Author: Team Position Squared

  • Top 5 SEO Trends for 2015 and much more…| Best of the Week

    This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world.
    Content marketing efforts
    From the Position² Blog This Week:
    Top 5 SEO Trends for 2015
    What do you think are the SEO trends that will attract huge attention from digital marketers in 2015? Well, we have short-listed at least 5 that we think will make it big in the New Year.
    Top Stories this Week: Social Media
    Top Stories this Week: SEO, PPC and Digital Media
    Google tab manager Best of the Week Video
    Watch this video from PPC University to avoid common ad copy pitfalls. It helps you streamline your advertising strategy for better conversions.
    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.

    Download the complimentary EVA White Paper now

    Know more about Enterprise Visibilty Accelerator(EVA)
    If you are reading this blog post via a RSS reader, please click here to subscribe.
  • 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.

    Position2 Shared Top SEO Trends for 2015

    Image Source

    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.

    Position2 - Mobile Search Optimization is the most trending factor in SEO

    Image Source

    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.

    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!

  • 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

    igital_mobile-ad-spending

    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.

    internet_mobile-internet-penetration

    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.

  • Google Launches “Store Visits”

    It’s an exciting time to be a digital marketer. You never know what’s in store for you in the digital world as you are in for a surprise the every other day. Google has just come up with a very pragmatic way to measure the effectiveness of your AdWords campaigns. Going forward it will try and link you online marketing campaigns to your offline sales!

    Since the last few years tablet and smart phone usage has proliferated quite sensationally around the world. People are using it more and more to visit ecommerce sites on the go. Due to the mobile form factor , the Internet user’s location can be determined easily and this is the basis for Google’s ‘Store Visit’ to see the light of the day.

    But there are privacy concerns as well. Google which had previously been embroiled in litigation regarding privacy now wants to steer clear of any such issues, with the launch of this new feature. It has reassured users that their data or location details will never be revealed to the advertisers.

    A New Era for Digital Marketers

    Even in this day and age of digital marketing, the truth is that brick and mortar stores have not seen much of a dent in their sales. With Google’s ‘Store Visit’ all those ecommerce players who have a physical store can now rejoice. Using  a customer’s location, the store’s AdWords campaign can now be mapped to actual footfalls in the physical store. This is one metrics with the highest efficacy to determine the true return on investment of your digital campaign and this has got the digital marketers quite excited.

    Imagine you are marketing online for client’s hotel booking using the Google AdWords program. This ‘Store Visits’ tool gives you a direct way to gauge the impact of your online advertising campaign. Your customer’s location will be tracked by Google and if the same customer comes to your client’s hotel and books a room then you can rest assured that your advertising has really paid off.

    This will definitely make more marketers to tread the digital path. Now you can not only drive sales to your offline business store front but you can measure the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaign in a tangible way too!

    Will you be registering for the Google ‘Store Visits’ for you business!

    Do let us know!

    Contact us now for highly effective digital marketing campaigns offering tangible results!

  • 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.

    Position2- An example of Panaya serving users with real-time personalization of content

    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.

    Contact Position2 to learn more about personalized content marketing

    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.

  • 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.

    google-hindi-ad

    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.

  • Slideshare Throws Open the Analytics Tool

    It’s the age of integrated marketing wherein you will see a host of features being added to online resources that will aid you in 360 digital marketing. In a bid to help publishers get a feedback on their presentations, the eponymous slide sharing website ‘Slideshare’ has sprung on a pleasant pre-Christmas surprise! You get a free analytics tool to assess your content’s performance so you can better tweak it to your user requirements.

    If you are a webmaster or a web content publisher then this tool helps you get information on your- top slides, recent sources of traffic, recent visitors, traffic originating geographies, engagement statistics and such other useful nuggets of information. You can also get a detailed feedback on how people are engaging with your presentation and the channels that they are using to get to you.

    If you closely look at the social media platforms lately, it is not hard to deduce a pattern here. Every site worth its salt wants to get on the free analytics tool offerings bandwagon in order to give of all people, the digital marketers, a better way to curate their online campaigns.  Henceforth you will be able to precisely monitor what people like so as to tailor make your content to exacting user needs. You will be able to keep tabs on user likes, emails, comments, downloads, and embedded link clicks.

    Since the advent of the Web 2.0 technologies, the web is slowly but surely going towards being more and more interactive. It’s a two way street, all the way! Now that’s exactly what the Father of the World Wide Web Sir Tim Berners-Lee had envisioned when he threw open one of the greatest technological gifts that the modern man has ever received! This latest development from Slideshare is a small step in fulfilling what Sir Berners-Lee had earnestly espoused a long time ago.

    Let us know what you think of this new offering from Slideshare.

    Contact us to benefit from Integrated Digital Marketing now!

  • 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.
    Content marketing efforts
    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.
    Top Stories this Week: Social Media
    Top Stories this Week: SEO, PPC and Digital Media
    Google tab manager 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.

    Download the complimentary EVA White Paper now

    Know more about Enterprise Visibilty Accelerator(EVA)
    If you are reading this blog post via a RSS reader, please click here to subscribe.
  • Facebook Incorporates C.T.A Buttons for Business Pages

    What do you do – When you have a user base of 1.35 billion and counting? When your market capitalization is north of $200 billion and climbing? Well, you find newer ways to make money out of your business!

    That’s exactly what’s driving the world’s largest social media giant. Facebook will soon be launching a Call-To-Action button for its business users who were complaining since a very long time for the lack of incentives for having a Facebook Page! This feature that is to be launched shortly will first be available across the United States and then the rest of the world.

    Facebook will initially provide CTAs like – Contact Us, Shop Now, Sign Up, Book Now, Watch Video, Use App and Play Game. These links could take you to any destination on or off Facebook depending on the needs of the business entity that is using them. Businesses are glad that going forward they can have a strong CTA on their Facebook Page so that they can get more leads or conversions as the case may be.

    CTAs for Businesses

    • Contact Us – A general CTA to know more about a business
    • Shop Now – Ecommerce portals
    • Sign Up – Newsletters, White Papers, Mailers, et al
    • Book Now – Movies, Airlines, Hotels, et al
    • Watch Video – B2B businesses to shed light on their new products, offerings et al
    • Use App – App developers or general businesses offering apps
    • Play Game – Entertainment sites or game developers

    Since this new feature has not yet seen the light of the day, we do not have statistics for this new button yet. But it has been in beta testing mode for a company called Dollar Shave Club for around three weeks and the company is just thrilled at the results that this CTA has delivered.

    Facebook_CTA

    Looking at their 2.5X higher conversion rate as compared to other relevant social placements, it seems the CTA button is here to deliver results.

    Let us know what you think about this new CTA button from Facebook. Contact us for a better conversion rate for your brand on Facebook now!