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Improve Your Digital Marketing ROI Using Big Data, and much more…| Best of the Week
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Google Updates Technical Webmaster Guidelines
The Googlebot that crawls all the web pages could until now only understand textual content and not image based content, CSS or JavaScript. But all that is going to change now, thanks to a recent Update to Google Webmaster Guidelines. Now you will have to optimize your site not just with respect to the textual content but also with respect to the images and the JavaScript too. You will have to do extensive optimization for your CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) too because the Google Spiders will now recognize them.
If your website settings are such that your robots.txt file is preventing the Googlebot from accessing your Java files then you are at a loss and Google advises you to render access to the bots. The Google Panda algorithm will negatively view your content if it is not up to the mark with respect to JavaScript or CSS file.
If in case you are not sure JavaScript and CSS is getting indexed or not, then you can do a manual check by the following process.
You need to first select Fetch option under the Crawl tools and then you need to enter the URL of the site that you want to check. If you want to test the homepage then you need to leave the field blank. Press Fetch and Render button so that the Googlebot will begin to crawl your website. Once the crawling is complete you can press the Submit to index button to see the detailed results of the indexing.
Previously Google used to advise webmasters to check their content on text only browsers like Lynx but now with this new update you will have to check the content on regular browsers to see to it that the site is optimized keeping the new Google update in mind.
Google offers the following advice for optimal indexing of your website.
- Be sure to use only the most popular technologies on your website that support the maximum number of browsers.
- Speed is an important factor for the Google indexing hence avoid all roadblocks to swift indexing like large downloads, et al.
- Club your various CSS and JavaScript files together and also compress them for better and easier indexing.
- Handling of full JavaScript and CSS can be tough at times due to various issues and hence optimize your website so that all these additional formatting styles are easily indexed at all times.
Let us know how this new Update from Google will affect your SEO efforts, going forward.
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How to Improve your Digital Marketing ROI Using Big Data
Today we are in the middle of a radical shift in the way we interact and communicate with one another. Factors like democratization of data, mobile computing, broadband Internet ubiquity, faster and cheaper computing prowess have all contributed in making big data so momentous today. Big data might happen to become as important as Internet itself to businesses and the society in general in the not so distant future. You don’t need to be intimidated by big data as that is clearly not going to help you in any way. All you have to do is implement these big data essentials to enjoy better ROI for all your digital marketing campaigns.
Use Data Analytics
You can find exactly how your website is faring using any data analytics that is available online. Google Analytics is a very useful tool if you want to get an accurate feedback on your website. All you have to do is register for Google Analytics and you can begin monitoring your website. It gives you an accurate idea about how many people visited your website and how long they stayed. You can find out how exactly they landed on your page i.e. the external site that directed them here. This is useful if you are already into digital marketing since now you know which are the campaigns that are working for you.
Go for Retargeting
Today it is not enough if you track your users on your website, you need to keep tabs on them even after they leave your website. It is an essential part of retargeting wherein when they go to some relevant website you can again target them and have better chances of converting them to customers. Since the user has already seen your ad before, he is more likely to reciprocate positively to your ad this time around. But for this you need to use cookies in order to keep track of your user whenever he is online.
Exploit Social Media
The explosion of social networking sites is one of the hallmarks of the Internet since the rise of the search engines during the early part of the millennium. Today everybody is connected via Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, et al. This makes your job easier since all you have to do is find out what these people are saying about you and your competitors thus offering you a lot of insight into customer opinions and proclivities. You can then dovetail your digital marketing strategy accordingly and make the most of this new found knowledge.
Learn from People’s Searches
Learning from people’s search queries can be a very rewarding experience for you if you do it analytically, diligently and persistently. This can throw light on what people are demanding and what are their expectations from any product or service. Google Trends is a very good platform to delve into people’s search patterns. You might not get too excited in the beginning since it is a whole lot of data that you have to sift in order to get anything valuable out of it. But if you do it with perseverance then you would be surprised to find out how much insights you can gain about your customers both existing and prospective. You can get a detailed list of what people are searching, the frequency with which they are doing it, the websites that they click on the results page and such other useful nuggets of information.
Put your House in Order
Before you go about looking for data anywhere on the World Wide Web do organize the data that is lying in your own data centers. This can be immensely helpful in ways you would have never imagined possible. You can do detailed research about your customers and profile them as per their past interactions with your website and the result that it delivered to you. You can compare two instances where you received different results and find out the exact reasons for such a disparity; sales is one parameter to consider here.
DBMS (Database Management Systems) from marquee names like Oracle, IBM and Microsoft cost prohibitively high and are beyond the reach of small business enterprises. In such a scenario, you can consider buying the software from small suppliers who differentiate themselves by focusing on niche markets. You can even try Linux operating system as a database platform since it is an open source product. According to Forrester Research’s product evaluation, open source databases viz. Ingres, PostgreSQL and MySQL come out as some of the best.
You can find out the exact reasons why you could not convert your leads to sales in a particular scenario as you are now backed by compelling data from your own database. This shall help you fine-tune your digital marketing strategy saving you precious resources by offering you better insights into conducting highly targeted campaigns.
Position² Point of View
Today we are living in a world where information is generated at an unprecedented rate and off-the-shelf raw computational power is getting better by each passing day. Now these are the two parameters that make big data so widely popular and sensational. You might love it or you might hate it but you just cannot ignore big data. The field of big data analytics is still in its infancy. The explosion of data in today’s world is really mind-boggling to say the least. Data scientists today are the new age rock stars (excuse the metaphor). There is highly valuable information out there in all that raw data that is zipping from one end of the globe to the other in the blink of an eye. Though it is still nebulous as to where we are headed in terms of exploiting big data to our advantage, one thing is for sure that big data analytics has evolved today from being a business initiative to a business imperative. The faster you realize that, the better it is for the fortunes of your company.
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Social Media for Enterprise [Infographic]
Today if your brand is not present on social networking sites you are unwittingly losing out to your competition. Companies around the world are investing heavily in social media marketing in order to ensure favorable customer engagement. Here’s a quick primer of what the social media world looks like in terms of enterprise participation. This might just spur you to take the plunge and actively incorporate an integrated social media strategy backed by real-time analytics, to power your digital marketing campaigns.
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AdWords Targets Users Making In-app Purchases
App marketers can now target users who have purchased a particular app or made an in-app purchase through the Google Play Store. They can do this by targeting AdWords for the Google AdMob ad network. Thus the marketers can now show their ads to people who are more likely to buy their app or an offering within their app. These ads are basically display ads served within the Android apps. This is a new feature from Google wherein ads will be served to users based on their previous interaction with an app. It offers better ROI to digital marketers and it also benefits the users since they will be offered products or services which makes sense to them.
Consider a user who has bought Dropbox cloud data storage. Now this user is a very good target customer for the Amazon Cloud Storage S3 (Simple Storage Service). So this new AdWords targeting lets you serve Amazon S3 ads to anybody who has subscribed to the Dropbox Cloud Storage service. That way Amazon has a higher click-through rate at a lower ad budget.
Using Google AdWords to serve specific targeted users will definitely send you lesser leads but the chances of your leads getting converted to sales is higher since you have qualified leads now.
Is this new feature from Google worth your attention? Do let us know.
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Pinterest to Get More Ad Driven
Pinterest is getting more assertive with each passing day when it comes to pushing ads on its platform. Its test launch of Promoted Pins some time back this year went down well with both the advertising fraternity and the user community. The scrapbooking site now wants to scale its revenues by upping the ante as far as advertising is concerned. Pinterest opening up its advertising platform to all businesses is imminent.
Pinterest initially beta tested Promoted Pins in May this year with only a small group of advertisers. Today Pinterest is a force to be reckoned with in the digital arena controlling 23% of referral traffic to e-commerce sites across the web. This has caught the fancy of digital marketers who now want a slice of this booming ad platform in order to draw more sales and brand value alike.
Setting up Promoted Pins on Pinterest is quite easy. First you pick a pin that you want to promote. You then specify which search keywords you want to attach to it. You can choose geography, language, user demographics for which you want your advertisement to be targeted. You only pay when somebody clicks on your ad to visit your website. Hence, this is a Pay Per Click model and advertisers bid against one another with no minimum bid price needed, as of now. Pinterest is a product and image driven environment where users actually embrace brands. It has proved so far that it has a huge power over online ecommerce which will only grow in the days to come.
Pinterest offers Analytics Dashboard to digital marketers building ad campaigns on its platform. Advertisers can check which Pins and boards are driving the most clicks and conversion to sales so that they can specifically concentrate on them. They can get a detailed report about which of their Promoted Pins attracted the most impressions and repins.
Promoted Pins is a very robust advertising model because people interact with these pins in very much the same fashion they interact with Pinterest. There seems to be an alignment between what users would like to do on Pinterest and what advertisers would normally want them to do. People want to discover new things on Pinterest. They repin things they like in order to save for later use or to share with somebody. That way Pinterest is unlike Facebook or Twitter as far as digital advertising is concerned. People explicitly use Pinterest boards to save stuff they would like to buy! Now that is manna from heaven for any digital advertiser worth his salt. This has made Pinterest a very lucrative platform for advertising in the digital world, without a smattering of doubt.
Are you excited about Pinterest Promoted Pins? If yes, kindly let us know what you think about it.
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Local SEO, Google Panda Update, and much more…| Best of the Week
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Effective Ways of Improving Your Business Using Local SEO
Local SEO is becoming one of the most essential components of every business or brand that wants long-term success across search engines. Location-specific searches and the results that go along with them suggests that local business owners need to step up their game in terms of local SEO.
At present, Google alone has to manage more than 100 billion searches per month from around the world. Among them:
- 4 billion queries generated from desktops per month in the United States alone have local intent.
- 50% of all the mobile queries have local intent.
Local SEO is a great way to target customers by allowing the local businesses to get featured before their customers are looking for them. Higher a business ranks in this local search result, greater are its chances of being noticed by a potential customer.
What is Local SEO?
Local SEO has grown significantly over the last few years, particularly due to the rise of smart phone usage and better connectivity all around. Although it has lot of similarities with organic SEO, it is ultimately very different.
Local SEO is focused on providing results that are relevant to a searcher based on his/her current location.
Why Local SEO Matters?
The number of search queries with local relevance is increasing due to the growth of mobile search. More and more local customers use mobile phones and mobile ‘apps’ to find best local business while they’re walking around.
In order for Google and other search engines to serve users with the most relevant information using the vast amount of data they have about us, local based results will become more and more prevalent. So the search engines rely on information including local content, social profile pages, links, and citations to provide the most relevant local results to the user.
The rise of location-specific search of late makes it incumbent on local business owners to seriously start considering ways to scale their local SEO efforts. With the recent Google Pigeon update, local businesses are scrambling in a frenzied manner reacting to the changes.
How to Optimize Your Business for Local Search?
1. Create Google+ Local Entry and Optimize
Claim your listing on Google+ Local. If you have already claimed your Google Places page, then it can automatically be moved to Google+ Local, and hence you can manage your Google+ Local page from your original Google Places dashboard. When you appear on Google, you make it easier for the customers to find information regarding your business online. They can see the contact information, hours of operation, direction, as well as the reviews and the ratings.
2. Encourage Reviews To Add Credibility To Your Business
Online reviews are playing an increasingly critical role in driving consumers’ purchasing decisions. The quantity and quality of reviews also strongly influences how your business appears in local business listing results. Note that having a more positive score (quality) is more important than quantity of reviews.
3. Build and Optimize Citations
NAP (name, address, phone number) citations are a key ranking factor in local SEO. Local citations from quality directories and other locally relevant sites are still very important to gain higher local SEO ranking on Google search. Google crawls them and compares them with the address data on the company’s website. Citations increase the trustworthiness of the company.
4. Local SEO Website Optimization
Optimize the website for local search; include some geo-specific information so that the search engines understand the locations you are trying to target.
- Use your City and State names in your Title tags, Meta descriptions, and in the content of your site appropriately.
- Make sure you website provider is making use of the Schema Local Markup, specifically for the Place and the Organization tags.
5. Ensure Your Business Website is Mobile Friendly
Google has also recently indicated that one in three US mobile queries is now ‘local’ and 87% of people use their phone when on the go. Google also found that 95% of mobile users look up local information on their phones and the primary functions are calling or visiting a business place. When you are on top of your local SEO, you have a better chance of ranking higher for mobile SEO too.
Conclusion
Local search engine optimization is becoming increasingly important, especially because of the rising number of searches via mobile devices. Google is using a combination of proximity, reviews, citations, and other factors to prioritize Local SEO results. Local SEO trends are rising as of now and they are only going to get better and more significant in the future. Now is the time for you to take advantage of local search engine optimization and boost your business before your competitors gain an edge over you.
Image Source: SearchEngineLand
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The Google Penguin Algorithm is Reborn
After more than a year, Google has officially come up with a streamlined version of the Penguin algorithm which is being referred to as the Penguin 3.0 Update. The Google Penguin Algorithm was initially announced in April 2012. It was basically a deterrent mechanism for webmasters who indulged in Black Hat SEO techniques. These include but not limited to, deviously increasing the ranking of a web page by manipulating the number of links pointing to it. These tactics are commonly called link schemes which are in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Google penalizes such websites by lowering their ranking and blacklisting them so that genuine websites have a fair chance of ranking higher on the search engine.
In order to prove that your website is clean in the eyes of the Penguin, take special care to see to it that your links are all genuine. Black Hat specialists realized long back that if you have links from an authoritative site then your site is also ranked highly in the search engine. Hence they started buying links on a big scale and started creating link farms wherein you could choose which links you want to be associated with, for your website. Soon Google got a whiff of it and it started taking stringent actions. Thus, the Penguin algorithm was born.
Penguin 3.0 is more of a re-write of the original Penguin algorithm than just being a refreshed version. So you need to be extra cautious in order to pass muster as far as Penguin 3.0 is concerned. Beware of paid links or text ads that pass PageRank since it is a clear violation of Google guidelines. Get rid of poor quality backlinks. Do not use the same optimized anchor text on too many links since Google thinks you are confusing the user and hence you will not be ranked higher.
Penguin is a filter algorithm that sits on top of the search algorithm in order to check for fraudulent links and penalize the websites indulging in it. Penguin is not too concerned about the content on your website but is more interested in the links that point to your website. So webmasters need to abandon all Black Hat techniques in their quest for higher search engine rankings now.
The best way to find out whether your site has been affected by the Penguin algorithm is to check the traffic to your website on the day Google launches a major update. The most effective way to do this is using the Penguin Penalty Checker Tool. That way you can take note if Google is penalizing you for some issues related to links pointing to your website. If in case you are being penalized then you need to rectify it at the earliest. If your website does not show any changes in the traffic on the day a major update is launched then you probably might be safe. But confirm it by getting an audit done for your website and find out if there are any objectionable issues with regards to your website that might cause your site to drop in the search engine results page.
If unfortunately you have been hit by Penguin 3.0 and whatever you do does not seem to alleviate the matter then you will have to wait until the next Penguin update or release to authenticate what you have done is according to Google’s diktats. If you feel that some obnoxious website is trying to spam you by linking to your website in order to lower your PageRank then you can tell Google to ignore such websites by using the Disavow Links Tool.
Quality content is always the most important aspect of your website to attract links from reputable sources. Never pay for links since that could make you vulnerable to getting blacklisted by Google. Always build your site with the end-user in mind. Consider it a given that the users are seeking using a smooth interface to navigate effortlessly on your website. That way you are bound to get a good ranking on Google search.
Connect with Google Certified Professionals to find out what this updates means to your website.
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Apple iAd Offers Retargeting Sans Cookies
Apple, a company that revolutionized cutting-edge gadgets is now trying to get a foothold in the lucrative mobile ads market that was hitherto dominated by industry giants like Google and Facebook. With the re-launch of iAd (Apple’s mobile ad platform), advertisers can now better target audience across the iOS mobile platform letting them have a shot at a bigger customer base. Apple for long was actively striving for cross-device ad serving and retargeting via the iAd platform without much influence. But this renewed attempt from Apple will help open the floodgates for advertising agencies cutting across industry sectors like retail, game developers, travel apps and a lot more. Thus, whenever a user is exposed to a certain ad, he/she can be tracked across the iOS platform in order to make the maximum impact.
Apple has added audience retargeting capabilities to its mobile ad platform iAd on iOS 8. This means that digital marketers can now follow their customers across different apps and also various websites on iPhones & iPads. This way the customers will feel a greater sense of connection with the brand as advertisers make a renewed attempt at reaching out to them.
Since cookies don’t work on mobile devices, Apple had to create a roundabout way in order to target the mobile users. They achieved this using the universal Apple Id that gives access to iTunes, iCloud, iMessage and all things Apple. This way digital marketers targeting Apple customers can get a detailed report of all the users on the mobile iOS platform helping them understand quirky user behavior to serve tailor-made ads.
Using the Apple iOS platform you can create audience segmentation which will get updated automatically and thus you will see that you can target people in a certain segment using a unified strategy since there is a semblance of a single unit here. Now digital marketers can improve their ROI as they can send personalized messages to users depending on their past interactions with the iOS platform. Apple users spend a majority of their time on connected devices engrossed within apps. Hence no digital marketer can afford to lose such a big opportunity.
If a particular user is at a certain level of a game he/she could be sent a targeted ad in order to encourage him/her to upgrade to the next level. If some user has abandoned an app then he/she could be encouraged to revisit that app. Thus the opportunities are many and Apple is just beginning to experiment with this new idea of tracking customers on their mobile devices where cookies seem ineffectual.
Apple has been a late entrant in the mobile ad space or any ad space for that matter. But it is definitely hoping to take giant strides with the iAd upgrade. Looking at Apple’s history of triumphing at almost everything that it has undertaken in the recent past, it is just a matter of time before it succeeds in this venture too.
If you are a digital marketer excited about this new advertising opportunity and would want to leverage it for your brand then please get in touch with us by clicking here.
