Content Marketing & SEO

Top 6 Mobile Measurement Partners in India

  • Aanchal Agrawal
  • |
  • 19 April , 2023
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    • 7 min read

Top 6 Mobile Measurement Partners in India

What is MMP? 

Mobile measurement partner (MMP) is a third-party attribution platform that measures, collects and organises app data, thereby helping companies to assess the overall performance of campaigns from a single dashboard. This type of platform analyses campaign performance across various marketing channels, ad networks and media platforms and subsequently provides the exact impartial overview of app attribution, to the extent of showing which source is responsible for the app install, app revenue or any other goal. 

A mobile measurement platform plays a pivotal role in helping app marketers track the accurate ROI of marketing campaigns and enable them to optimise the campaigns for better results.

How does an MMP work? 

By integrating SDK (Software Development Kit) which is a piece of code into the app, mobile measurement platforms can attribute each app engagement and post-app install activities to the exact media source and the marketing campaign. Thus, SDK helps you with which creative impressed the user and which ad lead to the app install or other conversions. 

There are a plethora of attribution models that help marketers measure the impact of their campaigns. However, multi-touch attribution is currently the most popular and preferred attribution model. This model identifies every touchpoint that urged the user to install the app and distributes the credit accordingly to the specific source. 

Also read: Beginners guide to app marketing 

Best Mobile Measurement Partners in India Every Marketer Should Know About 

1. Appflyer 

Appflyer is one of the most effective mobile measurement partners in India which focuses more on attributing app installs to specific marketing campaigns. It is in-built with several advanced features such as retargeting attribution and multi-touch attribution, thus ensuring optimal performance of user acquisition and retargeting campaigns. It also provides advanced reports like retention reports and cohort analysis. These reports can also be customised in terms of Organic Vs Non-organic data for user acquisition and retargeting campaigns. Furthermore, the reports can be broken down into Source, Geo, Partner, Activity, etc.

Pros 

  • Easy to integrate 
  • This tool highly prioritises privacy and security, making it extremely safe to use.
  • Commendable support 
  • Provides view through attribution upto 7 days which is a blessing for marketers to measure brand campaign impact.
  • Better iOS visibility; provides a full view of performance with a SKAN solution that gives accurate, granular measurement while keeping you compliant and your customers’ data private
  • The industry-leading solution for measuring incremental growth

Cons 

  • Dashboard customisation is limited

2. Adjust

Adjust is an extremely safe and reliable mobile app analytics tool. It is integrated with the most advanced fraud prevention system, which blocks malicious codes from entering the ecosystem of any ad campaign. This MMP provides detailed insights on important metrics such as organic installs, clicks on ads and in-app events. It has acquired Unbotify cyber security in 2019. Since the acquisition, Adjust is also well-equipped to eliminate ad fraud bots that enter the app as fake users or subscribers.    

Pros 

  • Customisable audience segmentation
  • Excellent support 
  • Very user-friendly, most of the features are highly intuitive 

Cons 

  • Reports can be more detailed and granular 
  • UI is a bit confusing and complicated 

3. Branch

Branch is an ideal mobile measurement platform for Indian brands that prioritise app insights related to the user experience. What sets this tool apart from its competitors is it offers influencers analytics. It also supports the integration of email provider services which helps you to send in-app messages to your users and track them efficiently. A report shows that brands that utilise Branch can more likely to expect 3.5 times more customer lifetime value and a phenomenal 200% increase in mobile app revenue earning.

Pros 

  • Simple and intuitive UI 
  • Easy to use dashboard with no user limits 
  • Allows a lot of integrations 
  • Competitive cost

Cons 

  • Doesn’t work well on Instagram 
  • There is scope for new, better features on the platform

4. Singular

Singular is a robust app analytics tool that offers more than a thousand integrations with all the leading ad networks. It offers various features like deep linking and fraud prevention. It helps you to identify the impact of any cost spent on any advertising channels such as SMS, mobile apps, websites and emails. The most impressive feature of this tool is that in order to provide a comprehensive performance analysis, it links touchpoint attributions to external data connectors. Thus, it gives you access to extensive performance data on every creative, media source. 

Pros 

  • Enables quick report generation 
  • Offers utmost data integrity 
  • Offers creative reporting

Cons 

  • Can't connect pre and post-install to all granularity levels.
  • Data accuracy can be better

5. Kochava

Kochava is a versatile, all-in-one audience mobile attribution platform that is also available for web, OTT and other media platforms. It is very user-friendly as it sends alerts when key KPIs and metrics change, thus ensuring that you are informed about even the minor, but essential changes in installs, conversion rate, revenue or other post-install in-app events. It can be a preferred choice for indie developers as it offers a free plan to companies that agree to give access to their data. It can be used by companies of any size and supports up to more than 5 thousand monthly users.

Pros 

  • The dashboards are well-organised and comprehensive 
  • Excellent support 

Cons 

  • Inefficient fraud detection

6. Tenjin

Tenjin is one of the most cost-effective mobile measurement partners. It offers several integrations for companies to measure attribution and ad revenue in an accurate and efficient manner. It allows you to track their attribution without any charge and offers advanced features and detailed insights for its premium users. It is considered to be very ideal for gaming companies. 

Pros 

  • The support team is very responsive 
  • UI is extremely intuitive
  • Offers a comprehensive view of data with several breakdowns 

Cons

  • Integration of third-party tools can be quite a hassle 

Top Mobile Measurement Platforms At a Glance 

Features + Functionality Appsflyer Adjust Branch Singular Kochava Tenjin
View Through Attribution 7 Day View Through Attribution can be configured Custom attribution waterfalls and attribution windows can be created Only last click attribution is possible Only Last Click Attribution is feasible Offers Multi-touch Attribution 7 Day View Through Attribution is possible
Setup & Configuration Setup with any partner (including affiliates) is quick & bug free Offers seamless integration with hundreds of partners Very simple integration process Often Integration Issues are faced Simple and seamless integration Integration can be made more simple
Privacy Preserving Machine Learning It has a comprehensive platform to avoid data breaches in your machine learning projects. Offers data privacy through features like Server-to-server (S2S) Authorization, SDK Signature and Single Sign-on and Two-factor Authentication Ensures to keep data secure and private by following the GDPR and CCPA guidelines Not a very conservative platform to support privacy. Ensures utmost compliance with GDPR and CCPA guidelines Complies with GDPR, UKDPA and CCPA guidelines
Web-to-App
Measurement
The report interface and inability to real-time data which helps to analyse daily performance. Granular level cross-network measurement is possible Measures the full value of each marketing channel effectively Real time reporting is not very accurate and affects daily performance analysis. Offers Always-On Incremental Measurement, which is a real-time marketing mix modeling tool that provides companies with recommendations for optimal budget allocation. Measures Time to Breakeven (TTBE) on everything; it uses infinite x-day Total LTV and ROI to measure your exact time to breakeven with precision.
User Interface User-friendly UI with effective predictive analysis User interface is a little difficult to navigate, multiple clicks are required to get to one action. Simple and intuitive UI The UI is not too flexible and takes a while for CS respone. We also have issues related to the data load. Has commendable UI features. The dashboards are comprehensible and easy to understand Has an extremely intuitive UI.
Fraud protection Completely Automated with their P360 tool In-built with the most advanced fraud prevention system Has a sophisticated fraud protection system with flexible blocking rules and hands-on fraud mitigation support. Not completely automated. Offers protection against fraud tactics such as Click Injection, Install Hijacking, Click Flooding, SDK Spoofing, In-app Purchase Fraud, Fraud Bots and more Fraudulent activities are detected and blocked through Mean time to identify (MTTI) blocking
Reporting Tools Great at reporting, simply extraordinary for apps. -Does give you real-time reporting and tracking. -Easy to create analytics reports -Excellent at campaign analysis. Compare and analyse results across apps, metrics, and time periods in a single view for smarter, faster marketing decisions. Offers very robust reporting features with several filters and views The reporting tools could improve. Is kinda slow to use and allows very little customization. Offers different kinds types of reports such as Click, Event, Install, Network Summary, Cost and many more The dashboards consist of multiple data groupings, filters, graphs. Access to the dashboard is free.
Product Improvement Constant Product Improvement & World’s Largest MMP Reports can be more detailed and granular There is scope for new, better features on the platform Much Slower in Newer Features Eg. for iOS Fraud detection can be improved further Integrating it with third-party tools can be quite a hassle
Pricing Expensive A bit expensive for small businesses Afforadable and flexible Economical Expensive Economical

How to choose a Mobile Measurement Partner? 

1. Privacy and security

It is extremely crucial to opt for an MMP which is in-built with superior privacy and security features that guarantee utmost confidentiality as these tools have access to the customer data and insights. Ensure that these mobile attribution platforms are reliable and unbiased and do not disclose or share customer information with third parties. 

2. User-friendly interface 

You optimise many key marketing campaigns and might even take important business decisions based on the insights provided by these platforms. Thus, it is important that the insights are presented in a easy to understand and intuitive format and should be also be easily accessible. 

3. Data accuracy and advanced set of features

Marketers should ideally choose to integrate an MMP that provides accurate insights on the attributions and campaigns on a granular level. Studies show that lack of granularity and multi-touch attribution models have led to inefficient decision-making with respect to marketing campaigns and thus wastage of marketing budgets. 

Analysing the impact of each creative, user interaction, media source and attributing them to the goals and conversions manually can be an extremely challenging task. But now that you have learnt what is an MMP,  how it works and top 6 MMPs in the market currently, it is time to leave the brunt and taxing task of attribution and measurement to these mobile analytics tools, so you can focus on areas which truly benefits from your creativity and discretion. Need further help with choosing the right MMP for your brand or anything related to digital marketing? Reach out to us! Let’s collaborate and scale great heights together. 


Increasing Organic Traffic & Revenue: D2C Case Study

  • Aanchal Agrawal
  • |
  • 8 August , 2022
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    • 3 min read

With the advent of the digital era, businesses have shifted to the virtual space and content marketing is now at the crux of all brand-building endeavours. Be it product descriptions, guides, awareness content, blogs or visual creatives, with an ocean of content at the disposal of your consumers, how exactly do you highlight your brand’s name?

Content marketing is an aspect of the digital marketing ecosystem that if leveraged properly, can help build a brand’s entire identity by shaping how consumers perceive it.

But most importantly, it can help bolster your presence in the digital world by building a brand’s authority, through improved SERP rankings and increased visibility for relatable search queries.

Wakefit, a former mattress-producing brand reached out to us at Social Beat with an objective to not just increase organic traffic to their website and generate organic revenue, but also restructure their brand identity into a home-solutions providing brand.

From Sweet Dreams to Adding Life to Homes!

Having established an identity in the mattress industry, the biggest challenge we faced was to introduce and establish them in the niche of household solutions. So, how do you compete with brands like Pepperfry and UrbanLadder who were already established as leaders with good authority on SERPs?

This is where our SEO and content marketing strategies were pivotal game-changers for Wakefit! 

We performed analytical competitor surveys to pinpoint major differences and opened up scopes that could be leveraged to outrank them. We did this by curating engaging content rendered with extensive keyword research and interlinking and backlinking that helped add credibility to Wakefit’s website content.

Learn about the top free SEO tools that can help you rank better on SERP!

Major Pillars to Restructure Wakefit’s SERP Rankings for ‘Home-Solutions’ queries

We leveraged long-form and short-form content to spread awareness about the brand’s latest slew of products and services:

  • Blogs and Pillars:

We curated 36 new blogs and 24 new pillars/guides centred around sleep, home wellness and decor categories. Each content piece was induced with seamlessly occurring keywords and relevant interlinks to create an organic web for latching on to viewers and driving them from the awareness funnel to the consideration funnel.

  • Frontloading Page Optimizations:

Once taken live, each content piece was monitored minutely for their performance and optimized and hyperoptimized to morph them into their best versions. We frontloaded product pages and category pages after optimizing them with the newest scope and added a section for frequently asked questions. These FAQ sections opened up opportunities for us to leverage SEO best practices and helped these pages rank for related search queries on the SERP.

Our content marketing strategies brought about favourable results in less than 7 months of implementation by outranking major competitors like Pepperfry and Urban Ladder. 

Have a look at some major targets that our campaigns pulverized:

  • 57 % growth in monthly organic traffic and 132% growth in monthly organic revenue (July 2021 vs Feb 2022)
  • We raised the overall number of monthly snippets by 112%
  • While the monthly organic traffic for optimized blogs increased by 105% we generated a 594% increase in the monthly organic revenue.
  • Monthly optimised pillars enjoyed a 40% increase in organic traffic while bringing in a 129% boost in revenue generated organically.
  • We enjoyed 11264 newfound organic sessions thanks to about 50%of the pillar pages ranking in the top 5 positions on SERP.

Our endeavours were also recognised at the Content Marketing Summit Asia 2022 as the Best Content Marketing Strategy (2021-22).

 

Find out more about our content marketing stories by visiting our campaigns page. Feel like collaborating with us? Don’t shy away from contacting us at any of our branches!


Creating Better Content for B2B Businesses

  • Sayantan Rudra
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  • 24 June , 2021
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    • 7 min read

B2B content marketing has always been important, but with live conferences and trade shows getting canceled, the importance of B2B content is skyrocketing. Unlike B2C sales, B2B decision-makers don’t have to deal with pushy salespeople. They tend to search and sift through information online and consume content that drives their purchase decisions. 

Hence, creating targeted content that aligns with B2B decision makers’ needs can help you streamline your marketing efforts, generate leads, and drive conversions. Let’s look at how B2B companies can create better content. 

 

Understanding B2B Touchpoints

A customer touchpoint is a point of contact or interaction between a customer and a business. It could result in an exchange of information, service, or transaction. The problem with touchpoints is that not many companies understand and leverage them the right way. This subsides the importance of touchpoints and the role they play in determining the overall customer experience.

In terms of customer experience, a touchpoint can help you understand your customers’ current situations, their motivations, and what drives their loyalty. It’s important to realize that channels aren’t touchpoints. They provide a broader view of how customers interact with you. For example, online is a channel, whereas Facebook Messenger chat can be a touchpoint. Touchpoints are more precise and specific.

Naturally, most organizations list the following things when defining B2B touchpoints.

  • Direct mail
  • Websites
  • Billboards
  • In-store cashiers
  • Customer service centers

The problem with these touchpoints is that the organization thinks that a customer has had a linear relationship with these touchpoints and has engaged with them in meaningful ways. This presumption is entirely company-focused and doesn’t consider the customer perspective.

While the touchpoints mentioned above are crucial, here are some overlooked B2B customer touchpoints that you shouldn’t ignore.

The Brand Advocate Touchpoint: Established, trustworthy, and reliable individuals endorsing your brand or product in the B2B space

The Upgrade Touchpoint: Marketing materials, such as well-structured upgrade emails that help upsell to existing consumers

The Invoice Touchpoint: Clear, effortless, and transparent invoices to make the invoice experience quicker and positive

The Marketing Simplification Touchpoint: Simple website navigation with relevant product recommendations to simplify the purchase process

The Partner Touchpoint: Similar experience across multiple selling channels, such as third parties

That said, a typical B2B journey could include the following touchpoints:

  • Website
  • Social media
  • Chat
  • Email
  • Blog
  • Referral
  • Mobile app
  • Search engine advertisements
  • Social media advertisements

Customer journey, especially in the B2B sector, isn’t linear. It involves multiple touchpoints. For example, a buyer may come across your brand through a search engine advertisement. From there, they may visit your website and sign up for the email newsletter. Some other buyers may land directly on your website through search engine results and take a disparate journey.

Therefore, B2B companies need to create content keeping all the different touchpoints into account. The content required on your blog will be different from the content you share in your newsletter, though all these points will serve the same purpose – to push the buyer further down the funnel.

 

Crafting a B2B Content Strategy

 Follow these steps to craft a winning B2B content strategy.

Understand Your Buyer Personas

The first step towards creating a winning B2B content strategy is to determine who you’re creating content for. Who are your target customers? Are they business owners, marketing heads, customer support managers, engineers, or technicians? You may produce great content, but if it doesn’t resonate with your target audience, it won’t deliver the desired results.

Hence, creating accurate buyer personas is important. Developing personas helps you determine which people among your target audience are most likely to make a purchase. You can even create multiple buyer personas depending on your business and create content for all of them.

A few areas of information to fill when understanding buyer personas are:

  • Personal background: age, education, marriage, etc.
  • Role: job measured, skills required, report to, manages, etc.
  • Company information: industry, total revenue, total employees, etc.
  • Goals and challenges: success, values, challenges, objections, etc.
  • Buying preferences: preferred communication, industry associations, industry publications, social networks, etc. 

Based on the above information, craft personas that are closest to your target customers. And avoid spending too much time on prospects that aren’t likely to open their wallets. Keep refining your personas to focus on groups that are most likely to convert.

Build Trustworthy, Thought-Leadership Content

Edelman and LinkedIn conducted a joint study in 2020 and found that 89% of B2B decision-makers believed that thought leadership enhanced their perception of an organization. Some reasons why you should focus on building thought leadership content are:

  • Become the real voice of the customer
  • Build and own a market instead of being a part of it
  • Drive enhanced customer engagement

The problem with current B2B thought leadership content is that it lacks quality. It isn’t well researched, lacks original insights, and is written from the company’s point of view.

To be considered as a thought leader, your content should:

  • Communicate in an easy-to-understand way
  • Challenge the way the audience thinks
  • Say something new
  • Have strong opinions
  • Publish data to validate your position

In a nutshell, your content should have a clear point of view, direction, and impact on your audience.

Distribute Content Across Social Media Channels

Content distribution is the holy grail of B2B content marketing. You may have created the highest quality content, but if you don’t promote it well, it won’t go anywhere. As Mark Schaefer says in his book The Content Code, “In addition to quality, content marketing success must also include community, distribution, and promotion.

 A blog is a natural choice for content distribution for most organizations, and rightly so. It provides you with the opportunity to share content on search engines, climb up the rankings, and be found. Sadly, search engine optimization (SEO) has become more competitive than ever, and ranking on the top of search engine results may take way too much time and effort.

So, while updating your blog is crucial, support your content distribution efforts by sharing content on social media. Some channels you should focus on for B2B content creation are Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

In addition to organic content distribution, consider paid advertising. It can amplify the reach of your content and help you reach more users in less time. Pairing paid content distribution with organic efforts can do wonders for your B2B content marketing strategy.

When it comes to content distribution, don’t overlook the benefits of promoting your content offline. With tools like QR codes, you can share digital content with an offline audience and provide them with an omnichannel experience. For example, you can create a customized QR code using a QR Code Generator, link it to a blog post explaining a product in-depth, and put up the code on the product packaging. Customers can scan the code using their smartphones to read the blog post and learn more about the product.

Personalize Content Communication

Personalization is no longer a buzzword you heard in the B2C marketing landscape. It has become an essential aspect of B2B content marketing. As many as 77% of sales and marketing professionals believe that personalization can help build better customer relationships.

The most effective way to personalize content communication is to micro-target your audience segments. Micro-targeting will enable you to develop content and landing pages  specific to your audience based on demographics like location, personal data, work information, and decision-making behaviors.

That data will enable you to reshape your content at all stages and touchpoints of a buyer’s journey. Once you have micro-segmented your audience, you can send them personalized content in the form of email newsletters, product emails, outreach emails, and more.

Detailed Product/Service-Related Content 

When it comes to B2C content, brands need to be cautious of being salesy. Talking too much about your product or service can turn off the customers. That isn’t the case with B2B content marketing. B2B decision-makers need in-depth product/service information, so the more details you provide about your product or service, the better chances you have of making a sale.

Investing in video content can help take your content marketing efforts to the next level. A survey found that 53% of tech-focused B2B buyers consider video content to be the most useful type of content. Moreover, video is significantly underutilized in the B2B world, as most organizations prefer adhering to traditional content types, like blog posts and white papers. Including video-based product/service guides into your content strategy can give you a substantial competitive edge.

Assess the Touchpoints to Different Stakeholders

The final step in creating a B2B content strategy is to understand the stakeholders involved. Multiple stakeholders can be involved in the B2B decision-making process, though their role, influence, and accessibility in the process can vary. It’s essential to create content in a way that communicates with all stakeholders and all touchpoints.

To create content specific to each stakeholder, you’ll need to understand the company’s decision-making process. Determine who’s involved in the decision-making unit (DMU), which departments are included, and how their decision-making process looks like. Based on these inferences, you can devise a content strategy for stakeholders across all touchpoints.

 

Types of Content B2B Companies Must Leverage:

 As content marketing continues to become more specialized, B2B companies need to be specific when it comes to the content they create. While content marketing options are endless, here are some types of content every B2B company should leverage. 

Case Studies and Surveys

As discussed, building trust and credibility is one of the cornerstones of B2B content marketing. Case studies help you establish trust and credibility. You can show prospects how you have helped others, which will help them make informed and confident decisions. You can have case studies in both text and video form on your website, social media, or YouTube channel. 

In-Depth Guides

Creating in-depth guides serves two benefits. First, it provides in-depth information about a topic to the reader, which establishes trust and credibility. Second, it attracts more backlinks. The more information you provide about a topic, the more backlinks you’ll receive. So, if you want to streamline your SEO strategy and receive more backlinks, start creating in-depth guides and tutorials. 

Blog Posts to Accelerate the Sales Funnel

Blogs remain one of the most effective types of content in the B2B landscape. They allow you to send your message and build an audience easily and quickly. However, make sure that your blog posts inspire action and guide the readers down the sales funnel. If your blog is failing, the chances are that you’re leaving your readers hanging without asking them to take action. 

 

Conclusion

There’s a lot of B2B content out there, but there are potential gaps that you can use to outrank it. By identifying those holes, you can create high-quality content that not only helps your audience make confident decisions but also win a spot on the search engine results. 

-------------------------

Author:

Akshay Deogiri, SEO outreach specialist at Beaconstac.


Top 7 Content Marketing trends to leverage this 2021

  • Shreya Ravi
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  • 4 March , 2021
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    • 9 min read

COVID-19 has created a new halo of importance around content marketing. Business is down and companies simply don't have the budgets to spend on paid marketing. So, who can they turn to, during these times of distress? Content marketing, of course! Never before, has the power of organic marketing been this profound. Organic marketing is the new focus for organizations across the globe because they realize that content, after all, still remains king.
A solid content marketing strategy plays a pivotal role in every business strategy to expand and communicate their products and services with the masses. Keeping this in mind, here are the top 7 content marketing tips and trends to leverage this 2021, to help your brand reach new heights:

1. The rise of content communities:

A content community aims at breaking the barrier between brands and people. It acts as a bridge that fosters human, personal interaction between brands and their target audience. A great example of this is how Netflix creates their own troll accounts on YouTube and Twitter to ask questions to their audience and even make fun of their own content. Nykaa also has a thriving content community that brings together make-up and skincare enthusiasts together under one roof. Content communities significantly reduce your outreach cost, allow you to interact with thousands of people through funny, topical content, improve content promotion and tap into community trends on a regular basis. Community content marketing is definitely a top content marketing trend to look out for!

Here are the Hows and Whys of content communities for content marketing:

Start your own community:

Is your brand just starting out, and you’re looking for interested folks? Start your own content community. This can be on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or any other social media platform. Use this community to invite people and share insightful blogs and articles.

Content communities build loyalty: Picture a situation where your content community gets deleted on a social media platform. Awful, isn't it? Don't worry. You can bank on your army of loyal content community members to defend you and restart the conversation elsewhere. Use these communities to build camaraderie, loyalty, and strong relationships.

Content communities ultimately drive traffic:

Imagine you have 5,000 members as part of your community. That’s 5000 more people rushing to your website every time you launch something new or have interesting news to share. They are great drivers of organic traffic, thereby increasing your reach.

How we built a content community for Mfine to drive app installs:

Mfine is a healthcare consulting app, through which patients can directly consult with doctors through video, voice call, and text. Mfine wanted to focus on app installs and consultations specifically for pediatricians. They wanted to reach this goal by creating organic awareness among parents, the main target group.
To achieve this we developed a child care and child nutrition microsite with authoritative content to build trust around the app. We created an in-depth vaccination chart and food chart for infants, as well as tools such as a child BMI calculator.

We achieved:
  • 700 app installs through organic traffic
  • Ranked for 500 organic keywords in Google

2. Demand for more visual content:

Let’s get real. Our attention spans have drastically dropped in recent years, and most of us prefer content that is visually stimulating and gets our endorphins running. Videos have become the most consumed form of content today, with streams running into the millions and billions of views every day! Thus videos are going to play a very important role in driving engagement in 2021. Brands simply cannot stick to traditional written content. They must transcend beyond and make active efforts to create both short videos such as thumb stoppers and long-form visual content optimized with SEO to enable maximum content promotion. Video marketing for visual content is a content marketing tip worth considering very seriously!

Here are some ways to bring make videos the focal point of your content marketing strategy:

Get your intros right:

If a video doesn’t capture a user in the first 15 seconds, be sure that he/she is not going to watch the video fully. When it comes to creating a great video, you absolutely need to nail the intro! The first 15 seconds decide if your video is viral-worthy or not. Some ways you can do this is by using hyperbole, dumping fascinating facts and numbers, jumping right into your content, and avoiding long-winding animations and logos.

Use YouTube smartly:

YouTube is a slippery slope. Your videos can take years or get views or even less than a week to touch a million. One sure-shot trick to get more views is to use the suggested video option that shows up when you’re uploading a video. While optimizing videos for SEO is absolutely important, tagging videos as suggested, and using catchy titles and descriptions goes a long way.

Stick to a script:

Not all of us natural speakers. In fact most of us fumble and bumble in front of a camera. If you suffer from stage fright, simply record a neat script and practice till you nail it. Even the best YouTubers stick to a script.

3. Listening is the new reading - Podcasts:

Apple had over 43 million episodes on its podcast in January 2021. And that’s just one platform. So you can imagine how many people around the world are listening to podcasts every day. Podcasts have become extremely popular because of their ease of use! You can listen to anything of your choice while walking, cooking, driving to work, and even in bed. Podcasts for meditation and news especially have gained a lot of traction lately. Brands too, need to jump on the bandwagon and leverage this content marketing trend to engage with new audiences. Brands can talk about market updates, provide educational content and even stream interviews through podcasts. There’s room for so much opportunity for content promotion and content marketing through podcasts! It's one content marketing tip, you simply cannot ignore.

Here are some ways to leverage podcasts as part of your content marketing plans:

SEO optimized podcasts:

Did you know that you can ever optimize your podcasts to increase rankings and searchability? You can distribute podcasts as individual landing pages on your website and optimize titles, descriptions, and static content to drive enthusiastic listeners to your podcast.
Explore new content formats: Podcasts can be very interesting when done right because it allows you to explore a variety of formats while communicating with people. You can have interviews, short stories, episode-based content, free vs paid content, etc. The choices are endless.

Provide valuable content:

People want to hear what’s relevant to them. Hence choosing your podcast topic becomes very important. Include content that is fresh or topical. Keep listeners updated on the latest developments.

4. Personalised content marketing:

What does personalized marketing mean? It simply means catering to a person’s most individual self through your content. Personalization will be a very important aspect of your content marketing strategy this 2021, because, among the barrage of information available to a consumer, they want to connect and engage with content that really hits home. So, how can brands create personalized content for better content promotion? How do they figure out what each of their consumers like? It’s all a numbers game at the end of the day. Personalization lies in data analysis and figuring out, through numbers, what your consumer is engaging with the most. Try to receive as much information as you can from your consumer, and then accordingly, start observing trends and patterns to figure out what they like and don’t like.

Here’s how you can send out personalized content to your audience:

Good old email marketing:

If there’s one evergreen content marketing trend, it is email marketing. It just never goes out of style! And it's here to drive traffic up your sleeve this 2021 too. Try different email styles. Use punch lines and minimalistic content that pushes users to go straight to the CTA.

FOMO personalized marketing:

FOMO stands for fear of missing out. And brands are leveraging these very emotions to create personalized content. By showing people what has currently captured people’s attention, you can instill curiosity and drive searches towards the same. Smart copy with the right keywords can help drive FOMO marketing.

Custom video messages:

Brands can use customized content in videos to help reach out to people. For example, if your company is planning to send out a video message about a new product, make sure it comes from a very personal place, such as your CEO directly addressing the target audience. With the right automation technology in place, you can achieve this in no time. Such is the power of personalization.

5. Domination of Voice Search:

Have you ever talked to your phone asking to find “The best Italian restaurant around me”? You're not alone. All of us have asked Google and Alexa to do favors for us because it's just that simple, isn't it? Voice search has burgeoned like anything over the past year, and in 2021, there’s no sight of it going on the down-low. Voice search accounts for almost 20% of all the search queries today. So, how can businesses tap into this? By creating content that is voice search-friendly. If you’re a healthcare provider, and someone searches for “Thyroid test around me”, make sure you show up. With the right optimized content, you can certainly rank high on search engines for voice too. Voice search marketing is definitely one of the top content marketing trends this 2021.

Here are some interesting facts to keep in mind when leveraging voice search for content marketing:

Focus on voice SEO:

Most voice search results show up from featured snippets, pieces of content that Google believes are the most relevant and accurate description of what you search for. Thus your voice search SEO is very important. Find out how you can make your answer better than the existing featured snippet, but using keywords that make your content visible.

Website SERP results should be high:

Voice search is a combination of many things that Google deems important and your website’s current ranking is one such factor. If your website has a good ranking and is well recognized with all SEO checkpoints in place, your content will receive recognition on voice too. This how you layer and present content throughout your website has a huge impact on voice SEO.

Focus on FAQ pages for voice:

Does your website have a comprehensive FAQ page? If not, it's time to make one. FAQs are often a favorite among Google when it comes to picking up answers for voice searches, so make sure you answer every question possible with respect to your content. Also, FAQs are picked up as featured snippets, which as you already know, is super voice-search friendly!

6. Diversification of content and content amplification:

People get bored with just one type of content. We’re constantly looking for content that engages us in different ways. Brands cannot continue to stick to a single format of content. Brands must diversify their content, in order to meet their consumer needs. If you’re in charge of the content marketing strategy for a brand, you should try out long-form blogs, short copy, podcasts, videos, thumb stoppers, interactive tools, infographics, pillar content, and more. There’s so much scope in content marketing for content promotion and content amplification. All you need to do is explore. Here are some content marketing tips to diversify your content:

Picture Perfect:

All of us love visual content. It's savvy, catches your eye, and keeps you hooked. Create attention-grabbing content for platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest that have millions of followers around the world. They include topical posts, infographics, and even GIFs with succinct content that convey your message.

Deep dive into Q&A:

Quora is a great platform for content marketing! There are gazillion questions you can find on the platform that you can answer, thus spreading your expertise to many people at once. You can create a brand account and even answer questions from there to build credibility.
Brochures and Ebooks:
If you want to go beyond blogs and pillars, take a shot at creating brochures and Ebooks that are not only comprehensive but also great assets to easily share across social media platforms. They are easily downloadable too. And of course, they should always be optimized with the right keywords!

Case Studies:

Case studies are a great way to connect with your customers and build trust among them. Remember, case studies need to be extremely detailed and as factual as possible. Back it with some images, surveys, graphs, and statistics to add variety to your case study.

How we used Content Amplification for ZestMoney:

We wanted to reach out to a huge potential target audience of noncredit card users for their business with an outlook of ROI.
We aimed to significantly increase organic traffic to ZestMoney’s website and encourage more people to explore Zest’s no-cost EMI service to make their dream purchases, interest-free. We did in-depth keyword research and optimized all existing content with relevant keywords. We also created new product pages and in-depth no-cost EMI guides, and a user-centric blog that became one of the biggest drivers of organic traffic.

We achieved:
  • 12% increase in overall traffic in 2 months
  • Non branded keyword positions between 1-2 up by 40%
  • 1200+ additional keywords started ranking
  • Site health and optimization increased by 35%

7. User-generated content(UGC)’s rising popularity:

User-generated content is content that is created by people, rather than by the brand itself. UGC marketing has one big advantage. It is extremely authentic and trustworthy because it's directly coming from the user himself. UGC marketing is largely positive, creates a de-facto community, gives you free publicity, and attracts new users on board because of its authenticity. Content marketers must focus on creating as much UGC as possible. UGC marketing starts discussions online, leading to higher engagement and visibility.

How can you use UGC in content marketing to drive results?

Reviews:

According to a study conducted by The Consumerist, over 70% of users look at reviews before buying a product. If you have bad reviews, you’re in for some serious trouble. Good reviews act as vital UGC that can make or break your business. This 2021, garnering good reviews should be on your checklist!

Hashtag contests:

One way to get more UGC is by creating quirky and fun hashtags on social media. Users can share statuses, photos, and more using your hashtag as part of their captions. Branded hashtags build awareness about your brand and help set you apart from competitors too. While hashtags are extremely short-form content, they’re highly effective!

Gamification:

Here, users are basically asked to complete a set of tasks and are rewarded with a badge of achievement. You can also offer special discounts, coupons and more. Swiggy does this all the time if you’ve noticed. Small steps inspire people to participate and engage, thus building your outreach and paving the way to a loyal customer base.

Content marketing has so much to offer and is true, one of the cornerstones of any successful business strategy. Your blog page can make or break your business. Aligning your content and SEO efforts in the right direction can do wonders for your brand. Content marketing will see exponential growth this 2021, and with these marketing trends and content marketing tips on board, it will only reach new heights.

These are the top 7 content marketing trends to watch out for this 2021. If you haven’t leveraged them yet for your content promotion, what are you waiting for? Get started!


Content promotion strategies that are guaranteed to drive traffic

  • Rohit Uttamchandani
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  • 25 January , 2021
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    • 4 min read

Why content promotion is essential

Good content promotion techniques can go a long way in effectively building brand recall and trust with a brand’s target audience. This calls for a calculated SEO content strategy.  SEO is a key ingredient in every business’ digital marketing strategy. The COVID-19 pandemic has made all understand the potential of digital marketing. However, this also means that there is more competition in the digital marketing space. In such a scenario, it is critical to ensure that content cuts through the clutter and reaches the audience it has been created for. To stand apart in the crowd, brands to practise content promotion to reach, inform, engage and educate their audience.

Content promotion strategies

Merely ideating, creating and publishing content does not work anymore and content promotion requires as much, if not more, effort as content creation. A word of caution here though – content amplification works best for content that has been ideated and created keeping in mind the interests and needs of the target audience. So, here is how you can use an SEO content strategy for content promotion.

Respond to questions on Quora

A great promotion technique is to ask and answer questions of any subject matter. Quora is recognised as the most comprehensive and trusted online forum. Since forums provide an open-source for your Target Audience to discuss a topic, you can add value by responding to their queries using your existing write-up, if relevant. You can also link back to your blog or website, which effectively renders your work as a credible source.

Tweet various snippets from your content

Have interesting stats or facts that are share-worthy as individual pieces of content? Sharing those snippets on Twitter is an effective content promotion idea as it can lure people in to read more. The microblogging giant is one of the most active social media platforms today, so anything interesting that fits within 280 characters is bound to be retweeted. You can even take screenshots of other elements like pictures, infographics and quotes and use a shortened URL of your website for promotion.

Vernacular marketing

9 out of 10 internet users’ first language is not English. A great content promotion technique would be to create vernacular content and promote it vernacularly as well. This is a very effective tool to reach the audience of tier 2 and tier 3 cities. It increases brand awareness and builds on the trust factor as the audience can relate to the content more. Vernacular SEO content strategy removes the idea that your brand is “foreign” and strikes an emotional chord. 

Link to relevant sites/Mention entities when sharing

One of the main aspects of content promotion is linking to sources while writing your article. When you publish your content and promote it on social media, use Twitter mentions or Facebook hashtags to prompt those sources that you’ve used their information. Doing so will increase the chance of your article being viewed by multiple individuals through the mentions.

Post on relevant LinkedIn groups

LinkedIn is nothing but the Facebook variant for all things professional. A helpful SEO content strategy would be to use LinkedIn for promotional purposes.  Much like Facebook communities, LinkedIn has an option where you can create groups. Find such groups that could make the most out of your content and share it on their pages. If your content is beneficial, many of the users would share and circulate it among their peers increasing your reach.

Turn content into a ppt/pdf and upload to SlideShare

SlideShare is the perfect place to content promote presentations to get the visibility you need. Once you upload your content on Slideshare, you can also share the link on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube as well. 

Leverage the reach of Influencers

Reaching out to influencers at scale is a good content promotion idea. Getting your content featured by some key influencers or getting them to share your content can amplify your reach drastically. Pick influencers that are relevant to your domain and engage with them. Contact more than one influencer and engage with them regularly for better reach.

Video content marketing

60% of the people who use the internet are visual learners. A fruitful content promotion technique is to make use of YouTube. More than 50% of women make a purchasing decision after watching a video. This is a wonderful opportunity to create a personal touch for your brand by engaging with your audience on YouTube while helping visual learners retain information better. YouTube is an SEO gold mine, so make use of hashtags, titles and descriptions to increase your reach. As for audio learners, one can use podcasts as a content promotion tool.

Using Pinterest to drive referral traffic

Pinterest is a wonderful forum for content promotion. You can create boards where people can pin your content, save it and learn about your brand’s story as well. It is an effective SEO content strategy because it directs people to your website as well. Pinterest communities can help with your engagement and helps your brand understand what your audience wants. 

The content promotion strategies mentioned above are used to their fullest potential by some of the best content marketers on the planet like HubSpot, Whole Foods, Asian Paints etc. Of course, some of these strategies may die out while others will evolve, so to stay ahead of the curve, you'll need to keep your eyes peeled and ears tuned.

If there are any content distribution channels which you have tried that could be added to the list, do let us know in the comments below.


Pillar pages- An epic content marketing tool

  • Ayesha Rafeeq
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  • 20 January , 2021
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    • 6 min read

The COVID-19 pandemic created a massive impact on digital marketing companies. Many businesses had to shift online and rethink their strategies, so the demand for digital marketing services rose.  2020 also saw an increase in competition for holding a strong online presence. To establish the same, SEO and content marketing is of vital importance. Out of many epic content marketing tools that are used, digital marketing experts agree that content pillars stand apart. One of the most effective ways to secure your position on the world’s favourite search engine is by creating powerful pillar pages that catapult your website traffic. Pillar content is a comprehensive piece of content based around specific topic clusters.

What is a ”topic cluster”?

A topic cluster is essentially a technique used while creating pillar pages. This technique involves going after topics rather than focusing on just a set of keywords. With this technique, you can choose broad content themes that you want to own and create multiple blog content around it.  

With Google’s Latent Semantic Indexing, creating topic clusters for pillar pages ensures you cover numerous semantic keywords that cannot be done otherwise. Until recently, content marketers were creating individual blog posts that rank for a particular search term. However, most broad themes have multiple topics, which means your URLs are competing against each other.

For example, if you are a real estate developer with an active blog page that covers a wide variety of blog content, then creating content pillars that tie a certain broad theme can boost your search rankings.

Scroll down to see how!

What is a pillar page?

A pillar page (also known as cornerstone content) is the base for the topic cluster model. It is a consolidated page on your website that acts as a pillar but has enough room for more details in the cluster blogs which are hyperlinked to the content pillars.

The topic is broken down into chapters and covers all the aspects of a particular topic to increase the chances of ranking on the first page of Google. As mentioned before, all these sub-topics are interlinked to the main blogs on the website, where the concept is explained in much more detail.

For example, on our website, we have blogs on real estate marketing, YouTube marketing, Facebook ads, etc. So, writing content pillars on these topics is the ideal way to go because we have enough clusters to interlink too as well.   Featured below is our pillar page titled A complete guide to digital marketing for real estate”. The objective of the page is to rank for anything connected to digital marketing for real estate. It taps all the aspects of digital marketing from the lead generation strategies involved to an in-depth case study on how a real estate company grew via digital, providing readers with a one-stop solution to all their queries related to the main topic.  

Another example is a pillar we have on YouTube SEO tips. This pillar covers everything relating to YouTube SEO and tips to grow your organic subscriber base. It is broken down into chapters and links to other clusters connecting to the main topic.

How does a pillar page boost SEO?

The in-depth nature of content pillars helps it rank for a variety of keywords making it an epic content marketing tool. However, it’s not just about keywords and ranking! Since a pillar page has versatile types of content, including videos and other forms of interactive pieces, readers spend more time on the page which is again a great ranking signal. To add to that, the page is interlinked to many other content pieces on your website keeping the SEO juice within your domain. Last but not least, pillars also help in lead generation, making it not just an epic content marketing tool for brand awareness and consideration but also conversions. 

For example, we created a laptop buying guide as a one-stop destination for users looking for the perfect laptop. It covers all aspects of the buying process from the laptop specifications you need to look for to where you can buy your laptop from. The pillar also includes an interactive laptop finder tool that readers could use to find the ideal laptop. Through this pillar, we were able to generate more than 170 organic leads, out of which 50 consumers visited the nearest laptop store and bought a laptop. The revenue generated via the pillar leads resulted in 18X ROI for the brand. 

When to create content pillars?

While it is a good idea to write pillar pages for all topics that you want to rank for, you also need to start by looking at how much content you have on your site. Since pillar pages act as a central traffic signal that drives visitors to other web pages, it makes sense to first check if you have enough pit stops to divert your audience towards. Start by checking your blog database and see if you have enough diverse topics that cover all aspects of the main topic.

As explained in the flowchart above, the first step of creating content pillars is to find a high-volume keyword that you intend to rank for, do not have content on and want to explain in depth. With all these three criteria in place, your content pillars are guaranteed to get you a high rank on Google.

                                                                           Source: Hubspot

Structure of a pillar page

A pillar page consists of the following elements:

-          Topic clusters designed in the form of chapters: Since a pillar page is a middle ground between a blog and an e-book, it is usually designed with chapters for easy navigation. Each chapter is explained with different types of content from infographics to interactive tools. The chapters are diverse and cover all the other semantics of the pillar topic, to increase its chances of ranking. Needless to say, each chapter is optimised with a unique set of keywords of their own.

-          An enquiry form: Leads are the fruit of digital marketing that produces freshly-squeezed ROI juice. Keep track of your visitors and nurture them into customers by placing an enquiry form with an appropriate call to action on your pillar page. Featured below is the pillar page created for Casagrand, one of India’s leading real estate giants. The page opens up to a form, along with a sticky tab for easy access from anywhere in the page.

The page titled “An ultimate NRI guide to buying a property in India” covered all topics from documents needed to invest in India to the types of properties NRI’s are entitled to buy.

-          Share buttons: Keep the tunnel of communication open between your pillar page and your target audience with sticky share buttons. From social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to networking sites like LinkedIn, choose the forums that make sense for your brand. You can also pick sharing platforms used by a majority of your target group. After all, you do not want all that content to go unread!

-          A well-designed UX: There is no doubt that UX can make or break your business sales or revenue. A well-designed page with easy navigation helps in increasing the time spent on the page and reducing the bounce rate. Additionally, with all the interlinked in-depth content, it is only a matter of time your page ranks on the first page of Google, attracting organic traffic like a moth to a flame.

- Include Visuals: Pillar pages must try and cater to different types of learners. Most internet users are visual learners. So making use of infographics, videos will increase your sessions, decrease your bounce rate while helping you engage with your audience. Visual learning also helps with brand awareness and recalling as it helps users retain information better. 

To know more about such epic content marketing tools and SEO strategies for your brand, check out our Video on Pillar content for organic traffic and leads.

Now that you know how pillar pages work and the effect they have on your website traffic, it is time you level-up your SEO game with this promising trend. Whether you are an FMCG brand, B2B organisation, Financial giant or a leading real estate developer, boost your brand visibility with pillar pages and make your organisation stand out in the digital hemisphere. 

Now that you know how pillar pages work and the effect they have on your website traffic, it is time you level-up your SEO game with this promising trend. Whether you are an FMCG brand, B2B organisation, Financial giant or a leading real estate developer, boost your brand visibility with pillar pages and make your organisation stand out in the digital hemisphere. 


Top Free SEO Tools: Boost Your Website’s Performance

  • Team Social Beat
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  • 7 July , 2020
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    • 14 min read

In today’s digital world, the key for your business to perform well online is to reach the top of the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) and for this to happen your website must deserve to be at the top.

With Google’s frequent algorithm updates the need for page speed, unique content and SEO strategies has become a necessity. Fortunately, there are a lot of free SEO tools online for Indian marketers that can help you assess the website content thereby helping you achieve your SEO (and business) goals. You don't need to use all of the best SEO tools available under the sun to improve your ranking, just the right ones to get you covered.

20 Best SEO Tools List to Improve Search Rankings

SEO tools can give you some insights and updates, thus offering you a better understanding of your website's general health and success. If you are looking forward to achieving better results for your website, then here are some of the best free SEO tools you should be using.

Some of the tools are completely free while others have certain functionality limitations whilst using the free version. But both make sure you are satisfied with your analysis!

Google Analytics

Every individual interested in online marketing should ensure Google Analytics is integrated into their website. Google Analytics is one of the free SEO tools that provide the data of traffic received on the website. The Google Analytics tool helps you identify the source of the traffic whether it's organic, referral or even paid campaigns. It also has functionalities to break down the metrics further to identify the device, location and behaviour of the users driving traffic to your website. This helps you understand your audience better.

Helpful Add-on: Google Analytics (for google sheets). This GA add-on allows you to generate and schedule reports on google sheets to ease the tracking of data.

Click to download the Google Analytics for sheets add-on.

Google Search Console

No top free SEO tools list is complete without Google Search Console. Google Search Console formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools is a tool that focuses on optimization and search result performance. The tool also helps you with analysis of the technical aspects such as coverage issues, internal, and external links on the website and the speed of the website. It is also one of the only places that provide reliable query data.

Helpful Add-on: Search Analytics for Sheets helps you transfer data without any hassle. This add-on allows you to pull data from Google Search Console on Google Sheets with ease.

Click to download the Search Analytics for Sheets add-on.

Google Data Studio

Any SEO tools list is incomplete without Google Data Studio is a reporting tool that allows you to merge data from different sources like Google Analytics, Search Console, and Google Sheets. This tool helps you present and customize your data in the form of a dashboard making it convenient for reporting and can be built for free.

One of the best free SEO tools is Google Trends which helps you to understand what people search for and the search volume over a period of time. You can easily filter the results based on the region, time frame, category and type of searches such as web search, image search, shopping search or YouTube search. You can also do a comparative analysis between two terms and then finding getting the insights is all up to you.

MOZ

MOZ, one of the best SEO optimisation tools, is the first choice of  top webmasters. The Domain Authority score by MOZ is an industry-standard to gauge the quality of a website. MOZ bases this score on various on-page and off-page factors. Moz provides SEO extensions for Chrome to get analysis jobs done quickly and with minimum clicks! With MozBar, you can get website link metrics for domains and pages through the Page and Domain Authority. Check out the top free SEO tools from MOZ for link building and analysis, keyword research, page performance, local listing audits, and more! Here are some of the features of the MOZ tool that you can use:

Keyword Optimization

MOZ  helps you to keep track of your domain’s ranking and search visibility for the keywords you want to target on your website. You can also perform a competitive analysis to understand your competitor's position for your targeted keywords. Hence, Moz is one of the free SEO tools that take care of the off-page and on-page health of your website!

Site Crawl

MOZ audits your website and identifies potential errors that could arise when a spider or a search engine bot tries to crawl your website. It can also help you optimize errors in your metadata which can help you rank better in search engine results.

Backlinks

MOZ analyzes your backlinks to understand where you’re getting your backlinks from and the quality of the referring domains. To aid your contextual marketing efforts, MOZ helps you to identify the anchor texts that link to your website. MOZ also helps you to keep a track of recently acquired backlinks and also the backlinks that you have lost.

Check your Domain Authority on MOZ

MozBar

MozBar is one of the SEO extensions for Chrome which adds a sticky toolbar that knows the right information to determine the credibility of a website. The MozBar is one of the free SEO tools that provides the domain authority and page authority of a website to draw an understanding of how credible the website is. You can also click on the Moz bar and generate reports instantly.

Try out the MozBar on your Chrome browser.

SEMRush

SEMRush is an all-in-one toolkit for all your SEM needs. SEMRush is by far one of the best free SEO tools in the market, which provides tools for most of your digital marketing needs. But, please note that you can use the free version of SEMRush with limited functionalities. Based on the requirement, SEMRush has divided its website into toolkits such as the SEO toolkit, Advertising toolkit, Content Marketing toolkit, Social Media toolkit and Competitive Research toolkit. So, this makes SEMRush a vital one for any SEO tools list.

Keyword Research

You can also perform keyword research and find out your rankings for a keyword. You can either track a set of keywords you have shortlisted and see its performance for organic or PPC campaigns or identify keyword opportunities by just entering your domain. SEMRush is one of the best free SEO tools that help you find keywords and thus assist in ideating new topics!

Backlink Analysis

In the link-building section, you can get an overview of all the backlinks to your website and fulfil your off-page SEO requirements. Identify toxic links that can affect your site health and your domain’s ranking in SERPs. You can also set up a tracker to identify opportunities for backlinking and track their progress over time.

On-page and Technical SEO

You can audit your website and find on-page and technical issues on your website. It provides you with a site health score and gives you suggestions to improve your site’s performance. It can also track local listings for your business and monitor the reviews your business receives.

Competitive Research

You can compare your keyword strategy to that of your competitor and identify any competitive opportunities you can grab. It can identify the strengths of your competitor’s domain and find out what is working best for them. It can also help identify keyword and backlink gaps between your domain and that of your competitors in order to improve your position.

Rank Tracking

This tool keeps track of your ranking position in SERPs on a daily basis. In addition to this, you can also keep an eye on the volatility of the search engine with respect to any changes in the ranking algorithms. You can get a list of the top domains that are currently ranking on search engines.

Ahrefs

One of the best free SEO tools is Ahrefs as it can 10x your organic reach strategically. This is another wonderful toolkit for all your SEO needs. You can perform a site audit to identify issues and optimize your website. Ahrefs is a truly remarkable tool that every SEO specialist must have in their toolkit.

Organic Search

You can track how your website has been ranking over a period of time. The keyword research is an important tool to understand the search queries and find opportunities for your keyword strategy. Analyze your competitors in the industry and track how you performed in comparison to them.

Page Analysis

Analyse individual pages on your website either by the traffic they receive or by the type of content or content pages that get the most shares on social media platforms and other domains online.

Backlink Profile

It helps you to identify the backlinks and backlinking domains to your website. You can also understand how your contextual linking strategy is working for you by analyzing the anchor tags. You can keep a track of the backlinks you have recently acquired or lost. Have a look to see an analysis of the internal linking status on your website and identify any orphan pages.

Outgoing Links

This is an important aspect of SEO as important as backlinks are. If you are providing link juice to low quality websites it can give an indication to search engines that you are a low-quality website which can lead to lower rankings or penalization by these search engines.

Rediscover your website at Ahrefs

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that helps you manage your on-page SEO tasks easily. It also measures the readability of the content on your webpage. It helps you to easily edit the meta-information such as the title and description while editing your page on WordPress. It is one of the free SEO tools that provide you with utmost value but will come with certain limitations in functionality. In that case, you’d have to upgrade to a paying plan!

Moreover, with Yoast SEO, you can also measure the optimization of the content on your page for target keywords and keyphrases. The snippet editor shows you how your webpage appears in the search results. Similarly, you can also control how the meta information of your page appears on social media platforms.

Follow these steps to install the Yoast SEO Plugin on WordPress.

Hotjar

Ranking in SERPs and leading visitors to your website is not enough. Google also gives priority to the user experience which is the culmination of many factors like the bounce rate, time on page, pages per session and other on-page factors. Hotjar is a heatmap tool which helps you understand your visitor’s behaviour after they land on your page. Hotjar helps you track activities like clicks, taps, scrolls or potential parts of the page visitors looked at. And, that's why it's one of the best free online SEO tools for bloggers.

Like a weather map, the colour ranges from red which shows high activity to blue which represents low activity. This heatmap tool could also help you to run A/B tests on different versions of your website to track user responses to the changes. All you need to do is add an asynchronous script to your website and follow the analytics to improve your website.

UberSuggest

Ubersuggest is an all-in-one SEO tool that helps you win in the SEO world. The key factor while doing SEO is to be aware of what you're doing and what your competitors are doing and how you adjust your strategy accordingly. This is also one of the free SEO tools that provide you with data on keyword ideas, keyword volume, backlinks requirements for the keyword, and competitor analysis. Better yet, it also has one of the most thoughtful SEO extensions that eases your marketing efforts by a lot!

UberSuggest Extension

Neil Patel has recently introduced the new uber suggest chrome extension which makes it super handy to do SEO. UberSuggest is one of the SEO extensions for Chrome that allows users to have keyword information directly from Google search results. This is one of the SEO extensions for chrome that shows all the required SEO metrics in the SERPs themselves. Plus, it provides the search volume trends of the keyword and backlinks acquired by the competitor websites which are ranking in the SERP, it also provides related keywords to target. Hence, this is one of the top on page SEO tools that marketers are fond of!

Click to download the UberSuggest Extension.

SmallSEOtools

Despite its name, Small SEO Tools provides plenty of on-page SEO tools. SmallSEOtools is an amazing SEO chrome extension that every content creators need. Your content team would appreciate the functions such as the plagiarism checker, paraphrasing tool, image-to-text converter, and other tools.

Similarly, for SEO you have tools to check the keyword density in text, a keyword analyzer, and a keyword finder. You can run a backlink analysis for your domain and find places to improve the website’s crawlability. You can also do a competitor analysis for the keywords and backlinks. There are a host of tools for website tracking and management on this website.

Keyword Planner

SEO is about targeting the right keywords. The keyword planner tool which is Google’s very own provides the average search volume for a specific keyword. It also provides keyword variations and related searches for that focus keyword. Keyword competition is also provided which can get tricky sometimes while you're performing keyword research for SEO since it's only used for ads.

SEO Minion

SEO Minion is one of the SEO extensions which provides on-page analysis. This is one of the free SEO tools that provides the metrics necessary for on-page analysis making it handy to have a quick check of your page based on the on-page checklist.

Smacient Interlinking Tool

Interlinking pages in a website is a key factor in SEO to allow the link juice to flow from one page to another. It also prevents orphan pages. Interlinking each of the pages can be time-consuming. The Smacient Interlinking Tool is one of the most helpful on page SEO tools for digital marketers. provides suggestions of other similar pages in the website with a suggestion of the anchor text to be linked to ease out the process.

Schema Markup Generator

The Schema Generator is indeed one of the most popular on-page SEO tools, that can help users optimize for their target keywords. This Schema Generator tool makes it really easy to create the code to implement schemas onto your website. The tool has a list of schemas to choose from to generate the code for it to be added to your website.

HTTPS Status Code

This tool is a status code tool that checks the status code of the URL. The tool can do wonders when you are searching for the status code of bulk URLs to identify certain issues in a specific URL status code. It also checks the response headers, and redirect chains of a given URL.

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is one of the best SEO tools to make sure your on-page SEO is optimized. Screaming Frog SEO Spider is one of the best technical SEO tools out there. It identifies the technical errors of your website to help fix and improve your site's health. The spider can be crawled by entering the website, uploading a list of URLs or entering a specific sitemap file.

WooRank

WooRank is an SEO monitoring and auditing checker that offers you an excellent on page SEO tool It helps you identify critical issues that could have caused your domain to rank lower or be penalized by search engines. It has a clean and easy-to-use interface that highlights the issues and explains the need to rectify those issues. Analyzing the code and files on your website, WooRank identifies hidden errors and helps you visualize the improvement of your ranking in SERPs.

GTMetrix

GTMetrix is one of the free SEO tools that can help you to test and monitor the performance of your page. With page speed gaining importance for ranking in SERPs, GTMetrix goes beyond Google’s page speed insights tool. GTMetrix offers PageSpeed and YSlow scores along with a detailed analysis for improvement. You can run the tests for different server locations and also simulate the response on different devices. All you need to do is enter your website and run the analysis.

WhiteSpark

Local citations are extremely important for businesses that operate in a specific geographic area or those who want to increase their keyword ranking for location-based keywords. This is one of the free SEO tools that find where all your citations appear and also identifies where your competitor’s citations appear in order for you to fill those gaps. It also has a tool to analyse the NPS of the reviews that are left for your business online and in Google’s reviews. If expanding your geographic presence is important to you, check out WhiteSpark.

 

Keywords Everywhere

This is one of the free SEO tools that help you with keyword research. Typically, it shows the monthly search volume of a keyword, competition data and CPC on more than 10 websites! Moreover, Keywords Everywhere has multiple other integrated tools that bring you keywords that pages and websites rank for! This, like other tools on our list, allows limited accessibility in the free plan. According to your goals, you can upgrade the plan to a paying one, if needed!

Answer The Public

The great Answer the Public is one of the rarest free SEO tools that help you find topics that people are asking! It’s uniqueness allows you to visualize the queries of people into five categories: the 5 Ws and ‘Will’, ‘Are’, ‘Which’, etc. It shows topics that are exploding and can help you be findable in the SERP if done right. These segregation also helps you in strcuturing your blogs or long-form informative content as well!

 

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is one of the free SEO tools that offer great value to an extent. It helps you identify the best content and social search opportunities. Moreover, it also helps you in your quest fo find new and relevant keywords that fits your website and your business! Therefore, it is one of the most important tool in this SEO tools list that analyses all that your brand needs!

Hope you found this article useful. To know more about digital marketing tools and trends, do stay updated.

Frequently Asked Questions on Free SEO Tools

  • Which is the best free SEO tool?

Google’s SEO tools like the Google Keyword Planner, Google Analytics, Google Search Console and others help you gain maximum information for free! Many businesses turn to Google’s SEO tools as they are free and provide ample information and assessment!

  • How can I improve my SEO for free?

You can improve your website’s SEO if you check your website hygiene in the following ways:

  • Find relevant keywords with low competition for your website pages,
  • Write short, easy and crisp content that helps people understand quickly,
  • Optimise your title and meta tags,
  • Organize your URL structure,
  • Fix 404 errors,
  • Update your blog or service/product pages often,
  • Optimise images on the page, and more!

  • What 3 Google tools would you use for SEO?

Here are the top 3 Google tools any business can use to better their SEO hygiene:

  • Google Analytics
  • Google Search Console
  • Google Trends

  • Can I do SEO on my own?

Yes, definitely! You can do SEO on your own for your website! You can look into ways how to go about SEO practices and use the free tools from Google to start with! You can go with Google Trends, Google Search Console and Google Analytics to track growth and results!

  • Do I have to pay for SEO tools?

It depends on your goals and objectives. If you have an extensive growth plan, then you would need to upgrade these free SEO tools at some point. You can handpick them according to what you require and stick to them for better results and understanding of current website health!


7 Image SEO Tips To Follow in 2020 For Improved Ranking On SERPs

  • Nandita Raman
  • |
  • 22 June , 2020
  • |
    • 5 min read

Even if you’re new to the concept of image SEO and do not understand why an article would choose to talk about image SEO tips, hang on! Correct SEO practices are a goldmine waiting to be unleashed. I’ll just start by saying - all your digital marketing efforts will go in vain if you do not leverage this integral marketing element - SEO. 

Before jumping to image SEO tips, let’s first deal with the basics. 

What is SEO? 

The unpaid strategy that goes into making any given website rank higher on a search engine is called SEO

Search Engine Optimisation is essentially optimising your site so that it gets picked up by search engines and gets displayed on relevant searches leading to higher traffic. The strategy is unpaid and thus focuses on ‘organic’ results. Under this, the design, content, images, links, and writing - everything needs to be optimised in a way that search engines (Google, 90% of the time) show the website as a top result when someone searches for a related keyword. 

Why does SEO matter in the digital marketing world? 

Not a secret: Yout website visitors are your potential customers!

SEO matters because: 

  • To welcome an influx of online traffic, you need to rank higher on Google. 
  • 33% of clicks on a search engine are on the first ranking page, and 75% of all clicks are on the first five listings. SEO is the way to go if you want users to click on your website.
  • The higher your rank, the better will be your brand’s visibility and thus credibility.
  • High ranking builds trust and digital authority like nothing else. 
  • Once users trust your brand, sales are bound to follow. 
  • The indirect advantage of SEO is that when you spend time optimizing your website, you also end up enhancing its usability and fine-tuning user experience.  
  • SEO helps you build and sustain a quality relationship with your audience. 
  • It gives you the much-needed competitive edge which is a tough nut to crack in present times. 
  • SEO gives you an edge and shoots up your conversions.
  • All of this adds to more sales, a loyal customer base, and substantial business growth. 

                                                                      Image Source: Backlinko

Why is it important for images to be SEO optimised?

Image optimisation matters because: 

  • They extend contextual information to the search engine which directly affects the page ranking. 
  • Your page loading speed is enhanced which in turn increases user engagement. 
  • Images consume significantly higher bytes than any other component of a website. This emphasizes the fact that their size and complexity is bound to influence a site's performance.
  • Aberdeen Group's study suggests that even a second’s delay in page load time leads to a 7% drop in conversions. Also, around 40% of individuals will abandon your website if it takes more than three seconds to load. Image optimization comes to the rescue here. If you can reduce the size of your image, maintaining their quality, your page loading time will improve drastically. 
  • Improved page load time = improved user experience. This will encourage conversions and enhance your customer retention rate. 
  • Optimised images require less storage on the server and thus site backups are quick and efficient.

Here are 7 Image SEO tips to keep in mind while optimising images:

1. Name it right: 

This has to top the list of image SEO tips because it’s so obvious and straightforward and yet most of us miss out on it. Google must be clear about what your image’s message is - without even looking at it. How does that happen? By naming your image. Use your focus keyword/keyphrase at the very beginning in the image file name. For example, if your image displays dogs, the file name shouldn’t be GDS5654.jpg, but dog.jpg.

2. Format it right: 

When speaking of crucial image SEO tips, formatting is what will follow. Here’s how to zero-in:

  • JPEG offers color and clarity with a comparatively small file size.
  • PNG to keep background transparency intact
  • WebP for a combination of high-quality results and small file sizes. 
  • SVG especially for logos and icons. 

 3. Scale it right: 

The quicker a page loads, the better it is for SEO and user experience. Images have a huge role to play in the loading time of a page. The maximum width of your images can be 720 px, no matter what your screen size is. Images wider than 720 px are then automatically resized to fit the screen. 

Note that the browser still has to bear the burden of loading the image in its full-size i.e., if your image is 3500px, the browser would load it entirely and then display it at 720 px. To avoid this, resize your images effectively to suit the width you need. 

4. Dial down the size: 

The next in the list of image SEO tips is to compress the image and offer the smallest file size. Keep experimenting with various file sizes without being afraid. The visual quality usually faces little to no noticeable difference while the file size numbers dial down remarkably. 

5. Leverage Responsive images: 

Speaking of image SEO tips, we cannot miss out on the magic of srcset - the HTML code to instruct the browser to load different versions of an image in accordance with different screen resolutions. 

Suppose you upload a 620 px image and someone visits your webpage using a smartphone with 420px display, then their browser has to unnecessarily suffer the load of 620 px when it can do so perfectly with 420 px. That is where responsive images drop in. For instance, here it will dial down your 620 px image to 420 px to suit your smartphone display.

6. Add captions and alt text: 

We all are used to skimming and scanning through an article. Another point in image SEO tips, therefore, would be to include captions (text) with your image when needed. KissMetrics stated that an average reader goes through the captions under images 300% more than the copy itself

Apart from this, add alt text to your images - it ensures that all information is intact even if the image isn’t available to the user. This alternative text must include an SEO keyword so that the image is clear to the search engine as well as to the user.

7. Include structured data: 

It’s simple - you can use structured data to show your users what kind of content is associated with your image on your webpage. By doing this, you will encourage better quality traffic to your website. Currently, the 3 markups that Google gives you are products, recipes, and videos. You can use the markup that describes your content the best. 

I’d like to leave you with the maxim: Knowing isn’t enough, you need to take action. Now that you’re aware of the strategies that go into making your page rank higher, make sure you experiment effectively. You can now incorporate the best images and leverage these image SEO tips to welcome quality traffic, sales, and growth to your business. 

About the Author:

Vinayak Agarwal is the co-founder of myHQ, a startup with a mission to revolutionize the way millennials work. They are creating a network of beautiful & inspiring coworking spaces and work cafes for people to work, network, and co-create from. myHQ is also a vibrant community of 10,000+ entrepreneurs, freelancers, and working professionals.

An entrepreneur at heart, Vinayak is an IIT Delhi alum and he worked with Goldman Sachs for 2 years before starting myHQ.


Best Newsletter Templates for Email Marketing

  • John Davier
  • |
  • 18 June , 2020
  • |
    • 5 min read

How a business will progress heavily depends on how it's marketed, and in the 21st century, email marketing is one of the best methods. The invention of email marketing has eliminated the necessity to print out thousands of banners and posters, as it can reach beyond borders.

However, this doesn't imply that this comes free of cost and it certainly doesn't lessen competition. Every brand is leveraging this effective way of reaching out to people through which they're generating considerable amounts of conversion either directly or indirectly through this medium.

This can only be done if your emails can function as if they were words from a real human being, and if they could appeal to their audience. However, you can’t achieve this if your email isn't personalized.

Here we'll discuss how different templates can help you reach your target audience, and what sort of template will fit your company. Let's dive right in.

Best Newsletter Templates for Email Marketing:

1. For Retail Shops:

The abundance of retail stores in every town and city is the reason behind the hefty competition. Research suggests that the retail shops’ success depends heavily on the extra features or USP they offer, as in most cases, the prices and the products will be the same. So, the goal should be to highlight the USP alongside your products.

Tips for Design:

You can take multiple approaches, depending on your aim and target audience.

  1. Using clean and light themes for informing about better features, more convenience, or how you can offer a better experience overall is a good idea.
  2. If you want to broadcast that your store offers a sale, you should make that the entire newsletter’s main attraction. It's recommended to use bold and big fonts. The color can be either Black and White or colorful, depending on your target audience. Make sure to mention when the sale ends in lieu of increased  demand.
  3. If there's a giveaway, you should display the items along with their price to create a sense of value.
  4. If there's something you want your audience to see, you can use handwritten fonts. These fonts tend to jump out of the page; that’s exactly what you want.

2. For Real Estate:

At some point, Real Estate emails used to be full of promotional content, but that doesn't "engage" people much. You can create engaging emails by adding information such as how great the neighborhood is, or how amatuer buyers can select a property offering that's just right for them.

Tips for Design:

  1. Real estate newsletters don't necessarily have to contain pictures of the house or apartment you're offering. It can also feature images that instigate a feeling of royalty or a picture that'll convey that your service is the gateway to the clients’ dreams.
  2. You can use colors, but ensure that the information is written on a clean and preferably white background.
  3. You can write on how they can choose the right property for themselves, how to decide the right time to buy. Studies show that offering tips on how you can develop influence in a particular neighborhood works as well.
  4. If you're listing an apartment for sale, make sure to add the price. If the prices aren't included, people consider that as shady, and it may affect the clicks you get negatively.

3. For Businesses in General

Every business is trying it’s best to adapt to the dynamic market, and that's why the necessity of regular internal and external communication is more significant than ever. Here are some tips on how you can curate some effective newsletters.

Tips for Design:

  1. The best way to make an impression with your clients is through concise emails. You can use black fonts against bright,  white backgrounds with normal texts, and colorful fonts for the headings. There should be just enough pictures to grab the attention of readers but not too much lest it distracts readers.
  2. You can inform them about any update or how the company is growing through these emails. A great way of making the email precise is by applying a filter on the pictures that are the same shade as the fonts. This helps maintain symmetry.
  3. Employees are the most efficient when they follow the company guidelines. You can remind your employees with an email and weave your guidelines into design.

Who says business newsletters can't be colorful? Some of the best newsletter templates are super colorful. You can create some colorful newsletters for your email marketing campaign, which will differ from the usual and generate clicks and sales.

4. For Fashion:

Fashion newsletters are a great way to attract your audience and to generate revenue. You can forward your best collections, or even the clothes you need to get off your inventory through these emails. However, this is often ignored, and people find their inbox spammed with hastily drafted fashion newsletters.

Tips for Design:

  1. Offering promotional, exclusive content, and sales is an excellent way of generating revenue. However, if every newsletter of yours offers products, people are bound to ignore them.
  2. You can make your newsletters more engaging by offering useful content. You can always offer stuff like how to maintain a specific product, dress up for different events, what's the latest trend, etc. The best fashion newsletter templates offer engaging content of this sort.
  3. As for the fonts and background, you can go classic, or you can go creative. As for the traditional approach, you can use black fonts against white background, add products, product descriptions, and a marked-down price.

On the other hand, you can also go wild and use different fonts and colors. This depends on what sort of products you're advertising and who your target audience is.

5. For Sign-up Newsletters:

Getting your audience to sign-up for your service is one of the hardest things to do, but it can bring you many benefits and of course revenue. However, these types of letters perform great if they're personalized. A personalized email newsletter can perform twice as well as any general mail; that's why you should focus more on making them personalized.

Design Tips:

A welcome email is an excellent way of getting your customers hooked up to your service or business. Usually, these emails are collected when they make a purchase. If they receive a welcoming email after their purchase, they may feel connected to your business. If you can make this happen, they'll be inclined towards signing up. Use the font and theme for such emails according to the items the consumer is inclined to purchase. Doing so will enable you to personalize the email to the most significant degree.

If you're unable to filter your email list based on gender, you should opt for newsletters that speak to both. You can do so easily by adding an equal number of products for both men and women patrons, and if these products appeal to them, they may consider signing up for more.

Making one of the best newsletter templates for signing up is by emphasizing what's in it for them. A person will surely sign-up for your newsletter if you can convince them that it'll benefit them. This type of newsletters should always be listed for more readability.

6. For Body Care and Health-Related Brands:

Body care and health-related businesses took to online platforms recently, but you'll surely fall behind if you don't invest in this, as the other companies have already gone all in. You can make such newsletters engaging with the following newsletter templates:

Design Tips:

Using the color green is an excellent way of making the best newsletters relating to body care and health-related products, as green speaks for a healthy living. However, that doesn't mean that you can't use other words. For instance, if you're promoting a product that contains lavender as a particular ingredient, you can use violet as the theme color, which is a more relevant idea than using green.

Apart from just promoting your products, you can offer different tips as well. These tips can be on making DIY products, healthy snacks, or you can survey the necessity of certain products and desires for updating your inventory and approach.

Conclusion:

The only limiting factor in making the best newsletter template is your creativity. There's no set rule of thumb at play here. However, you can follow the tips mentioned above while making a newsletter for your email campaign. Remember that email marketing is one of the best methods of getting the word out, so you should never rush on this. Take some time to consider the message of the newsletter, the target recipients, and what you plan on achieving through this. Answering these questions will allow you to create the best newsletter templates for your email marketing campaign.

John Davier

Content marketing guru at Mailmunch. I’m passionate about writing content that resonates with people. Live simply, give generously, stay happy.


Google’s Broad Core Update – May 2020

  • Deepsikha Agarwal
  • |
  • 28 May , 2020
  • |
    • 3 min read

After a core update at the start of the year in January, Google has announced the next update to its algorithms early this month, on May 4th. Each update affects Google’s search algorithms and is released with the intention to present information that is relevant and authoritative for any search result. 

What does the latest update entail?

With COVID-19, many industries have seen a decline because of the nature of their business, while others have seen an increase. This has resulted in a significant shift in the way users search for queries online as well. This is why Google has chosen to rank certain categories higher in its latest update. This will allow relevant content to appear to match searches during these uncertain times. 

For example, the search for content related to news, health, and online communities has shot up, while categories like travel, sports, and live events have seen a drop. Google’s latest update accounts for these shifts and the change in algorithms strongly affects Search Engine Results Page (SERP) volatility. 

The core update that was announced in January also affected SERP volatility, but May’s core update displays a peak in these rates, which is illustrated in the graph below.

It is important to note that the update also affects thin content, as well as old content which has not been refreshed in a while. Such items will be ranked lower by Google’s algorithm update. But if there has been a change in rankings for the entire industry, there is no guarantee that implementing changes will help increase the position of the content in SERPs. Featured snippets have also been impacted with the update.

Users may recall that in September 2019, Google announced a core update that resulted in a similar outcome which changed rankings completely. A key difference was that YouTube videos began to outrank Wikipedia pages. So this is not the first time something of this sort has happened.

Which industries are affected most?

Since the core update reflects the direct impact industries have witnessed throughout these last few months, the same industries have experienced a win or loss with this unprecedented change. 

For example, news has become paramount during these times. People across the world are trying to stay informed on COVID-19, as well as the impact it has had on various spheres of our normal lives. Information on health and medical research is also being widely consumed. And with people restricted to their homes, the number of hours online have shot up as well. Users are spending more time on different social media platforms, streaming services, and other categories of entertainment. Thus, these are the industries that have benefited most from the update this month, with news coming out on top.

Other industries have not fared as well. Travel and real estate have seen a dramatic drop, and this is reflected in the results of the update as well. Similarly, live events and entertainment, autos and vehicles, tech, and fitness, among many others, have taken a big hit. Many websites are reporting a significant drop in traffic, which is likely due to the change in the SERP algorithm.

Because marketing during COVID-19 is already in a state of flux, it is important to stay up to date with these changes and implement corrections accordingly. This can make keeping up with competitive SERPs easier. However,  it might make more sense to wait until the market picks up for industries currently experiencing a decline in demand and engagement. 


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