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Author: Team Position Squared
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Top 5 SEO Trends for 2015 and much more…| Best of the Week
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Separating the Men from the Boys of Digital Marketing
2014 saw a huge deluge of digital marketers trying to solve business problems and some even offering quick fix solutions in order to succeed in today’s dog-eat-dog world! We at Position² firmly believe that it is time to separate the men from the boys of the digital world. There needs to be a clarity of purpose in this space since every digital marketing activity is not for everybody.
Demand creation for firms via paid acquisition, content marketing and supporting marketing operations are some of the mantras that we live by. Digital marketing is a dynamic space. A stand-up comedian once sarcastically commented that in the digital space “tomorrow’s technology has gone obsolete yesterday!” Jokes apart, that is the kind of demanding atmosphere that digital marketers need to work on a daily basis.
Back to Basics
Digital marketing is part art and part science. As a digital marketer you need to be able to balance both these aspects with aplomb if your clients are to get the best bang for their buck. Some of the important ways in which we work to deliver stellar results for our clients are –
- Paid Acquisition – This arena has seen a lot of interest in the recent past and we believe with the right approach businesses can get great ROI. This includes pay per click advertising on search engines, bidding for ads on social networking sites, et al
- Solving Real Business Problems – It is one thing to take things for granted in the digital world, quite another to deliver consistent results that surpass your client expectations. We at Position² let our actions speak on behalf of us
- Content Marketing – This is going to be one of the defining factors of digital marketing in 2015 since there is a lot of untapped potential in content marketing that marketers need to harness going forward
- Demand Creation – Business decision makers sometimes don’t know what they need until they are given the option to simplify or enhance their businesses. That is exactly why we go about doing what we do as far as demand creation is concerned for our B2B clients
- Customized Solutions – We don’t make your business fit into our digital marketing model. That is not relevant today. We in fact, build a marketing model that is just right for your business. We believe businesses have unique needs and creating bespoke digital marketing solutions that are fully flexible is the only way to go
- Cutting-edge Technology – Using technology where it is needed but with a human touch. You need to work in consonance with the latest tech developments in the digital world and let technology work for you and not the other way round.
2015 promises to be a watershed year as far as digital marketing is concerned. The developments in the digital world will have huge implications on how you go about selling your products and services. We at Position² are in for the long run. We want to make a difference to our clients businesses and through their success will our success be ultimately reckoned!
Do let us know your views on digital marketing in 2015 and beyond!
Contact us now for integrated digital marketing to make your brand go places!
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Top 5 SEO Trends for 2015
2014 has been an eventful year in the online search space with more focus on making search experience user-friendly. Google’s algorithm updates like Google Panda 4.1, Google Penguin, all highlight the same issue. Additionally, new features on Google Webmaster & Google Analytics dashboard have enabled SEOs deliver better web-pages for the users.
It’s time for marketers to focus on 2015 and look at the techniques that will hold ground and begin showing results in the New Year!
Top SEO Trends for 2015
- Optimizing for Mobile Search
- Conversational Search
- On-page Markup
- Content Strategy
- Website Architecture
- Integration with Social Channels
Mobile Search Optimization
1 out of every 5 individuals in the world now owns a smartphone. With the rapid growth in the smartphone market, usage of Internet on mobile devices has reached a new high. With this trend in place, digital marketers are now particularly targeting users browsing via mobile devices with renewed interest. All kind of digital assets now need to be optimized for mobile. Google is now updating algorithms that reward sites rendering optimally on the mobile platform with a higher mobile ranking. Your site optimized for mobile combined with a great mobile UX feature will stand out as the winning factor in 2015.
Conversational Search
Hummingbird update stressed on words as part of search queries. Phrases with conversational words are now given priority and web pages that provide a solution to these conversational queries now rank higher rather than pages that just tend to “match” these keywords. Hummingbird makes an effort to understand the real intent of a searcher rather than just the syntax.
Conversational search queries will continue to gain more importance in 2015 – the reason being these kinds of queries address the “actual” need or the search intent. Keyword & Content strategy in 2015 should be a combination of long-tail and keywords which address Latent Sematic Indexing (LSI).
On-page Markup:
Schema markup should serve as a great way to display rich snippets although these may not be the only ranking factor. Schema markup helps improve click-thorugh rates as search results for schema-enabled pages have a higher tendency to boost trust among visitors.
- Creative works:CreativeWork, Book, Movie, MusicRecording, Recipe, TVSeries …
- Embedded non-text objects:AudioObject, ImageObject, VideoObject
- Event
- Health and medical types: notes on the health and medical types underMedicalEntity.
- Organization
- Person
- Place,LocalBusiness, Restaurant …
- Product,Offer, AggregateOffer
- Review,AggregateRating
- Action
Content Strategy
Content still is the “King” of SEO. The only thing that would require a re-alignment is the kind of strategy required towards content generation. Content going forward needs to be a blend of long-tail & conversational keywords. Content generation can be in various forms – websites, blogs, rich-media assets like Press Releases, PDFs, PPTs & Videos. Content syndication in lieu of link building should be the mantra. Association with other sites needs to be carefully evaluated before committing, more so after the announcement of Google Penguin 3.0. Content calendars need to be in place to serve as placeholders for developing fresh on-site content.
Website Architecture
Site structure & content placement will have a key role to play. The way websites are built emphasizing user navigation & other usability factors, will be a pivotal factor to rank higher on Search Engines. Websites need to have a clear navigation, neat URL structure and an organized content architecture. All these aid in improving bounce rates and avg. session duration which are now amongst the varied factors considered for better ranking on Google. Diagnostic tools like Google Webmaster and other online tools like Moz should be of great help to diagnose and repair errors.
Social Media Integration
Not to be left behind in the race for SEO, is Social Media. Social posts too now have the power to rank well on Search results. As Matt Cutts says “Facebook and Twitter pages are treated like any other pages in our web index, so if something occurs on Twitter or Facebook and we’re able to crawl it, then we return that in our search results”. Leveraging Google+ & YouTube will go a long way in helping website optimization. Prominence should be given to generate additional content using Blogs, data/product sheets and spread them across the web using social media platforms. Social sharing buttons need to be integrated across websites & blogs for a better experience. Overall focus of marketers should be to give users an enhanced experience on Search – be it via a website, blog, digital asset or social post.
Contact us now for SEO deployment that delivers real results!
Have a Great Year ahead & Happy Searching in 2015!
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Mobile Advertising Set to Dominate
The stage is set for the explosion of mobile advertising in the year 2015. Finally digital marketers are able to connect all the dots, tie all the loose ends, dot the i’s and cross the t’s. As a digital marketer your digital advertising strategy should be more mobile-centric, in order to reap rich dividends.
Today’s users don’t need bulky desktops or laptops to enjoy a seamless web experience. As far as mobile form factor is concerned, smartphone and tablet screen size is large, the data speeds are awesome, and prices are affordable. More people today are browsing the Internet on the go. All this makes targeting prospects using mobile devices, lucrative and irresistible.
The Mobile Paradox
Comparing the above two spending, it is apparent that mobile advertising is still in its infancy. But that doesn’t mean that the mobile Internet users are a minority, anymore. For the first time since Internet was conceptualized, mobile internet users have actually overtaken non-mobile internet users. This gap will only widen in the days and years to come.
The above charts show a comparison of number of mobile ‘Internet users‘ vs. the total number of ‘Mobile phone users‘. The mobile Internet users’ statistics can no longer be ignored. Digital marketers not having a mobile marketing strategy will feel the heat, come 2015.
A Peek into the Mobile Internet Paradigm
Having a mobile-friendly version of all your online assets, be it demos, applications, sales materials, communications, et al is no longer optional. It is critical. People use the Internet for not just checking emails and catching up with friends on social networking sites but also to research about products and services. As a B2B digital marketer, it is high time you realize that your target audience is making influential business decisions while on the move.
You cannot have a mobile marketing strategy just as an add-on to your overall digital marketing strategy. You need to deliver top-notch mobile experience at all times. Have a mobile-first strategy for marketing, sales, advertising, SEO, CRM and such other things in order to stay ahead of the curve in 2015 and beyond.
How will the mobile form factor shape your advertising strategy in 2015 and beyond? Do let us know.
Contact us now for a targeted mobile advertising campaign.
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Evolution of Content Marketing and much more…| Best of the Week
This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world. 
Best of the Week Video
Watch this Whiteboard Friday video anchored by Rand Fishkin. He talks about organizing your web content to let Information Architecture help you in SEOWhite Paper: Increase Visibility for Your Content by 4x Today’s traditional SEO is inadequate: Ignite your search results by accelerating visibility in more places than ever before.Download this White Paper and learn: - SEO, why the way we know it is not enough
- Introducing and implementing Enterprise Visibility Accelerator (EVA)
- Using multi-channel tracking tools for effective monitoring
- How EVA benefits businesses.
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Google Launches Hindi Advertising!
The search engine biggie Google has woken up to the potential of consumers speaking in the vernacular Indian language, residing mostly in the northern part of the country. Google has just launched ads in Hindi to cater to over half a billion people who speak the Hindi language fluently. This will help global advertisers to connect with this market that was hitherto not possible online. Now this is a very big move for Google and also to the tens of hundreds of brands and companies that will partner with Google for this particular program.
If you see the above online newspaper wherein the content is in Hindi but all the advertisements are in English! Now you don’t need a rocket scientist to tell you that the click through rate of such an ad is abysmal when compared to the same ads served on an English daily. So Google had to change its tack. It adapted, improvised and overcame the problem of ads not resonating with readers caused due to a language barrier and came up with a solution that is making it more India-centric.
Now onwards, AdWords advertisers can effectively build campaigns on the Google Display Network using text, image, video, rich text, et al. As part of this new development, Google has also introduced Voice Search in Hindi and an exclusive website to find out the best available online Hindi content across websites, videos, apps, blogs, et al, that has been aptly named hindiweb.com.
Google had just some time back launched the Indian Language Internet Alliance (ILIA) that is assigned with the task of promoting Indic-language online. Google is aiming to reach out to over 300 million online users speaking Hindi by 2017 via this ILIA master stroke!
The adoption of Internet in India until now was mainly being unleashed in the international business language, English. Of late companies are seeing the potential of advertising in Hindi as a majority of this demographics does not speak English, anyway. This was basically an opportunity squandered online and for a brand like Google this was unacceptable. Though Google search is available in a variety of Indian languages, serving advertising in an Indian language is a first for Google too!
So what do you think about this new Google development?
Post your comments below!
Contact us now for all round digital marketing.
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Evolution of Content Marketing
We trace the shift in the approach to marketing with higher than ever emphasis on “creating meaningful experiences” for the audience.
Global Content Marketing
The traditional content marketing was very limited in ways of reach and effect. Content marketers traditionally ‘push’ what they have, to potential customers rather than what potential customers demand. Majority of the websites in the past are example of this traditional content marketing where content was deployed using a single common language (usually English) for visitors across the globe.
- A single website is developed online for the entire targeted areas to advertise or show all the available products, services and information
- The content is created without any targeting for specific geographies or regions
- The intent of the content is not customized to suit specific potential customers
- The tone of the content seems like a one-way communication
The traditional content marketing was just like a seller offering what he had, not what the buyers needed or demanded. The dissemination of information was straightforward and limited.
Geo-based Marketing (Localization of content)
Globalization influences the reach of content. With business expansion and scattered target audience, a single website is not the best solution to market to the whole world. Marketers realized that whatever content they marketed was to be understood by specific sets of target audience and hence had to be tailored accordingly – which is Localization of content based on the Geography.
The whole information is translated and modified to suit each targeted consumer in terms of local preferences, languages, products and services demanded. Marketers realized that the perception of their website adversely affects the acceptance of their products in those geographies where content has not been localized and optimized.
Coupa Software was in its rapid 120% growth stage with customers spread across 40+ countries. It had 150K+ users of its services in over 140 countries who used 20+ different languages. Coupa had no bandwidth to localize their marketing campaign to suit every specific region. But with the help of Cloudwords, a translation and content localization company, Coupa Software has managed to localize their products, thus, attaining a higher click through rate from the same audience. This audience now brings more than 50% higher conversion rate.
Personalized Content Marketing
Approach to content marketing has shifted from a global audience to local to a more individual level. The localization of content has been filtered further to a more accurate target. This involves real-time personalization of content.
Personalization means identifying a person’s attributes such as potential, behavior, profile etc, and customizing their experience by presenting them with relevant content, call-to-action or visuals. Personalization can be B2B or B2C and has a unique process consisting of Who (target audience, potential, profile), What (content, case studies, videos, assets) and Where (website, email, mobile, ads).
What personalized content marketers do is that they track the overall behavior of an individual engaging with the content. User preferences, likes, navigation history, pages navigated, sections of the content viewed and other such data is collected by the content marketer. The more the visitor frequents the website, the more personalized the content gets with every new visit due to his previous interactions. The content is generated based on the visitor’s profile like location of access, time, source, form factor, et al. This way the visitor is served when he is most interactive and engaging optimally with the website and its content.
Take for example, Panaya has a visitor from a particular IP address who browses through the content and clicks on some link. In the first visit, the user is served a normal web content that Panaya offers to all visitors.
Based on the pages visited and the sections of contents read by the visitor, Panaya served a different content to the visitor when he returned back to the site. This highly personalized content marketing strategy is likely to boost conversion because the visitor has been served with content that he wants from the website.
How does Personalization help you?
- It creates a meaningful interaction by serving the right content
- It educates and nurtures top-of-funnel prospects
- It optimizes budget and lowers cost per lead
- It improves site performance, analytics and content consumption
- Extends marketing automation reach
- Turns anonymous prospects into qualified leads
Contact us to learn more about personalized content marketing.
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Add E-commerce Analytics for Better Business and much more…| Best of the Week
This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world. 
From the Position² Blog This Week: Add E-commerce Analytics for Better Business
It’s great to have an ecommerce portal. But are you tracking how your online business is faring? Well, it’s a vital part of the business process. Learn how to track your ecommerce venture now for a better return on investment.
Best of the Week Video
Watch this video on Whiteboard Friday anchored by Josh Bachynski who talks about Google Panda 4.1 – do’s and don’ts. It makes for a compelling watch.White Paper: Increase Visibility for Your Content by 4x Today’s traditional SEO is inadequate: Ignite your search results by accelerating visibility in more places than ever before.Download this White Paper and learn: - SEO, why the way we know it is not enough
- Introducing and implementing Enterprise Visibility Accelerator (EVA)
- Using multi-channel tracking tools for effective monitoring
- How EVA benefits businesses.
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