The Trade Secrets of Online Brands

In this era of digitisation, creating an online brand has become one of the foremost ways of gaining eyeballs and making one’s presence felt in a highly competitive environment. Irrespective of whether one has a physical presence or not, one has to resort to online marketing to build a brand that people will relate to and identify with.

An online brand, so to speak, is any company or individual trying to build goodwill through active and engaging presence in the online sphere. In short, growing one’s business online is directly proportional to growing one’s brand. We are living in an era where start-ups and corporate alike are trying to create a niche for themselves in a cluttered online space, to acquire their share of fame. The most important way to create a brand online is constant communication with the users or customers. A brand is what the users make it. Like Jeff Bezos, the CEO and Founder of Amazon.com says, “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room”.

Secondly, the value of a flawless, easy to use and navigate and visually appealing website or app can hardly be undermined. A smooth user experience by means of an impactful logo, a clean user interface and a well-designed website are other prerequisites. A neat logo that conveys the brand message also helps in brand recognition among the masses. A creative tagline can adequately sum up the values and ethics of a brand. It is almost like a crisp and concise introduction about your brand for first-time users. Quality and easily identifiable content on the website and functionality of the over-all site can further ensure visibility.

Digital marketing activities, such as, Search EngineOptimization, Search Engine Marketing and regular blog articles will also drive traffic to the website that can result in actual leads. Presence across all social channels is indispensable. One should aim to develop and build a healthy relationship with the target audience by educating them about the company’s mission and goals. The content one posts online should be in sync with the general values of the brand to avoid any inconsistencies in the brand message one tries to convey.

Timely mailers with succinct and relevant information will further boost one’s reputation as an online brand. An e-commerce company such as Limeroad, for example, runs engaging promotional activities through sections like Rush Hour and Shop City. The success of an online brand also relies heavily on word-of-mouth. Hence, there is an intense focus on capturing customer review and feedback via various calls to action such as ‘Rate This Item or Service’ and ‘Write a Review’.

Apart from the above-mentioned advantages, creating an online brand can also help companies cut down costs on running and maintaining physical outlets. If you want your brand to reach out to the masses with limited warehouse space and a handful of people to manage operations, then online branding is the way forward for you.

Why are not Your SEO Techniques Working for you?

SEO is an art that cannot be learned or perfected overnight. To get the best results you need to keep on top of the latest techniques, be creative and spend time perfecting your skill. However, it is never an exact science and there are many mistakes waiting to be made. Here we'll take a look at some of the most common SEO pitfalls and how they can damage your SEO efforts.

Lots of Traffic, No Conversions Finally, with plenty of research and effort you have published and optimized your pages with your first batch of keywords. Your analytics start to show lots of traffic coming in. Great! The only problem is that your conversion rate hasn't increased. This could be down to the keywords you have chosen not being targeted to your audience, being too generic or not being competitive enough.

Duplicate or Shallow Content It's one thing getting visitors to your website, but it's quite another keeping them there. One of the best ways to hold their attention is with meaningful and highly targeted content. If your content is shallow at best and holds no relevance, your visitors will leave in their droves. Duplicate content is another big no-no and could get your website penalized. You should always ensure that every page you publish has unique content that doesn't exist anywhere else online.

Poor Link Building Strategies When somebody else links to your site, whether they do so from social media or another website page, Google sees this as a recommendation and will boost your ranking as a result. Problems can arise when websites that are completely irrelevant to your offering start linking to you. Google's smart algorithms recognize the relevance and could ignore irrelevant links over time. Aim to manage your own link building strategy with guest blog posts on relevant sites and quality content on your own site that attracts relevant and authoritative links.

SEO Ranking Factors in 2018

SEO Ranking Factors in 2018: What’s important

If you are one of those new marketers or just had a new website, then these days it is equally important to be active on an online platform. However, today, only a mere online presence with a good website layout is never going to help you attain your business goal. In fact, in last few years, SEO has changed the way of conducting marketing, gaining customer’s attention even for those who are not new to the industry. Today, as a business owner, it has got more vital to apply most novel and smart SEO strategies and perform business online. In last ten years, the Google has made various changes in the algorithm, and so it has got essential to add most effective SEO tactics to improve and increase the website ranking. Definitely, the old tactics or formulas are not going to work anymore.  2018 is about to come and the real factors that are going to play a significant role in coming days are:

In-depth Content will add extra benefit

The Google spider used to visit your webpage and examine if the keyword appears in title tag, description tag, H1 tag, URL and Image ALT tag. Although Google still will count those factors, in coming a time, instead of only just computing content, the focus will also shift to context.

Website Security

Website security is once again going to be the most important SEO factor. In recent times, the internet security has turned out to be the most critical factor for protecting the businesses from any cyber-attack, and in the coming year, the concept may gain more significance.

Pay Attention to Voice Search

“Voice search” is going to be the next big thing in SEO. As per Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends report, since 2008, Voice searches performed in Google has gone up 35x. Adding to that, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, recently announced during Google I/O keynote, voice searches are going to score 20% off altogether searches on mobile devices.

User Experience

As per the study conducted by SEMRush the more user stays on your website, higher the chance of your website getting ranked well. So, you got to keep monitoring your website’s speed, its readability and navigation structure. In 2018, UX will also be the key to maintain search traffic by generating an engaged audience.

Links will be Key to success

With few essential points been said, SEO is more about links and content, and so links will again be the decisive factor to crack the first page. Links will still be the base of SEO in 2018. However, a key challenge for 2018 will be managing the guest blogs and opt for a right method or tactic to involve them as a part of a link building strategy without bringing any negative impact on a brand’s reputation.

It is essential that you just settle for the actual fact that as we have a tendency to proceed towards 2018, SEO is already dynamical, and to achieve a decent ranking goes to be more difficult.