Contentmart was one of the most accepted platforms across the web to provide businessmen with experienced and well instituted content writers. It served as a meetup site for the businessman looking for writers and writers looking for work. All the writers that were registered with Contentmart had to qualify for it by passing a test before bagging any assignment.
However, due to unstated reasons, Contentmart was shut in the year 2018. But, one shall not thereby lose hope of coming across the best writers around them. Some of the websites that are walking in the same path as that of Contentmart and can provide you with potential writers are mentioned below in the article.
1. Toptal
As they quote, they connect the world’s top talent with the world’s top organizations. Toptal has more than 10,000 clients and more than 500 employees. It provides job opportunities to the people with the caliber and those who have become a member of Toptal by passing a 5 step interview. And it takes you around a month to clear the interview. Yes, that’s quite a long time, but worth the hard work put in! Working as a freelancer at Toptal will provide several perks like high financial rewards, flexible timings and a variety of projects. Other than the outside projects, you may explore Toptal’s blog and choose to write for it.
User rating – 4.1/5
2. Textbroker
They claim to cater to your needs as the most diligent writers in the town! Not just that, they have a lot in the pocket. They present verified US authors who have an ace in writing articles and posts that are optimized for search engines. They see to the diverse needs of customers and provide them with varied content. Their authors have expertise in a wide variety of fields, like, travel, health, cryptocurrencies, you name it and they have it. They not only write but translate the content that is required. They have over 80,000 clients across the globe. Sounds amazing, doesn’t it?
User Rating – 3.6/5
3. TheHoth
TheHoth was founded in the year 2010, placed in St. Petersburg, Florida and promises to grow your business with SEO. Its parent organization is Next Net Media LLC. It is one of the best reseller SEO programs for agencies and consultants. They extend affordable plans and links. If you’re trying to increase your website traffic and choose to contact TheHoth for the same then no need to worry because you’re at the right place and would get good and noticeable results.
User Rating – 4.5/5
4. Fiverr
Fiver is a platform for freelancers starting with their careers. The platform name Fiverr is popular because most of the services are available for $5. Having said that services like website design, server management are quite expensive.
The platform is recommended for a quick and easy job but never for something that takes time. One of the “never do a thing” on Fiverr is SEO service. Most websites get spammed in less time which requires reverse effort to remove bad links. We have seen many of our clients that get spammed because they though SEO is a day job and got their website stuck on SERP pages.
5. Scripted
It is yet another platform that works towards providing a meetup point for freelance writers and organizations. As they say, Great marketing requires Great Writing. Therefore, they ensure that all of their written material is plagiarism-free. They encourage monthly newsletters to the users of various organizations that hook up with them intending to keep them engaged and occupied.
User Rating – 3.8/5
6. Solvid
It is an international marketing service based in London, England. Getting their work published in some of the well-known publications including Entrepreneur, Huff Post, ReadWrite, StartupGrind, The Next Web, Business.com, GoDaddy, B2C, and more, Slovid has proved its writing in the world market. It has a high spirited team of professional marketers, SEO’s, copywriters and a lot more. Whether it is driving more traffic, improving ratings or gaining media coverage, Solvid has got your back.
User Rating – 4/5
7. Pepper Content
Pepper is an online platform where businesses can get content done in many different languages. The platform doesn’t show any sample and isn’t very professional while working. We kept them in the list and the business is still in the startup stage and it can make a significant improvement over a period of time.
8. Upwork
Upwork is one of the most popular freelance marketplaces in the US. People from different parts of the world connect here and execute their work. Upwork works with “pay per hour” or “complete budget” model. The good thing about Upwork is the money is kept in an escrow account and transferred to the freelancer only when the client is satisfied. On Upwork a development company can also create a team and workaround, to get that feature businesses to have to get a premium account and pay Upwork a monthly charge.
Cost: Suited for small Business Owners
Theme: Not good for freelancers getting started in their career
9. People Per Hour
As the name suggests, freelancers on this platform offer their service on a pay per hour model. Right now, People Per Hour also has a feature to bid to complete the whole job than a pay per hour model and many business like associate freelancers in that way.
Cost: Cost of work for a business is comparatively less to UpWork
Suited for: Small Business Owners, Individual Entrepreneurs
Conclusion
Despite Contentmart holding a strong place in the web network, its absence has been efficiently covered up by several other websites, with the same objective and working as of Contentmart. So, you no longer need to worry if your favorite website has shut down. There are numerous and in fact, better options available in the market!
The world since it’s inception has been looking for to socialize with people, maybe using letters or emails, postcards or messages. The stone age to the era of world wars it has been a whole different story to tell. Now, we have enumerated applications for socializing and getting up close to people. These applications are wholly termed as Social Media. The term social media is an umbrella term comprising of various means that are used to connect people from all around the world.
Throughout the world, there are approximately 3.80 billion social media users, and 5.19 billion people who use mobile globally. Just anticipate the number of people you can reach through social media and websites. Social media is being used as a platform to reach out to citizens for a decade. Firstly, it was dominated by Facebook, however, now it has changed drastically because of Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and others. It has increased the competition amongst the businesses to advertise and market themselves, but at the same time it has paved way for businesses by giving them many platforms at the same cost.
You can get the most out of it, by offering your services and products on social media. The strength of the public on social media is not quantifiable, the more you invest the more you receive. Almost everything can be achieved using social media, products and services can be made available through social media.
Today, I will give you a detailed description of how to do social media marketing. Social Media Marketing is defined as a powerful way of making your products and services available to people using social media platforms and websites. Right from a micro firm to extravagant large scale firms, they all make use of social media to advertise or rather market themselves. Everyone tries to reach out to their customers using various means, but if you do not social media for your businesses, you are missing out on it.
Social media marketing is also known as e-marketing, and also is an important approach of digital marketing. Majority of social media marketing is used to share content and creative things using social media networks. To market products and services generally, businesses use images, hashtags, videos, and posting written text, this gives you a benefit by making audience engagement easy and feasible.
What social media platforms can you use to do the marketing? They are as follows –
Make use of Facebook Pages & Groups
Make use of Instagram
Make use of Google
Make use of Twitter profile and Community
Make use of LinkedIn Pages & Groups
Make use of Pinterest
Make use of QUora
How will social media marketing help you achieve your company goals?
Let the audience be aware of your brand.
Your products and services advertised on social media should have a crystal clear concept and should be easy to understand.
Increase the traffic driven.
Brand image should be trustworthy.
You should know what to convey to the audience.
Finally, how to do social media marketing for your business? Is another question that would be prevailing in your geeky minds. Social media marketing strategy should be driven according to your business type. For instance, if you are a business that works for lead generation, then the social media platform that plays a vital role for you is LinkedIn or platforms similar to it.
The ways you can do social media marketing are many, hence, I have few tips listed for you. They are as mentioned below –
Plan your content beforehand –
Make sure the content that you will be publishing on your social media should be relatable to the audience, and should not be anything that is just random. Your content should be planned and verified before letting it out to the public. Your unverified and under-researched content can create panic among the audience, and you never know what misfortune it can bring to you.
Research about your audience –
You knowing your audience and their taste is very important, else it’s exactly similar to not having an idea about cooking and you still want to do it. If you don’t know who your audience is, what group will you be catering to? And to add, once you are focused on your audience, what should you be giving them is the alternative question that arises. So, know your audience, know your products and services and how to deliver them to your audience.
Know your competition –
You should know your competitors that can be very toxic to your business. Every competitor will definitely look forward to implementing various ways of marketing itself on social media. You need to check your strategies and work accordingly because if you don’t work as per your competition, you have lot many things that you can lose.
Prompt Responses –
Look out for all the questions or queries that you receive from your customers about your line of products or services. Be a quick responder, and reply to their query as soon as possible. This builds a sense of familiarity within the customers and leads to a long-lasting bond between you and them. The bond between the business and your audience will be a word of mouth for your company, which will bring you more and more customers and business as well.
Scope of improvement –
Always have a scope of improvement on your work, this will be beneficial to engage your audience and will keep them wanting more. You should keep an eye on all campaigns that you run because if you don’t do it, you are not going to know how well your one campaign did over another. Hence, gives you a chance to keep improving and continue processing or analyzing your work.
Key performance areas –
The areas where you can perform really well and is the strength of your business should be leveraged. Whereas the areas that are your weak point should be worked upon more, to improve on it and make it your strength within the coming years.
Hopefully, the guide cleared all your doubts about how to do social media marketing and how to overcome it. This will serve as an inspiring article for you and will set an example for you.
Digital marketing has worked the best for n number one of the things. It has become the major solution for many problems that many firms might face for their marketing strategies. When one may have a doubt of tackling issues related to marketing it’s products or services digitally, the only idea that pops up in your brain is digital marketing.
People assume that the term digital marketing is very much overrated, however, they fail to understand the business it can create when utilized at it’s best.
Since the day things have turned digital, the way of practicing business has also changed drastically. Use of fliers, brochures, or pamphlets has become old school, now is the time when we take businesses online. This gives you the benefit of deciding whom to connect, whom to not and whom to make your target audience.
Previously, campaigns used to be complicated, and drove goals at the same time, however, now campaigns have become more lenient with achieving goals as their main focus. Nothing much has changed, the goals are still the same, it is the way of achieving them that has changed.
The article talks about lead generation and digital marketing, where leads can be generated using digital marketing. Lead Generation basically is a contemporary business that has come into existence in the past decade. Lead Generation is also commonly known as search engine marketing or marketing by making the use of social media.
Lead Generation using digital marketing mainly deals with consumer interest or queries related to your business products and services. When you talk about digital marketing, lead generation must be your basic plan for it.
Why do we need lead generation using digital marketing?
We need lead generation because we need customers for our business, no business in this world can exist without customers. For customers, a business should potentially advertise themselves and get customers attracted to their business. Therefore, once you score a lead, that lead can be passed down to the sales team to convert that lead into a customer who finally purchases our products or services. For reaching out to such customers, emails are the best suitable option or contact number could also be used for taking a follow-up.
This data can be further stored and used timely to contact customers, just in case some customer does not buy your products, you can contact him in future to try converting him into a potential buyer. Also, such data of customers can be churned again and again which will definitely give you some positive results.
What does lead generation in digital marketing actually do for your business?
It generates traffic to your website.
Helps convert the website visitors into leads.
And those leads can be converted into customers.
How do lead generation using digital marketing?
1. Optimizing business website
The website that majorly deals with your business products and services should be worked upon for its optimization. The optimizing factor will help you with customers’ understanding, website navigation, and content. You can get good leads generated if the website has not been updated or optimized in the last couple of years.
2. Lead Generation using SEO
Search engine optimization will drive the traffic to your website, this will let you score leads on people looking out for your business. For this, your content should be apt, precise, crisp and related to the services. The searcher’s query should get all the answers from your content, and if you fail to engage your audience you will have a tough time scoring leads.
3. Email marketing
Many B2B firms are known for this, they generally deal with clients’ email addresses and score leads and earn millions of dollars of profit. It is just a matter of time and effort that can let you win or lose the competition. If you invest a dollar for an email, you’re bound to earn somewhere around $30 to $40 dollars once to convert that lead into a sale. Email marketing is one of the old school marketing tools but has proved to be very beneficial for many.
4. Use of social media
Social media such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. are also used to score leads. Out of all these social media platforms, LinkedIn has proved to be worthy, the majority of lead generation firms across the globe make use of it and score thousands of leads. Social media has a very strong impact on people and is very influential when it comes to their purchasing habits.
There are many more ways that you can use to generate leads using digital marketing. However, the ones mentioned above are the most important ways through which scoring leads becomes easier and converting them into potential customers becomes more feasible. It is apparently a firm that decides what is promising for them, and what is favorable to their business.
Marketing a small business can be complicated, not because it’s digital marketing but because of the resources and budgeting.
Everything has to be managed in a very precise and result oriented manner with least testing or development time possible, because for a small business “Every penny matters”.
A small business, unlike a giant conglomerate, has very few sources of income and channels of finance.
They just can’t go ahead and invest millions of dollars for hoarding or a billboard for advertising their products or services.
Micro or small-scale businesses have a lot of things to look at apart from investing the whole amount in marketing.
When it comes to businesses opting for digital marketing the medium of marketing should be well well researched and the complete strategy should be prepared considering the whole budget.
Marketing that goes without a funnel has greater chances of failure.
Note: A funnel is a roadmap of the marketing process and built to improve conversion.
What’s the difference between free digital marketing and paid digital marketing?
There are many differences in doing free digital marketing and paid marketing. One of the grounded definitions is that “Free marketing takes time to get any result but Paid marketing starts giving the result from very next week”.
Any marketing either paid or free have their own benefits and they are chosen as per the business scenarios.
Free digital marketing mediums for small Business
Google My Business (Google Maps Listing)
Social Media Publishing
1. Google My Business Listing
Google My business is exactly the thing you see when you search for “Restaurant Near Me’.
Free Digital marketing here means ways you can do marketing without spending any money on media buying. ie: Buying sponsored ads on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google and etc.
1A. Google My Business – Self Managed
A basic digital presence like Google My Business listing can be managed by a small business owner. You should have a basic understanding of social profile management. It is very similar to the way you manage Facebook but for business.
Advantage:
You don’t have to spend any money.
Disadvantage:
The growth won’t be as expected
No strategy to presence will have low growth
1B. Google My Business – Managed by an Agency
A digital marketing agency like stablx offers Google My business management for free with its web design, social media marketing services. But if you want to get your Google Maps listing managed, it will cost you around $49 for one location.
Benefits of Google My Business management by an Agency
You can create a profile for yourself and create a business page and start publishing. In case you are considering to get it done by a professional, don’t forget to connect stablx.
Paid digital marketing mediums for small Business
Paid digital marketing can be divided into the following table. You can consider
You go where the fishes go i.e. you can do any business by the means of digital marketing, as it is not limited.
Comprehensively digital marketing for small businesses is a challenge in which you have to get 9 mangoes in 10 shots. Each shot will get one but should be executed with very little chance of failure.
Again, Small industries do not have huge cash at hand or bank to invest in various strategies of marketing.
What should they do!
How to do Digital marketing for small businesses in a small budget?
Doing marketing in a small budget is a practice followed by startups and entrepreneurs having businesses in the early stage.
Here are some of the predefined and cost-effective digital marketing ways to carry on marketing with a small budget.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Marketing
Content Marketing
Email Marketing
Social Media Marketing
Mobile Advertising
Paid Advertising
1. Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization helps you to drive the traffic to your website. It gives you the opportunity to leverage your website’s informative content. You can put on the best content or information to keep your page visitors or customers engaged for the longest possible duration. SEO helps your website in such a way that the keywords, search results, content, and navigation, make your website appear on the first page of the search results.
Everyone is aware of the chances of the website that appears on the front page of the search results getting clicked is highly increased. And these clicks will bring you your business, money, clients, goodwill, and the market share.
Initially, it will take quite some time(2-4 months) to see SEO results, but once you have enough authority over your competitors you will rank way faster than the first time and higher than your competitors. Authority is built when your website gets quality backlinks from other sites from a similar industry.
2. Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing works differently as compared to search engine optimization. There is a misbelief, that SEM and SEO are completely aloof, however, SEM is an umbrella term within which SEO is considered. SEM is more of a way of getting traffic inorganically(promotion on Search Engines), it involves buying traffic through paid search listings. Basically, you just have to pay for your website to appear on the first page of the search results.
3. Content Marketing
Content Marketing is part of inbound marketing where your content matters the most, the better the contextual concept, the best are the results and your profits. Generally, if you are a start-up or a beginner, this approach suits you the best. You need to be creative, innovative, make valuable content, be consistent so that you can get your customers and build a never-ending strong bond with them, and make them believe that you can be trusted.
Content Marketing = Targetted Audience + Helpful Content + Little to no sales pitch
4. Email marketing
Email marketing is one of the most used approaches by companies to provide services or products such as B2B and B2C. In this, you can directly reach out to your customers with your products and services, also you can research for emails of new customers and try converting them into your potential customers. Very popular amongst lead generating firms, email marketing has always been the well-defined approach for accessing certain groups of customers.
5. Social Media Marketing
Social media is very popular amongst any kind of age level, be it youngsters, adults, or old age. Everyone is connected to their loved ones, friends, and family through social media. Facebook stand-alone has over 2 billion active users and Twitter has around 330 million active users. Just imagine the number of customers you can target through these websites. You can use engaging videos, hashtags, images, and other social media tricks to keep your audience engaged, which can possibly be your customer.
Social media marketing is often useful for remarketing the customer with a discount offer after the customer has visited your site.
6. Mobile Advertising
You, me and everybody else receives various messages talking about offers, discounts, and more irrespective of the brands, business, and agencies. People using mobile phones, tablets, handheld devices, etc. are the target audience here for businesses. Firms send SMS, MMS, mobile-based applications, voice calls, website links, etc.
7. Digital Advertising
Digital advertising deals with advertisements that are available on all digital platforms. It includes all platforms mostly like Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. It aims to drive all the referral traffic to your website through paid digital display advertisements. Facebook and Google drive the major portion of advertisements out of all the platforms.
How to plan content marketing for small businesses & What you should never forget?
They can make a difference in the competition by providing their services or products digitally, or rather make their business available globally through digital platforms. With the help of social media, email marketing, SMS, content marketing, etc. can carve a niche for themselves. Small business can use different strategies to make their digital marketing more excellent such as –
Novel Content.
The amalgamation of digital concepts with physical concepts.
Old is gold
Be more creative rather than spending money on creating agencies.
Result Seeker
1. Old is Gold – New is rich
You must have heard the saying old is gold. It’s a great marketing strategy but only for very specific categories ie: Food, Wood, Houses (Community), Ayurveda, Homeopathy
But if you start selling the technology telling “Old is gold”, Your existing customer will consider leaving forget churn of new leads. It’s fine if you have some old tech running inside the office to do your job but not to put in marketing content.
Data has become the fuel for many industries that keep them lubricated. Exactly, in the same way, industries need to churn their old data and will be able to crack new customers using new marketing mediums.
2. Say Unique Be Unique
Raising just like any other will make you like any other. If you are a marketing product x, make the atmosphere of X.
Example: If you promoting ancient medicine make your store look like one ancient store. Doesn’t matter if the building or store is modern technologies but keep your store aligned to your product.
Your uniqueness will bring your identity and people like that uniqueness, and share with others which brings even more customers and builts a strong customer base.
3. The amalgamation of digital concept with the physical concept
Digitalization is the present and the future for us, but we will not always be involved digitally because there will be something else innovated. People are willingly going to go to brick and mortar outlets to experience physical shopping. So this will be the opportunity for small businesses to incorporate digital solutions along with physical shops, or vice versa.
4. Creative than Competitive
Agencies undoubtedly provide strategically defined services, but this does not mean that you cannot do it on your own. You can commence with the research, study it patiently, and get your desired results, this is how you can achieve it. This will not burn a hole and holds the power to bring great results.
Example:
Advertising is done by Ikea, intriguing members of netizens.
A few hours later, it gained momentum.
Wait, There is one more for the newest tech lovers.
5. Result Seeker
Doesn’t matter the kind of small-medium business you have, your marketing strategy and it’s execution should bring result.
An organic marketing execution between 4-6 months and paid campaign in less than a month.
Yes, I said, a month. A paid campaign usually starts giving results from week one, if something goes wrong it should not be extended for more than a month.
In case you are trying for viral marketing, ut takes time to develop a concept and reach the audience. Never leave in the first attempt but give a try for 3-4 times, if it doesn’t work out, try another creative agency.
Digital marketing vs Digital Marketing
Everyone a small business owner or anyone who is getting started with business has a question,
which medium should I target?
Isn’t digital marketing too new to be tested?
I have seen traditional methods of advertising and they work great? My uncle who purchased a new phone also seen an ad in the newspaper itself.
No, Those are self assumptions, every different product and price point has a different audience and a good marketing consultant helps you to reach the right audience.
Here is a sneak peek about the difference between traditional marketing and digital marketing
Traditional Marketing
Digital Marketing
Reach to Specific Audience
Not Available
Available
Medium (Ad Done on)
Radio, TV, Newspaper, Billboards, Electronic Billboard
Google, Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter, and etc.
Price
Very High
Small Budget
Risk
Cannot stop if the ad is published
Can stop anytime
Validity
None
People like or follow the page
Want to connect gain
Possible only if they called
Possibly even if they called, engaged, liked, or shown interest in the ad.
Targetting Quality
Below Average
Very Targetted
AB Test
Very Expensive
Quite inexpensive
Tracking
Mixed
Specific
Performance Measuring
Depends on Sales
Engagement, Lead, Conversion
A guessing game is never good for business, especially for small businesses because of limitations on resources.
Every dollar should be spent in the right direction and a few cents on testing something new.
Then, What’s the best way to go?
How to market a small business with a low risk of failure?
Audience Research & Persona
Campaign Budget
Campaign Strategy & Phasing
Content Planning
Execution & Intensity
1. Audience Research & Persona Building
Audience Research is a process of finding a set of possible customers from a large audience. Most of the platforms offer an audience and do not share phone numbers or any personal data.
They give access to an advertising system that is usually managed by digital marketing agencies through which small businesses are served.
The process of audience filtering may not make sense to you if you have never done any digital marketing. If a lot of things are blue to you, consider connecting STABLX, we can help with step by step strategy execution.
2. Campaign Budget
Being clear on the campaign budget helps you schedule different marketing activities and mediums of content distribution. When the budget is less and isn’t enough to put in all the activities in all mediums, spend on selected mediums that can bring your customers.
3. Campaign Strategy & Phasing
Campaign strategy is done to not miss in between. Of course, most of the campaigns are pretty clear but to keep the whole team and client and investors, these things should be defined.
Many business owners force the agency to put work on all the platforms and face almost 0 conversions and putting a little amount of budget on all platforms is a pretty bad idea.
It’s good when a sufficient amount of budget is allocated but not with so less than no conversions take place.
A simple reason for that is most of the social platforms use artificial intelligence to automate the audience filtering as per the product/service, and it takes time to understands the specifics of targeting. A campaign should run enough to make that happen when ignored, it causes 0 conversions and wrong leads most of the time.
4. Content Planning
This is the phase where the “message for the customer: is prepared. Big companies consider sponsoring celebrities but as we are discussing small business owners, we should not talk about those strategies.
Small business owners should be creative with it’s and stand out. If the advertising requires few push-ups and humor, add it. Humor creates a long-lasting effect in the customer’s minds.
Type of Content
Score of Reach
Images
8/10
Videos
8/10
Gifs
6/10
Audio
3/10
5. Execution & Intensity
The digital marketing project intensity is calculated by the amount of work done and budget spend.
The intensity should change on the kind of product/service being sold and it should change over time.
Example:
Family restaurant ads run on intensity on Thursday till weekends in intensity to get more customers on weekends.
A software company ads run at the beginning of the week with intensity to get leads and convert on weekends.
In conclusion, digital marketing has allowed every business to reach more customers that are likely to buy or at least traditional marketing.
Since the day, when the electronic devices can industry have seen a technological advancement, from there the marketing and especially digital marketing has become more digitally oriented.
Everyone can try and become the triumphant knight in digital marketing, but it does come with some price that everybody needs to pay, and that price is patience.
You should have the patience to deal with digital marketing because it’s not overnight that you will get all the profits, you need to study consumer behavior and the consumer movement.
Emails and SMS had been in line for a very long time, where we used to receive offers and other benefits through them. But since, Google, Facebook, Android, iOS, and others have come into the picture, digital marketing got its structure.
But above were the ways to do digital marketing for free but what if you have some budget and you want to get results faster?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is a process to optimize your website to rank websites on Google and other search engines. It is one of the most popular and most affordable mediums of digital marketing.
But What more,
Let’s dig into what I meant with the good quality and quantity of the website.
Organic results: Organic traffic is any traffic for which you don’t have to pay for.
Quality of traffic:
One can attract visitors from around the globe, but if Google is showing your result to someone who is in search of electronics whereas you have a fruit selling website. Then even though you might attract the audience, they are not the audience who would buy your product, so that’s not good quality traffic.
Quantity of traffic: once you get the right audience clicking your website from the search engine results pages(SERPs), then more the traffic the better it is
What exactly is the Search Engine and how does it work?
A search engine is a big library, it’s librarians to go to every website and look for web pages and store the relevant information in them.
One of the biggest libraries on earth is Google. In technical terms, it’s a search engine.
Doing search engine optimization is easy after you know how search engines work.
So how do they work?
Well, that’s what I’m gonna tell you next.
As I mentioned earlier, Search engines are like libraries which store web pages URLs in a prioritized order.
Every search engine has its own formulas to find priority and in technical terms, it’s called an algorithm.
When you try to search anything into the search engine then it looks through all the pages in its index and tries to show you the most relevant results.
To do so, it uses a computer program called an algorithm.
Nobody except for Google knows how their algorithm works to give search outputs, but we do have some clues given by them, here is what they say-4
“To give you the most useful information, Search algorithms look at many factors, including the words of your query, relevance, and usability of pages, the expertise of sources, and your location and settings.
The weight applied to each factor varies depending on the nature of your query – for example, the freshness of the content plays a bigger role in answering queries about current news topics than it does about dictionary definitions.”
Since now you might have a rough idea of how a search engine works, so now I can tell you how SEO works.
How does SEO work?
In simple words, SEO works by demonstrating to the search engines that your content is the best result for the topic of search.
This is because every search engine wants to show the best and relevant web pages to the viewer. Optimizing a website depends on the search engine you’re doing it for since Google is the most widely used search engine we would be talking about how it works on Google.
So the whole process of SEO is “optimizing your web page in such a way that it would rank higher for business terms” ie “Website Designer in New York”.
Before digging deep on how SEO works, let users understand the whole system of execution.
The whole SEO is divided into two parts
On-Page SEO (Things you do on your website)
Off-Page SEO (Things you do on others website)
Processes in SEO
On-page SEO
On-page SEO also known as on-site SEO is a process of optimizing the elements and content on a website in order to rank higher and get more relevant traffic from search engines.
On-page SEO refers to the optimization of both the content as well as the HTML source code of a page.
Before ranking higher in the search engine, proper on-page SEO helps the user to understand the context of the webpage easily and properly which leads to the accomplishment of completing a transaction. For a good on-page SEO, you need high-quality content along with good and relevant keywords.
The ultimate goal of on-page SEO can be thought of as attempting to make it as easy as possible for both search engines and users to:
Understand what a webpage is about;
Identify that page as relevant to a search query or queries (i.e. a particular keyword or set of keywords);
Find that page useful and worthy of ranking well on a search engine results page (SERP).
It is not only keywords or quality content which resembles on-page SEO, it includes more than that-
Link use on a page: How many links are there? Are they internal or external? Where do they point to?
Page load speed
Use of Schema.org structured data
Page URL structure
Mobile-friendliness
Page metadata
Off-page SEO
It is the action taken outside of a website in order to impact rankings within search engine results pages(SERPs).
While we don’t know the full algorithm Google uses to rank content, data given by Moz shows that off-page SEO factors carry likely more than 50% of the ranking weightage.
Search engines use backlinks as indications of the linked-to content’s quality, so a site with many high-value backlinks will usually rank better than an otherwise equal site with fewer backlinks.
There are mainly three kinds of links, natural links, manually built links, and self-created links.
Natural links are editorially given without any action on the part of a page owner. For example, a food blogger adding a link to a post that points toward their favorite produce farms is a natural link.
Manually built links are acquired through deliberate link-building activities. This includes things like getting customers to link to your website or asking influencers to share your content.
Self-created links are created by practices such as adding a backlink in an online directory, forum, blog comment signature, or a press release with optimized anchor text. Some self-created link building tactics tend toward black hat SEO and are frowned upon by search engines, so tread lightly here.
As it is clear how links are important for off-page SEO, but there are some criteria which determine the quality of the links-
The linking site’s popularity
How related the linking site’s topic is to the site being linked to
The “freshness” of the link
The anchor text used on the linking site
The trustworthiness of the linking site
The number of other links on the linking page
Authority of the linking domain and page
Apart from linking off-page SEO also consisted of –
Social media Data Points/Metrics
Web References
Brand mentions (With the link, without a link)
Content Influence/Popularity
And other 197 factors
Types of SEO
If you are an SEO enthusiast you must have heard about the line which is drawn between the types of SEO. The industry is clearly divided into three types, one is the black hat SEO, 2ndwhite hat SEO & the last but most popular grey hat SEO. We will be discussing more them and which one you should choose to get more traffic from google and why no strategy is a bad strategy.
White Hat SEO: What is white has SEO?
Wondering what white hat SEO is? If you are someone who follows 100% Google Webmaster Guidelines to get the traffic for your website, then you are a white hat.
The white hats stay far away from getting Google’s penalty along with their consequences. They play along by working according to the Google Webmaster Guide and get wins.
Although it might take them longer than the black hats to get those wins once they do get it the wins stay with them long, meaning the page ranking won’t differ much even though Google changes their algorithm.
Well, a fun fact no one is actually a 100% white hat.
Where and when to use white hat SEO?
-only good for companies like google/informative companies, since their lack of need for links.
-rarely seen but usually wrongly advertised (people sell white hat but end up doing grey hat SEO. Always have been an issue of duplicity, people intend to go for white hat thinking to stay away from getting penalty but the SEO agents sell grey hat techniques giving it the name of white hats.
-What’s the difference?
When you make a backlink by yourself, it’s a grey hat, when it is given by someone else without your effort it’s white hat. That is the simplest answer defining the difference between both.
Grey hats: What is grey hat SEO?
So, what is “grey hat” SEO?
As mentioned above no one is a 100% white hat, and people don’t want to be a black hat unless they are too good in it, so people end up being a grey hat.
According to the Google guidelines, one should just sit idle and wait for the website to grow naturally, well this is something which is absurd in 2020, so SEO pros acquire links in order to strengthen the page. While white hats don’t buy links just like black hats but they try to acquire links from trusted sites or place their links on legitimate sites.
Where and when to use grey hat SEO?
-most popular in the industry as all the SEO professionals use this strategy to do SEO.
-98% SEOs use this technique
Black hat SEO: What is black hat SEO?
Black hats are SEO practitioners. Black hat is just a tactic they use that falls outside of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines in order to rank sites.
Because of the fact that black hats don’t follow the Google guidelines, there is a high chance that the site might fall overnight, that is why black hat SEO is not preferred due to its high risk.
Well, people usually mistake black hats with hackers, black hats are those who don’t like to follow Google’s Webmaster Guideline but they are not breaking any law, so they are not hackers.
Where and when to use black hat SEO?
-when you must rank in a short amount of time, and you don’t care about the consequences. Quite hard to do it and not getting a penalty, so if someone is clever enough then obviously one can do that without getting caught.
-when you don’t need the site later, well it’s obvious that if you want your site to stay and doing it for a long term investment then better don’t go for it.
What service does Stablx offer?
White, Grey considered the need and executed only after approval from the client.
How to do SEO?
Since you already know the basics of how SEO works and what are its different processes and types. So I feel that it is time for you to decide what you really need. Also giving you a complete comparison of the benefits and flaws of each one.
Doing on your own:
Since you have a rough sketch on how these things work you can probably learn to do SEO on your own and do it for your website. The only problem with doing on your own is the amount of time it might take for you to learn and implement it, and of course, the experience of an agency or some individual would be better than yours.
In-House Team: An in house team is a dedicated team working for your company in order to bring more relevant traffic to your website or company. This kind of dedicated team would cost you quite a lot of money but the result would be better than doing on your own, but only suitable for a well funded and established company.
Higher an agency: Hiring an agency is the best and trusted thing you can do for your company to grow, it would cost you some money but obviously not as expensive as an in house team. I recommend this since these people are quite experienced and know what to do, and could also suggest the best thing for your website. You can check stablx for a better understanding of In house team vs marketing agency.
Here is a comparison between an In House Team and a Digital Marketing Agency
Questionnaire
In-House Team
Digital Marketing Agency
Big Company with a fancy budget?
Yes
Want the same/better result with the average budget?
Yes
Need Digital Marketing for many Business
Yes
Need Digital Marketing for one/few businesses with quality work and good ROI?
Yes
Want everything to be done inside the company?
Yes
Sometimes
Want to follow the latest trends, cope with algorithm changes?
Yes
Want the team to be a part of your company and sync with the whole marketing team?
Yes
Cultural Connection
Yes
Dedicated Team
Yes
Sometimes
Need Fresh Perspective to Market your product?
Yes
Need Execution from a Broader Skillset and Dept Experience?
Yes
Search engine optimization techniques
Rank for product/service pages
this is the optimization for your niche or product, it’s optimizing your page such that google ranks you due to your product/webpage.
Eg. suppose you’re a guitar selling website then optimizing your page and putting the correct keywords and relevant links to your webpage would rank you better for the niche “guitar”, or simply say the keyword “guitar”.
This is direct optimization of your webpage, the better it is optimized the better chance for your website to rank among the top 10.
Rank blog articles and convert(by funnel)
Funneling is a very interesting topic and changes the way we look at SEO. It explains how important it is for a brand to do SEO. Well, jumping to the ranking of blog articles.
Blogs, when written, should be written with keeping in mind the right keywords relevant and then put links to your article which would direct you to the main page of yours and along with that share your blogs through social media or mail.
When a new webpage, the blog is uploaded to the net then the crawlers put by the search engine starts crawling to your website through the links of another URL which could lead to your page.
After crawling the page will be rendered then indexed which would make you rank better, letting the audience click your website and if the quality of your page is good enough to retain them, the audience would turn to your customers.
How SEO helps business?
For a good business what matters the most is the reputation of the company, or more specifically speaking the brand value. It is not only true for big companies but also for startups
But what role does SEO play to maximize your business, if you are already having a business established ut you are not having a web page for it then in order to increase your reach to the world apart from your locality then creating a web page with proper SEO will obviously bring you a greater audience and better chances of selling your products.
If you are a startup or any company needing an investor then it would be wise to show the potential of your company and it’s not a webpage obviously but it does leave a good amount of impression on how sincere you are with the company. So keeping your ranking in the top 10 searches would give you a better chance of getting more funds.
Which businesses use SEO as marketing?
Speaking of the fact that SEO is a crucial entity one should implement to their digital marketing strategy in order to get a good result, in fact, I would say SEO is 60% of what digital marketing is.
As mentioned already in order to get more leads and to sell your products online as well as collaborating with different companies, all get better when you do SEO, as more the viewers are more useful for your venture.
Case Study 1: Amazon.com
Amazon spends $43.8 Million to get 31.1 million traffic
Amazon spends heavily on SEO and receives 996.5 Million worth of free traffic.
amazon.com
Traffic
Traffic Cost
Paid Traffic (Paid)
31.1M
43.8 Million
SEO Traffic (Free)
996.5M
833.2 Million
Case Study 2: BestBuy.com
BestBuy in the other site spends around 1.4 Million on paid marketing to get 2.8 Millions traffic.
BestBuy.com
Traffic
Traffic Cost
Paid Traffic (Paid)
1.4 Million
2.8 Million
SEO Traffic (Free)
41.9 Million
55.8 Million
Why is SEO popular among businesses?
Due to the digitization of the entire nation and with the increase in the number of internet users every day it is quite obvious that doing business online has increased the chances for it to grow.
In order to do business online, your website should reach the relevant audience and for that to happen SEO is very crucial and this the sole reason for which SEO has become popular among the businesses.
How does SEO help business? What kind of benefits does SEO give to businesses?
SEO for lead generation (Sales):
It is done to increase sales of the service or product provided by the business.
SEO for E-Commerce (Sales):
This type of SEO is done in E-commerce websites to show your product above others in an e-commerce site.
SEO for Education (Education to consumers):
These are blogs and articles written to educate the customers regarding the latest products or services provided by your business or businesses also giving the consumer thought of going with which brand. This kind of SEO is very crucial for internet literacy.
SEO for business and How to get started?
Search Engine Optimization is a skill that one has to update with every update in the search engine algorithm. SEO techniques have evolved and changed with the past few years, and the criteria of ranking changes with the change in algorithm.
Doing SEO in 2020 would be more complex than usual, it won’t be only keywords or building links, there would be many more things one will need to look at.
Your audience (e.g., how they behave and what they want).
What goes into SEO and what does it cost to the business?
Time- SEO is not something that would happen in 1 day or 1 week it takes time for a web page to rank among the top searches. For a stable webpage and good ranking, it takes around a span of anything between 4 months to 12 months.
Resources- So talking about resources it does take a good amount of your resources to be invested in SEO, so it’s better you hire an agency to do the work otherwise it would eat up a good chunk of your manpower to do proper SEO.
Money People say that SEO is for free it doesn’t cause you much money, but the truth is it does, learning SEO is completely free, but the tools needed to complete the task of doing SEO requires an investment. But it is quite cheaper than the conventional marketing strategy of advertising your product through different platforms which are obviously more traditional.
Basic steps involved in order to do SEO-
Business Overview, Goals understanding: before doing SEO you must understand why you’re doing it, and in what ways it is going to help you in your venture, and accordingly, you have to set your goals.
Rough Service Cost Estimation: now after having your goals set, it is wise to set your budget since it is what you need to know in order to choose the correct path to do SEO i.e, to choose freelancers or agencies.
Service/product prioritization (when less on a budget): if your low on budget then you can go for service-specific or product-specific SEO, you need to prioritize which service that you provide to do SEO for or which product you sell to do SEO for.
Keyword Research: it’s always wise to know your keywords because it will be what that will keep you ahead from the crowd. Knowing your niche is important so do the perfect keywords for it.
Expectations & Timeline: according to your preferred time you can go for the type of SEO you need to do, if needed for a short amount blackhat is preferred if the domain is not needed later.
Service Quote: after putting all the things together the quotation or say the price has to be set.
Approval: after that, it needs approval for the execution of the task.
Project Execution: after all this project has to start and the required things have to be done by the person in charge of doing the SEO.
Reporting: after completion of the task and when the webpage is ready the client is reported for their feedback.
Improvement: if any improvement is needed it will be done.
FAQ
Q) How much does it cost to do SEO?
ans) It depends on your requirement, whether to do SEO for a particular webpage or for all the pages in your domain, the time frame, all of this needs to be counted along with the competition in the niche, all this will sum up to your cost.
Q) Can I learn and do SEO?
ans) Yes of course you can learn and do SEO by yourself but it will cost you a lot of time, and hard work, if you are down with that then go for it.
Q) Is hiring an SEO agency a good idea?
ans) It is indeed a good idea if you can afford it, as hiring a reputed agency will keep you ahead than many who are doing their own as an agency knows the tricks along with all their experience keeps them a step ahead than the individuals doing SEO on their own.
Q) Is SEO dead?
ans) This question makes me laugh because it’s not gonna happen any soon, in this era when everyone is shifting to online business the need of SEO will be rising and won’t be going down any soon. Apart from optimization in Google, people have started optimizing for Youtube, Amazon, etc as well. So I don’t see it going anywhere any soon.
Is SEO really free?
The answer is no, honestly speaking it is not, there are people who will be claiming it to be free and try to sell their courses on SEO, by some clickbait photos and sentences, but the reality is it is not. Just like other industries purchasing software costs you money, just like that doing SEO costs you money for the tools required to do it. Whereas learning SEO can be free but doing so efficiently will cost you some bucks.
Is it possible to rank in 1 month?
The answer is not really, although it is possible if your niche is unique and you have done some good amount of black hat techniques to achieve it then you can rank within 1 month. But I feel that is a hypothetical scenario so it is not possible. It takes at least a time of 4 months to rank well depending upon the competition if the competition is good enough it might take a year too.
Why is it important to hire brand-centric and experienced people?
Doesn’t get spammed
Develops long term strategy
No sudden low traffic issues
No sudden brand disappearance
Connects and executes whole digital marketing strategy
These are the reasons for which going with a brand-centric and experienced agency is important.
What may go wrong if DIY goes wrong?
-a lot of experiments isn’t good for SEO in the brand’s favor
-the brand may disappear from google if the SEO is not done properly
-manual penalty may be given by Google if caught not obeying Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
-deviate from your business (real major issue)
These are some points which tell us what things can go wrong if you do DIY, but it doesn’t mean you can’t do it on your own, it’s just that you should look out for these mistakes.
Now you know what SEO is and How it’s done, What’s next!
Start doing SEO: DIY SEO
Build In House Team: if you think they can do your work go for it.
Hire an Agency: If you want the best results for your website don’t hesitate in going with an agency to do the job.
Discuss SEO costing: After selecting your preferred option talk with them do research on what should be done and discuss the costing.
In house digital marketing team Vs Digital Marketing Agency
The era of digital marketing has pushed businesses to go beyond cold calling and emailing. Today gaining trust in business and maintaining a long term relationship has become a pillar for future customers where cold calling and email makes the product feel under-impressing.
Today future-focused companies are building the reputation to gain customer and leave an experience that is unforgettable so customers ca return when needed.
If you observe the last 15 years of the relationship between business and technology, you will find a lot of human behavioural changes in making a purchase decision.
Some of the majors can be
15 Years Ago
Customers Today
People purchased Offline
People purchase Online
INFORMATION GATHERING
Gathered Info from Family, Friends
Today, Google it. In fact, say ” OK Google, what’s the price of iPhone X in India?”
Trusted Product because their Grandfather has been using
Trusted it because Google has left a rating
Wanted to buy a TV, buy the same TV the neighbour owns.
Search on Google “Best TV to buy for Money”
The whole point is the generation has changed and if online marketing is done in the same older way, it’s not going to produce a good result for the money spent.
Today the technology has changed and bigger companies are becoming bigger and bigger and smaller companies, dealers growth is slightly reducing every day.
The whole point here is people have changed their behaviour and today they are more attached to Google, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram and Quora.
If you are not on these platforms then you aren’t playing efficiently. As a business platform like Quora, Facebook can be ignored but Google, definitely not.
You know it’s competitive, but it’s competitive because it brings a lot of business.
Being absent from these platforms are not just leaving you away from your business but they are becoming a bridge for your competitors.
I have a website, So I am safe
I was it was easy, Actually, it was but it was 10 years ago where you just had to have a website with “words people search” for your products but not today in 2019.
Today, hundreds of business like yours are doing the same thing and they want more and more customers.
The company sitting in Bangalore runs ads on Google for Online Machine Learning Training.
The advertising has become so focused that now you can target the exact audience by targeting, interest, location, industry and much more. These targeted marketing are so focused and useful that they leave an asset which can be reused or showcased.
Tools like Facebook, Google Ads Networks, Instagram, Quora targeting has given so many options that now you will be able to target the audience you like, remarket existing visitors to make a purchase of the produce they visited a few hours ago and keep showing until they buy.
Defining outcome before running a campaign is one of the most important things companies should define as they keep pushing towards your goal. According to smart insight only 34% of the companies define their outcome.
The most directed channel online marketing is exponentially shifting to online marketing and the numbers rigorously improving and it’s all done through digital marketing.
Now there are mainly 2 ways companies build their business presence online to expand their business and do more.
In-house team
Digital Marketing Agency
In-house Team:
The inhouse team is basically a set of people hired by a company to perform digital marketing activities for the business. Forming a digital marketing team can be beneficial and allows to process any lag or latency in the process but with one disadvantage.
Forming an in-house team may cost more for a mid-level or small teamed business. Hiring best talents required a well-pushed fund, a new space, infrastructure, a good result manager and much more. But the good thing is they can process a good amount of work.
Digital Marketing Agency
Digital Marketing Agency is a group of experts from different subparts of Digital Marketing. ie: SEO Expert, Social Media Expert, Landing Page Optimization expert and etc. These marketers are well aware of the trends, and algorithmic changes in the industry and SERP. They handle 10s of campaigns in a day which makes them execution machine to generate better ROI.
Digital Marketing Agencies are comparatively cheaper compare the in-house team which drains the budget of marketing in forming an in-house team, building infrastructure and hire a manager to manage them for a goal.
Which is best to go with? Forming an In-house team OR Hiring a Digital Marketing Agency!
It all depends on the requirement you have and the budget you want to get the things executed with the same ROI.
Here are a few things you may consider before making your decision?
Questionnaire
In-House Team
Digital Marketing Agency
Big Company with a fancy budget?
Yes
Want the same/better result with the average budget?
Yes
Need Digital Marketing for many Business
Yes
Need Digital Marketing for one/few businesses with quality work and good ROI?
Yes
Want everything to be done inside the company?
Yes
Sometimes
Want to follow the latest trends, cope with algorithm changes?
Yes
Want the team to be a part of your company and sync with the whole marketing team?
Yes
Cultural Connection
Yes
Dedicated Team
Yes
Sometimes
Need Fresh Perspective to Market your product?
Yes
Need Execution from a Broader Skillset and Dept Experience?
Yes
Are you still confused?
Give yourself little time to sync things with your business. If you are someone who likes to own things and then execute at every cost, it’s recommended to invest in the team but if you are someone who believes in experience, and gets things done and also has the ability to select one from many approach them hiring a digital marketing agency can be the best option.
You have a startup and you may gain a great success in future too.
You might also be having a website for it and, congratulation for having a live website!
But let me ask you a hard question?
How many people know about your startup?
You may say, All the friends and family.
But let me tell you a bitter truth, they are the exact wrong audience to share about your company.
You share your idea to the people who are facing the problem you are trying to solve and the investors who would like to invest in getting the problem solved than just your friends and family.
Think of your future customers. Do they know about your awesome product which is going to solve their problem!
No! Almost no one knows about your startup except you and your friends!
If your answer is “NO” then you should immediately take action to improve your business Oe startup presence online.
When I say putting business presence online, it’s not just about building a static OR web application and putting it online but it’s more about attracting customers to the website without any personal connection.
You should start building your business presence online even before the first version of your product. When you do that, your audience will be excited about the product you will be launching.
To build an audience who will love your product, your virtual product should have existence on the web. Your company should appear on Google when people search solution of the problem your organization want to solve.
How to build a startup presence online so people know about it?
Putting business presence online is one of the most important things to do when you are a startup.
Of course not just creating an account on the different portal will attract traffic and people to your startup but by creating a website, writing content that will be loved by people and doing SEO definitely will.
How to build an effective business presence online to get thousands of people visiting your website?
Make your website live
Develop a Blog
Create Social Media Pages
Start Optimizing your website for SEO
Join Active communities
Start connecting people on Quora
Ask their problems and Share your solution
Build your audience in Facebook Pixel, Google Remarketing Audience
Market your product online
How to do SEO for a startup?
SEO for a startup is no different than doing a magazine.
A magazine usually has a bunch of articles which helps people to grab useful information. You startup blog can be another helpful blog where people will know about the problems and solution they are facing.
To get started with article writing, You can research on the problems your audience is facing and write high-quality content focused to help them to solve it,
We at StablX consider any startup is not just a startup but a great set of minds trying to solve a problem which was never solved. Because you are the people who are trying to help people and make them live a better life.
Now let me share you some of the online marketing techniques which will not just help you to gain visibility on social media and other channels but also on Google.
Appearing on Google for relevant keywords can alone bring you thousands of free traffic in no time.
Not getting enough traffic is common issue startups and new business owners and it happens because people don’t care about building a business presence online initially. No doubt no one is going to download your app unless they get to know about your app. This issue is usually faced in the initial stage of their business unless they find right for of marketing.
I say years because they don’t know how to do it OR if they know they don’t know How to get started?
In brief, let me tell you How can you build your business base without spending a penny
Create a Blog
Creating a blog is a brilliant way to market your product and services for free. It takes a minimum of 3 months to see any visitor on your blog but not bounded by 3 months you may see a traffic break under 3 months too.
The blog is a business asset just like your reputation in your market, and market value. It remains with you until you delete them and serves you with a big number of customers who never heard about your startup.
Here is a small result of having traffic flow after we developed the blog for this client and improved the ranking which was going lower and lower.
Start Publishing Article
Publishing article! You never did any!
Don’t worry! You don’t have to be a professional journalist to write an article. You can just start writing about a common problem and it’s solution on your blog and it will help people to solve their issue.
Be focused and Publish content about the problem your startup and business is solving and connect your product and services without looking like a marketing freak. This is a brilliant way to grow your business presence and loyalty online.
Do SEO
SEO, Sear Engine Optimization. a procedure which helps your business to rank higher on Google and other search engine and brings you thousands of visitors for FREE.
It is also the biggest channel which has the ability to go beyond the word of mouth and break the stereotype of getting limited leads.
SEO basics procedures can be done by anyone by writing an article but if you want to intensely focus on traffic generation in the least time possible then contact SEO, they will help you to build a base which will drive thousands of traffic to your website.
You will never know How much traffic you can get until you let people visit your website and let them read your content?
We tweaked the result and it was hiked in a few SEO technical changes and Off Page SEO and the traffic increased bt 17% in a week.
Talk to social media
SEO is great for the startups who want customers who are actually facing problems and searching for the solution on Google. But if you are solving a problem where people are not much aware of the solution then it is recommended to invest some time and budget in social media marketing.
Social Media Marketing will help you to gain an audience and let millions of people know about your idea in the least time possible unlike boundaries of search engines.
Social Media Websites like Facebook gives you the ability to target people based on location, interest, employment, behaviour and other 47 important parameters allowing you to target almost any audience possible.
Publishing and sharing content in facebook groups is not a bad idea but if you aren’t targeting the right audience.
It has the ability to go viral in no time if you do it precisely.
Do analysis before you get into direct marketing
Doing a depth analysis of the database you have and whom to call and connect will help you to improve the conversion and have control over resources.
Deliver the best
And the end everything matter is you, your service and the customer who will but the service.
If you are an industry where you expect people to repurchase your product and services then you should focus on the experience.
Deliver the best experience possible and the customer will come back to you.
That’s all!
Do you think I have missed something which will help startups to build a business presence online?
SEO, The buzz which once again became popular after Mark Zuckerberg officially announced about the Facebook algorithm changes which reduced organic social media reach. The update so intensive that people once again started considering SEO as the main traffic source and spend money on.
But the question is, You just need traffic on need traffic that converts and becomes your customer?
your answer is “Need SEO traffic that converts as a customer” then let me tell you that you need to do a proper research before you dive into SEO and end up also targeting the keywords which are not profitable or the keywords which have less intent to convert.
What is KAS?
KAS is an analytical process to target the right audience on Google and Other Search Engines to target the right audience with right keywords and right landing page to convert visitors into customers.
What is keywords research?
Keywords research is a process of finding a set of words, and phrases used by the customer’s to search the product online.
Ie: Best Veg Restaurant in Hyderabad, Best SEO Company Hyderabad and etc.
How to keywords research for business?
Keywords research is done with the help of a tool like Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz, Majestic and keyword planned(Not Accurate). The process includes listing all the keywords, making segments based on competition on the SERP, search volume, keyword strength and etc.
How to select more profitable business keywords for SEO?
The real value of keywords is defined by making it live and do AB testing. The AB testing of the webpage included a change in the content, customer friendly information, change in images and much more.
There is a problem with Regular SEO!
Regular SEO is a process of doing SEO where a person researches the SEO keywords for the business using SEO Keyword Research Technique and then he starts doing On-Page SEO and then Off Page SEO.
But this process wastes a lot of time, money and resources of the company which can be optimized.
Because as a company, You are going to spend a lot of money to rank business keywords which were just researched by an SEO expert considering the business audience.
In most of these researchers, It’s assured that many of them will not perform better and if you are going to spend money on ranking those keywords as well then you are doing something wrong.
This table will show you how much does it cost to target the right keywords
SEO Cost Sheet (6 Months)
Keywords
SEO Cost per Month
No Of Months
Collective
Digital Marketing
$50
6
$300
Digital Marketing Agency in India
$50
6
$300
Digital Marketing Agency in Hyderabad
$50
6
$300
Best Digital Marketing Agency in Hyderabad
$50
6
$300
Top Digital Marketing Agency in Hyderabad
$50
6
$300
Cost without filtering Keywords
Total
$1500
This is a general way to spending money on SEO(Search Engine Optimization) to rank your website higher on Google. But this expense can be reduced to a smaller amount and get more conversion. So what i am talking about? I am talking about filtering the keywords which don’t do well for the business, doesn’t bring leads even when the page has traffic.
How to filter wrong SEO Keywords that don’t produce business?
There are many ways to do it, but if you haven’t started SEO services for your business then the best way to solve wrong keyword issues is to get the audience through that keywords and see if people are converting.
You are to make sure that you are not mixing this procedure with other campaigns. If you do so the put proper parameter to filter which keywords have converted using Google Campaign URL Builder.
Campaign Builder is a free tool by Google which helps you to set a parameter in the existing URL so you can see the stats like channel, location, and etc parameters report in analytics without any other configuration in Google Analytics.
One your URL and Landing page is ready, start with AdWords campaign with a small budget which can drive a minimum of 50 clicks from each keyword.
If you are targeting 5 keywords in AdWords then your budget may look like this
Filtering keyword Using Adwords
Keywords
CPC
Charges
Digital Marketing
$1.5
$75
Digital Marketing Agency in India
$2
$100
Digital Marketing Agency in Hyderabad
$3
$150
Best Digital Marketing Agency in Hyderabad
$2
$100
Top Digital Marketing Agency in Hyderabad
$2
$100
Keyword Filtering + Leads
Total Cost
$525
The price shouldn’t be considered as the main factor as the CPC(Cost Per Click) depends on the business category, competition, and AdWords factors.
The benefit of filtering keywords and then working on it enormously and you save a lot in the period
Saves SEO resources, Time, and finance which are invested regularly to keep you on the Top.
Ranking your website will become easy as the keyword count is reduced.
Saves the Company Unfruitful Expenses low, SEO is a process where you keep pushing resources to keep ranking. The resources get reduces as you don’t have to work on a large number of keywords.
Filtering keyword is a one time process but SEO is a regular process to keep ranking. It requires regular investment to keep ranking on the top.
So using this KAS method you can filter business specific keywords and the sped time and resources to keep ranking higher on Google and get a free traffic from Google and other search engine techniques.
SEO has been in business for more than a decades, Now people has started believing google more than a human being as in most of the cases it gives an accurate result with right benefits.
Search Engine has become an essential part of our like, and most of us, at least people having smartphone consume it in a different way. It might be a simple google query, Questions to Siri or commands to google assistant we consume it regularly.
The reliability and easy to use is not alone which has built a market for search engines like Google but also the time and availability.
Now, you don’t have to ask a friend about the bike you should purchase. You may just google it and it will list out all the lastest bikes available in the market with detailed features. The point I want to make here is availability, You can do a quick google search at the midnight, being in park or anywhere you wish to.
The whole economy has a simple science, People love the products which are free and valuable and Google is one among all.
According to SEJ Google drives 65% of whole web search in the year 2015. Now the great things is, it has increased gradually increased because the Google Always Keeps changing its algorithm but where bing, yahoo, ROl are becoming outdated due to low-quality search results and less popularity.
What happened when these search engines, Voice Assistant like Google, Siri started being part of human life.
The human touch to real life got shifted into a smartphone. People started spending more time with these tiny devices all the time including being in bed, traveling to the office, search for a restaurant and much more.
This boomed a new marketing channel where people can build a business presence online and attract the customer.
Everyone stared listing their business online to get more customer. The business which built faster were able to get more customers. And the customers were not just limited to a locality but from all over the world.
Looking at the growth other business owners listed their business too to get more customer and the other business also started growing and then more business owners followed the same.
But, there was a problem.
The number of the result shown on the first page were limited to 10 business. But there were hundreds of business available for the specific category.
This is where Google started ranking these websites based on the quality of the websites.
In other words, Google started ranking website higher which were SEO optimized. This is were SEO was born and today majority of business owners wants to be in the top 10 list to get more business, make a customer visit their webpage and expand their business by selling their products and services.
It’s 2018 and now google considered more than 208 Factors to decide the webpage ranking and the toughest market even in the search engine history. If a business is not going online then the business will be limited to the locality and the city.
Now, Your question Might be how to get benefit with SEO for Business?
How to use SEO for business?
OR
The right question might be “How should get started with SEO to build my business presence online?”
This is the very first question business owners asks once they understand the value of taking their business online and this is what a business owner should ask too.
Going online doesn’t require millions of rupees but it requires your time and effort to make it happen.
But it just requires a right process with effective tools to rank higher on Google.
There are basically 2 type of ranking which is given for business.
Types of SEO for Business
Google My Business listing
Google my business listing is a 3 pack listing shown on Google Web Page and Google Voice Assistant. This listing is quite useful and gets most of CTR when available of a webpage or listed for specific keywords.
This is How Google Business Listing Look like
2. Top 10 Listing of Website
The top 10 list of websites are also ranked by the algorithm but in this ranking, Google comparatively gives less priority to a location that Google My Business Ranking.
This listing is a usual Google Search page which you usually see when you search something on Google.
Few Interesting Facts about SEO
The 2018 definition of SEO: SEO is a process of optimizing a website to rank higher on Google, and other search engines. The SEO algorithms are defined in a way that new business owners cannot fake the old reliable business.
To get listed in the top 10 business list on Google, you need to spend time, patience, and little technical efforts to make it happen. How to build a business presence online even if i don’t know anything?
OR
How to list my business online without knowing anything?
Building business presence online is an easy as well as the complex process. It’s easy for the people who has little technical knowledge or the people who can learn to build the business presence online but it might be tough for the people who don’t know SEO for search engine optimization.
Simple Ways to build your business presence online.
List your business on Google My Business Listing
Get a website Developed to showcase your product and services
Then you may ask if I am not technical I won’t be able to build a business presence online?
No, You can still build your business presence online and put all the efforts to get your business on the top 10 list of Google.
This can be done by contacting a Digital Marketing Agency or a reliable SEO Freelancer. They will help you in getting your business, getting reviews by your customer, and keep working until your business starts ranking on Google top 10 results, or the top 3 places in Google business listing.
Benefits of Listing a Business in Google Maps OR Google My Business(GMB)
Listing business on Google My Business OR Listing Business onGoogle Maps has a lot of benefits for business. It is more beneficial for the local store present in the area. Few of them are
Being Discoverable by Customers
Getting Direct Calls for Products & Services
Direct Connection To the Customer without any Broker
Paid Marketing isn’t necessary to get new clients OR Customers
Direct Calls to The Business
Improves Reputation of the Business
Social Proof of the Quality your Deliver
More Reviews gives more Business
Benefits of Listing a Business Presence on Google
Benefits of Listing a Business Presence through a Website
Getting Calls about your product and services
Ability To Showcase your product
Show how your customer
Ability to share more about your Business
More Product More Space
Ability to Add new Products and Services
Ability to collect emails and send a newsletter
Ability to let your customer know about the product and service
Ability to Implement Remarketing
Sharing Business Product Information and events though Blog
So, these were the great benefits and ability you get when you list your business presence online.
You may also ask Where is the proof of getting a business listed and being discoverable by the customers?
Here is a small snapshot of a business which was listed 30 days ago and here is the result
This is an impressive result for a new business which just went live Google My Business listing on Google.
That’s the power of listing business online and building business presence online.
What are your thoughts in Building Business Presence online?
Are looking for a digital marketing agency to boost your business presence online?
Yes! Then I am sure that you might also be looking too boost traffic to your website, do internet marketing and increase number of sales!
Isn’t it!
Well, let me help you with that by telling you the few important things only good digital marketing agencies have in common.
Because you don’t have to waste money in doing a marketing which doesn’t have a peak ROI.
This guide will help you to analyze your business and optimize the goals and improve the conversion for future.
A Digital marketing agency provides various packages like social media marketing, Search engine optimization(SEO), Search engine marketing etc, and some agency offers all these packages in a single package which is of low cost.
But before hiring a digital marketing agency you should take some steps in analyzing your business and what should be done to improve your business and decide which task you should hire a digital marketing agency.
In this article, I will be sharing an overview of essential things which you should do before hiring any digital marketing agency.
1. Understand your Business Goals Clearly
Understanding your business is of prime importance If you are confused with your business to spend time in analyzing your business goals or you can contact any of business associate through the contact us form.
To improve your business and even hiring a big digital marketing agency could rank your website make sure that you know the purpose and outcome once your website is ranking.
Remember Digital marketing agency will promote your business online with various mediums and get you the needed traffic, leads for your business. But it will only depend on how do you handle your customers after they opt-in.
So first take some time have patience and study about your business model, define your goals, define your business strategy, consult a digital marketing agency to proofread it, find out business outcomes and expenses.
Reanalyze to improve your negative factors. ie: Removing not working marketing process and then hire a digital marketing agency to build your presence online.
Now as you will have all the business goals defined it will become quite easy for a digital marketer to build an online marketing strategy for your business.
Now a digital marketer will be able to be to promote your website through various online marketing channels.
2. Define Outcomes of Digital Marketing
As you understand and define your business module, now it’s the time to define what part of the business will be driving traffic from online media and offline media.
If your business is completely online, then you don’t have to much worry about online marketing as everything comes under digital marketing.
But now you should break down the online business strategy, medium to advertise and goals you want to advertise.
What are some things that you can do by yourself to promote your business on the internet, Do not go much into technicality but have a basic idea?
We would also recommend you to do structural analysis/flowchart analysis before you begin and then come to a conclusion on a paper for the purpose to hire a digital marketing agency.
SEO– ranking your business website higher on various search engines ie: Google.
SEM– Ranking you higher on various search engine through paid methods.
PPC( pay per click) Management– Pay per click marketing.
Social Media Marketing– Spreading awareness about your company on a various social media platform.
Content marketing– Making valuable content for your company which includes Articles, Blog writing, Images video etc.
Mobile marketing– Promote your brand on mobile apps.
Email marketing– Making a list of your existing customers and keep them updated about your latest offers and services.
SMS Campaign- Doing marketing through mobile numbers by sending Text SMS.
Conversion Optimization- A process of converting customer in the least amount possible.
WhatsApp Marketing A brand new channel to grow your audience. (Only Available for Big Brands)
Do some research on all these topics and come to a conclusion that which service do I want for my company, which service would prove best for my company.
Are you confused with the services offered by digital marketing agencies?
Actually, you shouldn’t be, you should contact a digital marketing expert get everything clarified and also get a plan in return to boost your business online.
Marketing Framework means developing a plan of action for your internet marketing campaign which includes goals and the processes necessary for those goals to be achieved.
Marketing framework needs to contain everything that will be included as a part of marketing strategy, which means you need to present:
Marketing goals
Tools that will be used in the campaign
The approach that will be used in the campaign
Campaign costs
Revenue that can be obtained from the campaign
Tracking and measuring process
5. Understand Internet Audience
The Internet is a very big and vast place where marketers come with big dreams to achieve big figure. Most of them fail because either they don’t go with the right strategy or they do technical mistakes.
There are Billions of people using the internet and this number is increasing day by day. You have to be careful while choosing whom to target and How to target with right flow.
If you aren’t sure you should either be ready to burn your cash or consult a digital marketer to explain how to and why to do.
A digital marketing will also answer your questions which you might not have asked yourself while researching.
So where exactly my customers are?
Where do they reside?
How can you target them without spending a lot of money?
Answers for these can be easily calculated by a digital marketing expert in a small amount of time.
Digital marketing gives you the freedom to target your customer virtually, means you do not need to keep shouting across the streets to grab the attention of your customer like in traditional marketing.
Use IPIT (Internet Protocol Intelligence Technology)to track customers behavior on a webpage, a country he is coming from, personal interest and much more.
Having all that priceless information will help you to understand the quality of audience. You can filter them and push them to the next level of your marketing funnel.
6. Build online community
This world is now a social world where at least one out of four people is connected with at least one social media platform like facebook, twitter, google+ etc.
Now companies are forced to be present in social media platform because they cannot take the risk of losing some of the potential customers present on this social media platform.
Companies use this situation in their own advantage, to establish a relationship with the online user, and in order to do so, they usually use several social networks, as this way they maximize social media exposure and target different groups on different social networks.
Building your online community means that you are creating a base of loyal customers, by interacting with them, satisfying their need to be informed about your business, rewarding them, etc. This is very important on the online market when you aim to stay competitive.
You need a good relationship with your customers, as this will also help you with building your influence in the online community.
7. Increase your online presence
If you are not active online you will not be able to succeed in this internet world. There are many internet users who are competing with each other to grab people’s attention.
You need to maintain an active online presence in order to compete with your competitors.
Make a different group of people who will take care and will work entirely on improving online presence. Make use of social media, email marketing, reviewing sites, and local search engines like Justdial, sulekha, this will boost your online presence.
Start Before you Plan
Digital marketing is all about making strategies, plan and implementing it, where sometimes you succeed and sometimes not. You should start right away than looking for things to happen.
If you are implementing one strategy and analyzing it, don’t wait for this strategy to finish, instead, implement another strategy with some alterations.
By doing this you will be able to decide which strategy is more effective and giving you the best-required results, and keeping the outcomes and results in mind you can optimize your results further.
What should you expect from a digital marketer?
A digital marketer will help you in understanding the audience of your website. What kind of website is visiting your website?
8. Traffic Analysis
Your website is where you convert your visitors into your customers. Technically digital marketers call it conversion and it can be easily tracked by Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics if implemented properly. A conversion can be anything where customers choose whether to buy from you or subscribe for your newsletter, in order to achieve this goal you need to direct as much traffic as possible to your website.
Undoubtedly using SEM is a starting point, as you want to increase both organic and paid reach, through which you will be able to reach customers who are conducting search queries related to your business.
These visits are more likely to result in conversions, which is why this type of traffic is very important.
Besides search engines, you should use other media to generate traffic, such as social media (which is part of social media marketing),affiliate marketing (hiring referers or bloggers to promote your brand on their websites), emails (part of email marketing campaign), external links (links posted on other websites in the process of off-site search engine optimization), etc. All of these sources can generate quite an amount of traffic, leading to more conversions and increased profit. Instead of that, you can promote your business offline also like distributing pamphlets etc.
9. Analyze conversions
Having a lot of traffic without converting required visitors into your customers will not be beneficial for your business and you need to face the challenge of converting the visitors using different methods. It is not possible for everyone to become your customer, because not every visit will result in conversion, but you need to focus on increasing the percentage of those visitors that do convert.
The most important thing in order to increase conversions is to improve your landing page. A landing page is the first page the users will see on your website and analyze whether it is effective enough to attract the attention of the users.
10. Analyze and get feedback from users
The last but not the least, If you want to perform even better in your upcoming marketing plans then you need to analyze the impression you leave in the community, how much of the influence you have managed to obtain inside the online community.
You can use a free tool name hotjar to ask your customers for website review.
There are various ways to get feedback, with social media interaction being one of the easiest. You could also analyze the reviews on social media websites, and other websites as well, which feature reviews posted by other users.
Feedback can also be obtained by sending emails and asking for a feedback form to be filled out. You would ask your email subscribers about how was their experience with them and what do you need to improve.
You can also use your own website to get these feedback by asking them to fill a feedback form in order to get feedback from the website visitors.
After analysis, this information a digital marketer will be able to answer all your queries like
How many visitors website is getting in a month?
How the conversion can be improved?
What is stopping users to purchase your product and service, also How can you fix it.
