Thursday, 27 June 2019

WHY IS REPUTATION MANAGEMENT IMPORTANT


It wouldn’t be wrong to say that your business is only good as its reputation among your existing and prospective clients. In this digital age, it is crucial to know what your clients are saying about your business and take measures to protect your reputation. Reputation management allows you to understand how your clients see you, think of you, and talk about you.
The internet is riddled with examples of how negative social media reviews and bad online ratings have affected businesses. Just a few words like, “horrible experience”, “not recommended”, “worst company ever”, etc., can get prospective clients questioning your credibility. That is why it is essential to diligently watch and manage your online reputation to ensure success and growth.
There are several reasons to have a well-thought-out reputation management strategy in place for your business. Some of the important ones are:
1. Trust and Credibility
One of the success drivers for a business is having your clients’ trust. People like sharing their experiences with their friends and family, and even on their social media accounts. If they are disappointed with your products or services, they are likely to share their experience. In the online world, such news tends to spread around quickly, and you wouldn’t want people talking about your business in a negative context. People considering you as an option will readily change their mind when hearing other people talk ill of your products or services.
2. Sales
It has almost become a habit of people to conduct an online research about a business, their products and services, and public reviews before making the final purchasing decision. If you are not aware what people think of your business, you may miss out on the opportunity to meet your customers’ demands and improve your products or services accordingly. Ignoring the customers’ needs will lead to a decline in sales, which will get worse with time if you don’t take pay attention to your brand image and reviews online.
3. Professional Image
Existing and potential investors, banks, corporations, and the general public seeking to learn about your business will start by searching your name on Google. Investors are somewhat similar to customers – they just looking at your business from a different angle. Since they don’t know your business well enough, they will look for information online to make any investment decisions. What do you think their decision will be if they find out your negative reputation? It’s kind of obvious.
4. Recruitment
The foundation of any business is its workforce, and essentially the reason behind its success. Every person looking for a job, including the cream of the crop, looks for a company that has a good reputation in the market. A good online reputation can mean attracting great talent, who can take your business to new heights.

Difference between HTTP and HTTPS


Casual users rarely notice them, but HTTP (or, http://) and HTTPS (https://) are both options for the start of a URL, showcasing an important difference in all those web pages you visit on a daily basis. Even if you’re not very keen on finding out how stuff works, we bet this one will expand your horizons. Consider this your first lesson if you’re interested in learning more about internet security.
HTTP: No Data Encryption Implemented
Every URL link that begins with HTTP uses a basic type of “hypertext transfer protocol”. Created by Tim Berners-Lee back in the early 1990’s, when the Internet was still in its infancy, this network protocol standard is what allows web browsers and servers to communicate through the exchange of data.
HTTP is also called “a stateless system”, which means that it enables connection on demand. You click on a link, requesting a connection, and your web browser sends this request to the server, which responds by opening the page. The quicker the connection is, the faster the data is presented to you.
As an “application layer protocol”, HTTP remains focused on presenting the information, but cares less about the way this information travels from one place to another. Unfortunately, this means that HTTP can be intercepted and potentially altered, making both the information and the information receiver (that’s you) vulnerable.
HTTPS: Encrypted Connections
HTTPS is not the opposite of HTTP, but its younger cousin. The two are essentially the same, in that both of them refer to the same “hypertext transfer protocol” that enables requested web data to be presented on your screen. But, HTTPS is still slightly different, more advanced, and much more secure.
Simply put, HTTPS protocol is an extension of HTTP. That “S” in the abbreviation comes from the word Secure and it is powered by Transport Layer Security (TLS) [the successor to Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)], the standard security technology that establishes an encrypted connection between a web server and a browser.
Without HTTPS, any data you enter into the site (such as your username/password, credit card or bank details, any other form submission data, etc.) will be sent plaintext and therefore susceptible to interception or eavesdropping. For this reason, you should always check that a site is using HTTPS before you enter any information.
In addition to encrypting the data transmitted between the server and your browser, TLS also authenticates the server you are connecting to and protects that transmitted data from tampering.
It helps me to think about it like this - HTTP in HTTPS is the equivalent of a destination, while SSL is the equivalent of a journey. The first is responsible for getting the data to your screen, and the second manages the way it gets there. With joint forces, they move data in a safe fashion.
The Advantages of Using HTTPS
The security benefits mentioned above - authenticating the server, encrypting data transmission, and protecting the exchanges from tampering - are the obvious main advantages to using HTTPS. Site operators want and need to protect their visitors data (HTTPS is actually a requirement for any sites collecting payment information according to the PCI Data Security Standard) and site visitors want to know that their data is being transmitted securely.
The growing demand for data privacy and security from the general public is another advantage to using HTTPS. In fact, according to We Make Websites, 13% of all cart abandonment is due to payment security concerns. Site visitors want to know that they can trust your site, especially if they are entering financial details, and using HTTPS is one way to do that (i.e. it’s one way to show your visitors that any information they enter will be encrypted).
HTTPS can also help with your SEO. Back in 2014, Google announced HTTPS as a ranking signal. Since then, some studies and anecdotal experience from companies who have implemented HTTPS indicate a correlation to higher rankings and page visibility.

Friday, 21 June 2019

5 Efficient Reputation Management Strategies


Perception is reality, and in today’s digital landscape, a negative reputation can be the kiss of death for any business or brand. That’s why online reputation management is such an increasingly important, field. As online search inquiries and review sites come more and more to dictate a business’ bottom line it becomes imperative for companies to play a more active role in guarding their online reputation.
The question is, how can companies guard their online reputation as effectively and efficiently as possible? Manually Googling your business name day after day may be somewhat effective, but who has time for it? There are better strategies that companies can implement, such as the five listed below.
1. Automate your monitoring.
The first step is to ensure that your reputation monitoring is fully automated. The obvious solution here is to set up Google or Bing alerts for your brand name, as well as any branded products that you have, the names of your chief executives, and more. You’ll receive updates in your email inbox whenever these terms are invoked on the Web, enabling you to keep an accurate and up-to-date assessment of your company’s online portrayal.
Google and Bing Alerts are effective, but not necessarily perfect or comprehensive—which leads to our next point.
2. Use an array of reputation-monitoring tools.
There are plenty of other online tools, most of them free, that you can use to monitor your company’s online reputation. A few that are especially noteworthy include:
• A tool called WhosTalkin offers a thorough evaluation of your online mentions, including social media mentions, making it, in some ways, even more comprehensive than Google Alerts. It also takes into account images and videos that are marked with your branded keywords.
• Social Mention is helpful for monitoring what users are saying about your brand on social networks.
• Technorati enables you to peruse your keyword mentions on blogs.
3. Offer your customers chances to vent.
No matter how vigorously you monitor your online reputation, there may come a day on which your company is hit with a negative review. That can prove disastrous to your online reputation and your bottom line.
One way to avoid this is to provide your customers with more constructive ways to vent. Tech support forums and easily-accessible contact forms through which your customers can submit their inquiries or their concerns may help funnel some of their frustrations or their dissatisfaction away from sites like Yelp.
4. Encourage positive reviews.
Another approach is to be proactive in asking clients to leave reviews on your online review profiles, such as Yelp, Urban Spoon, or whatever else. You can’t really stop negative reviews from cropping up, but you can suppress them and minimize their impact by surrounding yourself with positive reviews. Reach out to your best, most loyal customers and ask them to give their two cents.
5. Respond to negatives.
What happens when your online reputation monitoring endeavors reveal a negative comment or review? The first thing to do is to take a deep breath and compose yourself. Never respond in anger or in haste.
From there, offer a humble and sincere response to anyone who has a legitimate beef with your business, offering to make things right for that customer. If the negative review is the work of a cyber-bully and is simply defamatory, however, you may be better off simply ignoring it. Any response you offer is only going to fan the flames and make things worse.

Benefits of Content Marketing Part - 1


1. Better SEO
In the past, “keyword stuffing” was a way to dupe search engines into ranking your page higher in their results. now, search engines like Google have advanced algorithms that allow them to accurately assess content quality. When you produce high-quality content consistently, you give Google more opportunities to put your page in front of people who are searching for topics in your niche. Content marketing benefits your business by improving your SEO and therefore your visibility.
2. Increased Website Traffic
With consistency in delivering great content comes increased website traffic. The more relevant and valuable content you create in your niche, the more people are likely to find your website, and the more likely they are to keep coming back for future questions. The more website traffic and repeat visitors you get, the more your overall website traffic can grow over the long term.
3. More Leads
Have you ever purchased anything without first gathering information on it? Consumers today have access to tools and resources that allow them to make careful purchasing decisions. As such, creating great content is singularly the most powerful way to generate leads for your business. By providing information that offers readers insight into your products or services, you give them the information they need to become a customer.  Content about your products and services as well as about your area of expertise helps to build trust, which helps to generate quality leads for your business.
4. More Sales
Creating content that engages your readers helps to increase your lead conversion, resulting in more sales for your business. Also, given that more and more people are blocking ads on their browsers, content becomes the most vital way of communicating the value that turns readers into buyers. The thing about great content is that it’s non-disruptive and naturally invites members of your target audience to engage with your business.
5. Enhanced Brand Image
Good brands often earn the respect of consumers before they even make a purchase, simply through the quality of their content. In this age of globalization, brand image is everything, and content facilitates brand image. With great content, you put yourself in control of your business’s reputation and brand identity.
6. Greater Brand Authority
As mentioned above, it’s the age of globalization. Thanks to social media and other online developments leveling the playing field, one business in a small town can actually be competing with thousands of other businesses all over the world. With so many businesses vying for the audience’s attention, it takes an established footprint through great content to actually win the audience. People are going to be more receptive to a brand they’ve read about than to one about which they have no prior information.
7. Increased Brand Loyalty
Brand loyalty is the bullseye. Content helps you gain customers first by converting readers to first-time buyers, and then continues on to influence those first-time buyers to become repeat customers. Over time, content helps you cultivate among your customers an affinity to your brand and a preference for yours over your competitors.
8. More Brand Visibility
There are millions of businesses striving to be seen by customers online. The only way to stand out from other businesses and establish your brand as the go-to in a niche is by regularly interacting with your audience through great content. The more you address the concerns of your audience through content, the more they see your brand and recognize you as an expert and thought leader in your niche.
9. Stronger Social Media Following
People will share your content if it solves a problem or satisfies a need.  When a reader finds your content helpful, they share that content others who might find it useful and before you know it, you gain more followers on social media who are eager to listen to what you’re saying.
10. Improved Customer Relationships
Customer relationships have always been important, but are even more important in the digital age because several people rely on the opinion of other people to make purchase decisions. Content is a great way to address the needs of your customers and tackle any form of issues they might be having with your product or services. Use FAQ pages, blog posts, and other online resources to provide a superior experience for customers, who won’t be able to help themselves from spreading the word about your business.
11. Increased Audience Engagement
If your business wants to survive, you must treat your audience not as a passive part of your business but as active stakeholders in the future of it. Brands that realize this use content as a way of engaging their readers. In fact, many businesses have been able to avoid unsuccessful marketing campaigns and product launches by engaging their audience and seeking their opinions.
12. Better Brand Recognition
Have you ever Googled a product and clicked on a website even though it wasn’t the first item in search results? Chances are, you clicked on that website because you’ve seen or heard about it before. Content is one of the best ways to make your brand so familiar that buyers in your niche are naturally drawn to you when they’re searching for solutions in your niche. As buyers are becoming more careful about what they purchase, content is a great way to maintain top-of-mind status with audiences in your niche.
13. More Brand Credibility
Reviews and testimonials are one of the most popular forms of content among people looking to make a purchase decision. People want to know about your brand and how it has helped others before committing their money. One great way to convey your value and reduce risk for your audience is by sharing insightful and honest content about your products/services through testimonials.
14. Faster Lead Conversion
If you’re an online marketer, you’ve most likely come across the term ‘sales funnel’. A sales funnel is basically a graphic representation of the steps involved in converting interested prospects into buyers. Often the sales funnel involves lots of steps and activities, some of which are painstakingly slow. One of the best ways to speed up sales funnel activities and convert more leads is through highly targeted content. Crafting content that is relevant to your prospective buyers will help them make up their minds faster.
15. Supportive of All Online Marketing Channels and Activities
Aligning all your marketing activities and channels can be a tough call, especially with the number of channels and activities that go into marketing today. Content acts as the glue that binds each channel and activity together to grow your business. It’s a great tool for ensuring that your marketing messages and goals are in sync all the time.
These benefits of content marketing aren’t exhaustive in any way. However, they’re enough to help you understand why the cliché ‘content is king’ will remain one of the most relevant phrases in the world of digital marketing. Still, you can only reap the benefits of content by delivering relevant and valuable information consistently to audiences in your niche.

Thursday, 13 June 2019

Difference Between SEO and SEM


SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing)are valuable, powerful business tools seem to be similar as both are geared towards generating traffic to the website, but when we look the terms deeply these are absolutely different traffic generation method.
The major difference between SEO and SEM is that SEO emphasises on improving a website in order to enhance its organic search engine rankings. Furthermore, SEO is a primary organic ranking strategy behind SEM. In contrast, SEM generates traffic through various resources such as paid marketing and SEO is also included in SEM.
Definition of SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a technique used for ranking a website in a good position and increase the visibility of the website so that it could be easily found on the internet. In other words, it improves the website organic search engine rankings. Here the organic refers to the free service. An optimised website is more easily recognised by Search Engine Crawlers which results in improving the rank of the website in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Google uses 205 criteria to evaluate which website belongs at the top of the Google search results for any particular keyword.
SEO can be optimised in two ways, Off-site SEO and On-site SEO. On-site SEO refers to optimize the website by correctly spreading the keywords throughout the website and making the structure (Web page, titles, tags, content, etc) of the website as good as possible which also complement the target keyword. Off-site SEO refers to getting the quality links from other high ranking websites to build up trust from the standpoint of a search engine.
The tasks performed for optimising the search are:
• Keyword research and proper use of those keywords on the website.
• Writing contents according to the need of the visitors.
• Optimizing the web pages to minimise the load time.
• Making the navigation simple yet intensive for the users.
• Building quality backlinks to your website from other domains.
• Constructing ways for visitors to visit more pages, spend more time on the site and decrease bounce rate.
Definition of SEM
SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is an umbrella term used for paid or unpaid search marketing in which a business pays the search engine to show their ads in the search results. SEM involves paid search (cost per click or pay per click) and organic SEO. The prior search engine queries statistics are analysed by the marketers to determine most effective keywords for the company’s to use it for the promotional campaign.
The keywords are the fundamental part, which forms the basis of the Search Engine Marketing as an advertising strategy. That is the reason, before choosing the keyword for the SEM campaigns, one must perform comprehensive research as a part of the keyword management strategy to get the better results. In SEM the ads show up in the SERPs near to the organic listing which provides an opportunity for the company to increase the visibility of its website.
Search Engine Marketing Strategies
• SEO (Organic SEM) – In this technique, the traffic is generated without using paid search.
• Paid SEM – This is the technique where the user pays for generating the traffic on their sites. For example, PPC (Pay Per Click) and CPC (Cost Per Click).
The tasks performed in SEM
• Launching the ad campaign with the intent of reaching to a specific audience.
• Creating ad groups that have various target keyword.
• Ad budget setting.
• Monitoring SEM metrics such as clicks, impressions, click through rates, etc.
Key Differences Between SEO and SEM
1. SEO means to optimise a website page content and visibility in order to gain the natural higher listing on the SERP. Conversely, SEM involves promotion of the websites to increase visibility and traffic in SERP’s.
2. SEM involves two techniques unpaid (free) and paid marketing. Unpaid marketing is implemented using SEO, so SEO is a part of SEM.
3. SEM traffic volume is controllable and rely on the amount that a person can pay or bid for the online marketing. In contrast, SEO is obscure to predict the traffic beforehand, and it also takes a lot of time as compared to SEM.
4. The SEO is an organic (free) search strategy while SEM is usually a paid strategy.
5. SEM is expensive although it is cost-effective technique. As against, SEO doesn’t require additional cost, unlike SEM.
For more details on our products and services, please feel free to visit us at Search engine marketing, Social Media Marketing New Delhi, Internet Marketing, Online Marketing India, Search engine marketing New Delhi

Advancements in Search Engines


As most of us know, search engines are continually advancing their algorithms to keep up with other digital technologies, aiming to continually provide a better experience for their users across all platforms and devices. This can be a blessing and a curse, as it does tend to create a lot more work for digital marketers, but the end result is an easier, more elegant experience for our users (and ourselves).
Voice Search:
With the rise of home and mobile assistants such as Siri and Cortana, voice search is going to be a big player in terms of organic search traffic in 2018 and onwards.
Voice search as a technology isn’t all that new, but as online assistants become better and better at understating different nuances in language and phrases, we have to step up our game to match!
As content producers, business owners and marketers, we need to get more conversational in our approach to the content we provide. For example, voice search queries are more likely to be much longer and in full sentences/questions rather than in broad and/or individual keywords.
Featured Snippets:
Featured snippets are all about real estate. Featured snippets, no matter the kind, take up more space on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) and are usually shown right at the top of the page. Due to these factors, Featured Snippets can push the 2nd and 3rd results below the fold, especially on mobile, so they quickly start to gobble up a higher proportion of the click-through traffic.
Some of the most common Featured Snippets we see are Quick Answers & Articles. If you type a few questions into Google, you’ll see what we mean pretty quickly. An interesting phenomenon is that the Featured Snippet on the page isn’t always taken from the highest ranking search result. Sometimes it’s the site ranking 2nd or 3rd that gets the Featured Snippet real estate.
Mobile First Index Rollout:
Google announced quite some time ago that they are working on a new mobile first index. If you haven’t heard of this before, it’s basically a completely separate index of the web purely for mobile search. We’re expecting to see search results differ on mobile and desktop devices more and more as each index becomes better targeted to the device it’s being searched on. If you ask me, I wouldn’t be surprised if we started to see a rollout of more mobile specific SERP features before the end of 2018.
So if you’re not already closely monitoring your website analytics and mobile vs. desktop metrics, there’s no time like the present. And by that we don’t just mean monitoring total mobile sessions vs. desktop sessions….


Thursday, 6 June 2019

Combine conversion optimization with SEO


We all know what a beautiful thing an effectively search-engine-optimized site is. Traffic flows in from natural search rankings without you spending huge monthly fees for pay-per-click ads.
However, you also know that site traffic is useless unless those visitors become customers – and that’s where Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO, also known as Conversion Optimization) is required.
(Note: Conversion Optimization services are often confused with Search Engine Optimization or SEO. If you get confused with the word ‘Optimization’, you’re focusing on the wrong word. If we were in the business of ‘Pancake Optimization’, we would probably be pursuing the perfect pancake, right? Likewise, Conversion Rate Optimization is the pursuit of the optimal Conversion Rate, not a higher Search Engine Ranking.)
Without Conversion Optimization, all the Search Engine Optimization in the world will, at best, increase your traffic levels, but your conversion rate will not improve. Or worse, unsophisticated onsite SEO techniques will actually lower your Conversion Rate. (You know the type of site I mean; the copy is so filled with repetitive keywords that it’s nearly impossible to read. That’s a credibility killer.)
If you’ve already been successful driving traffic with SEO you may be nervous (and justifiably so) that testing a new layout or content could hurt your search rankings. In our experience, however, that is rarely a significant risk.
SEO and CRO Can Play Well Together
Fortunately, the principles of SEO and Conversion Rate Optimization are totally compatible. Here are some foundational principles that apply to both SEO and CRO:
 You will achieve better Search Engine rankings with pages that focus on a single topic or product. This will improve your conversion rate too.
 Changing clever headlines (ie. your ad agency’s ‘Big Idea’) to Clear and Relevant headlines will improve both SEO and CRO.
 Replacing complex content presentations and animation (ie. Flash-esque content) will usually improve your SEO and Conversion Rate.
 Using clear content hierarchy with proper heading tags will help with SEO and force you to think about your message progression, which will likely help your Conversion Rate too.

As a Google Authorized Consultant, I’ve spoken with key individuals at Google about this question and their stated policy is to not penalize pages that have been tested using Google Website Optimizer. They’ve told me that Google wants to reward pages that provide what visitors are searching for. In fact, Google has requested that we provide any examples of conversion-optimized pages that have decreased in search or quality score ranking due to conversion rate optimization so they can address it. We have yet to see a single example.
Conversion optimization can help your SEO efforts in other ways too:
 A page that’s optimized for conversions will be more usable and visitor-friendly, which makes it more likely to receive inbound links and referrals
 Search engines will index pages more highly that are updated frequently, so it doesn’t hurt to keep the layout and content fresh
 A conversion optimized page should be using more relevant keywords that match what visitors are searching for
For more details on our products and services, please feel free to visit us at Online Marketing Company, Social Media Marketing, Online Marketing India, Search engine marketing India, Search engine marketing New Delhi

What Is Responsive Web Design


Responsive web design is a style of web development where both the layout and the content responds to the device on which it is being rendered and the size of the screen it is presented on. If you're viewing this article on a desktop browser, for example, try making your browser window smaller. The content column will shrink and the placement of the text will adjust. On our homepage, you'll see the image sizes adjust and the layout shrink from three columns, to two columns, to a singular column of content.
WHY IS RESPONSIVE DESIGN IMPORTANT?
Responsive web design is not only about adjustable screens and automatically resizable images, but rather about a whole new approach to web design. Given the rapid adoption of tablets and smartphones, web designers and developers want to eliminate the need for a different design and development phase for each new device. The solution is to build one site that has the ability to adapt to all devices.
Here is his insight:
o It improves usability and readability on mobile devices. More and more people are using a mobile device to browse the web.
o The content providers don't need to feed two different sites because the mobile and desktop are the same.
o It's recommended by Google in order to improve SEO.
4 Tips To Keep in Mind When Using Responsive Design
If you are thinking of building a website using responsive web design, here are a few tips our developers think you should keep in mind:
1. TRY TO KEEP EVERYTHING IN A FEW STANDARD LAYOUTS.
The more sections of the site that have a completely custom look and feel, the more difficult it will be to fit them into a responsive design.
2. MAKE YOUR LAYOUT FLEXIBLE.
Flexible grids use columns to organize content, and relative instead of fixed width to adapt to viewport size. Fluid layout is the best way to be ready for any kind of screen size and/or orientation.
3. AVOID LARGE AMOUNTS OF TABULAR DATA.
It is difficult to make tables look good at small resolutions.
4. BEGIN WITH A STARTER FRAMEWORK.
If this is your first responsive design, you should download something like Twitter Bootstrap and get a feel for how they organize their code and the techniques they use to keep things looking good at all device widths. ; If you are creating a Drupal site then check out Omega
By utilizing the key pieces of responsive web design CommonPlaces developed our wonderful new website. We can do the same for you!