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Archive for the ‘digital marketing’ Category

Google My Business: New Features For Local Businesses

May 6th, 2020

Your Google My Business (GMB) page is one of the most important things for your local SEO. it lets your customers know the basic information about your business like its address, phone number, operating hours as well as special offers. For businesses that cater to a local customer base, it goes a long way in establishing your business’ identity. Any SEO agency will suggest creating a GMB page as the first step in local SEO. For years businesses have been reaping the benefits of GMB profile. Recently, Google has announced some new features in the GMB profile. In this article, we will discuss what these features are and how they can be helpful.

GMB Clap Creative

New Google My Business Features

Booking New Appointments

GMB now allows your customers to book an appointment with your business directly from your GMB profile. Google now allows you to add an appointment URL to your profile. This URL can be of any webpage through which your customers can fill out a form to book an appointment. Most businesses are using their contact page URL here, however, you can also use your homepage here as well.

This feature will be the most useful for restaurants and doctors clinics as well as any other business that works around appointments or scheduled bookings. This feature gives the customers the power to schedule appointments as per their convenience while helping businesses keep better track of their bookings.

GMB Q&A

GMB profiles now give the option for your customers to directly ask you questions about your products or services on the GMB page itself. This is a great way for your customers to connect with your brand and get answers to some common questions that other customers could also have. You can answer these questions asked by the customers and both the questions and answers will be visible to everyone who visits your GMB profile.

You and your customers can give thumbs up or down to questions and answers to ensure the quality of your answers. This feature saves a lot of time for you if you are getting a lot of the same questions again and again. New visitors will be able to get these answers from the previous answers itself.

Direct Messages

GMB profile now gives customers the power to directly message businesses through their profile. This creates a clear line of communication between you and your customers. You can set up alerts when you get new messages and give a prompt reply. This also helps your ranking in search as Google always gives preference to more responsive businesses.

You can link a mobile number with your GMB profile and receive customers’ messages on that and reply to them through the phone as well. These days, customers do not live staying on long customer service calls so giving a direct messaging option to your customers will improve customer experience and conversions.

Expanded Product/Service/Menu Editor

When the menu editor was originally launched by Google, it was only for the restaurant business. Google now has expanded this editor to add products and services as well so that it can be used by a wide variety of local businesses to promote their business. This will help small-medium businesses reap the benefits of GMB profile more.

This feature was introduced to keeping local businesses in mind. Businesses can go into their GMB profile and add a catalog of their products and services. On the desktop, these products will be visible on your Google My Business page, and on mobile devices, they will be shown in the search results. Better product descriptions can also give your SEO performance a boost as well.

GMB Posts

Google My Business page posts have been around for years. However, they have recently added a new feature that allows you to add multiple images to a single post. This is great for businesses that want to showcase more images of their products for customers to choose from. This will make your posts more attractive to customers and get more eyeballs on them on your GMB profile.

During this Covid-19 pandemic, the GMB posts have added an additional option for businesses to share Covid-19 updates with their customers to let them know how the business is coping and how it is pivoting its operations in these times.

Conclusion

The purpose of Google My Business profile is to give local businesses the opportunity to reach as many customers online as possible and build a reputation for themselves both online as well as in the community. Make sure you update your GMB profile using all the above features so that your customers can get the most relevant results and information about a business on Google.

If you have more questions about how to improve your local SEO or want to get a free consultation, contact us today.

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Categories: digital marketing

The Importance of SEO and Digital Marketing During the COVID-19 Outbreak

April 13th, 2020

The world we live in is facing a massive shift in priorities as well as protocol due to the deadly coronavirus outbreak that has made the world come to a standstill. With many businesses having to temporarily close down their doors and others working in a limited capacity, the future of the economic world hangs in the balance as there seems no near end in sight to this pandemic. During all of this, businesses are turning to digital marketing even more than ever. Digital marketing agencies all over the world are coming up with strategies on how best to serve their clients during this time that will give a long term benefit to them in the post-COVID-19 world.

Here are some ways businesses can make use of digital marketing during this time –

Business Updates

In times of uncertainty, your customers want to hear from you more than ever. If your business is operating with limited resources, communicate that with your customers through a blog post or email marketing. Let them know that you are still operational and how they can contact you with their issues during this time. You can also share important offers with them to help them out during this time.

Google My Business

GMB updates are crucial for any local SEO of a business. There are many businesses that have temporarily closed. It is important to update your business page as temporarily closed so that you do not continue to get calls from customers with orders. If you are operational but your timings have changed, it is very important to make these changes in your GMB page so that you don’t leave your customers in a confusion.

Gain Competitive Advantage

There is a good chance that the competitors that have been ahead in the game from you would have paused their digital marketing activities during this time. By keeping your SEO and social media activities going, you can create a gap between you and them in the search rankings during this time period. You can check organic search trends to see which terms are being searched the most and can create content around that to gain more organic traffic.

Keeping Social Media Presence Up

Businesses should never underestimate the power of social media. In tough times like these, social media presence is especially important to let your customers know you are there and what you are doing. For example, if you are doing any sort of charity work or helping out your staff that cannot work, there is no shame in sharing that with your followers on social media to grow your goodwill. The same goes for just giving out socially conscious messages to your followers about keeping themselves safe during this time.

Audit Your Website

This is also a good time to focus on your website for any technical issues and to do a check of all the content assets you have. During the day to day operations, your website’s health, as well as maintenance, can take a back seat. Now that you have the time for it, do a thorough audit of your website for any technical SEO and non-SEO issues. Do a speed test to ensure the loading time of your pages is good. Make sure to update all relevant schema markup to go with any changes in your business. A content audit will help you know which piece of content needs to be updated and which is performing best for you.

Write More and Publish More

This is also a good time to create new relevant content for your website. This is the time when people in lockdown across the world will look for interest articles in their niche to read about to grow their knowledge. Show your industry expertise to those readers by creating helpful content for them that will draw traffic. The content published during this time can bring you great benefits in months to come when the world begins to reach normally hopefully.

Continue Gaining Customers

Regardless of the conditions today, there are still customers out there who are looking for products or services that you may be offering. While other traditional marketing techniques have been halted, digital marketing can still continue to rope in those customers for you. This will keep the business moving in a positive direction that will help you keep your staff paid. Identify which digital marketing agency you have gained the best results from in the past and capitalize on them.

Looking Ahead

As the world has now entered the fourth month of this global pandemic, the future holds a lot of uncertainties for businesses and customers alike. While we are all keeping a positive and hopeful attitude, continuing the digital marketing efforts for businesses might be what makes the difference between which businesses would survive and thrive after the dust settles.

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Categories: digital marketing

Reasons Why SEO is Important for Your Small Business

June 26th, 2019

If you own a small business, you might think why SEO is important and how it will affect your business to gain popularity on an online platform?… Well, surely it is important because your visitors will have fantastic user experience with the help of SEO services.

Many companies and brands know they need search engine optimization for their websites. This certainly improves a website’s overall searchability and visibility, but what other real value does it offer?… Check Below:-

Builds Trust and Credibility

The goal of an experienced SEO is to establish a strong foundation for a user-friendly website with a clean, effective user experience that is easily discoverable in search. And to build trust and credibility of the brand and its digital properties. Many elements go into establishing authority regarding search engines like Google. But authority is accrued over time as a result of elements.

Establishing that authority will do more for a brand than most, if not all, other digital optimizations. Problem is, it’s impossible to build trust and credibility overnight so, it is earned and built over time.

It Enhances Your User Experience

Search engines have learned how to interpret a favorable or unfavorable user experience, and positive user experience has become a pivotal element to a website’s success. Customers know what they want. If they can’t find it, there’s going to be a problem. And performance will suffer.

A clear example of building a strong user experience is how Google has become more and more of an answer engine offering the sought-after data directly on the SERPs (search engine results pages) for users. Quality SEO company incorporates a positive user experience, leveraging it to work in a brand’s favor.

It Increases Engagement, Traffic, and Conversions

With the rise and growing domination of mobile traffic, local search has become a fundamental part of small and medium-sized businesses’ success. Here comes the Local SEO that aims at optimizing your digital properties for a specific vicinity, so people can find you quickly and easily, putting them one step closer to a transaction.

Local optimizations focus on specific towns, cities, regions, and even states, to establish a viable medium for a brand’s messaging on a local level. SEO pros do this by optimizing the brand’s website and its content, including local citations and backlinks, as well as local listings relevant to the location and business sector a brand belongs to. To promote engagement on the local level, SEO pros should optimize a brand’s Knowledge Graph panel, its Google My Business listing, and its social media profiles as a start.

SEO Helps You Understand the Environment of the Web

With the always changing environment that is the World Wide Web, it can be a challenge to stay on top of the changes as they take place. But staying on top of SEO includes being in the loop for the major changes taking place for search.

Knowing the environment of the Web, including tactics being used by other local, comparable businesses and competitors, will always be beneficial for those brands.

Conclusion:

Google’s algorithm has many ranking signals. They have made noticeable efforts in the past few years to emphasize the signals related to engagement. Metrics like dwell time, time on site, pages viewed per session, and page load speed all been emphasized as having greater importance for Google to rank websites. And all is the part of Search Engine Optimization. With it, your local small business grows and expand to the worldwide market.

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Categories: digital marketing, Internet Marketing, SEO Services, Uncategorised

Digital Marketing Trends to look out for in 2019

February 5th, 2019

In order to reduce the stress of the growing complexity, a side effect that our ever-evolving technology has bestowed upon us, many of us at the start of every year make resolutions where we pledge to keep our tech stacks lean and mean for the coming year. However, these resolutions, just like our other ones, give way to the latest technological interventions that promise better results from previous years.

The good news is, one doesn’t have to plan a budget by indulging in self-deprivation or impracticality so as to acquire newer technologies. All one needs is to act smartly while having an implementation strategy and ensuring that you are empowered to take advantages of the latest marketing technologies.

The reality, however, is that the digital marketing industry of today is in a constant state of disruption from tech companies innovating at a fast pace. And as we progress further in 2019, a quick review of some of these emerging technologies might be in your company’s best interests. Here is a sneak peek on some such digital marketing trends that have aimed to rule our online world this year.

Several Digital Marketing Trends 2019 are:

Voice Activated Search

Undoubtedly, voice search will play a major role in our day-to-day behaviors. And companies who are aligning their offers with voice technology will capture the majority of the market. Though a majority of internet users are still unaware of everything a voice search can do, its prominence in smart devices will surely rise in 2019.

Visual Search

Another upcoming form of search is visual search which enables consumers to capture photos of their desired products with the help of smartphones in order to help locate similar items within a given store’s inventory. With unlimited application possibilities, it would be fascinating to see where this visual search takes us in 2019.

Video Marketing

So what kind of content did you consumed the most last year? Images? Blogs? Videos? Most probably videos. Convert it into marketing, invest your time and effort in making vernacular language based videos on YouTube to help increase your brand visibility on the internet. Videos are something that will continue to dominate in 2019 and beyond.

Artificial Intelligence

AI is another pivotal trend to watch out for in 2019. Almost half the industry users are already using AI in some form, a number bound to increase more than a quarter this year. It’s no wonder that Artificial Intelligence is providing enhanced analytics to assist online marketers in efficiently planning and executing campaigns.

Instagram Advertising

Instagram is one of those social media channels that is continuously soaring high in organic reach. Where last year was all about shifting businesses to Instagram, this year will be more about Instagram stories, Instagram content marketing, and Instagram advertising. If you haven’t taken this platform seriously, do it now.

Chatbots

Another one to dive deeply into the massive social media market is chatbots. Chatbots, by 2020 is expected to empower more than one-third of all customer service interactions. In addition to the progress in conversational interfaces, we are experiencing huge advancements in hyper-personalized experiences as well.

Augmented Reality

No doubt online shopping offers comfort and convenience but wait till you get the wrong fit and the hassle of returning and reordering. AR technology is one such that has helped brands solve this issue. Be assured that in the coming months, you will see advertisers continue to push the boundaries of AR innovation. Be ready to hop on this train.

Machine Learning

A subsidiary of AI, Machine Learning mainly focusses on machines’ ability to learn by themselves with the help of algorithms which they modify to learn more about the data sets they are processing. This year too Machine Learning is expected to take contextual content and marketing automation to whole new levels of speed and accuracy.

Conclusion:

Above are mentioned some of the hottest digital marketing trends that will gain (or continue to gain) major marketing ground in 2019. Just make sure your enterprise’s digital maturity matches your appetite for all of these wonderful advances in technology. So, get ready to embrace these emerging technologies and advertising formats that will thrive in 2019.

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Categories: digital marketing, Internet Marketing, SEO Services, Web Development
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