Reasons Why Your Business Needs to Use Video

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, Reasons Why Your Business Needs to Use Video

Do you know that over 500 million videos are watched every day on YouTube?

Currently, one of the most effective tools to push your brand, generate a skyrocketing ROI, and increase sales is video.

Clearly, you could be missing out on a huge number of customers if you are not using video in your business.  Without high-quality videos, your sales, brand, and leads will keep frustrating you. This is why every business, regardless of size, needs to have video content.

Keep reading to find out why you should use video in your business.

Videos rank well in search engines

Videos appear in 70% of the top search results. Hence, using video comes with huge SEO benefits.

There would be no point in publishing anything online if no one sees it, right? Search engines prioritize high-quality and relevant videos and rank them higher than plain articles. With an optimized video, you can be sure that a lot of online users will see you.

Video is more memorable than written content

The online world is full of marketing messages that get stuffed in there every day. Chances are, you can’t remember most of them.

How about a commercial video?

You likely remember quite a few of them. This is what video does. While you can ignore or forget the written text, you are less likely to forget a good video.

Videos are more personal

Your brand is not a static strategy on paper; it must be brought to life. It must ooze personality too.

While you can inject some personality into your written brand copies, a video does more than that.

It builds an instant authentic connection with your audience.  Videos allow your audience to know you more, connect and relate with you on a more emotional level. As you can guess, you are likely to gain more customers when they like your personality and trust your brand.

Boosts brand credibility

Users trust customer testimonials more than statements from the brand. This is why customer testimonials are a great marketing strategy. They boost your credibility and lead to higher conversions.

Well-thought-of, strategic customer testimonials win visitors over and turn them into customers.

While written testimonials are better than no testimonials at all, video testimonials do the job sufficiently.

Video is popular

Regardless of the social site you use, videos will be the dominating content. Considering the insanely high number of social media users, imagine how many people would see your video.

By posting a video online, you are exposing your brand to millions of users. Better yet, videos are sharable. According to HubSpot, 92% of mobile video audience shares videos. This means that it would be shared to millions of internet users if your video was to go viral.

Clearly, your business would greatly benefit if your videos were to be shared. You can get video experts such as video production company in Toronto to do the magic for you.

Videos are mobile-friendly

Almost everyone owns a phone now. As you can guess, people watch a lot of videos on their devices.  Research shows that more customers are using their mobile phones to search and make purchases. Hence, videos are the best strategy to reach this audience.

Signs Your Business Could Benefit From a Mobile App

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Mobile App|Signs Your Business Could Benefit From a Mobile AppWhether you’re aiming to capture new customers or delight the existing ones, creating a mobile app is a fantastic opportunity to improve and market your business.

With the rapid adoption of smartphones comes a great deal of opportunities.

To enhance your business and create more effective communication with target customers, you need to determine whether your customers would embrace the app.

What kind of app do you need? Who is your target market, and who are your competitors?

Here are a few ways you can do that and create more business opportunities!

Check your mobile traffic visitors

The first and the most important clue that your business could benefit from a mobile app is checking your website traffic. If you determine that a large share of your overall traffic comes from mobile users, there is your sign!

Use online tools such as Google Analytics to count the number of visits and check the mobile traffic ratio.

These kinds of tools also allow you to detect priority markets by looking at the countries that your traffic comes from. This will additionally help you to examine your website traffic and develop your app according to the demand.

According to Statista, mobile traffic accounts for about half of the website traffic worldwide, with almost 51% of global website traffic, and this has been consistent since 2017.

When you examine your website traffic, you will be able to determine whether a mobile app is the right solution for your business.

Then you can follow up by taking the necessary steps, such as using a responsive design and optimizing the user experience.
Do your customers need to use your service offline?

Depending on the type of your business, it is up to you to determine whether your customers could benefit from using some features of your website offline.

What is it that the offline access to your app would provide for them? Is it your content or maybe the tools you offer in the app? Or are they more attracted by constant availability and the speed of search?

Firstly, your customer won’t be frustrated with poor connectivity issues anymore.

These kinds of apps are especially popular with businesses like games and mobile entertainment, news, and guides, training and education, online shopping, and traveling.

Some of the basic examples of successful offline apps are Spotify, Kindle, TripAdvisor, and Google Maps. Although the app requires a connection to download and install updates, you can continue to use all its content offline, unlike with a classic business website.

By granting offline access to your services through an app, you are gaining more customer loyalty and providing them with a faster loading process. It also saves their battery and simplifies work with storage.

Try to look at things from your customer’s perspective. Would you as a customer prefer offline access to your app?
This allows you to determine whether this option would make sense for your type of business.

Who are your competitors?

The next question for you to consider is: are your competitors using mobile apps?

If so, then chances are that there is a demand for an app in your industry. The competitors have already tested the waters for you, so you can use that to your advantage.

When you conduct detailed research on your competitors and study their efforts and strategies, you will easily get an idea of whether your business will benefit from introducing a mobile app.

The app market is huge and you can surely find a dozen competitors with a mobile app. Learn from them, improve their approach and examine their marketing plan.

Use your competitors to your advantage. Check whether they are using the offline approach and better working conditions. Notice if they are focused on a top-notch UX/UI design. Do proper competitive analysis and make sure to check reviews from current and previous users.

This will allow you to find the best fit for your business.

Examine your demographics

You need to adjust your marketing efforts and observe how user behavior varies depending on different factors.

Did you know that 49% of people open an app more than 11 times per day? And even more so, that 21% of Millenials open an app more than 50 times per day?

As mentioned before, it is not just a way to gain more customers, but to keep the old ones as well, especially if they spend a lot of time on their phones!

A mobile app has many advantages over a website and offers many new possibilities to personalize marketing and improve customer experience.

Going back to your competitors, you should determine the regions where their site traffic comes from. Define your typical app user. Define his age, gender, language, education, and familial status.

All of this information will help you create your target group, which is of crucial importance for creating your app.
Your target group needs to share similar demographics and interests. You start by defining them and go further into planning. You adjust your features and design according to their preferences.

Find out their occupation. You will know their purchasing power, whether they have time for your app, and whether they’ll need it for professional purposes.

Conclusion

To determine whether to introduce a mobile app for your business, it is important that you follow these steps and cover all aspects.

Bear in mind- all information you can gather is valuable.

When you examine your mobile traffic, competitors, and demographics, you will get a clear idea for the next step in your business. Mobile apps are on the rise, and this could largely affect your business’s future.

So do your research, adjust your app features and bring your business to a whole new level!

About the Author

Joe Peters is a Baltimore-based freelance writer and an ultimate techie. When he is not working his magic as a marketing consultant, this incurable tech junkie devours the news on the latest gadgets and binge-watches his favorite TV shows. Follow him on @bmorepeters

7 Strategies to improve your web page ranking through SEO

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Web Page Ranking|7 Strategies to improve your web page ranking through SEOSEO is a lot about experimenting with a bunch of techniques and which ones fit the shoe best. It’s an absolute nightmare for webmasters to see their rankings stay stagnant month after month.

In this post, we look at the most promising B2B SEO strategies that will improve your web page rankings and organic traffic.

Update Your Content Regularly

Search engine optimization is an ongoing process. That’s why regularly updating your blog and publishing new content is paramount. It tells users that you’re always in the business.

Search engines also see sites that regularly update their content as ‘relevant’ ones. It’s a good practice to audit your site’s according to a fixed schedule (let’s say every 3 months) and make necessary updates wherever you see fit.

Internally Link to Other Pages

Apart from using link building techniques, you must also internally link your pages. While writing on a certain topic, you may find yourself creating references to other pieces of content from within your site. This is called internal linking wherein you add a link to other posts or pages of your site.

Internal links help search crawlers understand your content better. They also keep users engaged for longer by serving as tools of navigation. The words that you link to are called anchor texts. Since search engines pay special attention to these, be sure to use meaningful text for linking.

Pro Tip: It’s good if you read the entire copy after you have written it and proactively look for opportunities where it makes sense to link other pages. Having an internal linking strategy that cross-references and creates groups is good for any website’s SEO health. Although, it can seem a bit challenging and time-consuming; in the end, it’s worth it.

Improve the Load Speed of Your Pages

This is one of the most crucial ranking factors, and for good reasons too! For one thing, Google looks at slow-loading pages and thinks it’s not worth users’ time. In this way, high load times can negatively impact your rankings even if you have great content to offer.

Research tells us that 40 percent of visitors will leave your site if the page takes more than three seconds to load. Of those, eighty percent will likely never return. From an SEO health perspective, this is awful.

A quick loading page keeps people engaged longer and keeps them coming back for more. When Google sees this they will adjust your rankings accordingly by pushing it higher.

Therefore, you must check both your server response time and page speed. Pingdom is one free tool that can help you with that. You can test how your page loads from all across the world. To help with the load speed of your site, you may want to fix the themes and heavy plugins.

Produce High-quality Content

This one is a no-brainer. Content has been the king for a long time and will continue to. Producing high-quality, relevant, and fresh content should be any web marketer’s top priority. Other than that, you must look at something called ‘the dwell time’.

Dwell time refers to the average time a visitor spends on your site. Sites with newsworthy, fresh and, interesting information tend to enjoy higher dwell time.

Here’s something else to look at – Chrome happens to enjoy the majority market share in the world of browsers with 45% of all users using it. In 2017, it was downloaded the maximum number of times.

When a visitor bookmarks an interesting page, there’s a good chance they will come back to it. Having quality content can thus help your SEO rankings as more and more readers bookmark your site pages.

Title Your Page to Help Search Engines and Users

The title of your web page holds a lot of relevance both for users and readers. Search engines, at the time of indexing, will read the meta/title tag to see what the page is all about. Your meta tag is also also the blue color link people see in search results to get a hint about the page’s information.

It’s a healthy SEO practice to include relevant keywords in this tag. Also, the title tag is a little different from the description people see at the top of your page in a browser. If it helps with clarity, you should write one title for the meta tag to show in the SERPs and a different one for the page.

Create purposeful URLs

It’s easy to ignore the URL of the page but it carries SEO significance. It’s a good practice to include relevant keywords within the URL. You can see the page name appear in the URL in most CRMs like WordPress.

Before publishing, check and review the URL. if the page is already published, you can always redirect readers from the old page to the new one.

Target Keywords With High Commercial Intent

While doing keyword research, it’s easy for webmasters to focus mostly on the search volume. It’s also likely that you ignore terms with low search volume. But, that’s not always intelligent.

Once again it’s not always about the quantity but the quality of the terms. In simple words, you must look at the commercial intent of the searches.

For example, keywords like ‘link building services’ don’t necessarily have a lot of search volume. It must be no more than a few hundred. However, the CPC cost of such searches is $25. High commercial intent is an indicator that the traffic for them is made-up of invested and legit buyers.

End Words

SEO is a continuous process. As you progress, you may find some techniques to work better than others. But, the above-mentioned techniques have stood the test of time in yielding high rankings.

How to Increase Website Traffic: 8 Helpful Tips

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |how to increase website traffic |How to Increase Website Traffic: 8 Helpful TipsYou’ve got a top of the line product idea that you’re ready to tell everyone about. The thing is, if you don’t take the time to drive traffic to your site, nobody will know about what you have to offer.

You see, the more clicks your website gets, the higher your Google ranking will be. Since nobody ventures too far in their search, you need to be sure you make it to page number one.

Not sure how to increase website traffic? We can help you out. Check out this guide to learn how to get more clicks and keep all eyes on your site.

1. Use Social Media to Your Advantage

If you don’t have a social media page for your business yet, you should get on that. It’s too important of a resource to ignore. You can use social media ads to drive users to a landing page where they can check out your products.
If you have a sale going on, you can tell all your followers about it via a post. Make sure to include images, a description, and a link to the items when you create one of these posts.

You can also use your social media account to promote your blog if you have one.

2. Choose Interesting Titles

Your headlines and titles are a person’s first introduction to your site or blogs. They’re what gets people to click on your content. That means you need to choose something catchy.

There are two things that you need to keep in mind when you’re typing up your titles. Number one, they need to contain keywords. These are words that people type into Google to search for a particular item or piece of information.

So, what are these secret words? You’ll have to use a keyword tool to figure this out. These tools will tell you what a word’s competition and difficulty rating are.

You’ll need whatever words you choose to rank low in these two categories while also having plenty of traffic.

The second thing to keep in mind is trial and error. Once you have your keywords in mind, write a few titles that seem catchy to you. You can ask other people which one they think works the best.

3. Long-Tail Keywords

Single-word keywords are great and all but, long-tail keywords are the best. They can be as long as an entire sentence. They work well for a few reasons.

For one, they’re not typically high as far as competition and difficulty are concerned. They also provide a lot of traffic. The other thing is that many people take a hands-free approach by using talk to text.

When they Google search something with their voice, they’re more likely to use a long-tail keyword than a short one.

4. Keep Things Fresh

You’re going to have a million different people going to your site. Not all of them want to read an in-depth 1500-word article on how to paint their car. You need to have a mixture of short-form and long-form content on your site, or you’re in for a poor user experience.

It’s also a good idea to use some visual content. More people recall what they see vs what they read. This means that someone is more likely to share a bright, fun image on social media than a wall of text.

The more shares you get, the more people will visit your site. If you don’t use any images, you’ll be lucky if your social media post gets noticed at all.

5. Try Out Guest Blogging

Guest blogging will get you a higher search engine ranking than almost anything else. If you’re unfamiliar with what this entails, it involves giving your URL to other blogs like yours.

Whenever the blog user posts something, they may link externally to your site. When Google sifts through the posts and sees your URL there, it will see that you’re an influential website and thus, give you a higher ranking.

While you’re at it, you can allow guest posts on your blog as well. It will help the search engines understand what niche you’re going for and rank you accordingly.

6. Utilize Internal Links as Well

SEO tips 101 states that you need to use internal links as well as external ones. Let’s say for a second that you sell hair products. In an article about how to take care of your hair, you can link to what you have in your store.

Since the person reading the content is already interested in hair care, there’s a good chance that they’ll click the links so that they can see what you have.

Even if they don’t buy one of your products, the extra action means more traffic. Search engines will see that someone visited several of your webpages, which makes you look great.

7. Podcasts

Podcasts work sort of like a television series except for the fact that it’s all audio. They’ve gained a lot of popularity lately, so many companies have started using them in their marketing strategy.

The problem is that they can be expensive to create. If you’re a new company, you might not be able to afford the equipment. What you can do is volunteer to be a guest on a Podcast.

It’s not much, but it should be enough to get listeners interested in your website.

8. Comment on Blogs Similar to Yours

If you notice that a blog similar to yours has posted something relevant to your products and services, don’t be afraid to make a comment and provide a link.

Just make sure that the information you provide in the comment is helpful to people. If you drop a link with no context, you look like a spammer.

How to Increase Website Traffic and Increase Your Ranking

If you’re not able to drive people to your site, it won’t generate the traffic it needs to rank high in search engines. Since many people don’t go past the first page of Google, this can be a huge detriment to your business.

We hope that you’re able to use the tips that we’ve provided here today to learn how to increase website traffic and start getting the clicks that you deserve.

Are you looking for more ways to help your small business grow? Check out the entrepreneur section of our blog daily for all the latest advice.

Online Reputation Management: What You Should Know

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Reputation Management|Online Reputation Management: What You Should KnowHave you ever wondered how celebrities or big brands manage their presence on the internet? With the increase in people using online resources, social media, and reviews, one bad review can have a huge impact on a business’s success or reputation. Online reputation management helps those with larger public profiles to maintain a good online presence and representation in an age where everyone and anyone can use the internet to give their opinions. Here are some basic facts about online reputation management to help you understand what it is and how it works.

What is ORM?

ORM, or online reputation management, is the practice of using various strategies to help influence the public perception of an individual, brand, or business online. Obviously, if you, an individual, brand, or business, have genuinely done something wrong, then reputations should be damaged, and appropriate action should be taken, as covering things up can get you in a lot of trouble. However, if a person or business is under attack when they have done nothing wrong, for example, a competitor or jealous individual, this can have hugely negative consequences. This is where online reputation management can be used to push negative online content off of the first page of search engine results. It is hard to completely remove something from the internet, so managing your online appearances and presence can help to reduce the number of people who interact with negative content.

Who is it for?

Online reputation management is typically used by big brands, businesses, celebrities, or entities whose success can depend on what is online. One of the most common types is celebrity reputation management, which helps to put positive content onto the internet in order to make sure these are what comes up in search engine results when the name is searched.

Technically, anyone can use online reputation management to monitor and manage their online presence, and there are different levels and specialisms depending on how influential you or your brand is.

You can work towards managing your reputation yourself or enlist the services of a professional company. Typically, the average person will manage their online reputation much more simply than a large brand or celebrity by responding to reviews and comments, both positive and negative, and managing feedback. Many people trust reviews that are left online and will make decisions about individuals, companies, or services based on the reviews and ratings they see when they search the name in a search engine. Knowing when and how to respond to comments and reviews is just one of the many skills and methods involved in online reputation management. It becomes harder to manage your online reputation when you are more well-known or influential, or the challenges you are facing are increasing. You may then require assistance. There will be different factors to consider for this and various questions to ask yourself. These include:

  • Do you have time to generate and publish the content that is needed to push negative articles or search results to the bottom of result lists? Positive content that is high in keywords and other SEO techniques need to be created and published frequently. One great way to do this is by writing a blog, but you yourself may not have the time or skills to do this.
  • Can you write to a high level to create effective and engaging content that does the job it is meant to do? Including important keywords in your content will help it pop up higher on search engine results, and it is obviously important to make sure it is grammatically correct and well-written, as is it associated with you.
  • Are you technologically savvy, with a good understanding of techniques such as SEO? As well as SEO, you will need to manage a multitude of sites and social media platforms. Understanding how to build a good website is vital, and you may need some assistance with this task.
  • How large is the reputational problem you are dealing with? It is some small comments, reviews, or a few unwanted images, or is it something much bigger?

When considering managing your online reputation, find out what your current online presence looks like to an outsider. Searching various spellings of your name, or the name of your company or brand will bring up the currently most popular search results. Look through them and see if they present you in the way you wish. It is also a good idea to set up Google Alerts with various phrases so that you are constantly aware of any new material that is being created. This can help you save time, as you need to monitor the internet and be aware of what is appearing. Furthermore, you will need to learn when it is best to respond to comments or reviews, and when it should be left alone, as sometimes replying can push the comment further up search results, which is the opposite of what you are trying to achieve.

How does it work?

There are several methods and techniques involved in online reputation management. Generally, the aim is to push down negative content and get it off the first page of search engine results so that fewer people see it. Research has shown that around 95% of people only look at the first page of results when they Google something. The techniques used will vary depending on the client. For example, managing the online reputation of a celebrity is a big challenge because there is so much content being generated about them from different sources. These include news organizations and publications, social media, websites, and fan forums. If a publication is well known, then any information they publish will appear high up on SERPs, resulting in more people clicking on them.

There are different ORM methods that are utilized depending on the client and the situation, but some general methods include:

  • Generating new content frequently. The more positive content you create, the more likely it is to be engaged with and land higher up in search results. The whole idea is to flood results with content that is positive in order to push negative articles further down. This is where using an agency to manage your online reputation can be helpful, as you may not have the time, means or ability to create the volume and frequency of online content that is required.
  • Maintaining a positive online presence. Having a good website is one way of doing this and is especially useful if you, your brand, or business relies on a website over other platforms such as social media. A high-quality website will help it to appear higher up in search results, will be informative, grammatically, and technologically correct, with links and an easy to navigate layout. Writing a blog that you regularly update, interacting with reviews and comments, and encouraging people to leave reviews will help build your site. Furthermore, having your or your brand or business’s name in the website URL is important as it can help the site rank high for keyword content.
  • Claiming online properties. This involves making accounts and profiles on the various forms of social media, as well as a Wikipedia page and domain name for your website. These are popular and established platforms and websites to have accounts on, and are therefore more likely to appear on the first page of a search engine result. Furthermore, by having accounts on these platforms and sites, it is harder for people to create fake accounts and pretend to be the individual or brand.
  • Creating links. Links on your website or other accounts need to be functioning and up to date. Linking to other webpages that you want readers to see can help the flow of internet traffic between the two sites, as well as giving credibility to the receiving website. Links to your socials should be on your website and vice versa.

Jobs

If you would like to work in online reputation management, it is generally seen as a type of digital marketing. There are plenty of digital marketing agencies all over the world, and many offer online reputation management services. Other services they may offer include content creation, SEO, and website design. You need to have a good level of understanding of digital techniques such as SEO and have a great eye for detail. There are many skills you need to succeed in digital marketing, and online reputation management is a great way to combine many of them, such as SEO and content creation.

Managing your own reputation is a good way to save money, but it can be time-consuming, and you may not have the skills required to complete the job effectively. As previously mentioned, there are many factors to take into consideration that will affect whether you choose to do it yourself or work with an agency that can manage it for you. If you or your brand or business have been negatively impacted when you have genuinely done nothing wrong, ORM can help to rebuild your reputation online.