Building a successful marketing strategy for your business depends on choosing the right marketing mix and implementing plans that drive results. According to a recent study, marketers are expected to further increase their marketing spends this year, of which digital might consume up to 35% of their overall budgets. With digital marketing gaining more importance, it becomes inevitable for brands to think beyond Facebook & Twitter and explore new opportunities.
Pinterest is one of the fastest growing digital platforms with more than hundred million monthly active users, currently. This popular social bookmarking or photo sharing website allows users to create, discover and save media content related to their favorite topics, interests or hobbies. Thus giving brands, the perfect platform to curate relevant content and amplify it to reach the desired audience. Pinterest along with platforms like Instagram, Snapchat & Periscope are going to be growth drivers in 2016 so try them out to stay ahead of the curve.
How Pinterest works
Have you ever enjoyed window shopping at a mall or maintained a scrapbook with clippings and articles you love or find useful? Pinterest works on a similar model where users can find, share and pin (read as ‘save’) visual content pertaining to a wide range of topics and interests. It allows users to create 'pinboards', organized based on themes / topics where the pinned items get saved.
Launched in 2010, Pinterest was summarized to be a 'catalogue of ideas' for people looking for inspiration. Be it a DIY project, a chocolate cake recipe or a wedding gown inspiration - wide range of visually appealing content is sourced or uploaded by users all over the web. They have also recently launched their advertising platform, which can enable promoted pins & boards.
How to use Pinterest for your brand
Big or small, businesses can use this highly visual medium to showcase expertise and disseminate content to reach a wider audience. In order to build a strong customer base and eventually some loyalty, brands can market their products and drive traffic to their website.
Pinterest is not only the second biggest online network to drive referral traffic, but also the one with a higher shelf life. Even pins that are two months old can drive significant amount of traffic, with visually appealing images and keyword rich descriptions. In order to effectively use Pinterest to build your brand and achieve marketing goals, please find below some tips:
1. Set up your account
With the growing user base and average time spent on this platform, Pinterest seems to have become the new favorite for marketers around the world. In order to get started on this platform, sign-up for the business account that provides exclusive features to help you grow and monitor results.
Business name, category, website and bio are all you need to create your presence on Pinterest. It provides analytics, rich pins and advertising in terms of promoted pins which are not available otherwise. In case you already have a personal account for your business with good fan-following and referral traffic, Pinterest allows you to convert it into a business account without losing any data.
2. Plan your approach
Visuals are the most powerful medium for brands to capture the attention of its target audience and communicate better. Good and compelling visual elements tend to perform better for brands and result in higher engagement.
Retail brands should showcase relevant, high quality and vertical images of their products for users to like, repin or follow your account for more. Even brands with intangible products or services can benefit from Pinterest with the right content and strategy in place. Businesses that belong to healthcare, finance, education and other sectors can creatively modify their existing content into visual elements or share new content that is relevant to their business and target audience.
3. Create boards and pins
It is ideal to start with 8-10 boards with content categories that are relevant to your audience and business. Instead of just promoting your own products and speaking the brand language, look for relevant keywords or topics that are most searched by your target audience. Curate content based on user interests and create boards for broad themes & categories.
With Pinterest being the second largest social network to drive referral traffic, make sure you pin images, videos or infographics with links to your website. These backlinks can be included in the descriptive copy or photo caption for higher click through rates. You can see the profile of one our clients, Gehna over here.
4. Engage with your audience
In order to be easily discoverable as a brand and engage with your audience, repin relevant content across Pinterest and create group boards. This enables brands to invite bloggers or influencers to contribute to different themes and ideas. It also helps in building a community and interacting through contests, theme boards or by liking / commenting on their repins & personal collections. As Jeff Bullas mentions in his article, Shopify users referred by Pinterest, spend an average of $80 compared to Facebook referral of $40.
5. Boost your SEO efforts
Use the right keywords & hashtags in your descriptions & image titles to get noticed and gain more traction. In order to create quality backlinks and visits to your social media handles, add these links to your profile and individual pins that will drive traffic. Much like other platforms, local businesses can tag their location to pins and profiles to reach relevant audience on Pinterest. You can also see some of our other link building techniques tips here.
6. Make your website or blog Pinterest-ready
Pinterest is a great platform to discover new products, as it caters to a wide range of categories such as fashion, home décor, art, food, gadgets, travel, etc. Marketers can add a 'Pin' button to their products on the site to make it easier for visitors to share it across. For e-commerce players or businesses that sell online – these pin buttons can help in generating more sales and traffic.
Is Pinterest soon to be a part of your digital marketing mix?
Or stepping up your existing Pinterest marketing game?
Let us know about your experience so far in the ‘Comments’ section.
Every brand or website targets ranking on top of search results but achieving the same requires a lot of effort over a period of time. The search engine rankings are determined by a variety of factors. Mobile-friendly nature of your website, On Page SEO, Content quality & freshness, Number of backlinks and relevance to the search keywords are some of them.
According to a recent study by Moz conducted across 150+ industry experts, the top 5 factors for search engine rankings were as follows:
While there are various tools to help you with SEO, in this article we focus on 21 link building techniques that can play an important role in boosting your search engine rankings and website traffic. Though the number of backlinks is important but poor quality or spammy backlinks should be avoided. It can result in a negative penalty for your website by Google.
Today, Content Marketing is the buzzword. Brands are churning out content in large numbers. In fact, more than 27 million pieces of content are shared every day. In such a cluttered space, it is important to create content that is discoverable, sharable and informative to your target audience. Moreover, as Moz points out, “good unique content” is not enough– you need content which his 10 times better than the best content out there. Certain content types like How To articles, Listicles, etc. are examples of Pillar posts that can help you garner a large number of references/links from external sources. Read the BuzzSumo report for more details on this.
Influencer marketing is a gaining prominence as an effective marketing channel for brands. For the uninitiated, Influencer Marketing is the new form of word-of-mouth marketing that involves partnering bloggers and social media influencers to talk about your brand – be it on their blog or social media handles. An effective way to leverage influencer marketing would be to get the top bloggers in your industry to review your product/service. Apart from giving you important backlinks, it would also help you create awareness about your product among your target audience. There are many platforms in the industry that allow you to track the top influencers in your industry niche.
The other way to use influencers is to co-create content when you don’t have internal bandwidth to create your content. It’s important to keep in mind the user and find the right influencers who can create content for those users.
Under this technique, you track the resource pages in your industry and check for broken links using tools like Check My Link. Once you make a list of the broken links on these pages, you can reach out to the page owners with the list of broken links that need to be fixed along with the links to useful resources on your website can be linked to.
Visual content grab eyeballs and infographics can be a great format to build your brand and get backlinks at the same time, from people out there are who are looking for informative content in a visually attractive representation. You can also submit your infographics in a whole bunch of infographic submission websites such as visual.ly, infographick.com, bestinfographics.info, etc.
If you are looking to create fresh & novel content ideas, Surveys and Industry Trend Reports can work wonders for you. Launch an industry survey in your niche – it can be a simple consumer preference pattern for a consumer brand or an investment survey for a financial services player. Tools like Survey Monkey or GetInsights can let you create surveys in a whiff. They also have many pre-researched survey templates for each industry which can be explored.
Create reports, share it in different industry forums, mail it to top experts for their insights before releasing the report and include the quotes / insights in the report if possible, as it adds credibility to your study. For B2B businesses, releasing industry trend reports can be an excellent way to drive traffic to the site and build authority online. These reports have a strong sharability quotient and can garner a large number of backlinks online. Offline PR can also be activated to create more awareness around the release of the industry report.
Skyscraper content creation technique involves finding top performing content in your industry and adding more depth or value to the existing content. Once the content is ready, you can reach out to people linking to the existing content and share the link to your article. In order to find best performing content in your industry, you can leverage tools such as BuzzSumo, Topsy or Google Search to some extent. To read more on building skyscraper content, check out this article by Brian Dean.
You can write Testimonials for products / services that you have used for your brand with a backlink to your website that demonstrates how you have leveraged that product. It would be better to write a quick case study to add more value to the testimonial.
You can curate the top articles in your industry, take interviews of top experts or compile the insights from the latest industry report & convert it into a case study. Once the post is ready on your website, share the link with the experts and let them know you have linked to their content or have published their interview. For content curation, you can make use of tools like Scoop.It, Feedly, BuzzSumo as well as Google Alerts. Apart from gaining potential backlinks, this would also help you make your property more informative for your audience.
Effective internal linking performs three important functions:
Apart from linking to your own content, you can also link out to expert articles which are ranked on top of search results. This way you are linking and connecting content to sites which already have an established authority in your niche. While linking to external sites, do not forget to use the rel=”nofollow” tag. This tag prevents the link juice from passing on to the external site. Even in this article you see we have linked to the likes of Brian Dean, Moz & BuzzSumo amongst others.
Platforms like Quora have rich discussion on varied subjects. You can find topics in your niche and answer relevant questions with reference backlinks to your content articles. This would provide the information to audience who is already looking for similar information and at the same provide you good quality backlinks. Quora also has a blog section where you can submit your existing blog content with a link to the original piece.
You can repurpose old content in different forms to allow it to reach maximum number of people. You can convert your blog article into a presentation, or downloadable pdfs, Videos or infographics and submit it on multiple platforms. You could even translate the content into different languages if relevant for your brand. For example, a presentation can be submitted on Slideshare. You can also add more juice to your already existing blog content by updating it with latest insights, images, presentation and reference links
Search and connect with high-quality portals or websites for guest blogging. If done properly, it can be an effective link-building measure. Avoid low-quality websites or duplicate content as part of the guest blogging initiative. It can result in penalty from Google. Even commenting on relevant blogs is still a good practice in case you are unable to get guest blogging activated.
Build an engaged community on Social Media platforms & share your content regularly to amplify the reach of your content. On platforms like Twitter, it is important to share your content multiple times. To prevent repetitive posts, use different post copies, images and stats for sharing. Your engaged follower community is more likely to share or talk about your content. Linkedin has its own blogging feature and you could repurpose your content and publish it there for increased reach. For ecommerce websites even Pinterest can be a very interesting source for quality backlinks and traffic.
Last but not the least, ask for backlinks from quality source. For example, if you have great content on Personal Finance, look out for portals which list quality content from different Personal Finance resources and reach to them. If they find your content relevant, they might link back to it. Once they backlink, don’t forget to drop a thank you mail with links to other helpful content which might be useful to them.
Tools like Google Alerts, Talk Walker and Mention can help to track the mentions for your brand on the web. Track all mentions for your brand and see if these mentions have linked back to your website/blog. If the backlink is missing in the mentions, mail or reach out on social media and see if that can be converted into a backlink.
Track and analyze the backlinks to your competitor websites and check the source of their backlinks. Look at content and pages that have got the maximum links to see if you can produce better content on those topics. Watch out for aggregator sites or industry curators that link to their websites and reach out with links to your content.
Platforms like Zomato and Trip Advisor drives millions of visitors to their website daily. Leveraging these platforms in the right way can help claim relevant backlinks and at the same time, drive relevant traffic to your website. Partnering with top reviewers on such platforms (for example – see our list of top food bloggers in India) to seamlessly integrate their reviews / posts with links to your products can go a long way in providing quality backlinks. Forums likes MouthShut.com even have a blog section apart from the review section; you can submit your blog content there with links to the original article hosted on your website.
Old backlinks to your website can return a 404 error over a period of time, resulting from a new site or a change in url. Even in case of new backlinking, there is a possibility that the source site might make a mistake in typing the url to your site. You can use online tools to research the broken links to your site and redirect these.
Highly recommended for product based websites, submission to feedback sites can help drive lot of traffic to your website & also boost the conversion rates. LaunchSky, Valid8or, Product Hunt, Startup Lift and Beta List are some of the websites that can be used for review submissions.
Help a Reporter Out or HARO as the technique is better known as, is an excellent way to get backlinks from news portals. Once you sign-up on the reporter help portals like HelpAReporter, you are likely to get mails with requirements on information the reporters are looking for. You need to respond with the information from your end, along with helpful links if available.
Sometimes, websites, in their quest to achieve quick results, resort to negative techniques which are not seen in a positive light by the search engines. I would like to list out some of those techniques which should be avoided at all costs to prevent any penalty to your website.
Hope these techniques can prove handy to generate good quality backlinks for your website. In case you know any other method that works well and deserves to be a part of this article, please feel free to comment and let us know.
In a space as dynamic as digital marketing where things change rapidly (Google, for example, updates its search algorithm 500 to 600 times a year), it is fairly difficult to predict with certainty how things will turn out in a year. Nevertheless, digital marketing is all about catching the best trends early and leveraging them. Here are eight key trends that we think would be ones to watch out for in 2016:
The mobile web will continue to grow rapidly
Mobile has already seen massive growth in 2014 and 2015. With Google announcing this year that mobile traffic has surpassed desktop traffic and also releasing its mobile-friendly update (Mobilegeddon), mobile-first has already gone from being a “nice to have” to an absolutely “must-have”. Also, despite the mobile web accounting for only 20% of the time spent on mobile (80% of the time spent is in apps), mobile browser traffic is twice the traffic from mobile apps. With mobile apps facing a massive challenge on the user retention front and the mobile web growing rapidly, mobile marketing strategy is where marketers are going to be strongly focused in 2016.
Newer channels like Instagram will continue to gain rapid ground
With a large number of marketers swarming the three most popular social media marketing channels - Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn (93% of marketers use Facebook!), there’s a great deal of competition for any audience you would want to target. Relatively new and upcoming channels like Instagram (only 36% of marketers currently use Instagram), Snapchat (a meagre 2% of marketers currently use Snapchat) and Periscope, on the other hand, are fairly untapped and unlike Facebook, have seen a growth in organic reach over the last few years, as illustrated below. Early adopters to these channels are already seeing results and adoption will continue gain ground in the year to come.
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Influencer marketing will become mainstream
With organic reach of brand pages dropping across most channels, customers trusting social influencers more than brands and the growing use of ad blockers, influencer marketing seems to one of the most viable options for brands to reach out to their target consumers. The savvy early-adopter brands have already started adopting influencer marketing in 2015 and 2016 is when mass adoption will begin.
Spends on Programmatic buying and Real-Time-Bidding will rise
Programmatic buying uses the power of data to ensure the right kind of ads are served to the right kind of people in the most meaningful way, thereby increasing the effectiveness of the ads and the return on ad spends. An increasing number of advertisers are expected to allocate larger spends to programmatic in the next few years.
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Video will explode:
Video is no newcomer to the digital space but its consumption trends have seen a massive bump in 2015, especially with Facebook allowing auto-play of videos in the newsfeed. An increasing number of brands will direct a larger percentage of their marketing spends towards creation and promotion of video content. If you haven’t embraced video as a marketer yet, the time is now!
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Follower counts are dead, focus will be on ROI-driven marketing
With most social media channels cutting down on their organic reach, the concept of building a fan or follower base which a brand can reach out to for free is almost dead. Fan and follower counts have turned into pure vanity metrics with little business value. The focus in 2015 has already been on marketing that can drive direct return-on-investment in terms of measurable metrics like traffic and sales growth and this focus is only going to be stronger in 2016.
The popularity of Native Ads will increase
The popularity of ad blockers has seen a substantial increase in 2015 and Apple announced this year that its new mobile operating system, iOS 9 will allow ad blocking as well. In this scenario, native advertising, where ads merge into the platform on which they are displayed and do not seem outrightly promotional, is bound to see a huge spike in popularity. If you haven’t explored native advertising channels yet, now is the time to get started.
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10X Content will be the new SEO
The focus of SEO has shifted from just keyword optimization and link building to not only producing quality content that addresses users’ needs but also delivering that content to the user with the best experience possible. Content is now the new SEO. But, with large swathes of content being generated every day, only content that is not just the best content out there, but 10 times the best, will stand out. Creating this 10X content is going to be the way forward in 2016.
What are the other trends that you think brands and marketers must pay close attention to in 2016? Do share them with us in the comments section below!
Got good content up on your website but not sure how to promote it? You’ve landed on the right page to find out the answers.
What are Social Bookmarking Websites?
Websites that help internet users to search, store or manage content they are interested in and share it across networks. These social bookmarks are created using tags, categories or custom keywords and are usually public, allowing all members of the site to access it.
How do they help brands?
Brands and content marketers can leverage on social bookmarking websites to build brand awareness and promote their content. These sites help brands or users share articles, blogs, images or videos, in order to drive relevant traffic into their site.
Here are some of the popular social bookmarking websites and how they work:
Delicious is the world's largest social bookmarking service that lets users to save, organise and discover links on the web. The interface is quite simple and lets users build a collection of links, thereby creating their own personal search engine. One can also browse for interesting content shared by their friends or trending topics around the web. Getting listed on Delicious can certainly improve the page ranking & drive more traffic, provided the content is great.
A popular micro-blogging platform and a social network with huge traffic volumes globally. It that allows users to create any content in the form of short-blogs with relevant tags, enabling other users interested in similar topics to easily find it.
A photo sharing website with more than 100 million active users. It allows users to create theme-based picture collections called 'boards' and helps discover, save or find what interests them. This site is best known for its referral traffic and image categories such as infographics, guides, tutorials and DIYs have a higher click-through-rate.
A discovery engine that finds and recommends web content to its users. Majority of StumbeUpon users are there to look for unique or creative content personalized based on their interests or peer group recommendations. With over 30 million registered users, this site provides high quality backlinks and lets users like, rate or share web pages.
A well-known social bookmarking website where users can submit links to blogs, images or videos and its position on the Reddit page will be determined by votes from other users. A text heavy website that covers a wide range of popular topics and organised by areas of interest called 'subreddits'.
With over 1 million registered users, Scoop.it is a popular social bookmarking tool that caters to professionals, businesses and corporations. One can publish or curate unique content based on interests, keywords and share it with others in a visually appealing way.
This user-friendly social bookmarking service lets its signed-up users bookmark web pages for a later use, annotate files as they browse and share it with friends or colleagues. It helps in easy indexing of shared content on Google and drives good amount of traffic into the site.
An open source, social news service that allows users to create content, seed links to external content and participate in discussions. Most-voted content pieces appear in the home page and usually belong to popular topics like news, politics, business, art and technology. The site has over 40 million unique visitors a month, a Google page rank of 7 and high quality PR backlinks from related sites.
HubPages is a social content community where users share content, pictures, videos or pose questions to find answers. It is also a revenue-sharing website where authors can create original, quality content about various topics & earn via Google AdSense or other commission-based vehicles. Creating unique content articles or 'hubs' regularly can help brands in indexing pages more quickly and generating targeted traffic into the site.
Visual.ly is a community platform exclusively for data visualization and infographics. It is also a marketplace for publishers and researchers looking for images using keywords and category tags. Brands can create a profile and publish interesting insights & infographics that will drive relevant traffic into their site. It not only allows the users to share it across social media platforms, but also provides an analytics tool to measure the overall content reach.
Typepad is one of the oldest blogging platforms with built-in tools for customization and additional features like mobile blogging, multiple author support & photo album creation. This online publishing tool is a paid service that comes in four different subscription levels. One can also promote their content within the site and measure performance through their comprehensive stats tracking.
A bookmarking website that lets users to store all their favourite links at one place, which can be accessed from anywhere. These bookmarks are created using labels or tags and can be shared with anyone.
This world's largest social networking site also serves as a content sharing platform with large numbers of referral traffic every single day. Facebook also captures latest trends, news articles and topics of discussions using keyword searches. Thus, brands can take timely measures on generating relevant content on Facebook, which might bring in more shares or page impressions.
Yet another social sharing site with millions of active users worldwide, generating 500 million tweets every day. Fresh and interesting content can help brands gain followers on profiles, lists and also monitor user interaction levels in terms of retweets, replies and likes.
Owned by Google, this social networking site allows users to share content, images or videos across circles, communities or interest-based groups called 'collections'. Social bookmarking sites allow users to easily find content around topics they are interested in, store or share it with like-minded individuals. Thus, brands should capitalise on websites such as these, to amplify content and drive more targeted traffic into their site.
Do you currently use any of the above-mentioned websites for your brand? Or have more sites to add to this list? Share it with us in the ‘Comment’s section below. For more tips and insights on SEO / content marketing techniques, watch this space.
Social Web 3.0, a digital marketing conclave was organised by Madras Management Association on 23rd November at Hotel My Fortune, Chennai. The event was attended by industry bigwigs such as Maneesha Khanna, Director of Marketing, PepsiCo and Bhaskar Ramesh, Head of Industries – FMCG, Google India amongst the other notable ones.
The event started with an insightful keynote address by Hari Menon, CO-Founder & CEO, Big Basket on digital influence and analytics-driven future, which set the stage for the rest of the day. Vikas Chawla, Co-Founder & CEO of Social Beat spoke about how content & influencer marketing is changing the social media game. It was an interactive session with a series of questions on how brands can leverage content marketing to achieve business goals and what would be the ideal advertising-marketing mix.
Here are some insights on Content and Influencer Marketing discussed during the session:
If Content is king, there are too many kings out there.
Here are some tips to stand-out and leverage on relevant content to achieve business goals.
Influencer marketing is becoming an integral part of marketing budgets and here's why:
Digital media endorsement by an influencer can work wonders for your brand, only if you pick the right one.
Here are some metrics you need to consider before choosing the influencers for your campaign.
The next session was a case study by Maneesha Khanna, on #CrashTheIPL campaign that involved consumer generated video content. The idea behind this talk was to understand how videos have become the way forward for FMCG brands to easily connect with the audience. The success of #CrashTheIPL campaign could be contributed to the strong cross channel promotion - yet another game changer in the advertising space. Hence, brand managers should also explore highly integrated digital + TV campaigns, as both of these channels are here to stay.
Apart from these expert sessions and case studies, there were also discussions on various trending topics in the digital & social space. Social Media 3.0 also witnessed a bunch of digital enthusiasts who actively participated in Twitter & Instagram contests conducted during the event.
Were you a part of this digital media conclave and have more stories to tell?
Write to us about your experience in the ‘Comments’ section.
Every marketing expert knows the importance of content marketing. It is a great way to engage with customers and to provide them with knowledge. Creating content that is both relevant and valuable to its target audience is at the very heart of effective content marketing. With the growth of mobile and internet in India, every town and village in India has access to Internet. Thanks to this internet revolution, most of the target audience can be found speaking another language apart from English. So how are you going to address this problem? Our solution is a multi-lingual content strategy.
English is, of course, most commonly used language online not just in the world but also in India. However, Google data shows 94% growth rate for Hindi content consumption. Keeping this in mind global brands has started focusing on regional language as art of their strategy. A year ago, Facebook users were flabbergasted to see the login page in Hindi script. This was followed by US based visual discovery tool Pinterest launching a Hindi version, allowing users in India to use the translated version.Today, Google supports languages such as Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, and Tamil among others.With 127 million Internet users in India consuming content in local language, all global social media sites have realized the fact that they if they don’t go local in India they might soon lose relevance. Catering to the internet users in tier II and III towns, Google is now focusing to expand usage of its products like Google maps in vernacular languages, especially Hindi.
Of the literate 74%, only 10% read English while the rest consume content in the vernacular medium. Remaining 66% are literate in their local languages. According to a latest study conducted by Internet and Mobile Association of India and IMRB International, regional content availability can boost the growth of Internet in India by 24%. There are more than 70,000 newspapers printed in India and around 90% are either printed in Hindi or other vernacular languages. Realizing the importance of regional content, Indian app developers are also recognizing the need for local app distribution platforms. International app stores do not lend themselves to the easy discovery of highly India-specific regional content.
Yourstory.com, one of India’s leading platform for entrepreneurs and promoting the entrepreneurial ecosystem, recently included separate sections for regional content.
The website also offers content in 10 other languages including Marathi, Telugu and Bengali.
Their regional content strategy has taken off well and has received positive response from the audience. As you can see, the Hindi article has 650 shares and the Tamil content has over 200 shares. The website is updating their regional language pages everyday with interesting articles.
So if you are convinced that regional content marketing is important, here are a few things to consider.
It’s easy to ignore other languages if one dominant language makes up the majority. While English does make for the majority, there is a section that only consumes content in a regional language and this section could be your most important target audience. An English creative gets 0.1% to 0.15% Click Through Ratio (CTR), while a language creative can get 0.4-0.5% CTR. So if a language content and creative has a change to drive more traffic to your product or website, why not concentrate more on it?
When you market your brand in a regional language, it appeals to the emotional quotient of the audience. So localization of content should be an integral part of the creation process. For instance, McDonald’s involves its international teams at an early stage of product development, ensuring it can adapt their most effective marketing strategies to each individual culture where its campaigns are rolled out. Its in-country translation and localization teams ensure that the content strikes the right note in each country.
Your ultimate goal of participating in social media is likely to drive traffic back to your website so you can convert those visitors into leads. Without pitching brands directly, content marketing looks at generating relevant content that educates and creates awareness among customers. It has become an important marketing avenue for the fund-crunched startups to compete with the bigger brands. But it is very important that your content is unique and engaging for your customers. Duplicate or low-quality content can prove to be counter-productive. Once your regional content is up and running, the next step is to ensure that it reaches your target audience. There are many content amplification techniques that can help you promote your content to a large audience. The content strategy needs to be integrated with your social media marketing. It can be key to engaging consumers and many brands are successfully adopting this for their overseas marketing efforts. This video tells you why adopting a multilingual strategy is the only way to connect with the next billion Internet users in India.
Search Engine Optimisation SEO is critical for most businesses and especially for ecommerce businesses. We did put up a slideshare on the basics of SEO for Entrepreneurs which covers aspects like on page SEO, content marketing & amplification, mobile responsiveness and link building. We always recommend White Hat SEO so its also important to be aware of how NOT to do SEO.
In this context, there are various SEO tools out there which can help and one which is critical for On Page SEO in case you are using Wordpress as your CMS is the plugin by Yoast. It is a plugin recommended even for Advanced SEO by most industry leaders including QuickSprout, Moz & more.
YoastSEO Plugin is the powerhouse for WordPress search engine optimization. Barring structured markup data and schema tags, Yoast can handle most on page SEO elements. However, setting up this plugin might be tricky for some, and a startup or anyone without basic SEO skills, might find it difficult to configure. An incorrect configuration can stop search engine bots from indexing your website, or you might let bots crawl a part that might not be relevant to your business.
The best part is that most of the key features in YoastSEO are free, so let’s get started with the step by step tutorial to set up this free SEO plugin.
This is where you will provide information about your site and the person or company behind it.
Titles & Metas section under WordPress SEO has several tabs in it.
WordPress SEO allows you to set titles and meta for posts, pages, media, and other custom post types.
Step 7. XML Sitemaps
Step 8. Advanced (Breadcrumbs)
Simply check the ‘Enable Breadcrumbs’ box and rest of the settings will be displayed.
1.Permalinks
Step 7. Tools
Step 8. Search Console
I hope that helps you set up the Yoast SEO Plugin and also gets you started on SEO. Please do follow our other SEO & Content Marketing Blogs here.
Have a particular interest that you are extremely passionate about? Then blogging is the perfect way to start exploring your interest. Blogging is a hobby or a way to build your brand. It is a powerful tool, which can be a great PR for you and your brand. A blog is a simple, easy-to-use platform for connecting with and sharing timely and relevant information with customers. It’s your direct communication channel.
From an online journal at 1,000 words per post to a simple 140-character Twitter feed, blogging has taken center stage largely because of how useful it has proven itself to be in almost all areas of business. If successful, blogging can be a good way to make money and a full time career path as well. However, before we start talking about making a career out of it, the first step is to determine a topic of interest and set up the blog.
To set up your blog hardly takes 30 minutes. If you are planning to start the blog, then here the various top blogging platforms that you can use.
The latest buzz word in the digital marketing world that is steadily catching up with brands is ‘Influencer Marketing’. Western companies have leveraged this strategy of marketing for the past few years and the trend is quickly catching up with Indian brands as well. Brands in India have actively come up with successful influencer campaigns for the past 2-3 years.
What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is a term that has risen from the realization of brands about the power, peer influence and customer recommendation has over other forms of marketing. Especially in a time, where consumers have started using social media in huge numbers and have been public about their views about brands and products. Brands have realized that people are largely influenced by second-hand information from opinion leaders and this has led to a lot of brands identifying top influencers in their respective fields to try and reach out to consumers better.
Almost a year back we had created a list of top Indian Websites that were not responsive. A lot has changed since then. Myntra has moved to an App Only approach and closed down their mobile site. In the same context, Google’s next update is expected to be rolled out on April 21, 2015 and will concentrate largely on positively impacting sites that are mobile responsive. There will also be a marginal negative impact on mobile search results for websites that are not responsive.
So the question to ask here is, whether you site is mobile friendly? Google has its Mobile Friendly Testing Tool which can help you check. If you get a message "Awesome! This page is mobile-friendly.", then you have little to worry as you will most likely be on the safer side of the line.
However, for those who haven’t made their site responsive this Google update is going to put in jeopardy the search traffic and eventually ranking. Here are some tips to help you get started on this front.
Creating a mobile responsive site will be the key step towards being in tandem with the Google update. This was Google’s announcement earlier this year which clearly indicates Google’s focus on mobile friendliness. “Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results.”
The main reason behind the update taking this path is Google’s consistent stand on giving users the best online experience. With mobile traffic having significantly overtaken PC traffic in the past two years this update seems all the more relevant. Google even has an extensive guide on creating mobile friendly sites. If you have Google Webmaster they have a new Mobile Usability feature to showcase if there are usability issues that still exist.
If you are using a Content Management System (CMS) To make your site mobile friendly here are a few essential tips:
For Word Press Sites: If you own a word press site you can simply use a plugins available online. The three best plugins available are
For Magento Sites: Using existing mobile responsive themes is one option that many are considering. If you have an existing theme which is non-responsive then there are plugins to help with this.
The last option would be to adapt the existing theme to being responsive, but it requires extensive changes to be made at the code level.
The time your site takes to load plays a strong role in improving your page rankings. Despite the best mobile data connection, sites sometimes take a while to load and the reason behind it could be due to complex codes, slow server and other factors. Analyzing these problems and addressing them quickly can help give your site an advantage.
Using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or Pingdom Speed Test tool can help give you an insight into the changes you can make in your site to make it speedier.
Once these changes have been made appropriate modifications have to be made in the Google Webmaster Tool as mentioned in the steps below.
With the update coming out today, it would be prudent to make these changes to your site as early as possible. Making changes sooner will help your traffic remain higher after the update. If you are having difficulties in making these changes, hiring good developers to make them is always a recommended option.
We would love to hear from you if you have seen any positive or negative mobile traffic from today. Please do share it in the comments below.
