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5 Digital Marketing Trends to Watch in 2018

August 6, 2018 • Content Marketing, Digital Marketing, Featured • 41

Planning your digital marketing campaigns, reviewing and updating them from time to time, and executing them flawlessly – the entire process is no mean task. With new technological advancements along with frequent changes in customer behavior and social media trends, you need to be flexible and ready to fine-tune your digital marketing strategies.

Here are some top digital marketing trends of 2018, which you can use right away to stay at the top of your game.

1. Integrating AR in Digital Marketing Campaigns

A 2016 report predicts that by 2024, the AR (augmented reality) market size will be worth a whopping $100.24 billion. Though many marketers are still skeptical and confused about how best to use this technology, some have already started using AR to ensure better customer engagement and bring in new customers. If you haven’t yet joined the bandwagon, do so quickly.

Taking inspiration from Pokémon Go, you can use AR to offer geo-localized deals (like special discounts at a restaurant branch at a specific location). You may even use fun, interactive digital elements to educate your customers, or show them how to use your products and services.

2. Emphasis on Video Marketing

Over the next three years, predictions show 80% of global internet traffic being powered by videos. As people are watching an increasing number of videos on various devices, businesses and brands have found a new, powerful way to reach them, grab their attention and convert them into loyal customers.

You can leverage this incredible growth in the demand for videos in various ways, from marketing videos displaying your products and/or services, to behind-the-scenes videos showing how your team works.

3. Seizing the Micro-Moments

Every day, consumers use Google and other search engines to know, find, watch, do, or buy something quickly. By positioning your business to answer such questions, and do that fast in real-time, you can use these micro-moments to have a significant impact on your bottom-line.

Some effective ways of using micro-moments for digital marketing include investing in local search marketing (to leverage “near me” searches), using targeted keywords in your content to match particular search phrases, and ensuring you have a mobile-optimized website (as mobile devices are increasingly used in micro-moments). However, it doesn’t mean your job ends at being present across a growing number of micro-moments. You should make sure you understand your customers’ needs as well to help them proceed along their individual paths.

4. Planned Use of Chatbots to Handle Various Tasks

Most businesses use chatbots mainly for responding quickly to their customers’ grievances, queries or comments. However, businesses are increasingly using them for handling general questions, improving user engagement, and even closing deals.

If you can set your bots properly, it can be hard for someone to tell if they are interacting with a chatbot or an actual person. Apart from handling customer service issues, these bots can help you to get useful information about your site visitors (their email ID, preferences, etc.), engage them fast (with quick responses) and even drive home your messages effectively.

5. Integration of SEO and Content Marketing

Some digital marketers consider SEO and content marketing separately, and that’s how these people set themselves up for failure. Your SEO efforts won’t bear fruit if they aren’t complemented by your content marketing. And unless your content marketing uses the relevant keywords, has strategic backlinks and offers a great user experience (UX) as SEO demands, they won’t bring you the desired traffic. Thus, SEO and content marketing need to work together to make your digital marketing campaigns a success.

As a digital marketer, it’s important to stay updated on the latest trends and know how they are affecting businesses. If you aren’t using these trends to your advantage, or just using a few, make sure to tweak your marketing campaigns to leverage as many of these as you can. After all, adapting to these trends and crafting customized digital marketing plans to meet the needs of your global and local clients are exactly the steps that will help you stay ahead of the competition.

Are you up for it?

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A Beginner’s Guide to Fixing Broken Inbound and Outbound Links

July 26, 2018 • Featured, SEO 101 • 86
Broken links are bad for SEO. Worse, they can muck up the users’ experience. Users become frustrated when a click results in a ‘Page Not Found’ error or misroutes to the wrong content. This is why it is to your benefit to fix broken links, whether they are contained within your site or inbound. Here are some tips for accomplishing both of these goals.

Why Repairing Broken Links is Important

Broken backlinks happen for two reasons. Either you move or delete a page and the link to it on another site stops working, or the content writer linking your page makes a mistake and publishes an erroneous link. This can be as simple as transposing something or adding a stray character. In either case, the user or a search engine crawler receives an error when they try to access the page they want.

When this happens, that’s one less user to connect with your brand and content. You will also lose any potential link juice that comes from that inbound link. Let’s walk through the process of fixing this.

How to Identify Broken Inbound Links

Even if you could, this is not a process you want to tackle manually. You’ll need a tool. AHREFs site explorer is probably the most well known option. However, there are others as well. Moz has an excellent tool. There is also Google Search Console where you can view crawl errors. If you use WordPress, there are plugins that can perform this function.

Depending on the tool you select, you can identify and sort broken inbound links according to referring website, or the broken link itself. Once you pick a tool and identify the broken links, you’ll be ready to clean things up.

How to Fix Broken Inbound Links

Your approach to fixing broken backlinks will depend on a few things. First, identify how many broken links are there. How many pages on your site are linked incorrectly on other sites?

If there aren’t many to deal with, you can take a more manual approach. One possibility is simply reaching out to the linking website, letting them know about the broken link, and asking them to fix it. There are some benefits to this approach:
- You can make a personal connection with someone who values your content.
- You help them to fix a broken link.
- You can thank them for sharing your content and outreach later if needed for new link building opportunities.
Another option is to simply recreate the missing page at the URL being linked. If that isn’t an option, you can do a 301 redirect to another page on your site with similar content. If the page in question now exists at a different URL, simply redirect to that page.

Finally, you can allow the error to remain. However, instead of displaying the default 404 error, it is much better to create a customized 404 error. For example, if someone links to a product you no longer produce, your hard error can explain this.

What do you do if you aren’t quite sure what the page contained? You can try the Internet Wayback Machine. This site gives as thorough and complete a source of archived links that you will find. If your page is linked there, you can take one of the steps above to fix your link or redirect it.

Unfortunately, the Wayback Machine simply doesn’t have every online page archived. If that is the case, there is some more detective work involved. You will have to take context clues from the linking website. Specifically, you’ll have to read the content linking to your page. This may help you to determine the content readers are looking for. You can then recreate the content or find it.

How to Identify Broken Links on Your Website

This can be a bit less complex as you have full access and control of your own website. Here, you will find errors that fall into two categories. The first is internal links. These are broken links to other pages within your website. The second is external links. These are links from your site to other websites. In either case, according to Fuel Online, it’s important to remember that Google’s web crawlers use links to index and rank pages. Both broken internal and external links can result in penalties and negatively impact the way your site is indexed.

Assuming your site isn’t small enough for a manual check, you will need a tool for this as well. Keep in mind that depending on the size of your website, the ‘crawling’ process can take a bit of time. Once you have your listing of broken links you can go about fixing them.

How to Fix the Broken Links on Your Website

Unfortunately, the process of fixing broken links on your own website can be tedious. Your first option is to simply delete the bad links. This is simple, but depending on how many links you are dealing with, time consuming. You can just go to each page and eliminate the links that don’t work.

The problem with this option is that it can leave holes in your content. You may have to modify your anchor text and surrounding verbiage. You might even need to add content to make up for the removed links.

Your second option is replacing the broken links with working links. First, you can see if there is simply a mistake in your link and fix that. You can also search the website you linked and find the page you intended to link or one that works. If you’ve only got a couple of links to fix, you can reach out to the owner of the other site for help.

If using the original site you linked isn’t an option, you can simply use Google to find relevant content. In fact, you might even be able to find something that is a bit more up to date. Finally, I mentioned the Internet Wayback Machine above. If you can’t find the page you wanted to link, you may be able to modify your link to point at an archived version of the page you want.

Broken links are bad news. Whether they are links on your site or inbound links, they compromise SEO. Worse, they frustrate users. By using the techniques above, you can ensure that your content is read without disruptions. You also reclaim any link juice you may have lost.
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Pillar Page 101: How to Build Content for the Future

July 20, 2018 • Content Marketing, Featured, SEO 101 • 121

Anyone who creates content for a living should habitually ask themselves one question: what brings people to my website? At the end of the day, this is what really matters. Gorgeous web design, insightful blogs –– they’re all for naught if you’re not able to drive traffic to your site. Indeed, given the fact that the majority of interactions between companies and customers occur online, few businesses can afford to produce ineffective work. So anything a business can do to increase their traffic, readership, leads, and, ultimately, sales is of course massively beneficial. Therefore, it’s probably not a surprise that pillar pages have become so popular over the past few years. Though the pillar page can bring all sorts of benefits to a company’s website, today we’re going to focus on pillar-page construction. Here’s a step-by-step breakdown to creating a killer pillar page for your site:

Checking Your Site’s Viability

Before you begin work on a pillar page, you should first determine if your site can even support one. Ideally, pillar pages –– though long in length and rich in content –– shouldn’t require a ton of actual writing. Rather, the best pillar pages are born from an amalgamation of many blogs, articles, and pieces of content that you’ve created through years of work. Pillar pages provide solutions to businesses that have been blogging for a long time already. Unfortunately, that means if you’re just starting out, a pillar page might not be the way to go. Since pillar pages operate best when you can link and backlink to other pages on your site, not having the requisite blogs for a pillar page to link with is a bit like putting the cart before the horse.

Selecting a Topic

Let’s go back to the question we posed at the beginning of this article: what brings people to my site? This is a fabulous way to start if you’re struggling to narrow down a subject to build a pillar page around. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t necessarily want to tackle the broadest topic available to you. Sure, a pillar page does offer you the possibility to address more ambitious themes than a typical blog post could. But you still need to maintain a level of specificity if you’re going to provide your customers with a valuable resource. And that’s the role a pillar page should play –– that of a resource. (I.E. your content has to be useful!) Thus, finding the area where you can display a wealth of specified information is key to creating a pillar page that works for your business.

Scrutinizing “Related” Content

One great aspect to a pillar page is that, if managed properly, it offers leads one single resource in place of potentially dozens of smaller ones. The ability to access information on many closely related sub-topics in one spot is, to most leads, desirable. However, because you’re dealing with such a long piece of content, you do risk customers’ losing interest when encountering your pillar page in totality. There are a couple of techniques you can use to mitigate against this risk. For starters, it’s a wise play to include a drop-down menu at the top, or on the side of your page. That way, if a lead knows exactly what they want to read about, they can navigate there quickly. In addition, you want to make sure that your sub-topics are genuinely related to each other. It doesn’t do you any good to create an unfocused pillar page that jumps from tips on purchasing classic cars, to how to replace a car tire, for instance. Yes, both sub-topics are technically about vehicles, but it’s unlikely many readers will find both elements compelling. Lastly, if you’re able to break up your text with graphics, images, or videos (especially videos) there’s a greater chance you can hold your audience’s attention throughout.

Future Content Creation

The big mistake most companies make once they’ve launched a pillar page is thinking that their work is then over. It’s not –– not by a longshot. The truth is, for a pillar page to be effective, your customers need to be able to find it. And they can only do that once you’ve established it as an online presence. The best way to accomplish that is by optimizing future content and linking back to your pillar page. Odds are you’ll have more to say on a subject even after you’ve completed a pillar page. So use your new blogs as supporting pieces within your wider pillar-page strategy.

Final Word: What Not to Do

We’ll end this piece with a few major “don’ts” in regard to pillar-page creation. First off, don’t just copy/paste your previous work into your pillar page and call it a day. Even though you’re not creating a lot of “new” content per se, it doesn’t mean you can skip editing the work. Plus, a pillar page needs to flow and segue naturally. Copy/pasting will make your website look slapdash at best. Secondly, don’t use a pillar page as an opportunity for a hard sell. No matter how excited you are about your new line of cell culture tubes, resist the urge to advertise anything overtly. Your readers are there for information –– not to feel pressured into buying a product. Finally, though this should be a given, don’t ever –– under any circumstances –– claim someone else’s work as your own on a pillar page. Not only is this unethical, but it could end up causing you a heaping peck of trouble dealing with penalties from Google and other search engines.
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4 Tips To Ensure Your Website Design & SEO Is Done Right

June 16, 2018 • Featured, SEO 101 • 307
Getting a website that works well, shows up in search results and brings traffic is about balancing a number of elements.

The two most important are website design and search engine optimisation or SEO. Often you might work with web design companies who don’t know much about SEO or SEO experts who aren’t web designers. This can work but the key is to know what are the most important tips to ensure that both work together. Here are four important examples.

Understand usability factors

Search engines exist to show the best and most relevant results to users for the search they have conducted. This makes for happy users that return to the platform for future searches. It also makes for advertising revenue for advertisers on their platform which makes money for the search engine companies.

This means that if you offer good user experience when a user visits your site, this helps boost the search engine’s credibility with that user. So Google and co will reward websites that offer that good user experience. Hence it is one of the four important tips to website design and SEO – getting your user to stay on your website, making it easy for them to get around the site and share what they find. These are all key to user experience or UX.

Ensure content discoverability

The next point considers how search engines find content on a site. While clever, they essentially need links to lead them to it. This means if your content isn’t properly linked, then this harms its discoverability by those search engine bots. And this could mean your site doesn’t rank at all.

From a design viewpoint, this means creating a site architecture that is easy for users to understand, making it obvious how to get from one piece of content to another and encouraging them to do this. Top-level services or product categories are the most important with subcategories and product or services pages beneath them.

Have high-quality content

Once you have a good structure on your website and search engines can get around it, the next step is to make sure you offer high quality content that will have a better chance at ranking. This means planning the content beforehand and ensuring it is SEO-steady as well as well written and full of information that your audience wants.

Questions to consider asking about each piece of content include:
- What purpose does this content serve?
- What would users want to know about this topic?
- Does it convey the company’s message?
These questions can be a guide to ensure all quality added to the website is high quality, relevant and useful to the user to therefore rank well with search engines.

Watch SEO during a redesign

If you already have a website and are in the course of redesigning it, then it is a crucial time to watch SEO practices. It is easy to concentrate on the design elements of the redesign without watching the SEO aspects that can quickly have a negative impact on the site’ ranking.

Crawl your site before starting the redesign including looking at pages and other current rankings. Are there are any outdated or redundant pages? Do they need to be redirected? What are the high ranking keywords on the site?

Consider all of this to ensure the site continues to have a good, solid SEO profile and will continue to rank solidly after the redesign process has been completed. If you are changing the URL structure, have a redirect map in place before the new site goes live.
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How Good Web Design And Web Development Practices Impact SEO In 2018

April 26, 2018 • Content Marketing, Digital Marketing, Mobile, SEO Advanced Practices, SEO for Your Agency, Social Media • 634

Google’s algorithms are dynamic. So if you want to improve your web presence or maintain your visibility and ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs), your SEO strategies must be fine-tuned to match Google’s latest SEO update.

In fact, you’ll have to look beyond keywords, meta tags, title tags, alt tags, headings etc., as well as other ‘regulars’ several SEO plugins are throwing around.

So where exactly should you start?

Start right from the scratch with web design and web development. Sounds strange? I don’t think so. It is easy to assume that both terms have the same meaning and are used interchangeably. They are absolutely different and here’s why!

What is Web Design?

Web design is about the aesthetic aspects of your website as well as its usability. So web designers often use different web design programs like Sketch, Adobe XD, Adobe Dreamweaver, Color Wheel, Figma, Sublime Texts, Adobe Photoshop etc. to design the layout and other visual elements of a website.

What is Web Development?

Web development is about transforming a website design into a functioning and usable website. Web developers use various programs or languages for coding and they include Python, Java, HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, C++, Swift, Shell etc.

Web designers and developers do all they can to make your website a great one. Sometimes, just one person can do both jobs!

So how exactly does web design and development affect SEO? It’s time to find out.

How Web Design and Development Affects SEO

Let’s see how web design and development affects website ranking and visibility;

SSL Certificate (HTTPs)

The “S” in HTTPS means secure. Websites that are HTTPS include the SSL 2048-bit key and can secure a website connection via encryption and authentication. Once you have an SSL installed on your website, it activates the padlock and permits secure connections from a web server to a browser.

How is this relevant to Google and SEO?

HTTPS safeguards your website data and visitors information from hackers. So once you have it installed on your site, Google has no doubt in showcasing your website on search engine result pages. Google are careful not to recommend or display phishing websites on their search engine result pages.

It is no longer news that more and more Web users are interested in websites with HTTPS whenever they have to disclose personal data, buy, or sell via the internet. Google has confirmed publicly that it has a beneficial ranking effect on your website. So Google won’t hesitate to boost your website’s visibility and ranking on search engine result pages once you have an HTTPS website whether you do transactions on your site or not.

Seamless Navigation

Google loves websites that guarantee great user-experience. A user-friendly website design makes it easier for visitors to navigate, find whatever they are looking for and to spend more time on your website.

This reduces bounce rates and gives visitors more reasons to visit your website over and over again. Also, it will improve your website’s online presence and boost its visibility and ranking on search engine result pages. Good click-through rates is a signal of quality, can help your SEO in many ways, which is why it is an important ranking factor.

But if navigation is poor, visitors will leave your website in few seconds. This increases your bounce rate and signals Google that your navigation or entire web design and development is poor.

Responsive Web Design

Responsive web design and development are the spines of mobile friendly websites. Responsive designs allow your website to look great on mobile devices regardless of their screen sizes and shapes.

The number of smart devices users is escalating constantly. According to We are social, The number of mobile phone users in 2018 is 5.135 billion, up 4 percent year-on-year.

So if you have a responsive website, you can deliver better user experience to visitors as they access your website via various devices and platforms. Considering how smart device users search for items on the web, Google ranks mobile friendly websites higher than similar ones that are not. You can learn more about Google’s recommendations on how to implement your mobile website.

Web Page Speed

If you web pages load slowly, it could be an indication that your web design or development is poor. Sometimes, it could be heavy videos or images on your web pages. So optimize your videos and images and compress them if necessary to load faster.

However, compressing your images and videos to make them look poor so your web pages can load faster will cause more SEO harm than good in the long run. It will lower your visibility and ranking on search engine result pages.

You should consider providing various video file types (MP4, Quicktime format, Mpg, 3GP file extension etc.) so visitors can choose the one that matches their internet speed rather than compress your videos to just one format.

Great Content

As the old saying goes “Content is King”. This couldn’t be more relevant and true in 2018. Great content does not rely on keywords, headings alone to rank higher. Rather, great content provides valuable information that visitors want and need, in the most usable or accessible format, and at the right time without being bored.

Your website content should be tailored to appeal to your targeted visitors rather than search engines. Publish new content regularly, such as blog posts, white papers, videos, etc. to acquire links naturally and boost your visibility and ranking on search engine result pages.

Publish reader-friendly content that will spike your readers’ interests and hold them spellbound from the top of the page to the bottom. Tell exciting stories that revolve around their pain points and solutions. Most importantly, avoid sounding like a machine or robot and avoid duplicate content.

Integrate Social Media

Your web design and development should have some room for social media. Social sharing is constantly rising and one of the easiest methods of promoting your great content is via social sharing. So integrate your social media pages into your websites to expand your audience, and increase your visitors.

Once your content gets shared back and forth, Google records the signal that your content is more valuable and your site is likely a good sign of user-friendliness as well. So never miss the chance to spread the word about your website via social media and to rank higher on search engine result pages.

Bottom Line

It’s easy to overlook website design and development when you intend to boost your SEO ranking and visibility. The focus is always on keywords, Meta descriptions, tags, SEO plugins etc. and too many webmasters misuse these elements. However, if you focus more on website design and development, and do them right, all other elements will fall into place easily and your website will favor engagement. Offering quality content, you will accrue links to your site in a natural way, which is what Google wants you to do. Combined with sound web design and development fundamentals, you are sure to earn rankings the right way, and for the long term.
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