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Most of us know social media is increasingly important to stay ahead in this competitive world. Every business no matter small or big maintains a Facebook and Twitter account to be socially present and promote their business. With the rapid growth in the use of social media by different brands, there is an utmost need to examine the returns and benefits of going “social”. But, how do you measure the value and effectiveness of your social initiatives?

To put a stop for all the run down, Google has finally rolled out its new social reporting in Google Analytics. Google reports allow to track how social marketing efforts turn into site conversions. It allows you to analyze which social networks are driving the most traffic, what is the user activity when they arrive at your site, and how they are sharing the content. Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools have been updated to allow easier analysis of social actions on your site, how the social feedback impacts your search traffic, and the details of your more social visitor base.

According to Google the three main factors that Social Analytics will help with are:

• Determine the full value of traffic coming from social sites and measure how they lead to direct conversions or assist in future conversions.
• Understand social activities happening both online and offline of your site to help you optimize user engagement and increase social key performance indicators (KPIs).
• Enable brands to measure the ROI for social media activities and make better, more effective data-driven decisions in your social media marketing programs.

The current version shows three reports on Analytics:

1. Social Engagement: This report shows how users who interact socially with your data behave on your site. You can track all standard site behaviors (conversion rates, time spent on site, bounce rate, etc.) for the portion of your audience that shared the content.
2. Social Actions:  This is essentially an applied version of the Social Engagement Report that gives you a breakdown of the social feedback a page or site has received.
3. Social Pages: This page lets you examine, at a glance, which pages on your site are most important from a social perspective. The report will let you know which content on your page is generating the most and least interest.

Google Analytics’ New Social Reports:

The new Social Reports are being rolled out to all users, however in few countries it will be completely available over the next month and will be shown under the “Social” tab within the Traffic Sources section of the ‘Standard Reporting’ tab.

The following reports are included in this section:

• Overview
• Sources
• Pages
• Conversions
• Social Plugins
• Social Visitor Flow

Let us view some of the interesting features of the new reports:

Overview Report: This overview report offers a mini-dashboard from which you can get a view of all reports that can be found in the social media section of Google Analytics. The ‘Social Value’ section of this report is mainly useful to see how much conversation value is generated from the different Social Media channels.

Sources and Pages Report: Another addition is the social sources and pages report that displays the number of visits and ‘engagement metrics’ such as page views, duration of time spent and number of pages viewed per visit for each Social Media channel. These two reports work together to help you understand how users are interacting with your content from various social networks and whether it’s leading to a desired outcome.

Conversions Report: The Social Media Conversions report lets you measure the conversion rates that have originated from different social network sites and the monetary value they drive to your business. These reports also show the different types of conversions, whether it was an immediate conversion or a conversion that happened at a due course of time.

Social Plugins Report: This new report is very similar to what is offered today in the Social Action reports. It shows the summary of pages and the social activity that happened when it comes to social plugins in the site, such as clicking on a like, tweet or +1 button.

Social Visitors Flow: Basically, it enables marketers to access a visual representation of path followed by website visitors coming from social sources.

Google Analytics new Social reports are definitely a ‘Game Changer’ addition to the Analytics section. We’re really excited about the possibilities this presents in terms of getting a clear and accurate understanding of how our Social Media Marketing efforts are generating real value that’s easy to measure.

So, what are your thoughts on this new valuable update to Google analytics? Share your views and thoughts.

Online Marketing is the promoting process of a product or service over the internet. It comprises various types of marketing such as Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Email marketing, Display Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Referral Marketing and Affiliate Marketing.

In Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Paid Campaign (Pay Per Click) have been playing the vital roles in driving the traffic and generate revenue for a website. But now, Social Media has become the latest and popular trend for online marketing, where it creates brand awareness and helps building the brand image by attracting not just visitors but those who like your brand or products and helps the visitor or reader to gain the knowledge about the product.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social Media usually focuses on the efforts of creating attractive and attentive content that inspires the readers to share it with their social networks. It has also emerged as a low-cost platform to the organizations for their marketing campaigns.

Promotional Steps of Social Media:

Sharing:

Now a days, social media has become one of the major promotional factors in business as we can reach hundreds and thousands of people across the globe with in short time and promote the business. The great thing about social media is it reduces the cost and time spending.

Moreover, you find most of the people having social network accounts, as they have been addicted to social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinster and Linkedin etc., where they are getting all the global updates in these sites, which are compelling them to spend more time. So, it’s always recommended to choose social media to promote your business and increase the sales of your product or services. As per the recent survey, 57% of US marketers, 9% of Canada and UK marketers, and 5% of Australian marketers have been relying on social media to promote their business.

In order to promote your product or service, you could share some interesting, entertaining and surprising things that you could offer or share with your users. You could share about your products and services through fun stories, painted pictures, info graphs, videos that makes your users share and reshare your content.

Engagement:

Be in consistent and persistent touch with your users or followers by discovering relevant communities of interest and list the choices, needs and impressions of the people within each network. Be a participant of each community you are looking to activate and move beyond marketing your service or product.

Enable yourself to offer rewards and resolutions in times of need. Empower to improve your products or service, with your each participating experience and create, contribute strengthen your service and value. You need to create programs that could make you connected to everyday engagement.

Allow Your Content to go Viral:

As people spend most of their time on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, utilize the opportunity to make your website content go viral, which not only helps in building brand and generating traffic to your website, but also building strong professional relationships. Blogging (Squidoo & Hub Pages), publishing articles in news portal sites, press release sites and guest postings etc are also the significant and helpful resources to get your content go viral.

But, you need to have a perfectly justified, unique, clear and error free content with examples wherever required. You could make your content go viral by building strong content with stand out titles and getting engaged with your community. Remember, the way you present the content is the key in appealing your potential prospects.

Control of Social Media:

Ability to control social media plays a prominent role in social media marketing. If in case failed to control social media, you need to face the consequences that could lead to the criticism of the organization or product, which may result in losing the brand image. Because, people are opting social media networks to express their opinions, disappointment about a brand or retail, product and also they are using those sites to get the advices on their purchases.

Besides, you could also end up with failed relationships with your followers or users by losing control of social media. Therefore, it is very important to have policies and set of instructions that perform the task like dealing with negative and positive comments or reviews. One should possess the strategies to manage the social media with the support of coordinated information of their various departments, in order to build and maintain the professional relationships with their users or followers.

However, you could control the social media by taking some precautionary measures such as Customizing Privacy Options, Monitoring the Access, Developing Social Media Policies defining the standards of conduct of staff of an organization, Updation of Anti-Virus Software, Controlling Comments, Avoiding accidental sharing of personal details, Trust also plays important role in social media control.

Eventually, for a successful business through online marketing with social media, I emphasize on having effective strategies to be engaged constantly and persistently with your potential prospects and promoting your product or service in interesting and entertaining fashion, which benefits you to create a brand image and appeal to your potential prospects that may be converted into your potential customers.

The new era of Internet has transformed the way in which marketers engaged with their target market, mobile marketing, and the emergence of smart phones have added a new dimension to the online arena. With the remarkable increase of cell phone and smartphone usage around the world, it’s pretty clear to say that if you aren’t using mobile marketing, you’re missing out on a huge potential revenue stream!

Consumers use their smartphones or tablets to search for information about a service or product at the same time as they are looking at it in the store. Others, for example, search online for a place to eat or shop while walking the streets of a city they don’t know. The results they find at that instant play vital role in making purchase decisions, and in this way mobile surfing has become a key factor in the success not just of old fashioned stores but also of those with an Internet focus.

In these circumstances it is clear that surfers don’t use their smartphones or tablets just for leisure and pleasure, but they do so with specific objectives that can be transformed into income for a business.

But why is mobile marketing so important?

Whether you are travelling, or on a vacation, or watching a movie, your phone is always there to keep you company, either in your pocket or in your hand. This is why mobile devices are perfectly suited for marketing: they are always in use, always on, always available. By taking the advantage of mobile marketing, you are giving your business direct access to devices that are used by clients 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Mobile marketing offers marketers a cost-effective and visible channel to communicate to a broad audience. The mode of marketing may be through SMS, MMS, video, or Bluetooth, mobile marketing will continue to play a major role in comprehensive marketing campaigns.  Mobile Marketing comes in various forms and each can be beneficial to your business. Text Message Marketing (also known as Short Message Service Marketing or SMS Marketing), Mobile Friendly Websites and QR (Quick Response) codes are the three dominant forms that Mobile Marketing comes in.

According to Microsoft, while 70% of searches carried out on PCs are closed in a week, in the case of mobile searches, 74% of users make purchases based on their mobile device searches. Google Stats show that 53% of searchers purchase as a result of a smartphone search in the U.S. and 70% of smartphone users use their device while shopping in-store. Therefore, if you don’t have a mobile web presence, your business will be a sinking ship. It is important to begin building these instruments on top of your marketing strategy.

When considering your mobile marketing strategy, there are many things that you need to take into account. Let’s have a quick look at few of them:

Be present on mobile search. Mobile search is how people navigate the mobile web and it’s used more frequently than computer-based search. It is advised to have a separate, targeted mobile search budget and strategy since mobile tends to be local and closer to actual purchase. Also, make sure to test keywords and advertising copy.

QR (Quick Response) codes: Quick Response codes are now the latest buzz in the mobile marketing world. The basic idea of a QR code is to be able to instantly download information onto your smart phone about any given topic such as a link to a company website or a coupon. So, if you want to be ahead of your competitors and keep your business fresh and appealing then adding QR Codes to your mobile marketing mix could be the ideal solution.

Text Messaging: Make your text messages engaging and viral. Of all mobile marketing techniques SMS messaging is one of the easiest ways to reach the targeted audience. You can send your announcements, new products, promotions, and discount privileges through texts. This is very easy for you since you just need to send the text message to a bunch of people. You can also have a tie up with some mobile network provider and help you promote your products and services.

Create a mobile compatible website: By 2014 it is predicted that more people will access the Internet via mobiles and tablets than desktops and laptops. No matter where they are or where they ultimately purchase, people check your mobile based website. If possible it is advised to create separate website for web and mobile handsets. Understanding the end goal of your website is the first step in increasing its conversion rate so focus on conversion web design or take suggestions from professional web designers and don’t count on your traditional website to effectively deliver the information mobile users need.

You should make sure that the information on your website is easy to read and navigate, effective and to the point (due to small screen resolution) and doesn’t take the visitors much to figure out, since they’re probably on the go while looking at your mobile site. Ensure your mobile site loads in less than five seconds as speed matters and focus on the prime activity for mobile users. Of course, include click or call-to-action. Use customized promotion codes with your call-to-action to ensure that you can track contribution to sales and phone calls.

So How Can You Properly Optimize Your Website For Mobile Users?

Keep it quick and simple – many mobile users are on the move when they search so fast load times, simple and easy navigation, clear back and home buttons and clear and concise copy that is straight to the point and easily “scannable” are crucial.

Make sure it converts – if you want your consumers to get in touch or buy a product then make sure that this is hazel free to do from a mobile device. Minimum steps as possible, short data filling forms and easy selection and checkout process are all key to conversions.

Integrate local features – if your business has local demand where people may want to find and visit your premises then make yourself easy to find. Try and add Maps and even a GPS to go long way.

Note – Last but not the least is to make sure your site directs visitors coming to it from a mobile device, to the mobile version of the site.

For local businesses looking to increase their online visibility, combining search engine optimization (SEO) with social media marketing can create a powerful mix that will help grow your business in the long run. Most businesses realize that SEO is a necessary tool to gain visibility of a company because the companies that rank well at the search engines have a competitive advantage to those that don’t. And, Social media is one of the best ways to increase online visibility and get the word out about a product, service, or company when used correctly. Although social media is newer, its volatile growth shows that it yields with opportunity for those businesses willing to clinch its chaotic nature.

Consumers undoubtedly trust people and brands that they “know” and by reaching out to them in a space they use daily to find information, interact with family, friends, even to get the news, will only benefit your company.

Today’s fast paced world is becoming increasingly more and more internet savvy and customers expect you to be where they interact. If you organize your search and social media campaigns you’ll get more ROI out of both of them. How?

Many local businesses place hard effort to find ways to promote themselves, get links, rank in search engines, and eventually gain traffic.  First and most importantly any business should understand what their consumers want from local search and how their business is showcased through social media.

Many researches show that consumers want the basics such as information on proximity, services offered, hours of operation, rating and reviews and mainly contact information. In other words, they are looking that the business is nearby, open and easy to do business with. Fortunately, Google, Bing, and Yahoo offer Local business listings to help promote your business to local Internet users. And best of all, most are free!

Getting visibility in local Search Engine may be a bit easier than obtaining in National or Global listings because of fairly less competition. However, in most cases the tasks required to achieve Local Search Visibility and social media visibility are similar to traditional SEO regardless of the geographic market your business is targeting to connect with.

The essentials of Search Engine Optimization are highly important to perform well in Local Search and Social Media.

Add your business listings in Google, Yahoo, and Bing local business listing: If you have ever used Google to find a local business, then you may have noticed a map and Local Business listings closer to the top of the search engine page. This is called “Local Business Results”. Yahoo and Bing also show related business listings in their search results. Adding your business to these listings will allow you to increase your business visibility by displaying your address, phone number, products, services, hours of operation and more.

Before adding your business to these listings, identify the keywords used by searchers to find products and services.  After all, these are the terms and phrases used in Search Engine queries and if the content, local or global does not target these terms then the Search Engines will be unable to determine if the business you are trying to promote is actually relevant to a user’s search query. Also, make sure to include city and state in your Title and description META tag because this will help increase your local search results.

Submit to Local Directories: It’s important to list your business in local business directories as it can strengthen search results while helping businesses locate qualified prospects and attain better understanding of customer needs. Millions of users use these business directories to find local businesses and merchants with the intent of making spending decisions.

Did you know there are a quite a good number of local search directories out there? Business directories like Yellowpages.com, Google Places, and Yelp.com are frequently seen on the first page in Google when you search for a business or service. These websites have a widespread database of local businesses and they often allow users to post reviews and comments about those businesses. Therefore, for you as a business owner, it’s important to get listed in those directories.
Build Quality Inbound Links: Ultimately, your long-term goal is to build a large number of high-quality inbound links. If you have more links, it will be very easy to get a High Page Ranking. When other high-quality sites provide a link to a page within your site, the search engines see this as a sign of confidence. The secret of this strategy is to consistently and continually work to build quality links.

Google notes on their site that: “In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.”

The more high-quality incoming links to your site, the more “Authority” your site has in the eyes of the search engines and the better you will rank – both locally and globally.

Be Active On Social Media: Speaking of visibility, one of the best ways to gain visibility is to be social. Social media is nevertheless one of the most important ways that opens up a huge opportunity for businesses to not only stay connected with clients and customers, but reach out to potential new ones. Most of the social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn are free and make a great tool for setting up new contacts, promoting online events, connecting with your customers and more.

So set up your business profile which includes a good description and keywords as social media not only helps in building your brand and public relations but also generates traffic to your business. More than anything, you need to remember that remaining accessible and approachable is the key to build relationships!

Comment on Blogs & Forums: It may sound simple, but yes it is quite effective! Commenting on Blogs and Forums is very important SEO technique that helps to create more backlinks and traffic and it is also a best way to showcase your expertise.

Besides the new social media rage there is nothing like traditional old fashioned discussions. For the matter, forum boards (or Q & A boards) are still one of the most popular places to meet and discuss on the internet. Spend time to explore some popular blogs or forums in your industry, and join them. Posting helpful answers or opinions to certain questions or posts can bring steady, quality traffic to your company or homepage.

In Conclusion:

Today’s successful businesses use search engine optimization and social media to increase their online visibility and attract qualified visitors to their site, which in turn  increases their conversion rate and grows their business.

If your business mainly depends on a local market then now it is the time to challenge your competitors and take control of your geographic niche. Are you geared up?

If no one knows your product or service exists, it matters though how exceptional or useful it is. Every business needs to focus on increasing brand awareness. Isn’t it? But standing out amid a massive group of competitors is a challenge for any company in today’s business environment. It’s no wonder, then, why businesses are seeking for new and more effective ways of increasing the influence of their brand strategy in the marketplace.

Developing a Brand Awareness Strategy for your business, be it online or offline, is essential for the success of any business.  Branding is all about trust and familiarity. We all are naturally drawn towards products, businesses and services that are familiar to us.  Clearly, we have to mark our place in the trust stakes first by delivering a clear, concise and consistent sales message and then deliver upon our promises.

With a strong brand strategy, awareness of a company and its offerings can be increased in such a way that it sets up favorable view towards the company or business as a whole. To create this sort of “brand awareness” in the market requires skillful Brand Strategy.

So how can we create a skillful brand awareness strategy?

Brand Strategy is nothing new. However, the expectations consumers have for a product or service they opt is stronger than it’s ever been. This is why the companies/businesses interested in long-term success must create the most promising, targeted brand experience possible.

Let’s dig into few essential online marketing strategies for increasing brand awareness:

Define a Vision for your brand: Setting up a clear vision and insight of the company’s identity is extremely essential. The vision for a brand consists of a broad statement of what the brand aspires to be. This includes defining core values, core purpose and visionary goals. What is the business’ aim? How will they serve? How will they strive to fulfill the company mission?

Until these kinds of questions are answered, there is no point in creating business cards, building a website or going for online and offline advertising. Find out the unique features of your niche market and help create a proper picture of the expectations of your customers. Consumers want to know who they are dealing with before they’ll spend their hard earned money.

Know your Competitors: Knowing how your competition brands themselves can help you in developing your own brand. Brands are multidimensional and they usually carry with them several images and associations in the minds of the company and customers. However, all successful brands have a particular focus that distinguishes it from those of their competitors. A properly positioned brand must surpass demographics and clearly identify likely prospects.

Display Ad’s: Consumers are spending most of their media time surfing on the internet. So why aren’t you advertising where your audience are looking? Display advertising is arguably the most cost-effective way to market your brand and create brand awareness to people browsing and surfing the Internet and in turn generating leads. And now, the technology is readily available so every business can showcase their brand to reach out the audience.

By taking advantage of display advertising, every organization can now build a big brand on a fairly small budget by advertising on globally recognized sites and a mix of relevant niche sites with good traffic.

Paid Ad’s: Today’s complex world of search marketing entails more than inviting a potential customer to click a paid ad or natural listing. Paid ads not only drive traffic to generate conversions, but also help build brand awareness for your products and services.

When advertising through paid ads, you should also gauge whether more people have become aware of your brand from that ad. For instance, are more people searching for your company’s name in search engines? If so, these are good indicators that your company’s brand awareness is increasing.

Organic Search Engine Visibility: If your company is to be successful, you must get it noticed as much as possible and make it appealing to others. There are no greater influencers on purchasing decisions and brand awareness than Google, Yahoo, and Bing as they have increasingly become a popular method for consumers to shop and search for information. Users without doubt trust results that show up on the first page of search results.

Did you ever wonder why some websites rank higher than others on popular search engines? How exactly do they beat out the stiff competition and show up to the top?

More than likely, these successful sites have spent a lot of time focusing on search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO helps you to gain the new heights with your projects. They not only increase your sales in times, but also help in boosting brand awareness and create a firm basis for further development of your business. Top search engine placement for targeted keywords will allow your business be always in front of your genuine customers. Your business really deserves Google Search Engine Ranking.

The first step to success with search engine optimization is knowing the search terms that are used by the audience.

Keyword Research: Keywords are the words and phrases web users’ type into search engines to find the information they want. If a website doesn’t have the appropriate keywords incorporated naturally within its content and in other key areas which the search engines index, it can easily get lost in the wide expanse of the Internet.

Website and Content Optimization: Once keywords have been identified and properly incorporated, the next step is to create a site structure that best helps crawling by spiders. An optimized site should be accessible, usable, and readable.

Attracting Incoming Links: The following activities may help a site attract more incoming links, which will help boost search engine rankings.

• Issue Regular Press Releases
• Ask for Links
• Be active in virtual communities
• Submit to business directories

So why you are not taking advantage of this growing market with enormous potential of SEO?

Social Media: Since the emergence of social networking websites like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, branding experts have realized that these free social outlets can significantly contribute to brand development and potential sales.  Building a solid following base on these social sites is as important as building your targeted keywords’ rankings on search engines. If you create and update a profile for your business in a social media website, you can attract the attention and interest of millions of users visiting their sites each day.

You must create interesting, useful and engaging posts for your profile and provide your readers with information about your business, and any other relevant information. Not only must you create content for your profile but you must also contribute to the profiles of others. Become an active member of the social networking community by posting on the profiles of others and demonstrating your expertise wherever possible.

Become a Market Leader: To become a true leader in your market niche, focus on improving your customers’ experiences and interactions with your company. Perform like a leader and honor what your brand promises by continuing to deliver to your high value customers.

In today’s world, before making purchases, customers will:

• Look at reviews
• Read in-depth information
• And pay attention to word of mouth

As you are aware, a lost good name is hard to recover, so better not give a chance.

It’s simply clear that building meaningful brand awareness is hard work and takes a great amount of time and effort, but it must be done. Once you’ve established a great reputation you have to protect it and keep it. Everything that gets said about your company must reinforce the good things for which it is known.

Usually, people spend hundreds and thousands of money on SEO, for their website to rank on top in Google. They even succeed in doing so, but the traffic to their website does not seem that high, as they desire. As a part of their analyzing they found out that their conversions, sales and ROI is being affected due to low traffic.

Finally, they realize that their visitors are unable to find what actually they were looking for on the website. This proves that, the SEO strategies for particular website were not effective, though it ranks in the top position on Google.

What could be the reason for not getting the desired traffic to the website?

Quite possibly, performing SEO without effective and clearly apprehended strategies could be the reason, as effective SEO strategies is all about understanding the human psychology to the depth.

In other words, it depends on understanding the pulse of the market comprising desires, dreams, anxieties, hopes, problems, annoyances and worries. Once you understand all these factors, you would be capable to catch the demanding areas of a product or service and would be successful in holding your customers.

In order to achieve that, you need to first understand that SEO is not just meant to dig keywords and optimize a page for the search engines, but it is all about the people and their psychology. You need to dig deeper to get the pulse of your market, rather than optimizing a page for a particular keyword.

How to design psychological SEO strategies?

As a matter of fact, how could anyone know what the people think as no one could read anybody’s mind, is it not so? It’s very simple though, if you have got a clear picture of your targeted audience and expectations. You could get into their minds and unveil their thoughts, as their behavior and actions lies on their thoughts.

Now, you might be thinking how to intrude into their minds? It’s simple as you could track down all their actions on your website with technology (Web or Google Analytics). Using the analytics technology, you could track down the audience history like what pages they visit, how much time they spend on particular pages, what links they clicked to go further through the site and many more.

Being equipped with all the above mentioned information, you would be able to mark down the exact estimations about the thoughts of your visitors, while they browse your website. Further, by incorporating SEO along with the knowledge of your customers in every step of your business process, you will be able to achieve increase in conversions or Sales, Curtailing Costs and adopt better resources.

Additionally, it has always been recommended by the SEO experts, to look every page of a website as a ‘Landing Page’. Moreover, you will emerge as the conqueror of the visitors’ mind, if the visitors find your website as their perfect place for their needs.

In order to propel the customer to your website repeatedly, you need to comprehend the mindset of your prospect and structure your landing page. When you could read your prospect’s mind, you would be able to appeal your visitor that would lead to a sale or make a deal.

Effective Psychological SEO Strategies:

Keywords:

Keywords are very crucial as they serve as a clue to the website and they could offer you important directions to get into the mind and attitude of the visitor. It’s always suggested to create landing pages for specific keyword groups, which could intensify your SEO process. Which keywords to be targeted and understanding the psychology of your visitor, who lands on your site by that keyword, are the key secrets.

The most important thing to select the targeted keywords is to use your keyword data to try and comprehend a bit more about the visitors of your website with the help of software tools such as Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Because, you could find out more about your prospects as you dig much deeper. You will be able to gather the psychographic profiles of your visitors/customers, after scrutinizing your traffic and analyze the keywords, which lead the visitors to your website.

The results of your online business would quickly increase, after analyzing the data and comparing it against the actions taken by the visitors on your site, fine-tuning your landing page to test different proposals and measuring your SEO efforts, which seems incredible.

Analyzing Situations:

Analyzing situations is mandatory in any SEO campaign. It is very important to know about your current position, in terms of your business, competition and search rankings. You also need to know how your SEO campaign is doing, by checking the search rankings for your high-priced keywords, optimization activities, traffic targets and all the aspects of your business.

Besides, it is also important to find out the progress of your SEO campaign, by checking if you are getting higher rankings for important keywords in increasing manner. Also, need to check if you are targeting the right keyword phrases and are ranking high that accounts your sales and profits.

Additionally, you have to check if your SEO campaign is effective by testing the factors like if your efforts are perfect, is it cost-effective and guaranteed not to be superseded against the change of future search versions. Further, you also have to check if your SEO is well protected against unfavorable trends by testing if your search rankings will be destroyed in case of algorithm modifications or would be standing still.

Goals/Objectives:

After determining your current business status based on the ‘Situation Analysis’, you have to define goals/objectives to target your future. But be alert! You should always be conscious about defining your goals clearly, to achieve sales and profits apart from eyeing to get top search rankings. However, you should prioritize your important objectives, as your SEO strategies might have multiple goals though.

SEO Campaign Strategy:

A strategy is needed for SEO campaign, to get close to your business objectives. In order to do that, you need to pick a particular market sector to serve them. Because, targeting your audience in a broad market sector facilitates you to add greater value to your best prospects and would be able to place yourself in a position appealing to your prospects.

SEO Strategical Planning:

Though you have set the goals and strategies relevant to your business, you should also have ‘Plans’ that determines your SEO strategies will be successful or not. To be successful with your SEO strategies, you need to first determine which SEO concepts and the tools to use. Besides, you have to plan about the usage of tools as they could be used in several different and creative manners to get the results with all the other prospects of your business marketing.

Define Action Plans:

Further, SEO campaign needs an action plan to sketch the role of each member of the team. Because, a single person could manage the entire process of a small business and promotions, but in case of big or complex business projects specific roles should be designated to various members. At the same time, you need to check if you have made the right choice picking a particular person for the task.

After defining the action plans you have to set time limit/deadline for each activity and also select the certain parameters to check if all the tasks are being performed efficiently and effectively. A progress report would help in comprehending the development of the tasks that stirs the strong feeling in the team that makes them to work together with enthusiasm.

However, someone should be designated with the task of monitoring and reporting on progress, as some processes need to be monitored closely, while few could be monitored frequently. But, need to keep the track of important factors that are helpful in managing control, while most of the information is gathered by the software.

Picking the effective software and tools that could be cost-effective also show the impact on the success of your SEO campaign. Hence, it needs to be decided which tools to be used and how the data is used to measure that leads to the further actions and decisions.

The ultimate goal of any effective SEO strategy is to go beyond the common mission of ranking high on search engines for the highest value keywords and attain the potential of producing more sales, profits and the impact on market sector. But, in order to achieve these things, you should understand the pulse of your customer psychologically to be successful with your SEO strategies. What do you say?

In today’s online buzz of marketing, the combat between Search VS Social Media are increasing day by day and they are almost certainly the biggest talks by the business people to promote their product or services.

Initially search was created with intention to share or provide information, and later it turned out to be a body of knowledge for all mankind. While, social Media has born from the Marketing Strategies and gained revolution mostly from the last decade with social networking sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube.

With span of time, search and social have been used as online marketing strategies for business that complement each other. However, there lies the strong conflict in the Market, whether to invest in social media strategy more than the other, or to only pursue search marketing strategy but not the other.

Well, let’s shed some light on both the aspects of the online strategies and share your views and opinions regarding the present ongoing combat between SEM VS SMM.

Search Engine Marketing: SEM is a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.

In simple, the Search Engine Marketing is the process of gaining traffic from or visibility on search engines, where in the SEM covers two broad areas:

• Attracting traffic through organic/ natural SEO efforts
• Gaining traffic through paid search advertising

What is SEO?

SEO is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines through the natural (organic), or un-paid resources. All major search engines have such results, where web pages and other content like videos or local listings are appeared and ranked based on what the search engine considers most pertinent to users.

What is Paid Search Advertising?

Paid Search Advertising is also known as Paid Search Marketing – It is the process of gaining traffic by purchasing ads on search engines and websites. The ads are sold on the CPC/PPC/CPA/CPL and many more bases.

Before proceeding further to take a call on SEM VS SMM, have a look at the pros and cons of both the online marketing strategies.

Pros of Search Engine Marketing:

• Information Retrieval – A user query prompts search engine to return results that are ranked higher hierarchically using trust and relevance signals.
• Search Engines are the first preference to know the information on anything.
• Tendency to make a purchase is high.
• Fastest form of providing information.
• Advertisers can get an edge over the high competition by purchasing ads on the prominent places/areas to win the battle in this cut-throat business world, which will help the potential customers to see or buy the product.
• Search Engine helps in establishing a good and friendly search status.
• SEM is indeed an important strategy to increase classified traffic to your website. If you have an online business, more targeted visitors mean higher possibility of buyers.
• Brand awareness for a product or company / Awareness regarding a Company / product.

**Every good thing has its Flaws**

Cons of Search Engine Marketing:

Only top Ranked Websites or Business get the maximum clicks in SERPs.

• It is time consuming process as it takes time for New Businesses to appear on top in search results due to the stiff competition in the online world.
• Small business houses cannot afford to run PPC as it is highly expensive.
• We can’t communicate directly with the customers – Building relationship with customers is not possible–Absence of Community Building.

Social Media Marketing: SMM refers to the process of gaining business traffic or attention through social media sites.

Social media strikes as an easy accessing platform for every business to promote their services or products. In online marketing, social media focuses on the efforts of building brand image by engaging potential customers via attractive and attentive content that helps the reader to gain the knowledge regarding the product. This sort of targeted marketing is carried by word of mouth, which indicates that the consequences are earned through free social media than the paid media marketing strategies.

In the present generation, the highly sophisticated communication modes have become the resources for the Business to nurture brand awareness and also to enhance their customer service. On the other hand, communicating to the targeted customers or providing awareness regarding your product via social media is less expensive for the business.

Pros of Social Media Marketing:

• Social marketing gives chance to interact with potential customers and give them a glance at the business.
• SMM is very useful for a new thing or for a new product. As it’s a new invention, people will not “search” for it. If you use social media marketing to promote that product it will provide the awareness and grab the clientele.
• Social interactions & media sharing from the social network participants create the kind of content that can cheer up brand’s visibility via blog posts, profiles, videos, or other media.
• Social Media Marketing which is getting more popular, effective, cheaper and easier to use and implement.
• Social networks like Digg, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Stumbleupon have the search boxes, which are capable of getting more real time and local results than that of any search engine can offer.
• Viral marketing – News in the social media spread like bushfire across the world because of the viral potential of the media.

**As with everything in life the good must be paired with the bad**

Cons of Social Media Marketing:

• Social Media is very time consuming:  To use Social Media as a marketing media, you need to be patient as it takes long time and a lot of effort to find interested customers and to build relationships with your patrons.
• In Social media the law of reciprocity applies “Give & Take “- When a user has a response to an update regarding your Business, you should be there to reply to their queries enough to satisfy the curiosity. If this is not done properly, the audience will lose their faith in the Brand and will reflect poorly on our Brand name.
• Social Media is a living breathing beast: If you feed the beast then the beast works for you, but you need to feed it often – Business need to spend a lot of time updating its audience on the relevant issues and the updates might even occur hourly. When you are established and pull a large crowd, it will be a difficult process trying to meet the needs of all the people in your crowd.
• Hard to find the complete information regarding a product or service of a Business.
• Negative or bad taste in the social media spread like fire around the world because of the viral potential of the media. One malicious posting from an individual can cause the good name of your business or company to be flawed in a matter of hours.

Well, now after having a complete look at the Pros & Cons of Search and Social, I hope you can take your call whether to have only Search Engine Marketing for your business or vice-versa. However, from my personal experiences I feel that a mixture of Search & Social will surely rock the business.

Apart, from the above Pros of the Search Engine & Social Media Marketing the following are the advantages of including both the Strategies for running a successful business.

Advantages of Having Both SEM & SMM:

• Brand Building & Creating Buzz via word of mouth.
• It allows your business to reach out to a massive number of prospects.
• It is a more effective means of reaching specifically targeted demographics.

• If one source starts to fail, you could always boost your efforts in another area and know that you will not lose all of your visitors completely.
• Unify the marketing message across all media types and stay committed and active in the online communities.
• SMM plus SEO will equal more free traffic and better Search Engine Rankings.
• We can stay connected with your patrons.

In the long run of SEM VS SMM – Do you think Search is Best than Social or vice-versa? Let’s us know your views and opinions on the Combat of Online Marketing Strategies – Search VS Social Media, as we serve your Opinion’s Very hot!

Google is planning to renovate its ‘Search’ with a drastic makeover, in order to provide more relevant and direct answers to the queries of the users.

Until now, the search giant Google has been showing the results of a ‘Query’ in its search, based on the ‘Words’ in the related websites. However, the search engine is working to renovate the Google search feature to provide additional relevant results to a particular query, apart from the current list of web links or Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

The search company is eyeing to incorporate the ‘Semantic Search’ technology, a process of perceiving the exact meaning of the word typed in the search. With the help of semantic search, Google aims to facilitate the users by displaying more relevant and direct answers at the top of the search results page. For instance, to know the answer for ‘50 US States’, the search giant could provide the exact answer, rather than providing links to various sites.

How does ‘Semantic Search’ technology helps in providing exact answers? Google acquired Metaweb Technologies, a knowledge graph company in 2010 and has extended its vast databse from 12 million to 200 million like movies, celebrities, places, companies, people, things and many more. Additionally, the company would merge the semantic search technology with the current system, to show the exact results of the query in the search results.

The upcoming Google search renovation is one of the biggest changes made by the company in its history. Amit Singhal, a senior vice-president of the company quoted that, the new makeover of Google search would enable the search engine to match better search queries with the vast databse comprising millions of entities, which have been gathered in the past two years. He also expressed his hope over the new web with the answers. He also emphasized on the year long undergoing process to enter the next generation of search.

Google would be hoping to stand against Facebook, the social network that has collected a huge database with hundreds of millions of people, places and things. However, the social networking site did not provide a strong built search engine. Besides, the company is also expecting that the new ‘Semantic Search’ change would lure people to spend more time on its search engine to keep up with its competitors like Facebook and Twitter. Do you think, Google is trying to think like a human?

Optimizing your Ecommerce Store for Search Engines

When you have an ecommerce store, you know the most important aim is making sure that people visit your store and purchase your items. Isn’t it? However, when you are struggling with getting people to your site, there are several things that you can do to overcome this situation. The best way to ensure that you get the traffic you need is to optimize your ecommerce store for search engines. This means that people will lurch upon your store when they are searching for products that relate to the products you sell.

It is not advisable to simply rely on word of mouth or the online advertising that you can afford to get your site in the public eye.  When you do popularized advertising, you are trying to get as many people to your site as possible. However, simply advertising your own products and hoping that people will find them while doing searches is not always the most plausible situation. A lot of the sales that take place online happen because someone is using a search engine to look for things that they need, and they turn out to type something that will direct them to your site.

This is what optimizing your ecommerce store for search engines is all about.

For ecommerce sites, it’s all about conversions and sales. How can SEO help? It isn’t a magic bullet, but applied correctly, it can definitely boost results. There are many steps involved in ecommerce SEO process, and if you are going to do it right; you want to be sure that you follow each of the steps.

Let us view some fundamentals for ecommerce SEO:

Choosing the right Keywords: One of the basic fundamentals of SEO is the use of Keywords. Firstly, search engines rely on matching the words that people are searching for to the words that are found on your website. Therefore, it is important to manage and have the words on your site that people will be typing in the search engine box.  Then you will be able to find that these match much better than you might think.  You need to figure out which words and phrases can be added to your website for SEO. Keywords are sacramental to SEO and basically without using the right keywords, you’re lost from the start.  You need to do your keyword research for every important page and products on your website. Make sure the content is adequate and not ‘thin’.

Google advises: “Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.”

Search Engine Index: As basic as it may sound, of course, you need to make sure the search engines are able to crawl and index your website. The best way to do this is by creating an html or xml sitemap to ensure it crawls and indexes every potential page on your website. While the search engines may not index every single page for one reason or another, it’s crucial they do index your most important pages and best-sellers so make sure that is happening.

Sign up to Google Webmaster tools to get detailed reports about your pages’ visibility on Google.

Unique Meta Tags:  Meta tags however play a huge role in SEO. While some may think they carry no weight, Google and other search engines place stern focus on Title and Description tags. They are extremely important in gaining user click-through from search engine result pages (SERPs). These short paragraphs are webmasters opportunity to advertise content to searchers and let them know exactly what the given page has with regard to what they’re looking for. For every page, make a point your title tag and description tag are unique and carry the most important keywords of that specific page. In addition, do not stuff keywords into your meta tags that are not relevant to the specific page they are on.

Personally, I like placing the same product description that appears on the product page in meta description tag.

Link Building: Since you’re in business on the internet, you should treat traffic acquisition through link building as a business necessity. For the long-term success, you must try to develop an organic link-building strategy that is completely integrated into your business process to keep those links build naturally overtime. It is said that Content is King and Links are Queens. The tactic about link building is not the quantity of links but the quality of links.  If you get links from authoritative websites, they’ll make a huge difference instead of getting several links from very small websites.

Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes, “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.”

Avoid Duplicate Content: It is advised to avoid duplicating content at all cost. While this has always been an issue, in the past year, Google has made it clear that it does not like duplicate content from its algorithm changes in Panda. (Refer Google Panda Updates). The algorithm of Google is always looking for new techniques to avoid any possible positioning of website based on duplicate content, poor quality content etc. So make sure every single page on your website does not contain duplicate content from any other website on the web or even your own.

Do you allow affiliates to sell your products? Yeah, I guess you will surely, to increase your business.

If so, make sure there are multiple unique product descriptions and keywords that they can use. Also, be cautious of duplicate content problems that may arise from other companies or your competitors, who are selling the same product, using your product description content on their sites so that you do not get penalized in google search results.

User Experience: Last but never the least, User Experience plays crucial role to a successful ecommerce site. You need to build an aesthetically appealing yet search engine and user-friendly ecommerce store to increase lead generation, manage online reputation and customer communication with massive ROI.

Have you ever noticed sites such as Amazon.com, Overstock.com and eBay.in? There are a few user experience factors that these successful ecommerce sites have in common.  In this fast paced world, no one wants to click through pages of junk to finally see the price of a product, thus, upfront pricing and product descriptions are necessary for right conversions.  Product sorting options are also a great advantage for user, for example, showing highest or lowest priced items, best-selling items, newest items or relevant items at the top of the on-site search query.

An everlasting user experience helps to build trust and loyalty with your website.

Finally, SEO for ecommerce is highly competitive and constantly evolving. With these fundamental SEO basics for ecommerce, you’ll surely start ranking in the search engines. The more you show up, the better off you are going to be. SEO takes work and patience and in due time, you’ll find visibly positive results.

Many ecommerce businesses fail by not addressing the basic risks and pitfalls along the way. So to take full advantage of the ecommerce opportunity and build path to success, make sure you cover every element of ecommerce.

Let’s have a quick look on the elements to be emphasized while building a user-friendly ecommerce store.

Up-selling: Up-sells are usually very high profit items for the ecommerce business, and sold with very little effort. Now that you have potential customers on your site, the first task is to get them to buy; the next thing is to get them to spend more. By grouping several different products and services, you can give the customer a more advanced package that goes much further towards creating a satisfying solution.

Google merchant: For ecommerce businesses just beginning to build their online presence, turning to cheap – or free – Google tools can be a simple solution. Google Merchant Center is for those who want to put in products and sell them through Google. It is where you upload feeds, check item status, and get information about how well your listings are doing. Your products uploaded to Google Merchant Center feed the searches that other people do for products they want to buy.

Have at least 2 – 3 payment options: Often we get all the way to the end of a checkout process only to find that the site only offers a debit or credit card payment option.  By including PayPal and other alternative payment options, it can make huge difference between a sale or a customer leaving your store.

Use of breadcrumbs to guide the users: Breadcrumb navigation locates the current webpage in the context of a navigation path. It can help you to enhance visitor experience and reduce bounce rate. With the help of breadcrumbs, visitors can understand their exact location and therefore, take actions accordingly. Furthermore, it simplifies the navigation process.

Invalid credit card detection: Credit card fraud is a serious problem even beyond identity theft. For a merchant, it is important to ensure a credit card is valid when using it to process a transaction. Fraudulent transactions can cost merchants money if they do not perform basic security checks like reviewing the signature, validity etc.

Browser and operating system compatibility: A frequently overlooked aspect of managing an ecommerce website is testing the appearance of that site across different browsers. Make it a point to test your website every few months to ensure browser and operating system compatibility. Sixty minutes of your time could save your thousands of dollars of lost sales due to the site not working properly on your customer’s computer.

Keep checkout steps to minimum: Keep the number of checkout steps to a minimum and where possible try to reuse information e.g. don’t ask customers to enter their billing and delivery address, assume they are the same and then give them the option to change it. Ask for the bare minimum and do everything you can to get them to complete the transaction.

Registration should not be mandatory: This goes without saying really, but many sites still enforce registration before a customer can make a purchase. Remove any barriers in your checkout process such as compulsory registration. Give users the option to register later, perhaps with a very simple process.

In today’s online gusher of consumer opinion – dialogue, reviews and rumors come in little spurts and splash on a variety of different websites, blogs and as well comments to those blogs. It’s important for all businesses to understand what people are saying, knowing customer trends, and must see how they stack up against their rivals.

Your company’s reputation is an integral aspect in determining the degree of its good results. As you are aware, a lost good name is hard to recover and in fact it’s easier to stop something bad from happening in the first place than to fix the damage after it has happened.

Well, to stop those unexpected damages before it hits our business there strikes the most important strategy in marketing, which is called as Online Reputation Management.

Online Reputation Management means monitoring the reputation of a person, business or brand in the Internet world, with the goal of suppressing negative mentions completely, or pushing them lower on search engine results pages to decrease their visibility.

So to keep your Reputation high in the Online Market, let’s have a look at the best online reputation proactive strategies:

• Set up Google Alerts and Feed Reader :

Google Alert is a special feature that allows you to track the online reputation of your ecommerce website. It helps you to monitor news, web, blogs, groups and a comprehensive range of online media with regard to your business.

The alerts/conversations will be emailed to you at preferred intervals and thereafter the Search giant provides you with the info or keywords you choose to be alerted on the Googlesphere.

• New content creation that should exclusively Target Audience :

Well, before you start writing the Content focus on the audience for whom you are targeting and in the same way promote your content online with the Targeted websites. Great content adds great value to a site, but only if people know it exists.

• Involvement in the social Websphere (through blogs, forums, social networking):

The online Reputation of Website/Business/product/services can be spread easily with the help of social web sphere. In fact, social networking is a recent invention that has the Internet still at the edge of its seat due to its popularity with people. Social Websphere brings every kind of social group together in one place and letting them interact.

• Promotion of existing positive content :

Sometimes sadly the best article in the world is a waste of virtual paper without the readers it deserves. So it is advised to promote your positive content in all social networking sites, forums, and blogs and so on. The more it is promoted the more Value it grabs and finally spreads buzz and showcases positive aspect.

• Building social profiles :

Building social profiles helps you to interact with different kinds of people from one single place. It helps to increase your web presence and ultimately ROI and visibility, leaving no scope for negative news or mentions in SERPs. This is one of the best ways to promote you or your Business in the Market.

• Monitoring consumer reviews :

Consumer inputs and reviews play vital role in reputation management and creates buzz for the business. Consumers can provide feedback for other users about your product with a single click, or reach thousands of people with a single comment. Monitoring Consumer reviews helps in learning and understanding the needs and opinions of the clients and provides them with the needful that creates an impression of trust on the Business.

• Building Trust with Clients :

The more you build trust with the customers the more Reputation it grabs in the Market. If the customers are having a positive sign on your Business, irrespective of the negative mentions they will prefer your Services. Trust plays vital role in building interpersonal relationships between a Business and Customer.

Push Negative Mentions:

On the other hand, no matter how well your company performs and how exceptional your service levels are, there is bound to be things that tumble down through the cracks. Unluckily some people out there are very merciless and with personal grudges will write up scornful reviews regarding our Business on sites like RipoffReport, Scam.com, and many other sites – These are very Authoritative and strengthened websites and the negative mentions can be found right away on first page of Google.

In case you’re not familiar with Ripoff Report, it’s a consumer complaint website where anybody can post a “Ripoff Report” regarding person or business. To file a complaint a valid email address and author’s own verification is required.

However, with the help of online reputation management you can ensure that your positive listings do not get outranked by negative comments, and here we go with some of the Best ORM Strategies to push negative mentions down:

• Write unique, fresh, information and interactive articles :

One of the most important things in gaining Reputation to your Business/Website is unique content. Writing unique, fresh, informative and interactive articles helps you to get popular and listed on the first page of the search engine results. As a result, the higher you rank on the search engines for a specific keyword, the more targeted traffic your website/business will receive.

• Submit articles with Popular and Authority article Directories (Squidoo, HubPages, eZineArticles, Buzzle, InfoMarketers, Go Articles, and many more) but abstain from plagiarism :

Many people, hard pressed on time directly go to web directories rather than the search engines as all the services are listed under appropriate categories and hence it is easier to find the right services. All the major web directories are well-ranked on various search engines and submitting articles in Authority article Directories can grab lot of direct traffic to the Business.

• Promoting Articles in Social Networking Sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube and many more):

Great content is more important when dealing with social networks, as they make it easier for Users to find what they are looking for. In a very short span of time you can spread or promote your Business to the whole world. If someone in the Social Network sites like your Business services or products there are chances that even others would opt for it. Praise or Positive comment for your Products in the Social Network site surely hits your Business Reputation.

• Social Search :

Social Search can be approached from two angles, where in both are equally important for businesses.

a) Micros Search: This includes using social media to connect and engage with people based on keyword, location, and niche.

b) Macro social search: is a vital factor of social search that affects search engines like Google.

• Link Popularity Building :

All major Search engines put a lot of importance on link building and its effects which have a direct association to the top positions in the search engine result pages in determining the website’s ranking. Link building is a true test of quality and a time consuming process, but is highly rewarded to gain Online Reputation in the Market.

• Create and Maintain Professional Blog :

In Simple, Professional blogs, for professional people, for professional companies, are keys to online marketing success.

A professional blog is a place to write about current events for the corporation and for clientele to be able to read about it online. Customers are much more inclined to becoming lifelong customers if they can sense the company’s ethics, or how the company treats their customers in a professional business manner. By having a professional blog, a company can share those thoughts with their readership online.

• Resolving Disputes and Concerns Directly :

In today’s complex society we all deal with conflict in our daily lives in personal or at business relations. However, it is best to have our conflicts resolved quickly, cordially, directly and fairly without violence. As Rumors regarding Business Disputes and Concerns would spread like Fire in the Forest, which has a huge effect on Reputation.

• Hire Professionals / Experts :

In present competition world, it is important to promote and maintain the corporate image of an organization. Especially, in the Internet world maintaining the Reputation of a Business is one of the most important tasks and therefore it is always advisable to hire Professionals / Experts to safeguard your Reputation in the Market.

Conclusion:

A reputation that took decades to build can be threatened by a single negative comment. So Beware of Negative comments by following the above mentioned strategies.

Reputation lives and Travel Far!!!