Institute^[4] recent report shows that from 2016 ~ 2017, B2B marketers who saw remarkable increase in the success of their content marketing campaigns attributed 85? of their success to content creation, 72? to content strategy.

So, in-order to stand out from your competitors, you need to create a content calendar that provides you with sets of requirements for your marketing campaigns.

Ensure that your content calendar has a clear success measurement strategy that can be updated accordingly as the need may be.

A powerful content calendar will save you great amount of time and energy, keep you and your team organized, and also retain your reader’s engagement.

3.Video Marketing Will Continue To Rise

Why You Should Use Videos In Your Content Marketing Campaigns?

Video content marketing has risen over time to become the #1 go-to in terms of visual content.

Here’s what the brain behind Facebook said about videos.

“I think video is a megatrend, almost as big as mobile.” – Mark Zuckerberg

Studies reveals that 59? of business executives^[4] said they would prefer to watch videos than to read text content. It also found that by 2020 and beyond, videos will account for 80? of all internet traffic.

As you can see, video has the power to boost your marketing campaigns and increase duration, because it transforms users into promoters – in that 92? of mobile video users reshare videos with fans and friends on all social channels, thereby creating over 1,200? more shares on social than text and image content combined.

Facebook Live, Instagram video, and Twitter’s video are among the newest options to try to keep up with the rise of video marketing.

4.Micro-Influencer Marketing Will Gain Momentum

What is Micro-influencer? A Micro-influencer is a social media user who has direct personal connection with his/her followers, understand their needs, and has the power to move them to action.

When we hear of influencer marketing^[5], our first thought is usually “the use of celebrities to market our products and services” – either by way of endorsements or other marketing channels.

For example, Michael Heller, CEO of Talent Resources – told US Weekly that companies pay Kim Kardashian up to $500,000 for a post on Instagram^[6], while sisters Khloé and Kourtney get paid $250,000 per Instagram post.

Not many brands can afford that much. For this reason Micro-influencer marketing has gained momentum, because anybody as John Hall points out can be an influencer.
“Sometimes, all it takes is one person sharing a piece of content for the right publication, group, or individual audience member to amplify it significantly…” – John Hall

This is a digital edge where many locals are becoming influencers in their own rights. An influencer is no longer one who has millions of followers, but a person who has the power to move people to action.

5.Mobile Marketing Will Not Slow Down

Mobile marketing is a goldmine, so big that Mark Zuckerberg mentioned earlier, said that video is almost as big as mobile.

In fact, research found that 96?^[7] of consumers make inquiries and research about products and services through smartphones.

According to a research by StatCounter^[8], global mobile internet users surpassed traditional computer users by over 51?

As a result, StatCounter CEO said:
“This should be a wake up call especially for small businesses, sole traders and professionals to make sure that their websites are mobile friendly. – Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter.

The graphs shows that mobile will not be slowing down anytime soon, but will continue to rise even beyond 2020.

What Does This Mean For Marketers?

In simple terms, you need to optimize your website and web content to be mobile friendly.

Conclusion

Here we have the 5 trends to watch in 2018. There are many other trends that will shape digital marketing in the coming year.

However, these 6 trends are a must to consider as you plan to create your content marketing calendar for 2018, because they’ll help you grow your business rapidly.

The post 5 Powerful Digital Marketing Trends That Will Dominate in 2018 appeared first on Proven SEO Blog.

While it may seem like your business will gain the most benefits from utilizing a large variety of marketing channels at one time, you should realize that if to pull it off and to make this type of strategy successful, you need a multi-million dollar company that is able to spend thousands (and sometimes up to millions) of dollars every single month on a floor filled with marketing staff or an expensive digital agency that can perform these tasks for you. You might be wondering why you cannot do it yourself and the answer is quite simple – it simply takes up too much time. Utilizing just one single marketing channel already takes time and quite a lot of effort, so imagine having to attend to fifty marketing channels every single day. In the end, this could cost you more money than it brings in.

Which Marketing Channels Is Right for Your Business?

To make things much easier, you should first realize that targeting less marketing channels, especially when you are running your website or business alone, or if you have a small business without an adequate amount of staff that can attend to multiple channels at the same time, can be more beneficial for your business. Apart from this factor, you should also note that every marketing channel doesn’t really work for every type of business. Furthermore, it is also important to do proper research and to determine which marketing channels are worthless today and which ones are thriving. By combining these factors, you will be able to come up with a focused marketing plant that will help you engage with customers online and attract them to your business.

Quick Sprout recommends starting out with search engine optimization as the base of any business’s marketing plan. Search engine optimization refers to how well your website is optimized to outperform competitors for certain keywords in search engines, such as Google. This technique requires optimization to be done on your website, as well as back-links to be built from external websites. It is often considered to be the most valuable marketing channel as ranking for multiple high volume keywords can provide you with a lot of targeted visitors every single day.

Proven SEO, a company that specializes in influencer marketing and sponsored content, recommends utilizing some of the top social media networks as part of a marketing plan – including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat. Once again, not every social network will work for every type of business; thus, it is important to consider the target audience for each network and to determine which would be best suited for your specific business.

A Plan of Action

Kiss Metrics recommend setting some social networking goals for your business first, then to set up metrics that will help you monitor the efficiency of each goal. Finally, monitoring and measuring the performance of each goal will help you identify the marketing channels with the most potential – and those you need to drop. You also need to match certain types of content with certain networks, for example:

• YouTube is a video sharing platform, so you should share videos on this marketing channel. You can also utilize their video advertising program to display your video advertisement on the videos uploaded by other users.
• SoundCloud is an audio sharing platform. If you’re not going to set up podcasts, then this marketing channel will not do much for your business, so don’t try to include it in your marketing plan.
• LinkedIn is a network for professionals and not a channel that you should utilize if you’re trying to sell something to consumers, such as a diet pill or a piece of clothes. Rather turn towards Facebook and their advertising platform if you are not targeting professionals.
• SnapChat and Instagram are both image sharing platforms. The first one allows you to send images, animations and videos to contacts, and the other one allows you to post images to a profile page. If you do not run a hair studio, clothing boutique or another type of business that often takes pictures and posts them online, then you shouldn’t worry about these platforms, but rather focus on the ones your target audience is hanging out on.

Final Words

It’s 2017 and we all need to catch up to the fact that online marketing is a must for every business now – even those businesses that have been going for multiple decades have seen an increase in consumer engagement and sales after they started to make use of online marketing channels. While it may seem like a difficult task at first, setting clear goals and sticking with a smaller number of channels that suits your business best can make the task easier and even lead to more success.

The post Why Prioritizing Certain Marketing Channels Over Others Is Beneficial? appeared first on Proven SEO Blog.