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Position² @ SMX West, San Jose, March 2014
Position2 was at the SMX West event in San Jose last month represented by our Head of SEO, Rahul Banerjee.

We think SMX West lived up to its expectations this year, especially from a SEO point of view. A look into the future of SEO was most intriguing. SMX shed light on a few key future trends to watch for:

If you need additional information, feel free to reach out to us.
- Conversational Search: Advancement is seen both in complexity and nature because of changing user behavior. Now, there is increased emphasis on conversational and voice search. An example of this is the Hummingbird update which emphasizes semantic search methodology (for example, Google Auto Complete option) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) by looking at the relevance and meaning behind the query.
Our content strategies are aligned with user experience and the optimization of search engines also powers better search results. For example, the use of blogs, forums, the Google authorship program, social media optimization etc. helps reach out to the target more with the natural language parameter of users.
- Knowledge Graph: It is a system that understands facts about people, places and objects and the interconnectivity between them.With the implementation of the Knowledge Graph, companies will now need to make more efforts to build their brand online. Google will include results about reputed brands of authority who are trusted. Online brand building efforts need to be an ongoing activity.
However, Google is also testing ads on the Knowledge Graph and carousel.
- Structure Data Markup: It helps Google understand the content architecture of a website better and facilitates faster and more relevant results.We recommend our clients implement structure data markup (eg. Schema.org) on their websites.
Here are some more key relevant points for organic SEO:
- High competition: With Google testing out paid ads on search results, organic search results have less shelf space and are needed to compete more to be visible. For example, if you type “Hotels in San Francisco” in Google, the top scroll of the Google SERP includes only paid ads pushing the organic results lower.
- Mobile will soon dominate: Google mobile queries are set to surpass PC search this year.
Image Source: Google

Mobile is another factor that is altering the nature of search. Mobile capabilities differ from device to device, which in turn impacts the content development, communication, engagement and measurement.

Implementing and embracing personalization will make for better search experience.
- Apps: There is a global opportunity to develop and market through apps. However, app stores must also be localized.
- Social presence: Google may not able to read social signals completely from other channels like Facebook and Twitter yet. But, this is going to change soon, which is why we maintain a social presence for our clients and help them build the right influencer network. Google has already said that users who use their Google logins will experience better search results. Google will roll out a full fledged algorithm soon.
- Natural link building: ‘The best links are not asked for’. Work on natural link building. Do not use shortcuts or indulge in explicit link sales. Let the target audience refer, like, comment and build links for you.
If you have original content that is useful for people, you can ask for recommendations/references. But your intentions will matter. Google is constantly penalizing websites with vested interest towards link building as an activity.
- Devalued content: Press releases, articles and guest blogging are now devalued content due to over optimization techniques used by most of the SEO experts. Content that offers value should be created for the target audience and not for search engines.
- Build recognition, reputation and trust through well-devised content marketing plans. Authority plays a vital role for Google to rank a website. Consumers also look for brand reputation and trust levels before making online purchase decisions.
- Google Panda updates: It is likely that Panda will be updated more frequently. Expect one soon. Google is constantly testing out search parameters to provide the best results to users.
- World does not stop at ‘Not Provided’: Post the ‘Not Provided’ update, Google changed the way it harvests data from search to protect users’ privacy. First, all logged-in users were switched to “https” from “http”, where the referral data relating to that search is hidden. But, as already indicated, that refers now to the whole universe.
Position2 recommends analyzing success with page-level metrics like page-level traffic, bounce rate, percentage of new visitors etc. to have an edge and understand user engagement metrics.
- Generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs): These do not impact rankings. For example, a domain like www.buymycar.com need not be ranked for car related keywords if it does not have content related to buying cars.
Share your thoughts on the event insights with us in the comments below.

More to follow from Position2

… keep in touch!
April 19, 2014

Getting more engagement on Twitter, LinkedIn for B2B Marketing 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:

Getting the Most Engagement for Your Tweets
Twitter is undoubtedly a major component of most brands’ social strategies. But, what are the kinds of tweets that get the most traction? Which industry is topping the engagement charts? Read this blog post to know all this and more.

How to Create a Successful Business Blog
4 Facts and Tips About LinkedIn Advertising for B2B Marketers
10 Ways SEO Works for B2B Companies

Best of the Week Video
Entrepreneur and author Eric Ries talks about how big companies today can be trumped by innovations by smaller entities but brands still measure and reward the wrong performance.

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.

April 18, 2014

Position² @ The Marketing Nation Summit, 2014
‘The Marketing Nation Summit’ that concluded last week provided a world of insights, knowledge and excitement!

Team Position² loved the event and is already looking forward to the next one. We had a lot of fun but, as you know, we’re serious when it comes to business.

For all you folks who couldn’t attend the summit and for those who can’t get enough, here’s a quick recap…

Day 1 – April 7

Kicked off with an early morning run. Followed by on-site Marketo certifications where users could choose from one of four tracks that included – from basic forms, landing pages, emails to advanced and multi-stream nurturing.

The day ended with a business mixer where event participants and exhibitors got an opportunity to network and explore new technology integrations.

Day 2 – April 8

The excitement went up several notches on the second day with all the high-powered sessions lined up!

Ann Handley from MarketingProfs on Content Marketing

The morning session at 8:00 was illuminating with Ann detailing the aspects that content marketers can and can’t take from traditional publishers. She said that though there is plenty to take away, content marketers should go beyond that. Ann’s 5-point action plan:
- Experiences matter, not just narration: Add real-life examples instead of just narrating to your customers. It makes a lot of difference. Give them a feel of using your product.
- Talk to your customers directly: Connect with your customers by using words like ‘you’, ‘we’ and ‘us’.
- Experiment with your content marketing channels: Figure out your ideal content marketing mix. But also invest in different channels and learn what’s best suited for you.
- Have a can-do attitude: You can do a lot with even small budgets and teams.
- Be active in real-time: Participate in conversations as they happen or kick start them yourself.
Dayna Rothman from Marketo on Lean Content Marketing for Lead Generation

The session covered a wide variety of topics, from ideation to customers’ buying stages to creating the best content with small teams or budgets.

But but but…the keynote address by Marketo CEO Phil Fernandez and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was still waiting in the wings.

Phil Fernandez spoke more about Innovation in the Nation, this year’s theme. Besides highlighting the fact that many strong industry players were Marketo users, Phil also provided cool insights into marketing automation and new features of the Marketo platform:
- Real-time personalization: This allows marketers to personalize content for every member of the audience and helps succeed in creating unique, individualistic customer experiences.
- Marketo’s new SEO capabilities & the Marketing Calendar: Marketo’s SEO capabilities will enable you to optimize your site’s SEO and work on competitor comparison. Watch out for its launch by the end of this year.
- The Marketing Calendar will allow you to view, plan, map, adjust and trigger marketing programs in one place.
Post Phil’s session, Hillary Clinton took to the stage. She spoke on a number of topics ranging from inclusion of women in the technology industry to the infancy of the internet and how innovation needs a certain level of risk taking.

Day 3 – April 9

The last day of the Summit was not lacking in excitement. The keynote address was by Marketo CEO Phil Fernandez (again) and General Electric’s CMO, Beth Comstock.

After Phil Fernandez announced Marketo’s Revvie winners for this year, Beth Comstock took center stage and spoke on innovation and rapid changes in marketing:
- Practical innovation: It’s important to understand what people actually need and keep innovating to satisfy that need. Ideas don’t count unless something is done about them. The future has to be today…
- Innovation does not end: How do you instill ambition and accountability in your company? Dream big and scale. The journey of innovation involves offering powerful outcomes.
- Marketing is growing in power: Marketers are innovators and integrators. We need to be where the market is moving to. Marketing needs to be a vital function with a growth agenda.
- Mind sharing: Join hands with others in your system, solve problems as a group and expand your company expertise. Marketers are incubators of new businesses.
DJ Waldow from Marketo on Being Human

Marketo’s Digital Marketing Evangelist, DJ Waldow emphasized the importance of the ‘human’ element in marketing communication with examples:
- Email subject lines and copy: Make them humorous, conversational and creative.
- Videos: Personalized videos that help establish a rapport between company and customer are great. Though they may not be scalable, you can try them for important prospects and customers.
- Out-of-Office Replies: It helps communicate with your connections better if you’re more human.
- Email opt-out landing pages: Instead of ultimatums, personalize landing page copy and offer unique options.
Moz’s Cyrus Shepard on New Opportunities in SEO

Cyrus said Google has been energizing SEO and the new changes in the field can be good opportunities:
- Keywords to concepts: It’s the meaning behind the keyword that matters. You need to be contextually relevant to search queries.
- Schema, markup and meta data: Google promotes sites that follow content structure, like authorship and reviews. The increase in CTR’s is beneficial and social annotations and data make searchers more attentive towards search results.
- Web pages to awarding authority: Google is now moving away from blindly placing importance on web pages. The trend is to identify and reward experts who provide solutions through their content.
- Links to endorsements: Google no longer cares about link building activities. Person-to-person endorsements are more important.
- Page views to user satisfaction: Google measures bounce rate, time spent on the site, pages viewed per visit, shares, mentions etc. to understanding user satisfaction levels.
Whew! That’s some heavy lifting! We do hope you’ve picked enough points of interest from this post…

What was your experience at the Summit? We’d love to hear from you! Get in touch with us!
April 18, 2014
Getting the Most Engagement for Your Tweets
As a top social platform, Twitter is a strong contender for the attention of brands. A wide user base coupled with a powerful ad interface beckons with fans on Twitter. A recent study by Simply Measured showed that:
- 92% brands covered in the study tweet at least once every day
- Top brands scored an average of 20% growth in Twitter followers in Q4, 2013
Judging by the amount of content posted by brands, we can gauge the current levels of engagement. A new study by Twitter identifies what drives engagement for verified accounts:
- Photos received 35% more re-tweets
- Videos led to a 28% boost in re-tweets
- Quotes came third with 19% re-tweets
- Statistics led to a 17% increase in re-tweets
- Hashtags gathered 16% re-tweets
Of course, these figures vary based on the industry, but as mentioned in our earlier blog posts, visuals and videos are powerful marketing tools that build engagement.

However…there are more ways of improving engagement on Twitter.

With the growing trend of using multiple media simultaneously, you can cross link TV with Twitter using the latter’s TV ad targeting feature. You can craft compelling stories through your tweets to get consumers interested like Google and Nike have.

Curated content not just creates relevance, but also puts your individual stamp on it. At the end of the day, it’s all about providing great content.

The most effective way of creating engagement may be through the simplest thing. If you want engagement, ask for it through a powerful call to action. Ask people to follow you, download your content, retweet or even ask for replies.

To engage consumers you need to engage them on their interests, values or just capture their imagination. Sometimes that means doing the obvious and at other times, being creative. It starts by knowing your audience. Go ahead and try it – fortune favors the brave.

What are your strategies for getting more engagement on Twitter?

Image Source: Binkd
April 16, 2014

Choosing between A/B Testing and Personalization, Social Strategy for B2B 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:

To A/B Test or To Personalize?
Are you more inclined towards a/b testing or personalization? Read this blog post to understand why you should adapt both and not try to choose between the two.

Best of the Week Video
Check out this webinar by Marketo’s VP of Marketing, Jon Miller, where he talks at length about revenue cycles and gives tips on lead nurturing and growing revenue.

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

If you are reading this blog post via a RSS reader, please click here to subscribe.

April 12, 2014

Google Applies “Not Provided” to Paid Search Ads
Following up on its SSL encryption for signed-in searches, Google is extending the “Not Provided” arm of influence to cover paid search ads.

In an announcement on its blog, Google declared that it is removing the query from the referrer on ad clicks stemming from SSL searches on Google.com.

Google has assured advertisers that the latter will continue to have access to ad performance data and be able to optimize campaigns and landing pages. You will be able to draw crucial ads data from:
- The AdWords Search Terms report, which will give you access to the search queries that generated ad clicks along with key performance data.
- The Google Webmaster tools Search Queries report that will provide aggregate information about the first 2000 queries that generated organic clicks every day.
If you used queries in the referrer for reporting, automated keyword generation or landing page optimization, Google has provided alternative routes:
- To generate reports or automate keyword management with query data, you can use the AdWords API Search Query Performance report or the AdWords Scripts Report service.
- To customize landing pages, you can use the keyword that generated the ad click rather than using the query. The keyword and match types can be passed on to your web server by using a Value Track parameter in your URLs.
Position²’s POV

Application of “Not Provided” to paid ads will not impact our optimization since we will get actual search queries using AdWords Search Query reports. This is what our Head of PPC, Sudheer Dhayanand had to say about this move by Google:
- It will have an impact on dynamic query insertion on landing pages. But, we can insert keywords instead of search queries.
- It may have an impact on third party analytics tools because of unavailability of search queries.
- This will definitely impact companies who do not use AdWords tracking since they will not know which query has actually converted.
April 11, 2014
To A/B Test or To Personalize?

A/b testing or website personalization?

These are two separate concepts each geared to deliver more effective marketing.

Let’s examine a few important aspects of these before we go any further.

As is true for most things, a/b testing and personalization also have their unique pros and cons.

A/B Testing

A/B testing is an approach towards making your website/emailer/online ads more effective by testing each aspect of them individually to see what delivers the greatest effectiveness. It’s a process of identifying which combination of elements, placed in what order can deliver the best results.

Even if you have been carrying out a/b testing for years and have tested every element on your site, you can convince yourself that you don’t need website personalization only if your company is a single product/service selling entity and you sell to the same people in the same way, every time. This is a highly unlikely scenario.

With multiple products and services, the task of A/B testing is far more complex, as one can only test one variable at a time. Testing multiple elements, one at a time can be tedious with a high possibility of confusion and errors. However, complexity should not necessarily be a deterrent to effectiveness and the investment of effort is often worth it.

A/B testing builds effectiveness by focusing on what works with various segments of prospects. It looks at what works with the majority in each segment. What it misses out on are commercially important people who are not represented by the majority but possess significant business potential and this is where personalization comes in.

Personalization

Personalized marketing is about marketing to individuals based on their individual preferences and choices. This helps make them feel more predisposed towards the brand and inclined to buy. Personalized marketing includes personalizing website appearance, information, products, offers etc. This is based on data of the individual’s preferences if he is a regular customer.

But companies can hardly mine lots of data from a first time site visitor and target them with a great personalized experience. It takes time to build that kind of robust, informative database and apply it into your website experience. Sometimes marketers use a combination of individual data and data analytics to predict what the customer will like based on the behavior of other customers who closely resemble the individuals’ profile.

So, you should be using a/b testing, which will help you have a strong foothold with the best performing elements till your database gathers strength.

If you have a large website, it may not be likely to gain so much of traffic that you have sufficient data to personalize every page/section. In such a case, a/b testing is useful which helps to optimize specific points on your site.

Personalizing your website without a/b testing is like being a brand that is very interactive and friendly but does not know what its customers like.

Website personalization lets you can target every unique individual audience member. If you have your user personas down right, you can easily target almost everyone in your target audience by embedding their personas in your website.

What we suggest is that you take up both a/b testing and personalization. What do you think about a/b testing vs. personalization?

April 9, 2014

Google Releases Universal Analytics For All
Universal Analytics, which was in beta till now, has been launched by Google for everyone.

According to Google, Universal Analytics equips you to power up for the measurement challenges of today’s multi-screen and multi-device environment.

A few important things you need to know about Universal Analytics are:
- It has all the features, tools and reports of classic Analytics, including remarketing and audience reporting.
- Google will be launching the User ID feature gradually, which will help you understand your customer’s complete journey. This feature provides a more user-centric view of website traffic by showing anonymous user engagement activity across different screens and site visits. User ID will also enable cross device reporting.
- Current premium accounts will upgrade to Universal Analytics with the same service level and additional product features. Users with free accounts can also upgrade with all features intact.
- Unlike the prior lag in data, Universal Analytics offers timely reporting with fresher data if you are in a different time zone.
- The User Agent/IP Override feature will help you to proxy data from devices and intranets through internal servers onto Google Analytics.
For a real-life example of how Universal Analytics works, you can check out this case study.

Universal Analytics helps marketers in better tracking, campaign configuration and measurement with enhanced features:
- The tracking code is more flexible and easier to implement on different levels.
- It is easier to set up cross-domain or sub domain tracking.
- Access to new configuration options such as organic search sources, session and campaign timeout handling, referral exclusions and search term exclusion.
- Access to custom dimensions, metrics and new features, which will arm marketers with better measurement options.
If you want to know more about Universal Analytics, click here.

Image Source: Google Analytics
April 4, 2014
What to Expect @ Marketo’s ‘The Marketing Nation Summit’, April 2014
Image Source: Marketo

The much awaited Marketing Nation Summit 2014 is here! The event is from 7-9 April. It promises to be intensive and is tagged as the “Marketing Event of the Year”. Innovation is the key area of focus and the event has been designed to offer many enriching ideas.

As an exhibitor, we at Position² are excited to be in the midst of an atmosphere buzzing with ideas and insights.

Here’s an outline of the event’s agenda. The sessions are divided into 5 tracks to help you plan better:
- Track 1: Planning and measuring
- Track 2: Inbound marketing
- Track 3: Relationship marketing
- Track 4: Driving conversion
- Track 5: By popular demand (includes topics selected based on feedback from previous events)
Each of these tracks has individual sessions with topics that range from ‘Why Video is the Modern Marketer’s Best Friend’ to ‘How to Turn Every Bounced Lead into Two Warm Leads’. With speakers like Brian Kardon, Kevin Zellmer, Lori Wizdo & Nick Westergaard, there is a lot of thought provoking content on offer.

Statistics from recent surveys show that these track topics are hot buttons for many marketers in 2014:
- 70% brands say it is cheaper to retain customers than acquiring new ones
- 47% marketers said that increasing conversion rates is one of their top marketing priorities
- 61% said they will invest more in data and analytics
- 49% say that ROI from relationship marketing is better than acquisition marketing in this age of personalized marketing
There is going to be a powerful combination of new ideas, technologies, insights and healthy debates around these topics – all leading up to more effective marketing and better customer connect.

Visit us at Booth #188

We are a Marketo certified company and our Marketing Automation experts will be at the show. Let’s discuss about how we can help your business grow. You can also try your luck at winning a free marketing automation audit by Position²!
April 3, 2014