Wednesday, 6 February 2013

Digital Marketing Strategies For Small Business Owners


Ebriks SEO company Provides this time about You may get lost in the seemingly endless number of options of marketing and promoting your small business via the online media. Perhaps you have heard about twitter, but you haven’t tried to sign up for an account, not knowing the real worth. You have no idea whether traditional marketing tactics will work for you or not. Also, you don't know too much about other options. EBriks is here to unveil some digital marketing options which are there for a small business owner-
·         Presence on social media- The social media space is widespread. There are varied bookmarking websites, such as stumbleupon, facebook and so on. How do you know what tactic to use to ramp up your company's marketing presence? First, you should define your objectives. What do you want to get from social media? Are you planning to generate leads, share content or create new relationships? Second, you should choose a platform that fits with your business. If you are into beauty business then you could benefit from facebook, twitter and tumblr.
·         Third, you should ask yourself whether you are going to create a position based around your social media or you will do the posting yourself. If your business is doing good then you should hire an expert who is ready to dedicate his day to varied social media activities.
·         Search engine optimization (SEO)- It is important to rank high on search engines to come in the notice of your audience. In order to establish your brand in the online map, SEO is the right way to go. SEO is the integrated digital marketing that allows you to identify keywords/phrases and optimize content in order to increase visibility of your website. Here, measurable link-building and the creation of quality viral content really work in your favour. Scheming and spamming will never take you long.
·         PPC (Pay Per Click)- PPC marketing gives instant results because it allows you to generate visitors quickly and also gives you chance to measure your budget and ROI appropriately. By becoming well-versed in Google AdWords, you can get full advantage of the PPC marketing.
·         Email marketing is important- Never undervalue the importance of email. From viral email campaigns to weekly eblasts, many emails enjoy good opening due to vital factors like subject line, quality, and deployment time. Customers pay attention to only informative emails. Do the thorough research and give your audience what they want.
·         Good content marketing- In the absence of any good content marketing, your website can easily lost its place in the shuffle. You may have heard it many times that you don't need a social media strategy as much as you need a good content strategy. Although content marketing comprises of quality-written web content and social media maintenance, it is also including blogs, ebooks, webinars, white papers and wide variety of other outlets. Here, the main point is to engage with your customers and educate them about your products/services.

Tuesday, 5 February 2013

Google Warns SEO & Businesses to Avoid Fake Reviews



google-local

An update to Google’s spam detection algorithms will grow the number of reviews appearing on some Google+ Local pages. And Google has shared some advice with reviewers, business owners, and SEO professional on how to keep reviews from being deleted.
Google warns business owners that “fake glowing testimonies” written by SEO or reputation management companies will be taken down.
Also, “if a business accepts paper comment cards it might be tempting to collect them and ‘digitize’ them by posting the reviews on Google+ Local,” Google says in its advice for SEOs. “We ask that all reviews come from first hand experience and do not allow posting reviews on behalf of others.”
On a related note, Google advises against companies asking customers to write a review on a computer or tablet located on the business’s premises. Google said businesses should send reminder emails to customers encouraging them to review the business on their own time – just don't go so far as to give free gifts or discounts in exchange for encouraging them to leave positive reviews, Google warned.
Positive reviews on Google+ Local can help attract new customers. But when it comes to negative reviews, Google emphasized that it doesn’t take down negative reviews (unless they violate Google’s guidelines) or work with third-party reputation management companies. Google urged business owners to respond to such reviews and address the reviewer's concerns.
As for reviewers, they should:
  • Write reviews are about one specific location if a business has multiple locations.
  • Not write reviews for a company they currently work for.
  • Not include links in the text of reviews.
Reference:-http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2241393/Google-Warns-SEO-Businesses-to-Avoid-Fake-Reviews

Ebriks Infotech:-SEO Company

Top Super Bowl 2013 Google Searches

m-ms-super-bowl-2013
M&M’s licked the competition when it came to searches during Super Bowl 47, according to Google. Searchers were also went crazy for Beyonce – oh yeah, and those two teams who were playing between all the ads and the halftime show.
What were people searching for on Google during the Super Bowl? The top five trending searches were:
  • M&M’s
  • Beyonce
  • Baltimore Ravens
  • San Francisco 49ers
  • Colin Kaepernick
google-super-bowl-2013-trending-searches
The Super Bowl power outage was also big news, and the source of endless entertainment on Twitter, but only was the eighth most popular query last night on Google.
However, Yahoo reported that “super bowl blackout” and “super bowl lights out” were the biggest searches they saw on Super Sunday (people also searched for “why did the lights go out”, “superdome power outage”, and “what caused power outage”).
The Ravens beat the 49ers on searches in addition to beating them for the Super Bowl victory, but Kaepernick, the 49ers QB, beat out Ravens QB Joe Flacco. Other top searched players of the game were Ravens offensive tackle Michael Oher, 49ers kicker David Akers, and Ravens wide receiver and punt return extraordinaire Jacoby Jones.
As for which coach Harbaugh got the most searches, 49ers coach Jim Harbaugh defeated his brother and Ravens coach John Harbaugh, which I’m sure he could care less about.
On YouTube, the five most searched for Super Bowl ads were from M&M’s, Mercedes-Benz, Disney’s “Oz Great and Powerful”, Lincoln, and Audi. See “Super Bowl 2013 Ads: Budweiser’s ‘Brotherhood’ Wins the Big Game” for more on the big ad winners.

Reference:-http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2241412/Top-Super-Bowl-2013-Google-Searches

Ebriks Infotech:-SEO Company

SEO Roles of Engagement: Stimulate, Don't Alienate!


engagement-seo
Users search in different ways based on their intent of search. In a Google age, where every query is treated like a question, we need to understand both how and where users search to allow us to connect "intent to content."

SEO & the Consumer Decision Journey

Have you mapped your target customers' purchase funnel?
McKinsey published a study that categorized different cycles of a typical purchase funnel to give both structure and insight into the user intent and sales and marketing opportunity. That study, mixed with Google's own Zero Moment of Truth, offers a solid approach to online marketing when applied to the different components of SEO practices.
This article will address the first role of SEO engagement, and define how stimulus can be affected by SEO efforts.
seo-roles-of-engagement
Align SEO efforts, tactics and strategy around how & why people buy!

The 1st Role of SEO: Stimulus – Engagement for Awareness

Marketing is about addressing intent and influencing the choice of brand to satisfy that intent. In the stimulus phase of a purchase funnel, brands have the opportunity to engage with users, creating awareness through visibility created from SEO outreach, content promotion, and associations with third-party sites.
This visibility can:
  • Improve click through rates in search.
  • Influence user search behavior.
  • Help build trust.
  • Drive traffic.
  • Create awareness.
  • Build authority.
  • Leverage location signals to influence the immediacy of need.
Awareness is the first stage of building an expert brand!

Search Everywhere Optimization - Engage Anywhere

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SEO outreach generally focuses on placing content on relevant sites with the goal of links, but engagement for awareness is not limited to either text content, or embedded linking.
Images on Pinterest, videos on YouTube, Google+ pages, are all opportunities to be discovered and engage with target audiences.
Seeding content assets that are optimized for mobile, tablet, and desktop also allows a greater reach and is often better-aligned to create and/or target intent on restaurant, travel, and location-based queries.
Are you everywhere your target audience is searching, surfing, and socializing?

Engagement Marketing is Content Marketing+

Engagement marketing adds the additional layer of intent to traditional content marketing. Because every point of engagement requires a slightly different message to move people further down the purchase funnel, SEO professionals should align outreach efforts with content type, message and engagement action.
At the stimulus stage of the consumer decision journey, where the goal of specific content distribution is purely for awareness (i.e., the introduction of a new product or brand), a call to action may not even be required, and an embedded link may not even be necessary.
Although this may fly in the face of traditional SEO reporting, the goals of this specific type of campaign are different than traffic generation or onsite conversion goals, allowing more fundamental offline advertising metrics like reach, frequency, and demographics to be used as measures of effectiveness and success.
Stimulus is the path to conversion, not the conversion itself!

Engagement Matters

Google is a massive "connections engine," crawling the web discovering associations, affiliations, citations, mentions, links, and other connections that give topical context, trust, and authority to brands.
The search engine's awareness of these new connections stimulates their desire to engage (crawl), surface (include in index), and rank (display in SERP) brands that display a high level of trust and relevance to search queries.
My next few articles will dive deeper into the different roles that engagement, intent, actions, and interaction play throughout the search process and underscore how engagement should be a key factor in query research, SEO tactics, reporting insights, and overall online strategy.
Think of engagement as a common thread through your SEO process!

Reference:-http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2241075/SEO-Roles-of-Engagement-Stimulate-Dont-Alienate

Ebriks Infotech:-SEO Company

3 Big PPC Mistakes Even Pros Make & How to Avoid Them


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Everyone makes mistakes. You’ve heard that saying a thousand times, and yet it still rings true.
Even seasoned professionals make mistakes; and usually mistakes are the best way to learn.
Still, especially when you’re new at something, it’s encouraging to know that even the pros mess up at times. Every golfer loves it when Tiger Woods shanks a drive, for example.
I asked PPC pros to share their biggest PPC mistakes (anonymously, of course). One long-time PPC manager sent me three mistakes and said they’d made all of them in the last year! I know I’ve made my share over the years, too.
With that, here are the mistakes people made, and how to avoid them.

1. Budget Mistakes

“One of my team members uploaded a new campaign with a budget of $5,000/day, not $500/day. Campaign went live over a weekend and spent a ton.”
“PPC mistakes I have made: spending budgets too fast and forgetting to add new budget for the start of a new month (using Manager Defined Spend).”
One of the great things about PPC is that you can decide how much you want to spend. As an advertiser, you can decide to spend $5 per day or $50,000 per day – and you control the budget limits.
The problems arise when simple typos are made in budgets, or when an agency manager forgets to add new budget to their MDS (which I have done myself).
How to avoid budget mistakes: Have someone else double-check your entries, and put a reminder on your calendar for the last Friday of each month to reset your MDS budgets.

2. Bidding Mistakes

“My biggest PPC mistake: late one night I accidentally increased bids on two keywords... I meant to type 11 cents, but I typed 11 dollars. By the next day the account had racked up $7,000 in unwanted charges!”
“I tried changing bids only to remember that the client has automated bidding for those keywords – after spending time setting up all the new bids.”
“Biggest mistake: Forgetting a decimal point on a bid. Fortunately, it wasn’t for a client account. Unfortunately, it was for me. Ka-Ching.”
“Someone I worked with once put a popular head term on broad match with a £80 bid instead of a £0.80 bid.”
I’d be willing to bet that every PPC manager has made a bidding mistake at least once. It’s easy to type $30 when you really meant $0.30 – or vice versa – and the results can be disastrous in a short period of time.
I once set up a bunch of new keywords for a client in a very competitive vertical, and couldn’t figure out why they weren’t getting any traffic. Turns out I’d set the bids at $0.50 instead of $50!
How to avoid bidding mistakes: It’s hard to completely avoid them, but using an offline editor like AdWords Editor or Bing Ads Editor helps, because you can check your work before the changes go live. Also, make sure to check your campaigns the next day – you’ll easily spot anomalies before they get too far out of control.

3. Network Targeting Mistakes

“Not turning off content network for a new campaign, set to single word broad match. Not always a mistake, but this time it was.”
“With all the teams I've managed, the favorite rookie mistake has always been content network =on. Have seen £00s wasted on that.”
Google doesn’t do novice PPC marketers any favors with their campaign defaults. PPC best practices such as separating search and content (display) and proper geo-targeting are overridden by Google’s default settings, which target “All Countries and Languages” and “All Networks.”
google-network-default
How to avoid network targeting mistakes: Make sure all new hires are trained in best practices for PPC settings, and be sure to check their work early on. Using a desktop editor makes it easier to double-check all campaign settings before pushing campaigns live. After the changes are live, check the settings again in the online interface to make sure everything is the way it should be. Schedule a report, segmented by network and campaign, to be sent to your email the day after the campaign goes live. If you’re seeing traffic in the wrong place, you’ll know what to fix.

Reference:-http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2241384/3-Big-PPC-Mistakes-Even-Pros-Make-How-to-Avoid-Them

Ebriks Infotech:-SEO Company

Mobile SEO Tips by EBriks Infotech


Ebriks SEO Company provides the Information about Mobile SEO has emerged as a hot topic these days. It has been found out that of all search engine queries, around 30 per cent of searches are being done via mobile devices. This has brought new opportunities for companies to nab a substantial part of online business by focusing on mobile SEO. To give right direction to your efforts, EBriks Infotech have come up with some important mobile SEO tips that you should include in your marketing strategy-
·         You should keep in mind that your users are using mobile web in different manner. Phones are not built like computers. Your users will access the web by using a small keypad and perhaps with a pointing device like a finger or a stylus. Further they may be doing the same while travelling in a crowded bus or from their house. All these will make a difference to their patience levels and make SEO an imperative part of your mobile marketing efforts.
·         Cater your keyword list to get short and concise queries. You don't need to be a google mobile SEO expert in order to understand that majority of people, who search with their mobile devices, do so by typing short keywords. Unlike standard desktop keyboard, smart phone key pads are not as easy to operate. As a result, lot of users depend on search engine’s auto-complete feature to ease their findings. Keep this thing in mind while developing keyword lists.
·         Your customers should not face any difficulty in contacting you. You are optimizing your mobile site so that customers can easily reach to you with their phones, therefore, you should not overlook this benefit by neglecting to display your phone number.  Make sure your business phone number is prominently placed on your mobile site so that customers can give you a ring. Each phone call you receive is an opportunity to increase your business.
·         Enhance your entertainment value. It might be easy for some but proves to be tough for others. It has been found out almost 90 percent of all mobile device owners use their smart phones in their leisure time. So, keep this thing in mind and make your mobile content entertaining.
·         Mobile internet users are very trendy as they follow latest trends. So abreast yourself with latest trends and optimize the website in accordance to that.
·         You should keep in mind that mobile screen is not as big as a computer screen, therefore, you should pay equal attention towards navigation and designing part of a website. If your website has easy navigation, it will have good impact on your users.



Monday, 4 February 2013

Are You Making Any of These 5 Ad Testing Mistakes?


pushing-needle-backward
PPC allows you to easily split test ads. Better ad copy is a big competitive advantage. Google rewards people who write better ad copy with higher positions (more often) and a lower CPC.
However, the ease of split testing can lead many people astray, leading them to pause the better ad and use the under-performing ad. We all intend to move the needle forward, but sometimes, we inadvertently push the needle the wrong way.
Here are five things to be aware of while testing.

Mistake 1: Pausing an Ad Within the First Couple of Days of Campaign Performance

In the first couple of days, even with all other rotation settings set properly, Google tends to rank new ads either higher or lower, depending on the historical ad performance in the account (quality score).
We have clients who spend thousands of dollars a day on specific keywords, so the data would look “statistically significant”. However, the initial couple of days of data can be anomalies.
This is especially relevant for click-through rate (CTR), which varies significantly based on whether you're on the top or side of the search results. In the initial couple of days, Google fluctuates what percentage of the time your new ad is on top or on the side.

Mistake 2: Using Ad Performance From a Period Where Only the Control Ad Was Running

The only way to test is to use statistics from when both ads are running simultaneously, not a before and after. Conditions in the market could have changed, you may have changed bids on your top performing keywords previously, etc.
If you're having trouble figuring out when an ad launched, you can use labels to filter and identify when an ad went live.

Mistake 3: Not Running an Ad Long Enough

Similar to the first mistake, many advertisers will let the ad run for a month or so, negating the initial irrelevant data. However, in this case, advertisers will evaluate performance off of too few clicks or impressions etc.
This is simply fixed by plugging your performance numbers into an ad copy split testing tool. There are a number out there, but the one I’d recommend is from Chad Summerhill.

Mistake 4: Leaving Google’s Default Rotation Settings on

Google by default will show the ad that has the highest CTR. In order to properly test your ads, you can’t let Google decide when to show which ad, as your test results will become statistically invalid.
All you need to do is change the default settings on the campaign tabs (as you can see below) to rotate ads evenly. Otherwise, your data can get skewed.
ad-delivery-rotate-indefinitely

Mistake 5: Not Comparing Top vs. Side Performance

Most people don’t realize, but showing up on the top of the search results (top 3, with all of the ad extensions etc.) can get you 10x the CTR.
At a glance on many ads, it will look like CTR on one ad is statistically better, when in reality, it was just shown in the top position more often than on the side. (When you use your statistically significant calculator, make sure to put in stats for either just top or just side. Hint: Using top is way way easier, as you have more click dat

Reference:-http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2240721/Are-You-Making-Any-of-These-5-Ad-Testing-Mistakes

Ebriks Infotech:-SEO COmpany