by Karl Hudson | Mar 27, 2014 | Search Engine Optimisation
Are you still at the crossroads about whether to hire an SEO agency or not? Many business and website owners can relate to this dilemma though, so you should not be all that scared about figuring out the pros and cons of paying companies that provide search engine optimisation services.
Pros
There are many advantages that you can get from relying on outside resources to promote your business online. Knowing the following advantages would likely convince you now to hire SEO specialists:
- Cut down on your workload. As if it isn’t enough that you have to take care of your business and make sure that you’re still making money, you also have to think about how to keep the public aware of your products and services. You can focus more on managing your business if you hire experts who know what the latest SEO techniques are. You will also have the assurance that all the services will be provided by skilled and devoted staff from analysts and copywriters to editors and marketing professionals. All these people work as a team with the ultimate goal of optimising your website and increasing its ranking in the search engine results page. You can also hire consultants if you want to develop in-house services.
- Expect professional help. Given the fact that you will get your services from an established online marketing company, you can expect that only professionals will handle your project. These experts would determine what your website needs after careful analysis, then come up with methods to increase your ranking in the SERP without the risk of doing something unethical. Good SEO service providers only pursue white hat techniques, such as organic link building, blogging, and other methods that require providing the web users with fresh, useful, and relevant content. The staff will provide all the help that you need to ensure a sustainable success for your website.
- Save time and money. If you hire a professional Internet marketing firm, you won’t need to train your own staff, which would have cost you a lot of time and money on your part. The good news is that the competition between the different firms has led to the availability of services with very competitive prices.
- Conduct a fairly easy brand awareness campaign. As what was mentioned before, the ultimate goal of SEO efforts is to increase the visibility of your website in the search engine results page. This can be achieved through guest blogging, link building, directory submission, article marketing, meta tag development, keyword analysis, keyword selection, website analysis, and similar techniques. All these methods would aim to increase your conversion rates. Your website visitors will turn into customers who actually buy from you.
Cons
The biggest drawback in hiring SEO agencies is that you won’t be in full control of your online business. Remember that you will be handing the reins to the promotion of your business to outsiders, who are also likely to promote themselves as experts. That’s why it is even more important to screen all the companies that are offering their services to you.
The worst thing about entrusting your online promotions to outsiders is the feeling of being kept in the dark. It can be quite frustrating if you don’t know what is going on with your business or how it is perceived by the market. You will also have to pay them for whatever it is that they are doing, especially if you hired a company that does not provide results-oriented services. Regardless of the results, you are required to pay them for their services. However, you can avoid this by hiring a company that fosters transparency in providing their services. They will consult with you, tell you what they are about to do, what the expected results are, and what actually happened after the plans were implemented.
In the name of transparency, the team will try to explain to you their process of promoting your business online. You have to at least learn the basics about SEO. It would be even better if the service provider will let you give some input and update you about what they are doing with every major step in the process. You will still feel a bit in control over your website instead of being alienated from the project.
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by Karl Hudson | Mar 25, 2014 | Search Engine Optimisation
In 2013, search engines are all about content. This is expected to continue in 2014, especially with the fierce emphasis of the executives from Google and Bing to promote good user experience. Copywriting services will likely become more in demand this year.
Search engines define quality user experience as the ability of the users to find the answers in that they are looking for in your high quality content. This is worth pursuing given how becoming popular online and offline all boils down to good content.
According to marketers, 92% of their population rely on content creation for search engine optimisation. A survey even showed that it is still the most effective promotional strategy there is. However, the post-Panda times make it hard to pass any content as a good one.
Content Marketing Is All About The Content
If you want to establish contact and influence your market, you will need to pay them back with information, which is often seen as a valuable currency these days. This further emphasises that content is still king. A marketing campaign will lose steam quickly if it is based on bad content. To get long-lasting results, you need to produce good content at all times. This might mean a costly investment on your part, but it will be paid back in terms of increased visibility and better ROI.
Remember how search engines like Google really appreciate high quality content. This will in turn earn you broader search coverage, which can lead to increased website traffic that increases the ROI.
The Role of Content in Inbound Marketing
You can use content to attract the attention of your target customer during the different phases in their relationship with you in the following ways:
- Knowing-you phase. Blog content can be used during this stage because this is when you can introduce your products or services through organic search. This may later give way to premium contents from seminars and eBooks. The blogs might be your first point of contact with the customer so if you’re not that confident about writing them, you can hire SEO experts that provide copywriting services.
- Liking-you phase. The customers’ awareness of your business should be nurtured with the use of newsletters. This is when you can show them the extent of your knowledge, expertise, resources, and experience without overselling yourself. The newsletters may be eBooks or a series of emails composed of several blog posts.
- Trusting-you phase. Once you have captured the attention of your target customers, they have to learn to trust you. You can gain their trust through case studies, customer-generated videos, and customer success stories. It also helps if you get links, considered as votes of confidence, from other websites and good words from your customers through social media. During this phase, many customers who genuinely love your offers would be more than happy to participate in producing content for you.
- Trying-you phase. This phase is often neglected, but it is actually a good motivator to convince people to buy from you. The appropriate content here would be offline and online seminars, eBooks, and survey processes. At this point, you will have to deliver sample products or services at a zero or lower cost. You may also want to rely on workbooks, videos, checklists, and examples.
- Buying-from-you phase. This is another phase that many business owners missed out on during their marketing campaigns, thinking that customers have already bought from them anyway. However, it will significantly improve customer experience if you educate them about your products and services using content, such as an orientation or a new customer kit about what you are selling. You can give them in-depth user manuals or quick start guides.
- Repeat-buying-from-you phase. You would not want to wait around until the customers will realise that they still need your products and services. Enlist the help of your customers in spreading their success stories showing how good your offerings are.
- Refer-you phase. Make referrals easy on the part of your existing customers by developing certain tools for them. Work with your copywriting services to come up with content that will make introducing your business to other clients less challenging for your loyal customers.
Content creation is certainly an important aspect of any marketing campaign. It ushers new customers to your business, make them loyal to you, remind them of you, and help them convince other customers to come to you too.
by Karl Hudson | Mar 14, 2014 | Social Media Marketing
Ecommerce design and usability factors have an extraordinary impact on the success or failure of a webpage. Optimizing your ecommerce site according to best usability and design standards is a must for all entrepreneurs thinking of jumping on the bandwagon with an online business. Here are a few tips and guidelines on ecommerce usability and design.
Perfect Design in ecommerce:
Ecommerce design is not all about fancy eye-catching colours, layouts; Instead it should be something that shows your visitors how professional and high quality your services/product are/is. If your visitors don’t understand what you sell and cannot figure out how to use your page to find out then they wont spend anything. It is also highly important to develop and design your ecommerce site focusing on SEO factors because more searches means more sales which mean more earnings. Some other key factors to keep in mind are:
- Categorise products
- Use easier navigation system
- Recommend related products
- Use breadcrumbs
- Provide internal searching facility
- Test cross browser compatibility
Usability Practices that Build Trust:
Trust plays a vital role in ecommerce. If visitors don’t find your site to be a trust worthy legit site, then you will never be able to generate profit through ecommerce. Use the usability practices that help establishing trust in market and have already been through trial and error:
- Provide your real and available contact info
- Use logos, Trustmark’s and security badges of your payment methods in your shopping cart to make them more trust worthy.
- Disclose all hidden costs; return ability issues, security issues, shipping costs and others.
Best Usability Practices in Checkout:
Checkout process affects the actual number of sales in ecommerce. If you can make the checkout process simple and quick to use then visitors will more be more likely to buy from your site. Sometimes complexity and confusion in this process create barriers for customers. So, always try to adopt the best checkout process practices such as:
- Let them purchase without registration
- Show a confirmation page before they submit the order
- Break up the checkout process into number of easily understood steps
- Show order details with each and every cost associated with it
- Show easily visible and understood checkout button and shopping cart
- Don’t ask for unnecessary information
Ecommerce Design Factors – Layout Trends:
You must make an appropriate layout for your ecommerce site. The trendy ecommerce layouts have content, rich and longer homepages with fixed headers. Another big issue is responsiveness. Now we are seeing more and more visitors using mobile devices and tabs to access ecommerce sites. So, make sure that your site is responsive in nature so that anyone can get the actual layout of your site using whatever device they have. Some other factors that are an absolute must for the current trend are:
- Larger visual elements
- Social media badges
- Product comparison section (if needed)
- Promo products section
Well, there are lots of them. But you must keep an eye on the market as with everything in the world evolution is prominent online. Here comes the issue of flexibility in design and usability. Make sure when doing changes that your ecommerce design is easy enough to readjust effectively at any time. Also keep continuity on the standard of usability of your ecommerce site. This will ensure that customers you already have will not be startled by changes and it is still a comfortable way for your visitors to surf your page.
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by Karl Hudson | Mar 14, 2014 | Social Media Marketing
In the age of technology that we live in today it has become essential for each and every company to have a web presence. This is to effectively market one’s products and services. Even individuals now have their own websites. But if you run a business or an organization, then you will definitely need to have a website to create awareness about your services, or risk not making anywhere near as much potential customers and profit as you could be making.
To create a website doesn’t need to be taxing on your wallet, with only a little money on the Internet you can go a long way. You have a few affordable web design options. Even if you are not technology literate or you just don’t have the manpower to develop your website online, you can always hire the services of a reputed design firm to take the heavy load of your hands. However, you cannot just pick a company and let them take over the design phase for you. You want to do some research and use a few important criteria that I will go on to explain to you now.
First of all, check to see that the company you are interested in has a nice back catalogue of clients who they have created websites for. Go through this catalogue to see the quality of their work. See if there style matches what you are looking for and see if you they have made websites for any companies that have similar products or services as your own. This will give you an idea of how your website will turn out when they design it for you. So, research is key. Make sure you have checked them out before deciding on hiring them or not.
Secondly, when the Internet was still in its infant phase. Companies charged fortunes for a simple little website. Now it has all changed. You want to find a company that charges a reasonable price for the services. Usually companies that charge you outstanding amounts will also try to squeeze as much more out of you as possible.
Finally, choose a company that will give you a free quote for their web services. Some companies may not have a price on hand and you want to avoid these services. Go for a company that is transparent and is ready to give you a free quote for their services right from the start.
There are lots of different website design services out there, but not all of them would be up to your standard. Some might be well known companies and well respected, this means they could charge heavily for their services. Others may provide services at a reasonable rate, but their quality may be lacking severely. Therefore use this simple criteria to choose a business that is not only established, well reputed and will carry out your web design needs, but will also match the budget you have set. Select a company with a good back catalogue, which can provide a free quote for an affordable web design service. This will help you to find the balance between quality and cost. Therefore getting you a professional looking website at a price that makes your wallet smile.
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by Karl Hudson | Mar 14, 2014 | Search Engine Optimisation
These days, given all the changes from Google, it would be suicide for you to still use less than ethical SEO efforts. That’s why it is important that you at least know the difference between good and bad search engine optimisation efforts. A single mistake may cost you the entire website, which would be such a huge waste of resources on your part.
Ethical search engine optimisation refers to the methods used to optimise websites for the readers and web visitors rather than for search engines. This is the basic difference between white and black hat SEO techniques.
Unethical Tactics Explained
You may know the black hat tactics, which include the following:
- Developing content that creates a poor user experience
- Violating the rules imposed by search engines
- Using content that is meant more to gain the attention of search engine spiders instead of providing useful information to the users
These tactics used to be such a hit years ago. They were even considered legitimate back then. However, the excessive and improper use of these methods caused the search engines to brand them as unethical. Keyword stuffing is probably the most popular example of these black hat SEO techniques. It refers to the method of using a lot of keywords in a content, even if they are not really relevant to the topic.
Other forms of unethical SEO include doorway pages and invisible text. Doorway pages can’t be seen by users. They are mainly used to engage search engine spiders to give the site a higher ranking. Invisible text, on the other hand, makes use of keywords that are coloured in the same way as the background. It could be white on white or black on black, which means they can’t be seen by users but are certainly scanned by search engine spiders. These are tricks used to deceive the bots for a higher SERP ranking. If these methods are used now, you will surely get penalised.
Despite these risks though, there are still a lot of businesses willing to use these bad practices. They produce quick yet temporary results, making it seem like they are effective at first. But when you’re caught, the penalties would range from having a reduced website ranking in the SERP to being banned.
What Is Ethical SEO?
Given the risks that the use of black hat methods entail, website owners, businesses, and marketers realised that the only way to get sustainable and improved results is to use white hat SEO techniques. Add to that the fact that Google has made major changes in its algorithms, being ethical does seem like the best approach towards reaching the first page of the SERP.
In white hat SEO, the methods used are those in compliance with the search engine’s guidelines. It is usually about giving users informative and relevant content.
Content has always been king, but this point has been emphasised now more than ever with the introduction of the Penguin and Panda updates that are designed to ensure a good user experience. Lower quality sites are pushed back in the rankings, while sites with original content are being sent higher up in the SERP.
Content optimisation is best done using targeted keywords. Avoid overusing keywords though if you don’t want to be thought of as using keyword stuffing methods. Content should be original. It can stay unique through regular updates. But the most important thing to remember is to create content for the users, not for the search engines. Otherwise, users would be discouraged to visit your site and search engines may catch you and ban you from their results page.
Meta tags should be used in your white hat promotional efforts. These include title, description, and keywords and serve as an overview to the users and search engines. These tags should be original and relevant to the web page content.
For directory submissions, content should be submitted under relevant categories. A sitemap would help search engines find the links on the site quickly.
Although it would take time for the results to show from ethical SEO methods, they would be long lasting and significant. Temptations to use unethical efforts may be strong, but it’s just not worth it considering how smart Google and other search engines have become.
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