SEO can easily be assumed as one of the most competitive domains available today. Even if you are a big organization with enough money to burn on marketing and online promotions, staying ahead and sustaining yourself in the current eco-system can be a tad challenging.
Fortunately, it is not tough to decipher the paradigm of SEO. SEO is dynamic, but once you start getting a hang of it, all you need is an effective strategy to stay ahead of the curve and emerge victorious. So dive in and beat your competitors at their game with the help of these tips:
Know the other side of the bush
The first step in order to reach anywhere in this race is to study your competition thoroughly. You need to know the tactics they employ and the strategies they swear by. Take a deep analytical look at their on-site SEO. Pay attention to how their overall SEO activity looks. Has your competitor made a major change in their strategy recently? Be on the lookout for that. Rather, have a dedicated person in your team to do that.
Also, keep an eye on what they are not doing. For instance, SEOMoz’s Open Site Explorer will show you how your company stacks up against others. Look at where your competitors are not listed and leverage on those spots. Imagine your top 10 competitors are having more than 100 pages of quality content and 10,000 high authority backlinks. How long would you need to reach that benchmark? Perhaps you need more time to tank your business if it’s just entering the eco-system. Ranking keywords, increasing referral traffic, reducing bounce rate and creating high quality content is a part of the SEO.
Content is the King
Your content can make or break the overall existence of your online business. No matter how much you deny it, content is still the KING, and it is here to stay. Websites like Inch, Forbes, and even YourStory for that matter, get thousands of article submission requests every day, but only high-quality articles are published. The math is simple: the better the quality, the better are the chances of getting tanked on popular search engines. You need to be consistent with content quality. Make sure it is relevant to your site or business. It is highly advised to utilise other mediums, such as videos, podcasts, and infographics, to make your content look more attractive to your target audience. This will instantly boost your SEO ranking.
The idea is to churn out fresh content on a regular basis. The engines have to keep moving – if they become stagnant, your competitors will get an edge over you. In the internet-savvy world of today, when we eat and breathe social media, make your content crafty and creative enough that it has the potential to go viral. One such move and you are right on the map.
Monitor backlinks
Link Mining is an important backlink strategy whereby you see backlinks of your competitors, get in touch with the owner of these websites and put up a review or a guest post of your own. You should maintain a constant log of your company’s backlinks. You can shield yourself from any impending negative SEO attacks and ensure that all the links that lead to your website are relevant sources. Keep an eye out for your competitor’s link strategy. Tools like MajesticSEO can be used for assistance.
Keyword selection is the key
Your keyword selection and execution is the key to unlocking the success. If you have targeted a few keywords and they aren’t doing much to your business’ revenue or traffic, chances are that your current selection is totally wrong.
One of the biggest mistakes companies make is to rely on top-ranking keywords. If you find a combo that’s landing in the top spot, don’t assume that’ll help your business as well. You need to focus on search queries that yield the highest traffic for businesses in your category and industry.
Tools like Google Analytics help you monitor different keyword combinations and their related traffic correlations, while tools like Open Site Explorer can help you remain in the limelight.
SEO is an organic domain that changes and evolves by the day. Stay current and have the courage to try new trends as they emerge. Explore the unexplored and you will tend to grow as a company and manage to beat the competition, too. Create an SEO strategy that is ironclad with consistent commitment to your content, competitor research, on-site metrics and current news. Combine the real world results and the future trends to attain high rankings.
When you look at your mobile device – phone, tablet, or any other digital sidekick of choice – what do you see? One answer should hopefully be “a gateway to online shopping. According to Internet Retailer Magazine, mobile commerce (M-commerce) accounted for 30 percent of all e-commerce sales in 2015. That’s a 38.7 percent increase over 2014, putting revenues to just over $104 billion.
How did we get to a time where mobile purchases accounted for nearly a third of all digital commerce sales in the United States?
With M-commerce on the rise, it’s not enough to realize how much M-commerce is growing. To be truly effective at marketing and selling through this channel, retailers should be aware of the reasons why it’s growing in order to better engage customers through this shopping platform.
Smartphone Ownership
According to Pew Research, 68 percent of Americans owned smartphones in 2015 – a figure up from 35 percent in 2011. With smartphone ownership on the rise, it’s no wonder M-commerce numbers are rising with it. Using smartphones to shop is only natural, especially since they’ve become computers on-the-go. Now, the entire web is at consumers’ fingertips no matter where they might be – and forward-thinking retailers and app developers have come to realize that consumers want to shop using their smartphones, the same as they would using a computer.
Mobile-Friendly Websites
There used to be a day when a consumer could look at a website for their favorite retailer on their phone, and be frustrated that it wasn’t mobile-friendly. That’s where tech-savvy retailers, who began thinking mobile-first, began to transform their existing websites into either responsive mobile designs, which adapt their website appearance to the type and size of a visitor’s device, or specialty mobile designs, which are built specifically for mobile users with less overall functionality but improved design for purchasing behaviors.
Similar Web issued a report in 2015 stating that more than 55 percent of traffic to today’s leading websites is from mobile devices, an increase of 14 percent over 2014.Google also released an algorithm update in April 2016 that penalized websites in mobile search results that were not mobile-friendly (though there is no current impact to those same websites in desktop searches). This means sites are being rewarded if they offer a mobile-friendly website, and is a great motivation to move into mobile-friendly territory.
Popular Industries
Which industries are attracting the greatest volume of M-commerce traffic? Similar Web’s 2015 report lists the following industries as the leaders and most-visited by mobile users:
Beauty
Garden and Home
Health
Animals and Pets
Society and People
Auto
Hobbies and Recreation
Sports
Entertainment and Arts
Travel
Industry and Business
Consumer M-Commerce Habits
How are consumers engaging in M-commerce? It varies by industry, so considering a personalized plan for your business is one key to successfully engaging consumers through this channel. Even if customers don’t purchase a vacation, plane ticket, or car directly from their mobile device, their mobile device is playing a key role by giving that consumer the necessary information to make a purchase decision.
“For consumers, mobile devices have become an extension of the research and comparison phase of shopping, especially as they can quickly find products and reviews, as well as check their rewards through loyalty programs or credit cards via their mobile device,” said Amy Parsons, Vice President of Global Commerce at Discover. “Retailers should consider being present in the mobile channel based on what’s best for their type of business, whether it’s an app, mobile-friendly website, or social media channels, in order to reach customers and deliver relevant information.”
This means that even if your business as part of an industry where most sales are completed via desktop or even in-person (such as a car dealership), you should consider investing in the mobile platform as a part of your digital marketing strategy, knowing your customers will use mobile tools to come to an informed purchasing decision.
Key Takeaways
As the busy holiday shopping season nears, now is a key time to ask how you can improve your brand’s efforts around M-commerce. Do you need to hire a consultant to help your brand meet your customer’s mobile shopping expectations? How can you use your current website analytics (such as bounce rates and popular pages) to enhance your customer’s overall mobile research and purchase experience? Are you doing everything you can to make it easy to be found in mobile searches and to be user-friendly once customers find you?
The easier it is for your customers to complete a mobile purchase, the sooner you’ll start to build engagement among this digitally-demanding customer demographic. M-commerce is on the rise, which means the “M” piece of your digital shopping experience could reach new heights as well.
It’s easy to take your website for granted. The site works, after all. You paid special attention and invested heavily while developing it in the past. But in a digital world, your website keeps increasing in importance. And it may need updating.
Copywriter Tom Trush lists six signs it’s time to act:
– You need a designer just to make simple website updates: Search engines are focused on high-quality, consistently updated material, so it’s vital you can make regular changes. Ideally you want a content management system that makes such improvements easy.
– You don’t have a clear sales-lead funnel: Your website should not just be an online brochure, providing information about your company. “It should prompt action from your visitors in a way that grows and maintains relationships. If your website isn’t part of this process, it’s probably not doing much good for you,” he says.
– Your website looks outdated and isn’t mobile-friendly: Your website needs to compare favourably to competitors – it’s your storefront, and should be modern, accentuating your brand. And it must be mobile-friendly, something on which many sites get a failing grade. Ironically, some firms are failing by trying to be mobile-friendly: A Nielsen-Norman Group study found that the attempt to hide navigation behind a hamburger menu (the three-line button, often to the side of a page) because of smaller mobile screens, only makes reading sites more difficult. It found a 20 per cent drop in discoverability on both mobiles and desktops for sites with hidden navigation, hampering people from completing their tasks.
– Your bounce rate is high: If 70 per cent (or more) of visitors to your site only view one page, Mr. Trush says your content may not be delivering enough value to people. But he adds that landing pages can skew your bounce rate, making it seem worse than it is because users were directed to the page they needed from elsewhere.
– Your organization has made changes: If you have added employees, moved locations, or adjusted your marketing approach, the website should reflect those changes.
– You haven’t made updates in a year: Search engines love fresh content and you should love being of high appeal to search engines (and through them, potential prospects). Fresh content shows you’re active and improving. “If you’ve neglected your website, what message does this send about how you handle other areas of your business?” Mr. Trush concludes.
If you decided on an update, digital marketing consultant Monika Beck offers three tips to make it exceptional:
– Don’t make your website a brochure: Echoing Mr. Trush, she stresses the best sites are interactive, a dynamic source of information. Brochure sites tend to be static, and don’t grow in scale easily. “Brochure websites are about your business. The best websites should be about your target market. … Your website must be able to educate, inform, and even entertain your visitors,” she writes in WomenOnBusiness.
– Create a powerful first impression: Most people will land on your home page and the first few seconds there are critical. If poorly designed, it will drive people away from your company – and products. You want an effective call to action that indicates what you want folks to do now that they are on your home page. Give them a hint – and incentive – for what’s next. Include customer testimonials (at least one on the home page with links to a testimonials page) and write about how you are helping your customers (instead of focusing, as too often is the case, on your company). Add impactful images that tell your firm’s story, avoiding stock photos, and offer contact information, preferably with a phone number at the top of the page and physical address at the bottom. “Showing your contact information is an instant credibility builder,” Ms. Beck says.
– Optimize for search engines: This will include making a list of the target keywords you want to rank for – she recommends having 100 – creating at least one page for each keyword, and making sure that keyword is in the first paragraph and also found three to five times throughout the content. “Don’t stuff the keyword. Having your keyword in the content 25 times will not help. Use related keywords,” she warns.
There’s much more, of course. But those hints should help you evaluate your site and what can come next.
2. Finding honourable closure
Sometimes things go on and on. Your team is drifting, and needs somebody to provide an escape hatch – but one that honours your effort. On her blog, consultant Jesse Lyn Stoner cites these four instances for such closure.
– Is the meeting over?: The end of each team meeting is an important moment. You need to indicate what comes next and get people prepared to follow through on commitments. “Honorable closure creates focus and clarity. It can be as simple as taking a few minutes to recap decisions, next steps, appreciate what was accomplished and to thank team members,” she writes.
– Has the original goal been met by the team? If you don’t formally close a project that is completed, team members may continue to meet without a sense of what they are doing and why. Call a special meeting to acknowledge and celebrate what was accomplished. If other items seem worth attacking, define it as a new project. “Perhaps the same people will continue, but don’t assume it. Look at the project goals, the skills required, the interest of current members, and whether additional members are needed,” Ms. Stoner says.
– Is the purpose still relevant?: There may be more work to be done but times have changed and the issue is no longer significant enough to justify the effort. Refocus your purpose, or honourably call a halt.
– Have the members outgrown the group?: A support group can meet for a number of years but is no longer needed because the members have matured. But nobody wants to quit as that would seem disloyal and the group might well have moved from providing crucial support to each other to just becoming a social gathering, leaving some satisfied and some dissatisfied. Acknowledge what has happened and seek honourable closure.
3. Surviving the blade years
Entrepreneurs celebrate hockey stick growth, times when their sales and profitability grow rapidly at an angle that resembles a hockey stick’s handle. But before that cheerful time can come a period when growth is as flat as the stick’s blade.
Entrepreneur and angel investor Bobby Martin says almost every business has to endure what he calls “The Blade Years” to get to a point where it thrives. That phase usually lasts three to four years during which revenue is low if not nonexistent. “The stress of inadequate funds, feeling burned out, and experiencing extreme highs and lows leaves many founders overwhelmed and in a place of wanting to give up and wondering if they should keep going,” he writes on Thoughtleadersllc.com.
That’s a period to bootstrap, taking on as many projects as possible yourself to save money on staff and also seeking an outside source of income to free you from the emotional burden of not having revenue from the company. Don’t overspend in this period on marketing, which unfortunately too often is the case. Instead, spend time researching your market and improving your offering.
Finally, avoid sudden changes. “When the going gets tough, it is easy to want to make big changes and quickly. Knee-jerk reactions like these, especially during The Blade Years, may be catastrophic to the business,” Mr. Martin observes. Weigh your options, considering whether tweaks will beat lurches.
4. Quick hits
Etsy, the global online marketplace, encourages employees to document their mistakes and how they happened in public e-mails. “It’s called a PSA and people will send out an e-mail to the company or a list of people saying I made this mistake, here’s how I made that mistake, don’t you make this mistake,” CEO Chad Dickerson explains.
– Venture capitalist Fred Wilson recently looked through the iOS and Android app stores looking for non-game apps that had broken into the top 100 and stayed there for months. He couldn’t find any and that suggests launching a consumer-focused mobile app and getting sustained traction is almost impossible right now. Sure, somebody might manage it but the odds are stacked against such businesses these days.
– Boards dominated by conservatives pay their CEOs more than boards with a preponderance of liberals, research shows.
– The value for an in-store shopping trip comes from discovery, trial, and instant gratification, says marketing consultant Bryan Eisenberg. Apple stores understand that, with their test drives and passionate employees helping you discover the gadget’s features and making the sale if you’re dutifully enchanted. Rethink your store’s shopping carts and checkout lines. Eliminate friction – things that slow down customers – and give them discovery, trial and instant gratification.
– Consultant Jurgen Appelo advises redesigning your checklist of travel items so each has a preferred spot: Personal items, carried on your body; shoulder bag; carry-on luggage; check-in luggage. This provides smaller individual lists, is easier to oversee, and helps you know where chargers and other items are.
There are several reasons why your wireless signal is spotty or non-existent in some areas of your farm office – all of them can be frustrating. You just want reliable and speedy internet, is that so much to ask? It’s not, and it is possible to fix. Here are some tips and tools to help you improve the wireless connection in your smart office:
1. Check your antenna direction. If your wireless router has antennas, check the direction. The ideal position for maximum reach is one antenna pointing straight up and the other horizontally.
2. Avoid interference. Consider moving the location or position of your router to avoid interference from metal furniture, brick walls or other electronics.
3. Update your wireless software and firmware. Login to your router’s admin console and check for updates of the firmware. You should also check your computers and mobile devices to ensure that your wireless connection software is up-to-date.
4. Check your connected network. Some internet service providers give you access to login to mobile hotspots in the community. When you it set to automatically connect, it can do the same at elsewhere so make sure you avoid setting your ISP to connect automatically.
5. Connect to the better band. If you have newer router, you’ll notice that there are two networks – one for 2.4Ghz and one for 5Ghz. The 5Ghz band has less noise (fewer devices such as cordless phones and garage door openers), but is less likely to penetrate walls.
6. Repeat it. Wireless repeaters can extend your network throughout your office space, building or farm. Check out products and services like Ayrstone, eero and Luma. There are plenty of options for wireless repeaters, but these companies offer easy setup.
7. Replace it. If your router is old, it may be time to replace it. You can purchase a newer model online or contact your ISP to request a newer model as a part of your service agreement. They will not let you know when it is time to upgrade – you have to take action on your own!
How to stay safe on the internet Press Release from Oconee Co. Sheriff's OfficePublished:
With much of our lives centered around computers, technology and the internet, the Oconee County Sheriff’s Office is offering these tips to help keep you and your family safe.
“The Sheriff’s Office has committed itself to providing helpful information to help you and your family from becoming a victim,” according to Oconee County Sheriff’s Office Public Information Officer Jimmy Watt. “This includes updates periodically on various types of scams but also information, such as is contained in this press release, on how you protect yourself while you enjoy visiting the internet and your favorite sites and staying in touch with family and friends.”
The Sheriff’s Office is offering the following internet safety tips:
• If anyone calls claiming to be from a technology company and you did not initiate the call and they say that your computer contains viruses or malware or has some type of problem and if you pay money they will repair your computer or remove the harmful items, it is a scam and if you allow those individual(s) remote access to your computer, then your computer could be compromised and any personal or financial information could be compromised and other information could be erased or held for ransom. If someone from the outside gains remote access to your computer in this way, contact your local law enforcement agency immediately and do not pay any ransom, as this could further embolden the scammers. Also, make sure you have your files backed up in a virtual cloud environment and/or on some type of thumb drive.
• Change you passwords on a frequent basis and use different passwords for each internet account you have. The more unique you make them and the more difficult to guess, the better the chance you have from becoming a victim.
• You may also want to consider using two-factor authentication, which provides an additional layer of security by using a second known device. For example, when you change something on your account, such as a password, a text can be sent to you phone advising you of the change.
• Set your internet and social media accounts on the highest security level possible and post as little personal information as you can. Anything could be potentially used by individuals looking to scam and/or steal personal and financial information.
• If someone sends you an e-mail with an attachment and/or a link to another site and you do not know that person, do not open the attachment and/or click on the link as this is a way for viruses, malware or Trojans to be downloaded on your computer or allow someone to gain remote access to your computer.
• Be careful in regards to the sites you log into while in public places that offer Wi-Fi service as those hotspots may not provide enough security.
• Make sure you have your computer’s firewall turned on at all times and keep your antivirus software updated and current. Also make sure that the critical updates on your operating system for your computer are current.
• Look out for social media scams that offer gifts cards, for example, as a prize for taking a survey or for online shopping scams that offer merchandise at discounted prices. If an offer sounds too good to be true, more often than not it is and it could be used to steal personal or financial information.
How to stay safe on the internet Press Release from Oconee Co. Sheriff's OfficePublished:
