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Digital marketing amid COVID -19 Pandemic

According to the UberSuggest report, the organic search have gone down for many major sectors like the travel & luxury industry while it’s skyrocketed for news industry or financial space during this time. Conversions are down as well the night in shining armor has been Digital marketing amid COVID -19 Pandemic

 

If you are providing essential services or your business is related to the news or finance sector, this is the time to invest in your Digital Marketing. While other advertisers may go offline at this time and this can help you to capture traffic and conversions because of reduced competition. For other businesses, this is the best time to work around your SEO strategy and get on top of the search results by improving your ranking and by providing useful content as other businesses may be holding back.

How Digital Marketing Helps

It’s a great chance to save some money within your digital marketing budget. On average, cost-per-clicks CPC’s in few industries have dropped down by 8% and will further go down. This has reduced the amount of money you are paying for every ad which gives your business another opportunity to scoop up market share.

Many people are at home browsing, looking for discounts to save money during a time of unrest. It’s a great way to engage with your customers. It’ll give you a steady stream of revenue that will keep your doors open. You can push out your special offers through pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and social media.

There has been a massive influx of consumers shopping online, causing  Amazon to hire nearly 100,000 new employees. Utilize digital marketing now to stand out.

 

Competitors may be stopping their campaigns because of their fear of what is ahead or their current situation. So this is a great time to strengthen your campaign to improve your rankings and potentially outrank competitors. Since people are forced to be quarantined at the moment, there will be more eyeballs than ever before online. People will be consuming more digital marketing on all fronts.

People will be looking to social media especially for updates on closures, new procedures for businesses and news. They will also be looking to see how brands and businesses are reacting to the current business environment. Now is probably the most important time to be visible digitally because other forms of traditional marketing will be stalled.

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SEO Practices that Google Rewards

If you want to thrive in the jungle of websites on the internet, Search Engine Optimization is your BFF. SEO helps you rank on top of the Gooogle Search results. This helps you be in front of the customer at the time when they are looking for your product. Some of the SEO practices are rewarded by Google. Some are penalized by it. In this article, let’s go over the ones which Google simply loves.

 

Content

Content is king, there are no shortcuts to it. You have to write meaningful content which helps, informs and educates the user. Low quality content is going to rank lower. While writing content fill every loophole that you find. Write till you no longer have any queries while reading your content. You should make the topic easy to understand. Try and explaining the topic like you’d do to a 5 yr old. Also Optimize your Keywords, it won’t mean much if Google can’t locate your work.

 

Meta-Description and Alt Tags

Meta- Description is the snippet which you see under the Title in the Search Results. It supports the title by telling what is the web page about. The description should be attractive and informative to read. Also be sure to optimize it for the keyword you are targeting.

Alt Tags are description of the images that you have uploaded on your webpage. This helps list the photos with Google. And if someone searches through images your webpage will come up.

These are hygienic SEO practices to maintain for every webpage of your website.

Backlinks

Google sees the number of backlinks as votes of confidence. It’s a very important factor that affect your search rankings. It shows that you are an authority on the subject. But do note that not all backlinks are equal. The ones from well reputed websites and website from your Nieche are given more weightage. General Directories and low quality don’t really help.

 

Mobile Optimized Website

More user access the internet through mobile phones than they through computer devices. Having a Mobile-Friendly website is one of the key factors Google wants you to focus on. Mobiles are an important part of our daily routine. We literally carry them around everywhere. And are connected to the internet round the clock. Grabbing attention on these device should be a top priority.

 

 Paid Promotions

A way to top search results without doing the hard work. Paid Promotions. They put you right at the top. You won’t have to struggle with content and backlinks and what not. But, for the most effective results make a good ad copy, a decent landing page and choose keywords wisely.

 

All the stated ways are continuous processes, not a one time thing. Update these factor continuously to achieve optimal results Choose the method which suits you best. If you can spare the time and energy go for organic methods. If you just want to get it over with, then enlist the help of professionals

 

 

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Decline in Website Traffic- Here how you can Deal with it

The decline in website traffic is one of the most ordinary problems faced by today’s marketer. There could be many reasons for this cause. It is not necessary that this is entirely your fault and as the problem may emerge from either the Developer’s side or Google’s side. In the worst scenario, it could be from your side too.

Besides, this problem is quite natural and practically all websites around the world face this kind of issue. But Google Analytics and  Google Webmaster Tools indicate these factors.

Follow the article below to know about these problems and also know how to resolve these issues.

Analyze the decrease in traffic

It is the most prominent step to know more about your website. There can be many causes for the decline in traffic on your website. Among other things, there are different types of declines which we come upon.

The decline can be low and the traffic will recuperate on its own after some time. Likewise the decline can also have a higher slope which is not a regular condition to happen. In the prior cases, the reasons can be negligible and it would recover in a few days. Whereas in critical cases it could be due to Google Penalty.

Get familiar with Google Algorithm

Google’s Algorithm is much likely to be blamed for this issue. As in many cases, we see the reason can be due to Google’s Algorithm. Google frequently conducts a test on a different set of sites and then return back to default after testing. So, it is important to keep patience for some weeks before you panic.

You will be notified if Google rolls out an update. But you can’t see instant changes. It takes a time of at least two weeks to see the results on your site.

If you observe any decrease in the traffic on your site, it could be due to Google Penalty. To control this kind of issue, you need to log in to Google Search Console and search for a message and resolve it.

Know more about your traffic

The traffic on your website can have these following sources:

Organic Traffic: These are the visitors to your website who come from search engine such as Google.

Paid Traffic: These include sources such as Google Ad Words.

Referral: These are the traffic of visitors which may often come from a referral from your other websites

Social: It includes the views generated from the links from pages and blogs at different social platforms (such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter). This can also generate a lot of traffic if it runs through ads.

 

Check Google Trends

If you want to know about the changes spotted in search volume in current times, then checking it on Google Trends is the best option one can consider. It is preferred because you can find about the search volumes of each keyword and also up to 5 keywords of your site at one time and get detailed stats of each.

 

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SEO – Do it like a Scientist

Your Website is your research, consider Backlinks as citations of a research paper. The why don’t you do SEO like a scientist. Google sees a link to your site as a sort of a vote of confidence that your content is great that you are an authority on a particular subject that you are a trusted entity in this space. How does one become an authority on any subject? They study and they research.

Google takes all those things they look at them and they say well if everybody’slinking to them they must be great.And as a result they run to you a lot higher in the search engine results . So, to rank higher on Search Engines you have to realize your niche. Put out content on topics/events which you come across. Observe your Operations and make notes. You have to approach content as a research paper and do SEO like a scientist. Structure it in a format comfortable for the eyes. Explain the content as if you are explaining it to a kid around 5 years old. Fill each and every loophole you come across. That’s what it takes.

To all those marketers looking for quick ways to earn backlinks, I have one suggestion: Don’t. These searches generally don’t give genuine results. Although, you will find a websites claiming to get you links, in exchange for payments. You will be happy when you see it. You’ll realize this is the shortcut you had been looking for.

But the problem arises out of Google’s new algorithm which penalizes unfair means to manipulate SEO results. This is the worst case scenario. Even if you are one of the lucky ones and your ‘Dealer’ comes through. They will get you backlinks from PR directories, blog comments, forum signatures and User profiles. These do not hold water when it comes to Google Ranking.

Recent Google updates discount links which are from websites which do not address your Niche are or are from less reputed sources. You won’t be penalized every time but you also won’t see the expected results. It won’t be your money’s worth cause these links won’t have weight. As easy it is to gain these links, it’s harder to lose them. You can use the Google Disavow tool. This tool basically asks Google to not consider the links. But in most cases you’ll have to manually ask the site owners to remove the links of your sites.

 

Don’t go down the hill, whose climb you won’t enjoy.

 

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Black Hat SEO – Ways to get into Trouble

What is Black Hat SEO

Search Engine Optimization is like playing King of the mountain, you want to be on the top. Everybody wants to be the first result on Google. This depends on a lot of factors but Google hasn’t released them to the public.  The world knows at least some of the factors. There are techniques to implement these factors. Some of them are acceptable practices. Some of them are not. In this article, we are going to discuss the wrong ways: Black Hat SEO.

We might not know everything we have to do, but we should know what to surely avoid doing.

Things To Avoid Doing

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing refers to unnecessarily using keywords in an attempt to manipulate your Search Engine Ranking. Adding multiple variations of keywords where they add no value or repetition by paraphrasing.

This practice may cause your page to rank for irrelevant queries.

Cloaking

Cloaking involves showing different contents to users and search engines. Black Hatters will do this in order to make content rank for various terms irrelevant to their content. Spam websites will often do this to try and avoid a search engine bot finding out the spam content they serve to users. You might change the language of a page based on the country of your user.

You might change the size of your website when someone visits from a mobile device and another from a computer device. These are acceptable practices, as long as you are not changing the content that appears for search engine crawlers.

Unexpected Redirects

Similar to cloaking; this includes redirecting a search engine crawler to one page and all other users to another page. A redirect involves sending someone to a different URL than the link which enticed them to click on the first place.

Black hat SEO uses redirects beyond the purposes which they were intended for.

Poor Quality Content

Poor quality content that’s of no value to the visitor is also commonly posted by Balck Hatters.

This includes content scraped from other websites either by a bot or a person. At one point search engines like Google weren’t able to identify plagiarized content.

Google addressed this issue by updating its algorithm in 2011. Many sites with duplicate content took a free fall in search rankings.

Paid Links

Purchasing and Selling of links are strictly banned by Google. It has stated that “any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.” This includes compensation in kind for links.

To further check what’s an acceptable exchange, Matt Cutts, the former head of Google’s webspam team recommends looking up guidelines issued by the FTC.

Manipulating Snippets/Structured Data

Structured data also called rich snippets and schema. It serves the purpose to change how your content is shown on the results page. Black Hatters provide inaccurate information in structured data and misrepresent themselves to crawlers and site visitors.

For example, Black hatters might award themselves five stars from a fake review site and add structured data so they stand out on search results pages. This is highly risky as Google encourages visitors to report websites misrepresent structured data.

Blog Comment Spam

As the name suggests, this black hatter practice involves posting a link to your website in blog comments. This practice happens less often nowadays most authoritative blogs now make links in blog comments nofollow by default.

This means search engines like Google do not follow the link and neither do they pass any authority.

Link Farms

A link farm refers to a website or a collection of websites developed with the sole goal of Link Building. Each website links out to other sites in order to rank higher on the results page. Among other factors, Google ranks websites by looking at the number of backlinks a website has. Black hat SEO exploits this by using link farms to inflate the number of backlinks a particular site has.

The back is generally of low quality and doesn’t hold much weight.