Friday, 21 December 2018

Social Media Trends For 2019


Can’t believe 2018 is almost over and it’s time to start thinking about 2019 social media trends and predictions. While it’s difficult to predict the future, some things on social media won’t necessarily change. Of course, we can talk about new updates, new features and perhaps a new way of consuming video on social media (like IGTV for example), but chances are that we won’t see anything drastically new in social media in 2019. But what if I’m wrong?

Social commerce will grow exponentially

There is a top of 5 social networks that doesn’t change much from year-to-year. I am talking, about: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and Pinterest. But, in the last few years, photo-driven social media platforms had become very, very popular: Instagram, Snapchat and Pinterest. And it comes as no surprise. Because our attention span is also very short and it’s easier to digest visual content rather than text. I’d say that the growing popularity of Instagram, for example, is also because they sell a dream, a perfect life. The perfect filtered life!

2019 social media trends: Shopping on Instagram

Instagram is more than just a place you browse to find inspiration, it’s also a place of action. Another major social media trend on Instagram in 2019 is using this social media platform as a shopping tool. Yes, that is possible since Instagram introduced shoppable posts, which basically means adding links to your images directly on Instagram. But recently Instagram introduced shoppable Instagram Stories stickers. This way e-commerce brands can use the “product” sticker in Instagram Stories to tag specific products in stories, just like you can with regular Instagram shopping posts.

The rise of ephemeral content. Vertical video
2019 social media trends: Vertical video

Yes, vertical video is everywhere these days: from Instagram Story, IGTV, Instagram Live to Youtube. Who would’ve said, 2 years ago that vertical video would become the new way we consume video content on social media?!

But it makes total sense. We rarely use our laptops to scroll on social media, but we all use our smartphones for a scroll down Instagram feed. So, for all brands out there who want to make it on Instagram in 2019, the time is now to start learning how to create vertical content for Instagram. Start investing in a proper social media team.

Simple and more meaningful interactions. Chatbots

Facebook is the most popular social media platform around the globe with more than 2.6 billion people using Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, or Messenger each month.

While public sharing is and will always be important, it seems like more and more people want to share privately too. Share a funny meme with their friends on Facebook messenger or an entertaining story that disappears in 24 hours.

Augmented reality

Although it sounds kind of futuristic, you’ve probably already used augmented reality before. It all started with Snapchat introducing the famous “rainbow barfing” filter and soon Instagram and Facebook jumped on the bandwagon. In 2019, most celebrities have their own Instagram or Snapchat filter. For example, Rihanna launched her own shiny, sparkling filter – that will, of course, make you shine bright like a diamond (pun intended).


Why Content Marketing


Content Has Influence Over Other Strategies

Your content marketing efforts can have an affect on almost any other online strategy you have. For example:

• Want people signing up to your email list? Content can drive that.
• Working on SEO strategy? Relevant, quality content can help drive traffic and boost your SEO.
• Wondering what to post on social media? Sharing your blog posts is one important strategy.
• Want to find a way to connect with influencers or make other valuable contacts? Mentioning them in your content gives you a good excuse to reach out on social media.
• Looking for a better way to onboard your SaaS sign ups and give them the information they need for success? Do it with content!

Basically, content can form the basis of many of your other strategies, including as a lure to drive more traffic to your website.
Content Develops Your “Voice”

Every business would like to have some kind of sway over its audience, right? Content is a great vehicle for developing an authoritative voice and cementing your brand in the minds of your audience.

It’s about building authority and reputation, even a voice of influence. Smart content communicates that you are a desirable business to be following.

Content Marketing Is Cheap

Startups: unless you’ve received some kind of large funding round, you’re probably breaking out the ramen and trying to save on costs where you can. Usually the biggest chunk of cash is going into product development, and you’re probably needing to shoestring the marketing as much as possible.
You Can Leverage Established Audiences

We mentioned Design Pickle earlier and this was something they did well. He also mentions that booking the guest spot really gave him a push to actually get the content flowing, as he was accountable to someone else.

The key for your startup to best use this strategy lies in choosing established blogs which have a large audience who lie within your identified target audience. Keep a list or spreadsheet of those blogs and check as to whether they publish guest posts.

Good Content Can Be “Evergreen”

“Evergreen” content is the kind which never gets old. If you’re able to produce some good pieces, you will find they attract traffic for years to come. This means choosing topics which aren’t simply trends, because those will have an expiry.

What questions or problems do your clients have which will always require an answer? Those are the kinds of things to be targeting for evergreen content, even if you update them every so often for technology changes.


Thursday, 13 December 2018

Increase Website Traffic - Core Priorities


When you simplify the entire effort of increasing website traffic, it boils down to the following strategic objectives:

1. Increase the quality of traffic sources

2. Increase the number of links and mentions

3. Increase the click-through rate

Anything you do should contribute to one of these objectives. If it doesn’t, your efforts are likely going to waste.

Priority #1: Target audience

There are five major components of any good customer avatar:

1. Their goals and values as they pertain to your product or service.

2. The source of information they use (where do they hang out?)

3. Demographic information (age, gender, marital status, location, job title, income, education, etc.)

4. Their challenges and pain points (what compels them to take action?).

5. Their potential objections and role in the purchase process (why would they NOT buy your product/service?)

Priority #2: Keywords and topics

Your second priority is to work on identifying topics with a good return on investment (ROI).
Why content marketing? Because…

Dollar for dollar, content marketing is the most cost-effective way to generate new leads. Just consider these facts:

• Content marketing produces three times more leads than paid search and, generally, outbound marketing. It has both smaller up-front costs and bigger long-term benefits. Furthermore, as time goes on, content continues to perform with no extra expenses required. Meanwhile, paid search needs a continual cash flow to maintain results.

• Content marketing drives six times higher conversions than traditional marketing for converting people into leads and leads into customers.

• Generating leads through content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing.

• 61% of U.S. online consumers have made a purchase based on recommendations from a blog.

If you are still not convinced, this infographic should help:

Bottom line: content marketing works. It is efficient, compelling, less expensive and persuasive without being intrusive.

So, how do you find content topics that have the best potential for driving the highest return on your investment (ROI)?

First, ask yourself the following question: “What issues, problems or questions do my ideal customers face immediately before, after or while they are using my product or service?”.

Try to spot commonalities or patterns that might indicate the existence of broader topics.

Once you brainstorm a list of potential topics, open the AdWords Keyword Planner tool and type in your topics, one by one, while matching the targeting settings as close as possible to your ideal visitor avatar.

Priority #3: Content

To convince someone, who has never heard of you, that you are the best choice for them – especially when they might not even know they have a problem – is a tall order at best.

For an ice-cold prospect to become a customer, they will need to travel through three stages:

1. Awareness – They must first become aware that they have a problem and that you have a solution for it.

2. Evaluation – Next, they must now evaluate the various solutions available to them, including your competitors’.

3. Conversion – Only then comes the purchase and, ideally, the prospect becomes a repeat customer.

To move a prospect through all these stages, you will need to give them content specifically designed to satisfy their needs at each stage.

In other words…

• They need content at the top of the funnel (TOFU) that facilitates awareness.

• They need content in the middle of the funnel (MOFU) that facilitates evaluation.

• They need content at the bottom of the funnel (BOFU) that facilitates conversion.

Priority #4: SEO

As you work on your content, optimizing it for the search engines should become second nature.
You don’t need to become an SEO expert. Nor do you need to hire one. But, you should have at least some grasp of the SEO basics.

At a minimum, you need to master title tags and meta description tags.


Increase Website Traffic


Traffic sources

When you think about it, there is virtually an unlimited number of traffic sources. Basically, every online document (including non-HTML ones, such as PDF files), every chat message, every post on Facebook, every tweet, every game, can contain a website link.

Furthermore, a website address can be typed into any online browser on any Internet-enabled device.
In order to make some sense of this, it is useful to think of website traffic in terms of marketing channels according to its origin.

1. Organic Search traffic

This is traffic that comes from the search engines’ organic results. When people search for something in Google, for example, and then click on a result that is not a paid ad, they are referred to as organic traffic.

2. Paid Search traffic

The opposite of organic search is paid search. Paid Search traffic occurs when somebody clicks on an advertisement inside the search results. You need to pay for this traffic, usually on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis. It means you pay each time someone clicks on your ad.

3. Display traffic

This traffic is from display advertising, such as Google AdWords remarketing campaigns, banner advertising, and contextual ads.

4. Referral traffic

Whenever users’ click on a link from another website (other than major search engines), they are categorized as referral traffic.

5. Affiliate traffic

Any traffic resulting from affiliate marketing efforts, namely visitors arriving at your website via affiliate links, is called affiliate traffic.

6. Direct traffic

Strictly speaking, direct traffic originates when someone navigates to your website by typing its address into their browser. However, in Google Analytics, direct traffic numbers can sometimes be inflated because traffic from unrecognized sources is also accounted for as direct traffic.

7. Social traffic

Visits from social media sites that are not ads, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. are called social traffic.

8. Email traffic

This category includes traffic from clicks on links in email messages, whether mass email marketing or individual messages.

9. Other

Anything else that doesn’t fit one of the above categories.

Measuring website traffic

You want to keep track of who is visiting your website, what pages they visit, how long they stay, and where they have come from.

One of the best tools for measuring and analyzing website traffic is Google Analytics. It is extremely powerful and if you don’t already have it installed, it is highly recommended you do so as soon as possible.

At the same time, it is important to note that Google Analytics bundles traffic into channels based on the source and/or medium parameters, passed by the links themselves.

This means that the quality of the data depends on how good a job you do at tagging your campaigns. If done incorrectly (or not done at all), traffic can end up being miscategorized and your data will not show the real picture.

Different types of media

Before we get to discuss the actual process of building website traffic, there is one more concept I want you to understand. It is the concept of owned media.

You see, when you look at the different sources of traffic, you will realize that it is possible to distinguish between three types of media:

1. Earned media – media you have no control over; these are usually other peoples’ websites, social media channels, etc.

2. Paid media – media you pay to get mentioned on or linked to; these are places you can get to via advertising, most frequently through the big advertising programs, such as Google Adwords or Facebook Ads.

3. Owned media – media you have full control over; these are all your different websites, social media accounts, etc.


Wednesday, 5 December 2018

Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid



Most Common Mistakes
Google’s algorithms are aimed at helping people find “high-quality” sites by reducing the rankings of low-quality content.
But rankings can fluctuate for multiple reasons. Sometimes its due to human error and preventable.
The quick list of why sites drop:
1. Tracking the wrong keywords
2. Recent Google algorithm update
3. New website
4. Low quality content
5. Low quality links
6. Losing high quality links
7. Cheap hosting
8. Google penalty
9. Competitors trying harder
10. Business moved locations
On-Page SEO Mistakes
#1: Content Quantity Rather Than Quality
Content is still king. While there are other elements of SEO important to reaching the top of the search engines, high quality content remains at the top of the list.
How To Fix This: First step is to find the weak content on your website. To do this you can go to Google and type site:domain.com and see what pages are indexed in Google. From there determine what pages should be there, and if there are pages that should be deleted. If you built your site from a WordPress theme its possible you have pages and pages of irrelevant content indexed and worst it has nothing to do with your business.
#2: Unnatural Links
The effects of low quality link schemes is silent but deadly. Unsuspected business owners can be subject to these penalties.
Unethical SEO companies build poor backlinks on spammy third party sites to generate short term results for clients. Kinda like steriods for websites.
How to Fix This: You can fix unnatural links by making sure they don’t pass PageRank. To do this, add a rel=”nofollow” or remove the links entirely.
#3: General SEO Mistakes
If you’re handling the SEO for your site, investigating these key areas is going to help you kick major butt in fixing your seo issues.
1. Lack of communication: Before you panic, check with your marketing department, It department or in-house webmaster. A simple seo fix might be one email away.
2. Site crawl errors: Website errors can prevent your site from showing up in search engines. Use Google Webmaster Tools to find your site crawl errors.
3. Search engine algo changes: Learning about algorithms can help pinpoint recent fluctuation in your sites ranking. Moz has a great historical record of Google updates.
4. Recent site updates: If your site was recently updated by a team member, its possibly they inadvertently triggered an seo failure.
5. Recent CMS updates: WordPress sites regularly undergo system wide software updates to fix bugs and exploitation. If your site has custom features, its possible a recent update triggered an seo mistake.
6. Domain name expired: It’s possible your credit card was expired and your Domain Registrar could not charge your card to renew your domain.
#4: On-Page Technical SEO Issues
After examining your big picture SEO health, its time to find and fix the problem.  A large majority of SEO problems are due to human error.
• Rel=canonicals: The rel=canonical tag functions as a 301 redirect for search engines without physically redirecting readers.
• Nofollow links: If used in the wrong places it Nofollow links can cause havoc by no passing along link juice to deeper pages.
• Meta Robots: Excludes individual pages from search results.
• Robots.txt: A text file created by webmasters to tell search engine robots how to crawl and index your site.
• Page titles: Verify their visibility in search results and in your source code.
• H1 tags: Verify your H1 tags contain relevant keywords to describe your pages.
• Forgetting Image Tags: Ensure every single image on your website is optimized to be searched and indexed by search spiders by including ALT tags on each image.
• AJAX sites: Sometimes they can serve search engines the wrong content.  This is common with website builders like Wix.
• Hreflang: Verify your language tags are serving the correct pages.
• Navigation links: Verify that you have not recently changes your site wide navigation. Lack of links to deeper pages can hamper their placement in search results.
• Internal-links: Same concept as above but related to links within the content of a page.
• Meta Descriptions: Used to describe the content of a page to visitors in search results. Verify their visibility in search results and in your source code.
• Shared Hosting: Sometimes servers go down and neighbors commit crimes. Check with your hosting provider and make sure your site does not share the same IP with shady neighbors.
• Https / SSL: Duplicate content issues can arise if you are serving both secured and unsecured sites to search engines.
• Failed plugins: When not consistently maintained, plugins can have a cascading effect on the rest of your website.
• Site Speed: Google uses site speed as an SEO ranking factor—not a huge one, but definitely an important one.
• WordPress reading settings: Visit the reading settings in your WordPress dashboard. Make sure you unclicked the Search Engine Visibility button that says Discourage search engines from indexing this site.

What Is the SEO SCORE?



The SEO Score is a measure of how well the user-facing and technical aspects of your site contribute to search engine optimization, and ultimately, higher rankings and organic traffic.
Your site's final SEO Score is determined by its performance in four subcategories: Technical, Content, User Experience, and Mobile. Individual checks with different weightings are aggregated to provide a score for each of the subcategories. Some checks are scored solely on whether an element is absent or present (e.g. whether a site has a sitemap), while other checks are scored on percentage completed (e.g. the percentage of pages with no 404 error).
In the below table you will find detailed explanations on each subcategory, and what's needed to attain a high SEO Score.
What's needed for a high score
Search-engine (and user-) friendly URLs: URLs are meaningful to users, don't link to duplicate content, and use hyphens rather than underscores where possible.
Technical quality: Refers to technical quality as perceived by search engines. Domain is not flagged as unsafe. HTML and CSS validation shows site is error-free. How well the technical elements of a site enable it to be accessed, crawled, and indexed by search engine bots. If a site isn't properly indexed, it will not be ranked by search engines and no amount of on-page content or links will bring visitors to the site. Hence technical SEO is a key driver of organic traffic.
User content quality: Content is current, concise, easy to read, is free of misspellings, with few broken links. The quality of a site's visitor-facing content with respect to how it engages users and how well the meta-content aligns with the site content. Accurate, descriptive meta-content sets visitor expectations, and together with high-quality site content, ensures visitors don't bounce back to the search engine. Good visitor engagement levels, in turn, mean that a site's content is relevant and will be ranked higher by Google.
Indexable meta-content: Meta-titles and short descriptions are present for all pages. This helps search engines understand the context better and sets visitor expectations.
Unique content: No duplicate page titles or meta-content present. Duplicate content hurts SEO.
User-friendly visuals: Images are retrievable, accessible and don't slow down page loading time. Good visuals increase traffic from image searches.
User-friendly navigation: The most important pages are readily accessed two or three clicks from homepage and user is not overwhelmed with an abundance of links.
Responsiveness: Content is dynamic and optimized for the mobile operating system. How responsive or adaptable a site is to being used and displayed on a mobile device. As mobiles increasingly become the
primary device for accessing websites, having a mobile-ready site is critical for user retention and conversions.           
Touchscreen readiness: Site is optimized for touchscreen functionalities, e.g. tapping and scrolling.
Speed: Site loads quickly on mobile platform.