Many things need to be considered when integrating your E-commerce and SEO strategy so that they work as cohesively. The way to integrate SEO features into your E-commerce site is by having an SEO consultant as part of the core team of web designers, developers, and information architects. As an example, your Developers need to be aware of duplicate content issues and how to resolve them. Products on the E-commerce store should be organized by category and sub-category. This improve the E-commerce website’s optimization. Conduct keyword research of both your website and competitor websites. Remember that “long tail keywords” is where most of the action lies in terms of search. Make sure your website has breadcrumb navigation. Having descriptive meta tags that include prompts such as ‘find out more about’ is an essential technique. It’s a must to write Img Alt Tags. This helps non-visual readers such as vision-impaired consumers. There are so many things to keep track of it can be quite intimidating hence the reason for having an SEO consultant can surely easy these headaches.
While SEO and automation used together can have negative connotations, for E-commerce websites with thousands of products, it is important to facilitate automation whereby programmers can automate on-site elements such as title tags. User generated content should be leveraged to help improve the site’s ranking. Since user generated content tends to be original and fresh, this improves the site from an SEO perspective. Allow buyers to write product reviews and testimonials. This creates a community of happy users and convinces visitors that they can trust you. Help visitors spread the word about all the products on your site by integrating social media on product pages. Also, this will help you avoid using manufacturer product descriptions which can lead to duplicate content which is a no-no from an SEO perspective.
You can maintain a blog where you talk about new products and offers and have an FAQ page that helps answer the most frequent queries of your users.
Optimized product pictures and videos should be used on the site as the quality of your product pictures can influence how visitors feel about your product. Make sure customers feel comfortable sharing their financial information on your site. Prominently display the logos and text certifying that you comply with security standards (SSL/Visa). It’s better to offer peace of mind to visitors rather than take the security aspects of the website for granted.
Mobile and smartphone usage is growing like crazy. This trend will only persist. For E-commerce retailers, the website should be optimized for mobiles via using responsive web design or having dedicated mobile sites.
If you have local presence apart from being an online retailer, then your business’ name, address, and phone number (NAP) for all locations should be present on your website. All the branches should be listed on Google Local Business via a Google+ page. You should allow reviews and rating on each branch of your business. This will be displayed by Google when someone searches for a local branch of your business.
These are some of the basic E-commerce techniques that should be taken care of at a minimum to ensure survival and growth for your business in the online commerce space. If you need any help or assistance with your SEO strategy, please feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital Group.
One of the biggest challenges for a business is to engage with more people and convert those people that are engaged into customers. Entrepreneurs spend a good amount of money on creating websites that have brilliant design and a great user-experience. However, none of that matters if you are not getting any traffic to your website. This is where SEO (Search Engine Optimization) comes into play and allows a site owner to gain visibility online. SEO services usually fall into two categories; white hat SEO and black hat SEO. White hat SEO also known as organic Search Engine Optimization does not violate the terms of service of the search engines while black hat SEO completely ignores it. Any company that you engaged with for SEO services should be thoroughly vetted and you should be absolutely sure that they are only engaging in white-hat SEO services. Below, we will take a look at how white-hat SEO services can help you take your business to the next level.
✓Achieve Your Business Goals Every business online or offline has certain goals that they want to meet and exceed. If you implement the correct SEO methodologies and techniques on your website, you will be able to reach your goals quickly and efficiently. With the help a professional SEO company that can provide you great SEO services, you can see the rankings on your website increase in the search engines which will generate traffic to your website. When you generate traffic to your website, this will generate you customers and help you to achieve your business goals
✓Increased Visibility When a prospective customer is searching for a specific product or service, are you getting found online in the search engines for these services or products that you are offering? If the answer is no, then you need to be working with an SEO company that can help you increase your rankings in the organic search results ensuring that you are getting found for all the relevant keywords you want to be ranking for. The SEO company you work with will provide you SEO services which will help you get found and help you gain more visibility online across the multiple search engines.
✓Cost Efficient They are many marketing channels that you can opt for which will increase your sales and add to your bottom-line. However, SEO is one of the most cost-efficient methods that is available in the market today. Granted, it does take time and effort to rank high in the organic search results but once you are ranking within the search engine for your relevant keywords, the traffic is absolutely free. Compare that to Paid Search (PPC) where you are paying each time a visitor comes to your site, this can become an expensive affair! SEO services is one of the most cost-effective ways of generating traffic and sales to your website. The SEO company you work with will be able to provide you guidance and help you to execute the necessary strategies so that you are ranking high within the search engines for all your relevant products or services.
Summary Working with a company that can provide you SEO services can be a very profitable and fruitful venture for your business as long as you can find the right partner to help you. The SEO company that you choose to work should undergo a due diligence check, reference check, credit check and so on to ensure that they can deliver what they claim to. SEO is something that needs to be taken seriously no matter what size business you have and is something that can help your business flourish. If you are looking for a reputable, experienced and trusted SEO service provider, please feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital Group for any of your digital marketing needs.
You should know your audience to get the maximum mileage out of your content marketing budget — if your audience is CEOs and other senior management type executives vs. whether you are targeting teens. This will determine the tools and platforms you need to use for your content marketing efforts.
The must-use social media these days is Facebook to get your message to the largest audience possible. Facebook is the number one digital marketing platform if you are a Business to Consumer (B2C) company while LinkedIn gets primacy if you are a Business to Business (B2B) company.
Getting the attention of Facebook users can be a tricky affair. After you create a company Facebook page and upload a Profile picture, a large header image and otherwise give the Facebook page a professional look, the next challenge is to attract followers to the page or getting Facebook users to ‘Like’ your FB page.
This will probably require you to ‘promote’ your page on Facebook and FB will do that for you and charge you accordingly. After you get people to Like your Facebook page, you can start posting content to the page. The content may be articles, FAQs, viral videos or whatever may be of interest to your customers depending on your business vertical.
Facebook’s ever-changing Newsfeed algorithm ensures that it’s not enough for you to get thousands of people to Like your Facebook page. Those who have liked your business’s FB page may — or, more likely, may not — see your Facebook posts.
Only if those FB who have liked your FB page have also chosen the option and asked FB to always show your posts on top of their Newsfeed when they log into Facebook, then FB will show your posts to them for sure. Otherwise, more Facebook paid marketing is required.
Facebook says it gives priority to friends and family meaning posts shared by one’s FB friends appear on others’ Newsfeed. After that, the next priorities are for the Newsfeed to inform and entertain.
Content Marketing Using Facebook:
You should of course upload your blog posts to Facebook and do that on a regular basis for maximum impact. Facebook’s trending topics give insights into what people are talking about at a given moment and you could post relevant links to a trending topic. You could share interesting YouTube videos as well as images to your FB feed as people respond more to images and videos.
Facebook’s search box lets you find people and other business pages who may be competitors or just noteworthy or notable or good quality pages in general that you could learn from. And you can promote specific Facebook posts as well.
If you want to target a wide range of tech-savvy professionals in their 20s and 30s, having a popular Twitter feed can be a powerful weapon to reach them.
Content Marketing Using Twitter:
You can settle upon your plans and outcome out of your Twitter campaign — whether it’s about generating traffic to your website or blog, or about some ‘conversion’ action such as signing-up to an email list or joining some free trial.
Find, build, and engage with your audience on Twitter using lists in Twitter, Twitter’s search box, and Twitter hashtags. And schedule your tweets to get the maximum impact. You can also get content ideas from Twitter as well as monitor your competitor’s Twitter feed and keep tabs on them as well as get new ideas.
You can also ‘promote’ your content on Twitter if you can allocate a portion of your company’s digital marketing budget for this.
Effective Content Marketing Using LinkedIn
To target business professionals, using LinkedIn for content marketing is quite effective — even Microsoft thinks LinkedIn is worth investing in to tap into the business professionals with accounts there. LinkedIn groups are definitely useful for sharing content. Since LinkedIn is a network of professionals, it works best as a B2B marketing vehicle. You should ensure your posts to LinkedIn groups are relevant and useful to the professionals who are part of that group.
SlideShare is part of LinkedIn; therefore, you could have a presentation about your company or a product and share that on LinkedIn. Similarly, sharing videos can be useful and effective on LinkedIn as they are on any other social media platform.
When you share something to Facebook or Twitter, make note of what LinkedIn group that post might be suitable to and share it on the group with a relevant question to get a discussion started.
Now that LinkedIn has its own publishing platform, you can try and write original posts on LinkedIn or share a part of your blog post existing elsewhere and then link to your blog. LinkedIn posts also do well in Google search results often showing up on page one of organic results. Online publishers such as Quartz are already doing this in their endless quest for more traffic and hits.
Using Quora for Content Marketing
Quora may seem like too small or geeky a social network for brands or marketers to bother with it but it has a lot of trust worthiness and can help your brand build thought leadership over a period of time. You can use Quora to learn if there is any discussion happening around your brand or your competition or your business segment. It will help you keep track of the conversation and join in when relevant.
You can learn from others as well as answer users’ questions. One nice thing about Quora is the first person nature of the answers people can get from the likes of Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder. There are astronauts like Clayton Anderson answering queries on Quora.
As with any other form of writing, use catchy headlines when you write something on Quora. Also, you can start your own blog on Quora where you can share your own thoughts on a given topic. One benefit of writing on Quora is that it seems to have good traction in Google’s SEO landscape.
Schedule:
You have to be predictable in your content marketing plans. Once you have an audience for your content, you need to keep supplying them with fresh content on a predictable basis so that the audience is not disappointed. Much thought and effort needs to go into ensuring that you have a ready supply of fresh content.
Different social media platforms need different posting frequencies and schedules for maximum impact.
Twitter Schedule:
Maximum Twitter users log into their accounts in the morning — many do that first thing after they wake up — and at night. So, depending on your time zone, you could try to time your tweets accordingly.
Links to your blog posts can also be tweeted more than once during the day to ensure more of your Twitter followers get to see it. Weekend tweets can be lists of the best stuff you have shared over the preceding week.
Facebook Schedule:
As to the schedule of posts on Facebook, it has been determined that Thursdays and Fridays are best to run Facebook campaigns as people are in a more relaxed mood ahead of the weekend compared to Mondays when people are more likely to be in a grumpy mood or on Tuesdays when people are likely to be in the middle of work and overworked or overstressed.
LinkedIn Schedule:
It works best if LinkedIn posts are uploaded when professionals are likely to have downtime such as just before the start of the work day (7 to 8 am), or during the lunch break (11 am to 2 pm), and towards the end of the work day (around 4 pm).
One way to ensure a continuous supply of content to post is to aggregate content. This can be done occasionally or you can have a weekly schedule of posting aggregated content. These can be either internal or external content.
Someone like Maria Popova has built a formidable readership for her Brain Pickings website, and her newsletter goes out every weekend and it’s all about mostly content aggregation — excerpts of books, commencement addresses and so on. One more similar content aggregator is Farnam Street.
Tools:
You can use the different social media tools effectively if you become an expert at using them and learn each tool’s particular characteristics and quirks. NASA does a nice job of harnessing social media using different Twitter handles. Being ‘NASA,’ and doing what it does — operating rovers on Mars (Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity https://twitter.com/MarsCuriosity), spacecraft orbiting Saturn (Cassini Saturnhttps://twitter.com/CassiniSaturn), spacecraft now orbiting Jupiter https://twitter.com/NASAJuno) — it is relatively an easy task to gain followers among discerning Twitter users.
Everyone cannot be a pioneer in space exploration like NASA but businesses can try and build excitement around some scientific or space success or milestone being achieved and these can become popular on social media.
It’s not outlandish. That’s exactly what Google does with its relevant doodles. There was a Google doodle on the 4th of July when Juno successfully entered Jupiter’s orbit. There was a Google doodle celebrating Philae lander’s landing on Comet 67P.
Your social media tools are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Quora primarily. You have to decide how to use those tools depending on your target and your budget.
Outsourcing Content Marketing
Outsourcing content marketing to a digital marketing agency in India can be a wise decision and an investment worth making to build your brand’s online presence and reputation in the long term. Outsourcing done right can get great results for any business. Giant businesses like Apple and GE are using outsourcing of various activities in a manner that adds billions to their bottom-line and top line.
Focusing on core competencies leads to business success. This is as true — or truer — for small businesses as it is for large corporate. It is better to outsource your content marketing work to content marketing professionals at a digital marketing agency in countries like India instead of asking the kayaking instructor at your adventure tourism company to double-up as the in-house blogger and content writer.
Instead of asking the chef of your restaurant to do part-time duty as your website’s SEO guy, it is better to outsource SEO work to SEO professionals at an SEO company in India.
Finally, content marketing can both help companies keep in touch with customers and be used as a platform to attract new customers. Having a proper content marketing strategy is essential to get the best return on investment on this technique.
Humans are inquisitive creatures. They are naturally attracted to mysteries and secrets almost like moths to a flame. Hence, one secret to creating viral content is to create articles with the right headlines — headlines with the word “secret” in it.
A few examples to illustrate this:
If you are a tour operator or travel agency, your blog could contain an article titled ‘Seven Secret Rafting Locations in Colorado.’ Variations on that theme such as “Hidden Places in Colorado” and so on will work as well. A Google search is useful as that will provide a measure of help to gauge the number of articles that already exist on the topic and what are the “related searches” to your article title. You may need to or choose to tweak your article headline based on insights from Google.
The other popular headline writing technique and article format is to have a ‘Top 10’ format list such as “10 Secret Healthy Lunch Ingredients” or “Top 10 Beaches in Florida/Southern California/Gold Coast” and so on.
Becoming an expert in some niche can ensure you have a good audience for your content. Of course, becoming someone like Suze Orman in financial planning or Phil Plait in astronomy takes a lot of effort and only a few people will have the skills and will be lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time to succeed.
You could produce deeply researched articles on some topics and attract significant traffic to your website — something like WaitButWhy.com comes to mind with its massive articles about The Fermi Paradox orSpaceX or Tesla Motors. Online publishers may republish your content/article and this can get greater traffic for your website as well as revenue for syndication.
Quora is one more popular social media where you can share your expertise and online publications such asSlate reproduce some Quora answers under a partnership. Quartz also publishes content from Quora.
Ideas and Examples of Viral YouTube Videos:
Creating popular YouTube videos is not as difficult as becoming a Nobel Laureate. You only have to be smart enough to find your own niche area of expertise that also has a popular appeal and can attract an audience.
Different domains will have different levels of competition and existing players who already have an established brand recognition, reputation, wide audience, large number of followers and possibly a deep pocket and global presence.
If you are in the travel business and plan or produce a blog or vlog or YouTube videos, you are up against the likes of Lonely Planet, TripAdvisor, National Geographic, Fox Travel, BBC Travel, et cetera et cetera.
So any content that you produce must be unique enough in some way and not available at the sites mentioned above. But food and travel are such popular and vast business verticals that there is always scope to try and create an identity of your own that lets you stand out from all the other existing businesses.
After all, food and travel constitute some of the core and perennial hobbies of many. And the habits, fashions, and preferences change. New travel destinations suddenly become popular. New holiday activities go viral. Food fashion changes based on taste as well as the latest fad diet.
Perhaps of more limited interest than a popular YouTube channel about food/recipes/cooking would be one devoted to explaining common scientific phenomena as well as the technology inside everyday appliances. Such a YouTube channel or blog can also provide helpful tips regarding the common faults or malfunctions in those appliances and DIY methods to repair the appliances.
The technological complexity of the world we live in growing and people are often at a loss about sundry gadgets and how they work.
Even if something similar already exists, there can always be a different — perhaps fun or quirky — way to talk about those things.
Think about the wild popularity of a show like Top Gear with its trio of hosts including the ever controversial Jeremy Clarkson. It was all about being fun, outlandish, outrageous, quirky, and being irreverent and rebels which apparently appealed to millions of people around the world.
Among examples of brands using viral YouTube marketing, there is this from GoPro, the action camera company. Its ad containing video footage of a fireman in Fresno rescuing an unconscious cat reached more than 30 million viewers.
Another ad titled “Girls Don’t Poop” from bathroom deo maker Poo-Pourri acquired viral status with its toilet humor and got more than 30 million viewers.
The #DancePonyDance campaign from Three Mobile in the UK enjoyed good social media success with its related video of a dancing, moon-walking Shetland pony.
Science as well as science communication spans the whole gamut from wildly expensive to super-cheap and from Nobel Prize winning level of nerdiness to the amateur enthusiast. If you ever wondered what would happen if you soaked a piece of cloth in water and then squeezed it in zero gravity, then there is a video of astronaut Chris Hadfield doing exactly that in the ISS.
If you wanted to ever check out the tracks made by the massive, Apollo-era crawler transporter as it ferried a space shuttle to the launch pad in the old days prior to the shuttles being retired, well there is astronaut Mike Massimino doing that and much more and having loads of fun.
But non-astronauts like us can develop some serious expertise about, say, the Apollo missions, and create YouTube videos explaining interesting stuff about those historic missions and technologies.
That would be something like what Amy Shira Teitel does in her YouTube channel.
You might be a Nobel Prize winner like Dr. Wolfgang Ketterle and then you could talk about stuff like Bose Einstein condensates.
But you don’t have to be a Nobelist to explain mirror reversal in a YouTube video.
So the point is that there are countless niches and you just have to find one that meets your needs or aligns with your business goals or area of expertise.
Use a brainstorming session in the office to decide your strategy. Or many sessions.
Use the hive mind of Twitter may be.
Take ‘citizen science’ projects like SETI@home. What can be a business equivalent of this where consumers and just lay persons somehow become enthusiasts and participate in some project that you create?
If you are a tour operator who organizes adventurous activities such as whitewater rafting or sky-diving et cetera, you could post articles to your blog or create YouTube videos where you talk about the basics and the dangers and safety precautions to be taken while performing various adventurous activities.
Your company’s YouTube channel can also share YouTube videos from your customers doing various thrilling things like some edgy whitewater rafting.
Different companies have different levels of engagement with social media. Some like Tesla Motors have a cult following among social media-savvy technology enthusiasts and naturally there are plenty of viral videos of people driving their Tesla Model S sedans in ‘insane’ mode or using the latest Autopilot features. Tesla CEO Elon Musk is himself a pro at using Twitter not only during product or feature launches but at other times as well such as when some crisis hits the company. No other CEO of a major auto company like Ford, Toyota, GM, Ferrari, Fiat, Mercedes and so on deploys Twitter or any other social media tool with comparable aplomb.
Tesla is a minnow in the global auto business. Whereas large auto companies sell millions of cars per year, Tesla sold about 50,000 of its Model S sedans last year for a turnover of about $5 billion. But using social media, Tesla has built a level of visibility for itself where it is seen as a global player as well and its name is taken as seriously as the other auto businesses some of whom have been around for longer than a century.
In fact, Apple’s cult following is such that enterprising individuals are harnessing it for their own commercial gain by creating YouTube videos that go viral.
Duncan Sinfield and others post monthly updates about the construction progress of Apple’s Campus 2 and these get hundreds of thousands of hits.
Then there are those who put an iPhone in boiling Coke and upload the resulting video to YouTube and get millions of viewers for that.
If individuals can create interesting drone videos, the takeaway for consumer facing businesses is that they too can do similar videos with relevance to their own businesses.
A travel agency who organizes whitewater rafting or hikes on the Appalachian Trail can surely create nice drone footage of the rivers and trail routes and these will make for engaging viewing.
Google Tag Manager has been around for a while but many people don’t know exactly what it is or even how it works. So, what exactly is a tag you may ask for the novice users? A tag is a snippet of JavaScipt code that sends information to third parties such as Google and a tag serves a specific function. For example, if you want tracking capabilities on your website, you needed to install Google Analytics across all your webpages. This allows you to see and track the effect of your marketing or remarketing. If you are not using a tag management system as such as GTM (Google Tag Manager), you need to add these specific snippets of code directly on your mobile app, website or blog for example. Earlier, you needed the help or involvement of a web developer to help you install certain snippets of code for tracking purposes to serve or track different functions on your website. With the introduction of Google Tag Manager that is no longer the case as you can install snippets of code through Google Tag Manager without even being technical. With the introduction of Google Tag Manager, a webmasters life is much easier than ever. Below, we will discuss 4 reasons on why you should start using Google Tag Manager on your website if you aren’t already along with explain to you why it has become such a popular choice amongst both webmaster and marketers:
✓No More Multiple Tagging - Tag management systems are by no means something new that has been invented recently as they have been around for years now. Microsoft was one of the first companies to introduce a tag management system but they charged a fee to install/use it. With the introduction of Google Tag Manager, it allows you to use a FREE system that can make your life a whole lot easier without having to pay anything which is a huge plus. Google Tag Manager works via its own container tag which you can place across all of your website pages and even multiple websites if need be through a single login. This container tag allows you to replace all other tags on your website such as tags from Google Analytics, Adwords, Floodlight and even other 3rd party tags through the GTM container tag. If you are working with an SEO company or a digital marketing agency for your online marketing efforts, ask them to install Google Tag Manager which really allows you to keep all your tagging in one place. GTM has included all tags for universal analytics, Adwords, remarketing, classic analytics and even popular ad networks. From a marketers perspective, this is really helpful/easy as they can start using Google Tag Manager as it allows them to customize tags even with little knowledge of coding or development.
✓Easy To Do - Earlier on websites, you needed to install different pieces of code for different functions which is no longer the case as earlier mentioned. You also needed the help of a web developer if you weren’t technical enough to install snippets of code across each and every page. With GTM, you can install it once across all pages and keep on updating or making the necessary changes which makes it much easier than ever before. Once your Google Tag Manager container is added to your website, you can easily add, update or edit your tags through the Google Tag Manager web application making your life super easy. This also allows you to reduce errors and problems when trying to install Google tags or any other type of tagging that you want to add for tracking and optimization purposes. If you want to make any changes or add anything, you can do easily on your own as its in a single container tag rather than having to tag your whole website with a snippet of code. Lastly, you will also free up time of your web developers or IT staff who needed to help you with these things earlier on. They can therefore focus on other parts of the business that need these resources or work on other things you need help with rather than installing tracking or snippets of code which they needed to earlier.
✓Future Proofing - When you upgrade to Universal Analytics (if you haven’t already done so), you can easily implement GTM also as it will allow you to make future enhancements and upgrades easily. With the introduction of Google Tag Manager, you can easily add things later on in one GTM web interface rather than installing it across your whole website which will take more time to do as well as delay things. In addition, changes can be quickly made and you don’t require any coding changes that were needed earlier on. It really allows to speed things up from a webmaster or marketers perspective by allowing you to decrease launch time and being able to do things yourself. Future proofing your website is much easier now as compared to before and you can do that with Google Tag Manager. It allows you to really stay ahead and up to date as if you have a website with thousands of pages, imagine how long it would take to add snippets of code across all of it. That is no longer the case as a single update in GTM allows you to do this faster than ever before.
✓Speed & Tracking - The fact is when you have more code on your website it takes longer to load that webpage. With Google Tag Manager, this tagging system allows you to load only the tag container snippet and all your tags are housed within that specific snippet which means less loading time on your website. In addition, recording and monitoring what people do on your website is nothing new but with GTM, it’s easier than ever before to track events that are taking place on your website or blog. GTM even comes with event tracking built-in for certain things but it still does need some setting up of course. Some things you can track with GTM are form submissions, link clicks, time specific activities and overall clicks of course. Having a website that is fast to load is critical as even Google holds it as an SEO ranking factor as its part of a user experience which is absolutely essential. Lastly, you want to also be able to monitor what is taking place on your website through event tracking which is much easier to do now than before with the introduction of GTM. Both speed of your website and event tracking are very much possible if you install Google Tag Manager.
Summary The installation and use of Google Tag Manager can really make your life super easy if you are a webmaster or marketer. Time to market, tracking, events taking place on your website and ease of use are all things that GTM offers which is a must in this day and age if you are serious about growing/optimizing your website or blog. If you don’t have GTM installed on your website, then it is something that you should seriously consider doing as some of the above points make that very much clear. In addition, Google is also offering a free certificate for a limited time as well as training on the installation/optimization of Google Tag Manager which clearly shows how important it is. If you are looking for a company to help you install Google Tag Manager or help you with any other type of digital marketing or development activities, please feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital for any of your needs you have. If you have any other comments or benefits that you have experienced with GTM, please feel free to comment below as this list is by no means a complete one.
