Keyword research can conquer the search engines for you! 7 ways

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Content is king! It arrests qualified traffic to business information and potentially converts them into customers. But what brings that qualified traffic to your website?

Perhaps the least talked about tools, keywords are the smallest component of your digital marketing structure. Not less than magical phrases, they could make or break your business based on how you capitalize upon them. While debates about paid searches taking over have started, experts have it – ‘it’s early to overlook organic traffic, too early’.

As an enthusiastic service provider, you ought to stay intact to keyword research, for they would acknowledge back with the following benefits.

Higher rankings in organic search

Everything begins here! The idea of using keywords in content laid the foundation of Search engine Marketing and stays unbeatable even today. Strategic placing of keywords in content can cause dramatic fluctuation in your rankings. Use appropriate keywords especially in root domain names, page titles, URL and even anchor texts. Also, this is the most cost effective tool in digital marketing. The need to adapt paid searches arises when your organic strategy isn’t working. Work on it!

Though paid search results have gained momentum, more than 75% of searchers still go for organic results than PPC campaigns.

They help discover new business ideas

Broaden your research a step further and you may encounter new keywords hinting at potential business opportunities. For example, one of our clients dealt with mobile accessories. We were working on expected keyword shortlisting such as ‘mobile covers’, ‘best mobile covers’ etc. However, drilling more we discovered tremendous searches for ‘mobile leather covers’. The business wasn’t dealing with the product but ventured into it soon and generated huge sales.

Leaving room for some more researching in your plan will definitely unearth new ideas. Try different combinations and track their performances.

High volume traffic

The most traditional yet effective metric is the use of frequently used keywords. After so many trends setting in, using most popular searched keywords still garners tremendous traffic to the site; which in turn fuels your online presence dramatically. However, such keywords have to be stapled with relevant content, appropriate density and the quality of traffic received.

The competition is cut throat and capturing high volumes of traffic stays a challenge. It’s too early to overlook high frequency keywords. Keep intact your traditional know how and inculcate all popular keywords.

 

Better engagement with readers

Since keywords attract high volumes, it eventually concluded to way better connectivity with readers. Hubspot confirmed businesses that blog and take it seriously experienced a record 95% hike in inbound links and 50% more visitors to their websites. Blogging is a lucrative medium to address user queries and boost engagement with readers. Again, appropriate selection of keywords is the game changing metric here.

Helps bridge language gaps

The web has an indefinite reach and a business’ native language hardly covers every culture. This deprives them from potential users who are looking out for similar services as they but can’t really reach due to language differences. While releasing your product and services in every language isn’t a solution, keywords can help.

Keyword research can lead you to relative searches conducted in different languages. According to your geographic reach, you could think of expanding your services to the selective yet most convenient foreign lands. At least the valuable insights could be used to publish digital / traditional advertising content in a different language, thus reach more people.

Understand what’s your competition is up to

Everyone’s out and transparent over the web! While Google has been trying to keep a check on blatant copying of content (and succeeded though), it is hard for competitors to entirely hide their marketing strategy and be the silent player. While there’s no direct way of deriving what your competitor is upto, keywords could lead you to insightful information.

Just a simple search can lead you to the businesses with the same keywords as you. Think about the dedicated tools that are capable of retrieving near to accurate information about businesses playing around with keywords.

They help achieve better website experience

Firstly, keywords are a great reference source to improve information in the content and even add new pages for potential exclusive services. Fine tuning your website content is a continuous exercise and directly thrives according to the feedback from keyword research.

Secondly, keywords could be aptly used to navigate to other pages. Keywords as hyperlinks in the landing pages can route to more detailed content; may be another page, whitepapers, case studies etc.

This cuts down on extended browsing time invested in fetching valuable information. Readers actually prefer being walked through than manual scanning.

Intrigued? Let our consultants take the next step for you

Is your business prepared for Content Marketing? 7 signs it isn’t

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Most and especially small scale businesses may not have capitalized upon the hugely anticipated verticals of Content publishing and marketing. The reason could be many that directly hint at their unpreparedness for the transforming trends. Writing and throwing a blog in the ocean called web shows how primitive your perception towards the market is.

Content Marketing is essential, as essential as it is to have application developers on board. However, certain prerequisites have to be assured.

  1. Absence of Marketing Strategy in Place

Let’s get over the myth that Content Marketing is one of your many strategies in the portfolio. Infact, it is a catalyst to boost your current marketing approach. So, before you plunge at publishing blogs, white papers and case studies make sure you know your target leads, their expectations and your readiness to serve them. Marketing content without inculcating a set strategy is just an unprepared attempt towards trial and error.
What to do – Have an intricately researched plan to pitch the market and ‘then’ utilize the content power to capture attention. If it is still a strategy for you, then execute it in the end.

  1. Ineffective customer interaction

CRM tools sell like hot cakes for some reason. Capturing customer response towards services is highly important to inspire improvements and address their grievances faultlessly. The best blogs waste no time in tapping upon valuable information that an end user would want to consume. Thus, just copying content ideas from here and there in the name of reference would fetch no substantial returns.

What to do – Identify your customer interaction mediums and share the analytics data with the content team, the same as you do with the sales guys. This is aimed at prioritizing more relate able topics.

  1. You are dependent on a team of ‘journalists’

The decade left us with a valuable lesson of the R&D significance. The most talked about brands had their bets placed on innovation backed by rigorous research. While the competition gets aggressive, it is highly required that you identify the gaps and roll out exclusive solutions.
Content quality depends extensively on never heard before opinions and solutions. A team of writers only can assure superlative hold over vocabulary; is that what you had wanted?

What to do – Include writers with sound technical knowledge of the subject. The same should inspire them to conduct real time research and curate content that hits the bull’s eye.

  1. Promoting your product

Ofcourse that’s where all roads lead to! But the ‘shout out loud’ approach and flooding the social channels with your product features, success stories etc shall irritate the reader and you may end up in a spam’s folder. Understand this – you have to begin by ‘addressing a trending confusion’ your potential lead is locking horns with.

While walking through the solutions, you could utilize the platform in mentioning about your own product and that how it actually resolves the inconsistency. Many a times you may have to discuss the market challenges without mentioning your product.
The lead connects more with you since you are concerned about ‘resolving the issue’ and not ‘promoting your product’.

What to Do – Encourage your writers to come up with standalone opinions. Let them emerge as Content consultants and not just writers. They should match up to the surface level technical knowledge at the minimum.

  1. You are not writing for Search Engines

Time to discard another myth that SEO is a thing of the past! It may not be the crusader anymore but laughing at search engines is like ignoring the entire web. Your content has to be optimally verified before it gets published. All your content marketing efforts are nothing more than an average attempt at shouting in the waters.

What to do – Have a dedicated team of digital marketers. Keep your basics intact and work with essential keywords, trending topics and complying with all SEO norms.

  1. And that you are only writing for Search Engines

The missing art of story telling is the pain point here. Actually, a finely tuned balance is needed to satiate both – search engines and humans. You have to write smartly to attract search engines and write creatively to attract readers. The reader has to connect and get convinced that the paper talks about his business. As in point 5, content is not aimed at selling business directly. Only through tapping upon real time customer experiences, stronger relationships could be weaved.

What to do – keeping the end user in mind, use simplified language and steer your focus towards addressing more concerns.

  1. Not analyzing the response

Content Analytics – that’s another critical area you may have overlooked. Writing and writing more to publish more worked a decade ago. Your next move to market content should have improvements inspired from the feedback data of previous consumption. Why did or did not a specific article gained more readers, readers cross questioning in the comments, level of agreement or disagreement etc. could all be analyzed.

What to do – Checkout for the most effective Content Marketing analytics tools and build dedicated teams for it.

Don’t expect the results tomorrow! Content Marketing rests on long term benefits that take off steadily. Posting and evaluating the effort again and again will fetch nothing. Remember, Digital Marketing is itself making a significant shift towards ‘slow and steady’ and that’s where you need to hold on.

7 tips to boost conversion rate through PPC

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The beauty of PPC campaigning rests with the outmost flexibility you have to analyze the performance. Right from going selective about the plan you opt, to duration, visibility metrics and cost, Pay Per Click campaigning is steadily leading the digital marketing portfolio next to organic search.

However, with instant access to all scales of businesses, there’s more to it than firing a campaign only.
Here’s what you could follow to capture maximum benefits out of PPC campaigning.

Prioritize the customer from step 1.

Don’t advertise everything and anything through PPC ads. Have a definite goal targeting a certain group. Follow a user’s perspective and steadily track back to step 1.

This will allure users that the campaign was meant for them and that the brand could be the best pick for the services they need.

The shortlisted keywords should align perfectly with the business needs and the ads will fuel more conversions. This is because you had boiled down from everything to what actually is searched upon.

Start with smaller campaigns

And proceed steadily. Begin with keywords of highest frequency and design campaigns of smaller scope. With lower risk factor, you’ll have the advantage of testing different keywords and campaign titles and ultimately zero upon the best combination.

Expectations out of PPC are always tempting. Don’t make a waste out of haste.

Optimize your Landing Pages

Usually, landing pages record sooner exit rates if not made user friendly and visited through PPC ads. Every click counts and this is your ultimate opportunity to arrest a user’s interest.

Publish highly readable yet informative, use appropriate fonts, ensure a swift UX and strategically placed CTA’s.

Shift focus from product features to how users could benefit from. Also, fine tune a balance between too long and too short page lengths, something that syncs with your brand essence.

Make optimal use of Search Query Reports

All leading PPC hosts offer analytical reporting about the campaign performance. Many businesses tend to ignore it. Search reports provide deep insights about how every component in the ad campaign performed. You could ask for data pertaining to a particular region and time zone.

You can easily segment the traffic data to your website for a broader evaluation of your efforts.

Capitalize upon ‘Dayparting’ and Geological settings

These are perhaps the game changing features to hit Bull’s eye. Dayparting allows use to switch on or off the campaign during a particular time or interval. Subsequently, Geological settings help run a campaign for a specific region.

Such tools narrow down your hunt for a targeted group and invite relevant visitors only. Streamlined effort adds up to a much better conversion rate in the end.

Try Call Only Campaigns, they work

Landing pages are the riskiest part of a conversion cycle. A page layout/design of reader’s interest can only be guessed while all can’t be convinced. Thus, a few yet significant number of readers may exit the page with incomplete purchase sessions. As an alternative, Call only campaigns could be used to discount on the time invested in browsing through the page.

Call only campaigns allows the users to call the service directly from the ad. While only interested users contact your business, the negated extra effort contributes to the conversion rate.

Perform A/B Tests appropriately

Based on your campaigns scope and ROI expected, A/B tests may either be needed to be executed again and again or they may be required to terminate beyond a point.

When performed for longer duration, test runs built confusion with no clear gains. It is wise to decide upon the maximum possible gain anticipated so far.

At the same time, you should not hesitate to perform multiple runs and be entirely satisfied. Test every element. Accuracy at the smallest level contributes towards accurate conversion rate figures.

Bonus Tip: Advertise discounts, offers and other lucrative deals

PPC campaigns are perhaps the best mediums to advertise your seasonal offers. Firstly, the banner gets a default catchy design to attract more visitors. Secondly, discounts have a great record in converting leads. Inculcating both, nicely publish the tagline without telling away everything about the offer on the ad itself (since the idea is to compel a use to click the ad).

You may include anything, coupon codes, discounts or festive announcements. Such advertisements have a huge positive impact and are effective in luring more visits. Keep the message brief and anticipating. High conversions are guaranteed.

5 ways content could flip the game for underperforming sales team

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The toughest job in the world is at the receiving end every time. While a successful customer win is duly credited to the marketing, product developers and the sales, any failure is arrowed at the sales reps entirely. A lot has been talked about the real time challenges and the solutions ranged from better communication skills, to code of conduct and the knack to sell.

However, smarter brains have already asked their content teams to deliver innovative strategies that could help sales team perform better.

The following content marketing ideas are proven to have fueled the sales rep with better ideas for field discussions.

Pitch your Sales rep / team as Solution Advisors

The common buyer is well versed with marketing tactics spinned by a sales rep to close deals. This has deteriorated the reputation of a usual sales rep as evident from a recent study conducted by LinkedIn. It states more than 90% of prospects won’t engage with you because they know what the sales is coming up with and that it’s a waste of time. Also, they don’t expect the sales rep to clarify their technical queries about the product.

Encourage your sales team to share content about your product and the industry across their social channels. They should emerge as professional thinkers with an opinion of their own and not just ‘sales rep’. Let them have their take on what’s the next topic should be blogged about.

This will boost confidence at both ends – the sales rep and the buyer. Better leads are guaranteed!

Let everyone in the sales team have access to analytical reports

‘I’ll connect you with our technical team’ is the most usual and frustrating line expected out of a sales rep. Before the prospect puts forward his budget constraints, it is imperative for your sales rep to have last moment touch points. These should be actual facts hinting at your previous client’s experience, your plans to expand and many more. The prospect has to be convinced that his competitor is up for it and that the business should waste no time.

To fuel thoughts for such extempore minutes, share the analytics data with not just the sales head / managers but the rep at the bottom most level. They should be handy with impressive facts to counter the prospect that budget is actually not the constraint.

Make the access to such reports and studies instantly available to the teams.

Let the sales rep personalize the content with own experiences

Too much of marketing content restricts the scope of discussion to the product features. Your product may or may not be fulfilling the buyer’s expectation. To counter this, the sales rep should promote the product as a flexible tool that would customize as and when asked for.

To support this, he needs great content! Something beyond usual product features, testimonials, guides etc. Let the sales guy add own significant points. He could include actual pain points raised by previous customers and that how he assisted them with relevant solution. There’s a lot sales guys bring in from their prior encounters.

Of course, the additions can always be fine tuned by the content team before making it final.

Create innovative templates for sales rep’s email communications

Firstly, the rep will develop more interest towards what new the content team is doing. Secondly, beautiful yet informative templates will encourage a positive conversation with the prospect. Let them have the choice to add or delete what they want to. It resonates well with the personalization point discussed earlier.

Add links to case studies, white papers and even your website’s landing page. Without hovering away from the actual point of discussion, the marketing message could smartly carry the brand essence.

Believe it or not! It does leave an impact!

Let the sales rep know the prospect, in & out

Forrester has it that more than 75% of prospects don’t get convinced because the sales rep had no idea of the problem they faced. This is perhaps the most important take away from this post – ‘knowing your prospect more than he does’. Qualified leads do get botched up when the sales guy fails to address extempore questions.

The content team could fix this. They are always researching the market and are handy with sufficient data about what problems were faced by different businesses and how exactly their vendors resolved them. The sales team could use this knowledge base in understanding their prospects better.

Equip your sales team with content filtered by industries and business scales. If there isn’t much available about the prospect’s past, content about a business from similar industry could cover up the communication gap at the discussion time.

Content is the king because it drives the thought process for various verticals of your business and sales wing is no different.

You don’t have to create more content but create it differently.

5 reasons ‘Accelerated Mobile Pages’ can storm traffic to your website

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Don’t you hate your blog posts not loading swiftly over mobile phones? A lot has been discussed about how important a mobile friendly website is. But how exactly do we pull it off? You have had a website that displays accurately on mobile phones and tablets. What’s next?

After achieving that exclusive display size for different screens, it’s time to focus on loading them quickly; and it directly impacts your digital marketing response – content, traffic, conversions, analytics everything. ‘Accelerated Mobile Pages’ has the game set going for mobile marketing.

It reduces exit rates, almost kills them forever

Nothing is more inspiring than faster loading. Browsers locking horns with lethargic loading and moving to something else until the first screen opens is something AMP heals forever. It loads your post in a flash and perfectly responds to user’s scrolling. The result is – more valuable time spent and a drastically low bounce rate. What else are you dreaming of?

It’s one more (effective) reason to generate revenue over mobile

So here’s the deadlock earlier – Mobile ads generated revenue for publishers but burdened the site to load sluggishly and ultimately poor UX. Without them, pages loaded fine but publishers lost added revenue.

Accelerated Mobile Pages help monetize your site. As stated by the team behind project AMP – “It provides support for a comprehensive range of ad formats, ad networks and technologies in Accelerated Mobile Pages.” That is – you could publish ads without bandwidth issues and still let the reader focus on reading. Best of both ends fine tuned, nicely and accurately!

AMP does Analytics too! As good as Google Analytics

AMP discounts on added effort invested into tracking the happenings over the page. From Unique versus Repeated clicks, new visitors and subscribers, time spent, conversions etc., everything gets recorded and reported exclusively as asked for.

All types of social interactions and age view details get evaluated. Add to it the seamless integration with all leading Analytics platform (Yes Google Analytics covered), one more reason to use it now!

Enhanced visibility to the reader and thus the publisher

Posts powered by AMP appear separately with green symbol in the list. While the awareness for AMP is increasingly covering the common reader, they are already going selective with ‘Green’ marked pages to read since they load faster. It will take some more time for AMP to become too common, thus it’s the best time for you to plunge before every other post is ‘Green’.

Higher search rankings are directly influenced!

AMP has all the backing from Google

Google (and other search engines too) have confirmed a dramatic rise in search rankings for AMP pages. This has been done to encourage better user experience and do away with loading issues forever.

Also, the split-test becomes way too easier for AMP pages. The site owners are acknowledge with the display errors you had always wanted and many more.

Still not convinced? Go live without AMP and Google will remind you to adapt AMP soon. There’s already an official message floating around. You ought to since Google said so.

Get AMPed now!