If you want to learn which ranking factors are the most important and relevant for 2021, this post is for you. In this post, you will find out six of the most important factors that you should focus on in 2021.

Curious to know more?

Keep reading.

1. Content Quality

The most important ranking factor was, is, and will be content quality. The first and foremost rule of SEO is to create high-quality, useful content for a specific target audience.

But, what qualifies as high-quality content for search engines?

Here are some of the things that your content should have for it to be categorized as high quality. It should:

• Be unique and original
• Provide value to readers
• Be fresh and updated 
• Cover the topic at length 
• Be well-structured and scannable
• Be optimized for the right keywords

The last point on optimizing content for keywords is a ranking factor in itself, which we will cover later in this post. 

2. Backlink Profile

This is probably one of the most important search engine ranking factors as without backlinks you won’t get much organic traffic. 

Backlinks help Google find and index your website. The quality of backlinks shows how authoritative and trustworthy your website is.

If other authoritative websites are linking to yours, then in Google’s books, your website is also a good one. If two websites have similar content, but one has better backlinks, then Google will rank that higher in search results.

Suffice it to say that backlinks improve your site’s chances of ranking higher and should be a key focus area of your SEO efforts.

But, how can you find out if your website has a good backlink profile or not?

Use SEO tools to analyze your website and find out how good (or bad) your current backlink profile is and how you can improve it.

3. Mobile Responsiveness

These days, a significant share of online traffic comes from mobile devices. So, if a website does not render well on mobile devices, it not only loses valuable traffic but also sends bad signals to search engines.

After all, Google does not look kindly on websites that users bounce off of without even reading the content. So, optimize your website for mobile devices and make sure that it appears well on all screen sizes. 

Mobile friendliness is also important because of Google’s mobile-first approach. If you have a regular website and a mobile website, Google will use the mobile site for crawling and indexing.

The best thing to do is not have two versions at all and create one website that can be viewed from all devices. For that, use good website building platforms that provide mobile-responsive templates and design for all types of websites.

4. Keyword Search Intent

We all know how important keywords are for SEO. However, now, you also need to check a keyword’s search intent and make sure that your content matches it.

What’s search intent?

When a user types a search query, they either want information, seek to buy something, or are they trying to find a location or store. The reason why someone types a particular search query is the search intent.

Sometimes, similar keywords can have different search intents. For example, if someone searches for “best sports shoes”, they might simply be doing some research before buying the product. In this case, the search intent is educational and your content should ideally inform the user about the best sports shoe brands in the market.

However, if a user types “buy sports shoes online” they have purchase intent and are looking for retail sites that sell sports shoes. So, if you are a retailer, you should opt for this keyword over the previous one.

5. RankBrain

RankBrain is Google’s algorithm for measuring user experience on a site and is one of the most important ranking factors. 

Google strives to direct its users to the most useful and user-friendly websites. So, if your site does not send good UX signals, it will not get first-page rankings.

Google looks at metrics like bounce rate, click-through rate, dwell time, etc. to measure user experience. Basically, the more time a user spends on your website, the better.

So, how can you improve your website’s user experience?

Here are some tips to get you started:

• Keep your website layout and navigation as simple as possible.
• Create scannable content and avoid lengthy text-heavy content.
• Use internal linking to direct traffic to other pages on your site.
• Optimize your meta titles, descriptions, and URLs to get more clicks.

These are just some of the many SEO techniques that you can follow to improve your site’s user experience.

6. Keywords

Any list of search engine ranking factors is incomplete without the mention of keywords. 

Each piece of content that you post on your website should be created keeping a target keyword in mind. And, you need to add that keyword in that piece of content enough times for Google to recognize what your content is about.

So, what should be the ideal keyword density?

While there is no strict rule, a keyword density of 1%-2% is good enough for most types of content. For landing pages, however, you can keep the density a bit higher.

There are many tools to improve SEO that you can use to check and optimize your content and keyword density.

Conclusion

Most important search engine ranking factors change from one year to the next, but some (like content quality) remain constant forever. This post aims to provide a quick reference for anyone looking for the most relevant and important ranking factors for 2021.

Focus your SEO efforts on these and move to other aspects only after you have optimized for all six of these ranking factors. 

So, what are you waiting for?

Get started on it right now and boost your site rankings today.

The post 6 of the Most Important Search Engine Ranking Factors for 2021 appeared first on SiteProNews.

An effective marketing strategy hinges mostly on the ability to be where your customers are, which is what social media offers.

Most people use social media today with the number growing to over four billion users as of October 2020. Internet users spend almost seven hours online and two-and-a-half hours on social media daily.

If that is not enough to convince you to use social media to your advantage, consider this:

42% of all internet users use social networks when looking for more information about brands.

The current surge in social media usage is a result of the COVID-19-related lockdowns. These numbers show the importance of integrating social media with your ecommerce marketing strategy.

Not convinced yet?

Check out some of the benefits that using social media marketing for ecommerce offers:

1. Get Quality Traffic from Micro-Targeted Social Campaigns

Micro-targeting allows you to capitalize on consumers’ demands by gaining insights from their online profiles, interests, demographics, etc.

You can create a more targeted, personalized, and profitable campaign leading to greater audience engagement and better returns on investment.

Micro-targeting on social media also allows you to:

• Target audiences who’ve shown interest in your offers.
• Segment audiences by interest and elevate product visibility.
• Use localized words that can make an impression on your targeted audience.
• Show messages that align with an individual’s livelihood.

But how can social media help with micro-targeting?

Platforms like Facebook and Instagram allow you to use precise targeting and appeal to people’s emotions through localized ads. They increase your chances of getting quality leads that can convert.

Once a potential customer clicks on your ad, your chances of conversion will depend on your landing page creation tactics.

• Are the calls-to-action (CTAs) convincing?
• Does it showcase the benefits of your products or offer?
• Does it have intriguing images?

Placing an ad on one social media platform is not enough. You also need to write content that guides your leads to move them down the conversion funnel.

2. Drive Brand Awareness and Conversions through Social Media Shops

Have you heard of Instagram Shops and Facebook Shops?

Consumers can now discover and purchase products from your Instagram or Facebook Shop.

Facebook Shops and Instagram Shops make shopping seamless for consumers while also helping ecommerce businesses improve their conversion rates.

They allow you to create an online store, choose products you want to feature, and customize your shop with brand colors. Potential customers can then browse, share, save, and shop right from the social media app.

And the best part?

Visitors to your shop can message you directly if they need help or support or if they want to track order delivery.

3. Boost Search Rankings with Engaging Content and Quality Links

Before we can go any further, let me tell you that social media signals do not have any significant direct effects on your search rankings. However, there is a relationship between SEO and social media.

A robust social media strategy can help amplify your efforts to meet various ranking factors that Google considers while displaying search results.

For example:

You share content on social media that many people link to or share. You get more links directing people to your site and this can help boost your search rankings.

What should you do to boost the search rankings for your ecommerce business using social media?

You should:

• Optimize your profiles on each social media platform. Use similar images for consistency, ensure that your bio is relevant, and leverage keywords that showcase what you do.
• Maintain consistency in posting times and posting frequencies. You should post when your target audience is online.
• Optimize your social media content for shareability. For example, you should use viral headlines, eye-catching visuals, and convincing calls-to-action.
• Encourage visitors to your ecommerce site to share the products they like with their friends. Add sharing buttons to product pages and ensure that your products deliver value.
• Use easy-to-consume and shareable content formats like video and images. Share product tutorials, how-to videos, demos, and testimonials.
• Engage with your followers on posts and amplify your reach by sharing your content on other platforms as well.

Most importantly, you should track the performance of your social media strategy and replicate your successes. You can use social tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, and Awario to identify your best-performing content and improve future campaigns.

4. Increase Engagement and Sales with Social Videos

Your ecommerce business can generate more value by using videos for marketing.

According to a study, 80% of marketers said that videos directly increased their sales. 95% of them said that videos helped increase user understanding of their products and services. Similarly, 83% of them said that videos helped generate leads.

But there’s more…

Using videos can help increase the time spent on a page, allow you to answer customer questions, and increase shareability. They connect the buyer to the product and show them how to use it.

But what about Live videos?

Most social media platforms offer Live video features that ecommerce businesses can leverage to showcase their products.

You don’t need a professional camera to host a Live session. You can shoot videos on your mobile device as long as it has a high-resolution camera and excellent video quality.

But what are the best practices when hosting Live videos?

You should create buzz about the Live session the day before to get more people to join you. During the session, you should showcase your product from different angles, explain its use cases, and include subtitles.

Finally, you should have a Q&A session at the end of the Live session to answer the questions your audience has. Make sure that you allow users to share the video.

Ready to Leverage Social Media Marketing for Your Ecommerce Business?

Competition is fierce, especially with the pandemic, which caused many businesses to move online. But your ecommerce brand can stand out and grow by using the right strategies.

Integrating an effective social media strategy into your ecommerce marketing strategy can help you increase brand awareness. It can also help you drive quality traffic, increase conversions, and build a community around your brand.

Need help leveraging social media marketing for your ecommerce business? Get in touch with me to discuss the questions and ideas you may have.

The post How Can Social Media Marketing Help Ecommerce Businesses Grow? appeared first on SiteProNews.

Yes, there have been some speed breakers along the way, ranging from massive execution fails to misfit influencers. But, that’s just teething troubles for the relatively-new marketing tactic.

On the whole, the journey of influencer marketing has been nothing short of stupendous. And, I expect it to reach new heights during 2020.

How so?

Brands and marketers are showing more confidence in influencer marketing since it became more regulated and transparent. In 2020, brands will pump more money into nurturing long-term relationships with influencers and competing with bigger players who have jumped on the bandwagon. 

Don’t believe me?

Zine found that 58.5% of brands are planning to increase their influencer marketing budgets this year. Obviously, they see marketing and monetizing potential in influencers.

If you want to grow your business with influencer marketing, this post is essential for you. I’m going to discuss how the influencer marketing space is evolving. As a seasoned influencer and mentor, I expect these trends to continue for some time. If you want to win at influencer marketing, you need to master these trends.

Sound interesting?

Then, let’s get started.

The Great Influencer Marketing Makeover 

To do influencer marketing the right way, a great start-to-finish strategy is a must. But strategies are no good if they are outdated. Savvy brands and marketers are always on top of emerging trends in their niche. If you are one of them, make a note of the top three influencer marketing trends.

1. Brands Will Prioritize Fit over Followers

2019 was a turning point for influencer marketing. A number of brands came under fire for hiring mismatched influencers. Most of these “clueless” influencers were A-listers who shared posts that were totally out of character, thus making the whole campaign a joke.

Take a look at the Snickers-Katie Price fiasco. The lingerie model tweeted political posts for the brand’s “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry” campaign. But the exercise backfired massively. Apparently, people didn’t get the joke.

But we totally get it. Snickers fans couldn’t digest a fashion icon tweeting about a genre that wasn’t her forte, even in satire. Katie and Snickers were trolled heavily for their marketing ploy.

Brands often chase vanity metrics like follower counts when picking influencers for collaboration. They are under the misconception that high-tier influencers with massive communities can give their brands more reach. 

After these mismatch blunders, brands are now starting to vet influencers more on the basis of their values and content rather than follower counts. 

To me, this trend makes complete sense. Brand-influencer fit is the key to making influencer campaigns a success. If your influencers don’t align with your brand’s messaging, the collaboration can seem unnatural to audiences.

The glamorous Kim Kardashian endorsing Daniel Wellington watches is believable. But Kylie Jenner gushing about gaming consoles wouldn’t make sense. 

Get the picture?

Your ideal influencers can be your long-time customers or loyal employees. Their follower counts don’t matter as much as their relevance and engagement rates. That’s what defines “real” influence. 

Research proves that micro- and nano-influencers have better engagement rates than celebrities because they are more credible and believable. In fact, as the follower count increases, the number of likes and comments dwindles.

If you don’t want to be swayed by large follower counts of influencers, it’s best to use automated platforms for influencer discovery. 

These tools scan millions of influencer profiles to identify influencers who can be a good fit for your brand. In order to find influencers with the right brand affinity, they compare last posts and brand collaborations of influencers. Using these tools, you can be confident that you are investing in influencers who can deliver value.

2. Building Authentic Narratives Is a Priority

Continuing in the same vein, influencer marketing is more authentic now. Brands and content creators are focused on building compelling narratives through their content. This helps foster stronger customer relationships which are the backbone of influencer marketing.

Influencers who are also expert storytellers evoke emotions in consumers with their personal experiences. After all, purchase decisions are mostly emotion-controlled. Brands have learned the hard way that consumers love the authenticity of influencers. 

The age of copy-pasting captions and posting hyper-real pictures is over for good. Remember how Scott Disick embarrassed his brand partner, Bootea, when he forgot to edit his post caption?

I don’t expect brands and influencers to make such gross mistakes now. 

To keep their stories real and grounded, brands are offering more creative freedom to their influencers. What influencers say about a brand impacts 63% of consumers more than what brands say about themselves.   

I find this to be a positive change. Influencers have a better grip on consumer psychology. They understand the kind of content that strikes a chord with their audience. Brands can’t hope to attain the same depth of consumer insights through random market research. 

Plus, influencers are masters of their niches. Industry experts and opinion leaders can add weight to the content of their brand partners. When such influencers vouch for a brand, people sit up and take notice. Their trust and engagement with the brand deepens. That’s quite an achievement in the competitive webspace.

For all of these reasons, brands are opting for always-on influencer marketing. They either team up with multiple influencers with separate skill sets or with the same influencers over a long period of time. This helps build consistent messaging which, in turn, fosters customer trust.

Is that all?

No way. Savvy brands are going a step further to make their brand storytelling compelling. They are tuning in to what customers really think about their brand/products using social listening tools. 

They are drilling down into the stories that their audience enjoyed and the areas where their competitors are scoring. Drawing on these insights, influencers can craft more resultful narratives.

What if they catch negative customer sentiment? Their influencers can jump in and manage the crisis situation proactively. This way, brands can cut down on their social media response time — a customer service best practice with long-term benefits. It shows customers that brands are inclined to create authentic connections with them.

3. Messaging Is Socially Responsible

Consumers expect brands and influencers to play a more active role in society. 

Championing social issues builds consumer trust on brands. It also improves their online reputation, which provides many benefits.

Like what?

For one, consumers reward their trusted brands amply. Brand trust drives the purchase decisions of 81% of consumers.

So we have brands like Nike coming up with impactful digital campaigns like #Equality to raise their voices against racial discrimination in sports.

People expect influencers to demonstrate the same social responsibility.

Recently, celebrity influencers like PewDiePie and Logan Paul were heavily criticized for their irresponsible posts and behavior. The popular YouTubers lost many fans and endorsement deals for their distasteful content on issues like suicide and animal abuse.

These mishaps were an eye-opener for brands that neglected the societal impact of the content they or their influencers shared. This kind of callous attitude negatively impacted their brand reputation and revenue.

I’ve seen a major shift in the mindsets of marketers recently. Smart marketers are making social cause marketing a priority. They are teaming up with influencers who champion worthy causes that matter to their consumers. Not only that, brands have updated their product strategies to reinforce their social messaging.

Take Heinekens for example.

The beer brand started a campaign #WhenYouDriveNeverDrink to discourage drunk driving. They partnered with F1 racer Nico Rosberg to create a series of YouTube videos. 

The aim of the videos was to encourage people to take the designated drivers’ pledge and vow to remain sober when they take the driver’s wheel. 

What else?

To show their commitment to the cause, the brand helped redesign 10 UK bars so that they could air the videos. They took the step after consulting leading behavioral experts who endorsed their initiative. 

During the campaign, the brand rigorously tracked the number of drunk driving accidents originating from their pilot bars and found a drastic fall in rates. Now that’s walking the walk. And that’s bound to make discerning customers happy, 56% of who detest “trust-washing” (faking societal concern as a marketing ploy).

I see this trend continuing and brands bearing their empathetic side to their audiences. 

Are You Geared Up for the Change?

As you can see, the influencer marketing space has had a facelift. Influencers and brands are becoming more responsible, transparent, and customer-centric. If you want to lead the pack, you should be prepared for the “new normal” of influencer marketing.

The post How Quickly is Influencer Marketing Changing? appeared first on SiteProNews.

With this kind of competition, how can your small business stand out on social media?

What would make your target audience stop scrolling every time they see your posts on their feeds?

How can you increase brand recognition?

The answer to all of these questions lies in knowing who your target audience is, why they are on social media, and what value you can offer them.

You need to find ways to create content that your audience can relate to and build a community for your brand.

How can you do that?

This post seeks to present various ways in which your small business can stand out on social media.

Which Social Media Marketing Tactics Can Help You Build a Strong Social Presence?

Building a strong social presence can amplify your brand awareness, reach, traffic, and conversions. It can give your brand exposure while also allowing you to build strong relationships with your audience.

But every other small business is competing for attention on social platforms.

How do you cut through the noise and get your brand’s voice heard?

Read on to find out.

1. Start with an Effective Strategy

To stand out on social media as a small business, you need a robust strategy. Building a strategy will help you define what you want to achieve and how you will achieve it. It can also offer you insights into how you can optimize your social media marketing tactics for better results.

Building an effective strategy includes a number of steps:

Define your goals and objectives: Your goals need to be measurable, specific, and attainable. They should also be time-based and relevant.

What’s more?

You need to identify metrics to help you track performance. For example, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, you can track impressions, follower growth, reach, etc.

Re-examine your target audience: Who is your audience and what do they want to see on social media?

Knowing this can help you create content that they can relate to and will willingly engage with. It can also help you increase conversions.

Know your competition: A competitive analysis tells you who your competitors are, what they do better than you, and industry expectations. It’s a great way to spot opportunities too.

For example, if your competitor doesn’t have a strong presence on Twitter, you can work on strengthening your Twitter profile and community. However, make sure your target audience is active on the platform.

Analyze the performance of your social media campaigns: Which of your tactics have worked better than others? Find out what you need to improve, who engages with your content, and which platforms your audience prefers.

You should also find out if your presence on social media compares to that of your top competitors.

Evaluate and track the effectiveness of your strategy: Keep tracking and evaluating your strategy for strengths and weaknesses. Optimize tactics that work better, leave channels that don’t work, and strive to offer value to your potential and existing customers.

Re-evaluate, test, and constantly optimize your social strategy for improved results.

2. Maintain a Consistent Brand Voice

How does your brand sound?

Are you a serious brand, or a fun and relaxed one?

Establishing the right voice for your brand and maintaining it can help you connect with your target audience on an emotional level. And this can help you build stronger relationships.

But how can you maintain your brand’s voice?

Exposure to too much content can erode your brand voice. A quote you saw or a social media post you could relate to can stay with you and you may start writing in that voice. Writing in multiple ways can make you sound like you’ve got a multiple (brand) personality disorder.

So, it’s important to keep your brand’s voice consistent.

How can you stop copying other brands?

If you are a visual person, you should start by creating a visual chart. Every time you decide to publish a post or a Story, read the chart and stay true to it. You can also read your previously-published content to understand how your brand sounds.

Another option is to have a list of to-use and not-to-use words. This list can be a handy document for you to identify words that align with your brand’s voice and also the ones that don’t. You can then check them out every time you start writing your social media posts.

3. Maintain Consistent Aesthetics

To stand out on social media, you need to develop consistent brand aesthetics.

Why?

It helps you align your brand’s presence across multiple social media channels and reflect your brand’s style, mood, personality, and tone.

Having consistent aesthetics can make your brand recognizable and help you establish a memorable presence. A unique style can also differentiate your brand from your competitors.

How should you create brand aesthetics?

• Think about your audience: Who are they and what are their interests?
• Find a tone: What personality do you want your posts to portray?
• Determine your essentials: These will include the type of content to use, logo, colors, filters, hashtags, captions, attribution, etc.
• Have a consistent look across channels: Ensure that your brand’s name and profile photos remain similar across channels.

4. Use Strong Visuals

Strong visuals can make your social media account stand out. They can make your content look more attractive, engaging, memorable, relatable, and understandable.

Including visuals makes it easier to convey your brand’s message, highlight important data, showcase your products, and express emotions. They can help you tell your brand’s story and share messages.

How can you use visuals to stand out on social media?

Start by choosing visuals that are easy to understand and that add value to your content. If possible, avoid stock photos.

You should also use a variety of visuals in different formats. For example, you can use images, videos, infographics, memes, graphs, illustrations, product photos, demo videos, and screenshots.

But there is a catch:

If you want to stand out on social media, your visuals need to:

• Have a consistent color scheme across channels.
• Show off your personality, for example, with the fonts you use.
• Maintain your brand’s theme and aesthetics.
• Be of high quality.
• Be optimized for searches. You can include keywords, descriptions, and hashtags (wherever applicable) to optimize them for higher search visibility.

5. Use the Right Tools

The secret to standing out on social media is taking advantage of social media tools that can help you automate numerous menial tasks. They can help you boost the productivity of your team and give them more time to engage with your target audience.

Which tools should you use?

You should leverage marketing tools like Hootsuite, Agorapulse, and Sprinklr to take care of different aspects of your social media campaigns.

You can use these social media marketing tools to:

• Manage your social media accounts.
• Schedule posts.
• Publish on various platforms at once.
• Engage your audience.
• Discover content.
• Monitor conversations.
• Analyze campaign performance.
• Monitor your competitors’ social media activities.
• Track audience engagement.

You can also use online design tools like Piktochart, VSCO, and PicMonkey to create eye-catching graphics. With these tools, you do not need to be a designer. They offer numerous templates for you to choose from and give options to help you personalize them to match your brand’s aesthetics.

Are You Ready to Set Your Brand Apart from the Competition?

Standing out from your competition on social media may seem challenging, especially if you are a small business. But it’s doable.

You just need to find ways to cut through the noise and set your brand apart.

You can start by building a strong strategy with well-defined goals and audience groups. You can then incorporate strategies like developing a consistent brand voice, using visuals, automating your menial processes, and tracking performance.

Doing this will not only help you stand out from others but will also help your business grow.

Are you ready to implement these tips to make your small business stand out on social media?

Would you like to get more tips for boosting your social presence and improving your customer experiences? Let us know in the comments section below.

The post 5 Tactics: How Your Small Business Can Stand Out on Social Media appeared first on SiteProNews.

Although written content continues to be valuable, text coupled with strong visuals is gradually taking the front seat.

Have you ever wondered why?

In an era of content overload, users want content that’s appealing and easy to consume. That’s where visual content can help.

According to a report, 80% of marketers used photos in their social media marketing, and 63% used videos. It’s evident that marketers are using visuals to get the attention of their audiences.

Still not convinced about the merits of visual content?

Here are four ways in which visual content can boost your lead generation efforts.

Increase Brand Awareness

Although brand awareness and lead generation are often thought of as completely different strategies, they do complement each other.

After all, if people do not know you exist in the first place, how can they turn into buyers?

But what role does visual content play?

With visual content, you can communicate your brand values and messaging. You can educate your audience about your products or start conversations about relevant topics.

For instance, Grammarly is an online digital writing tool that helps people by correcting their grammar and making their writing more effective. They post visual content on Instagram and Facebook to reach out to people who are passionate about reading and writing.

What’s more, Grammarly maintains consistency across its posts by using the same font and sticking to a minimalistic look. By doing so, Grammarly can boost their brand recall value as well. 

That’s an important takeaway for marketers looking to produce more online content.

Repetition and consistency are the foundation of brand awareness, and eventually aid lead generation. In fact, a 2019 survey revealed that brand consistency can result in a 33% overall growth.

So, how can you ensure that the branding of your visual content is up to the mark?

There are a number of marketing tools that can help you come up with content ideas and designs to achieve the required consistency. With the help of a tool like Canva, you can easily watermark your visuals or add branded colors to your content.

Not only can this strategy help you build brand awareness, but it can also ensure that your content is not plagiarized.

Enhance Engagement

It is no secret that adding color, design, and graphics to your content makes it more interesting.

Think about it: would you want to read through a huge block of text?

With dwindling attention spans, chances are you prefer content that is scannable or easily readable.

Visual content can help you break down complex topics into a simple form. This, in turn, can help you engage your target audience more effectively.

Instead of listing statistics about a particular topic, you can create interactive infographics. Similarly, you can highlight your product’s features through entertaining explainer videos or even unboxing videos.

You can get inspiration from Singapore-based personalized skincare startup, Yours. They use visual-heavy content across their social media channels. On their Instagram channel, they have unboxing videos as well as quirky GIFs, memes, and infographics.

Furthermore, Yours encourages their fans to share their unboxing videos as well. To generate buzz and add social proof, they feature user-generated content on their Instagram channel as well. 

This is a great strategy to boost engagement and spread the word about your brand quickly. If you want to take it up a notch, you can also turn it into a contest or a competition.

Evoke Powerful Emotions

One of the most effective ways to get more leads is by forming emotional connections with your audience.

Consider this: 

A photograph of a mother holding her newborn baby versus a well-written passage about the mother-child relationship. 

Which would be more touching?

With visuals, you can evoke powerful emotions in your audience. If done right, visual content can trigger happiness, sadness, anger, and other emotions in your audience.

Not sure how to appeal to people’s emotions?

Let’s take a look at an example:

Brooklyn-based brand, Rescue Chocolate, is great at hitting people right in the feels. The chocolate brand donates resulting profits to the cause of animal rescue.

When there were talks about the potential banning of Pitbull ownership in Montreal, Rescue Chocolate uploaded a Facebook video with visuals of pitbulls in gardens and in the streets. In the video, they appealed to people to fight the injustice.

The video received 1.7K reactions and 628 comments.

Memes can be another powerful form of content that is capable of inciting emotions and going viral. 

After all, what’s better than making your audience laugh?

If you want to reach out to digital natives, meme marketing should be on your radar. The best part is that memes are easy to create.

For inspiration, take a look at the screenshot below. Potato chips brand, Ruffles, posted a clever meme on their Twitter feed to promote the brand.

However, it’s important to keep the sensibilities of your audience in mind while producing visual content that triggers emotions. After all, you don’t want to offend your audience.

That’s why it’s a good idea to leverage tools for social media listening. Comb through your social media channels to find out what your audience reacts positively to, and what they engage with most.

This can help you understand your audience, and boost sales.

Embrace Real-Time Marketing

A good content marketing strategy leaves the audience with the impression that a brand is relevant, aware, and reliable.

Real-time marketing comes quite close to that. It can help brands provide a great customer experience. In the process, visual content can also play an integral role to highlight current events or customer feedback.

A brand that nailed real-time marketing is KFC. 

When the American fast-food chicken restaurant ran out of chicken, the brand did not point fingers at anyone. Instead, they posted an apology to their customers.

Customers value transparency from brands.

This tactic can help you retain customers. When things go south, customers observe how you navigate your way through the crisis. If you follow the path of honesty and sincerity, they will have a reason to stay.

Moreover, this kind of content is more shareable and has the potential of reaching a wider audience.

Isn’t that crucial for lead generation?

Another great channel for sending the right message at the right time and the right place is email. Whether it’s something in the news or just a weather update, you can use it all in your email marketing campaigns.

To ensure that customers don’t turn a blind eye to your lovely offer, you need to design emails that are visually appealing. And the right colors, fonts, and pictures can make your emails more appealing.

Take some inspiration from the design in the screenshot below.

To create visual content for your emails on topical issues, you’ve got to be quick on your feet. To make the process easier, you can use email marketing platforms.

Summing Up

If you haven’t jumped on the visual content bandwagon yet, it’s about time you do. By helping you raise brand awareness, increase engagement, and evoke emotions, visual content can help you generate leads.

Does your content marketing strategy include visuals yet? How are you capitalizing on this trend? Please share your tips and insights in the comments below.

The post How Can a Visual Content Strategy Help Improve Lead Generation Campaigns? appeared first on SiteProNews.

So what should you do?

To understand how well you’re promoting your brand on social media, you should check and analyze how your audience is engaging with your content.  

This is where a social selling strategy comes into the picture. 

A powerful social selling strategy helps you make the most of social media by helping you connect with your audience in more meaningful ways. It also helps you convert them into prospects and customers. 

Social selling is all about understanding your audience better to enhance their experience by adding value in your conversations with them.

Here are a few tips you can use to improve your social selling strategy:

1. Build Your Credibility

Buyers purchase from brands they know, like, and trust. Building strong reputations helps establish credibility and trust among your audience. One of the best ways to build credibility for your brand is via social networks. 

Every single Instagram post, Facebook comment, or Tweet gives you the opportunity to show your audience what value you can provide to them. Social networks are a great place to connect directly with your audience and establish a solid foundation of trust. 

Here are some actionable tips to build the credibility of your brand:

• Share relevant articles and other forms of content from your industry.
• Quickly respond to complaints and queries to enhance their customer experience.
• Keep your audience entertained and well-connected to your brand by sharing relatable content.
• Add thoughtful insights to conversations that provide value to your readers.
• Share social proof. For instance, you can share pictures of your customers with your product, their reviews, how they used the product, etc. 

You can also leverage influencer marketing to gain the trust of your target audience. 

Influencers are people who have amassed a relatively higher number of followers on social media platforms by creating attractive content. They interact with their followers one-on-one and know exactly what their audience likes, dislikes, what stirs up a debate, etc. 

By collaborating with influencers in your industry, you can reach out to their audience and build credibility. 

For example, Danielle Peazer, a fitness influencer, collaborated with Naked Juice, a healthy drink brand, to promote them.

2. Discover Prospects by Monitoring Relevant Conversations

The best way to get better at your social selling is by understanding who your prospective customers are and what they want. By analyzing them, you will be able to personalize your offerings and provide better customer experiences. 

Track what your prospects and customers are posting on social channels to identify useful information that will help you create content that they’ll most likely engage with. You can use social media listening tools to help you monitor what people are saying about you, your services, and your competitors.

Identify common pain points that they’re facing and come up with solutions to address them. Watch for any feedback that might help you cater to your customers better too. This way, you’ll be able to nurture your relationship with your prospects and enhance their loyalty to your brand. 

Use all of the data you have collected from monitoring social networks to personalize your communications with them. You could also engage with the posts where they’ve tagged or mentioned you. 

For example, here is a customer who is complaining about a specific feature of Adobe, and look how promptly and brilliantly the brand has come up with a solution.

3. Consistently Provide Value

One of the most efficient ways to amp up your social media strategy is by providing value to your audience consistently. 

You should create informational content that can enrich your audience’s knowledge. Additionally, you should consider sharing useful content created by others as well.  

Your focus shouldn’t be on hard-selling your products or services. It’s also essential to keep coming up with useful content regularly to establish yourself as an authority figure in your niche. Once you have garnered the trust of your audience, it’s essential that you continuously engage with them by providing valuable contributions. 

Note how HubSpot regularly shares insightful content created by them and others from the industry as well.

To create informational content that resonates with your audience, you should understand what they like. For this, you can leverage AI-powered tools like Cortex. Through data-driven insights, it helps you figure out what aspects of your content resonate the most with your audience. 

But how can you consistently provide value?

Here are a few actionable tips that you can use to create valuable content on social media:

• Share your expertise.
• Address your audience’s queries and offer them solutions. 
• Always stay focused on potential customers. 
• Use relevant hashtags on your social media profiles to reach a wider audience.
• Engage with influencers in your industry to stay connected with your target audience.

4. Nurture Your Prospects

You identify and reach out to your prospects, but oftentimes, they are just not ready to convert. 

What next?

Depending on your industry, your services, and your brand’s reputation, it might take days, weeks or months to turn a prospect into a customer. During this time, the best thing that you can do to engage with them is by nurturing them. 

While you could use emails to communicate with your prospects, one of the major drawbacks of that is that everybody’s doing it. Unless you hone your content creation skills and come up with catchy subject lines, your email may not even be opened.

Nurturing your prospects the right way makes your social selling strategy more effective. You can reach out to your prospects on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, or LinkedIn. 

When communicating with them, remember that you’re there to nurture them, provide insightful information, help address their challenges, and build more trust. 

Try to add a personal touch to your communications with them to improve your relationships with them. 

5. Build Trust by Sharing Success Stories

Your company may have achieved a milestone or organized a phenomenal fundraising program for a social cause. But there’s little chance that your customers will know about it unless you share it with them. 

Moreover, it’s better to share your success stories directly with them instead of having them find out about it from a third-party network like a news website. 

Sharing success stories with your audience helps build emotional connections with them. 

For instance, if your company organized a nature-driven campaign where you planted over a million trees, you should share it with your audience on social networks. Take the opportunity to tell them how your brand fosters such campaigns and believes in nurturing the environment. 

You can also share customer success stories when you hit a milestone on your social networks. 

For instance, Taco Bell shares their special occasions with their audience on social media. Note how they celebrated the brand’s birthday and shared it with their audience.

There are many ways through which you can create and share success stories with your audience:

• Run a campaign for a social cause. 
• Create branded hashtags. Ask your customers to share their experience of using your products or services using the hashtag and feature them as your success stories.
• Share BTS (behind-the-scenes) content of your company. 
• Take your audience through a visual journey of how your brand evolved.

Takeaways

These tips can help you enhance your social selling game and turn your leads into your customers. When implemented together, these tactics can boost your social media performance and drive brand awareness. 

To improve your social selling strategy, you should create valuable content to build your credibility and discover what your audience likes by monitoring social media platforms. It’s also necessary to nurture your prospects and build trust in your brand by sharing your success stories with your audience.

The post 5 Effective Ways to Improve Your Social Selling Strategy appeared first on SiteProNews.

With that said, a bad customer service experience is even more influential on people’s purchase behavior. 66% of B2B customers and 52% of B2C customers would stop buying from a brand if they received a bad customer service interaction. This makes it crucial to avoid customer service mistakes that could negatively affect customer experience.

So here are four of the worst customer service mistakes you should avoid at all cost.

1. Not Being Responsive Enough

Responsiveness is one of the top factors that influence people’s customer service experiences. A Sprout Social study also found that responsiveness was the top brand action that would prompt consumers to buy something.

So if you’re not responsive enough when customers come to you with an issue or question, you risk ruining their customer service experience. 

Long hold times, taking days to respond to emails, etc. are major causes of customer frustration. You should try avoiding these mistakes as much as possible. 

You can reduce long hold times by opening up other channels for customer service such as live chats, chatbot support, social media messaging, etc. Opening up other customer service channels also means you could significantly reduce the amount of email enquiries, which will be easier to manage. 

If you’re low on resources, you don’t necessarily have to hire more people to handle customer service either. Investing in a reliable chatbot solution will do the trick. 

For instance, Amadeus, a travel solutions provider, was able to deflect 70% of their customer support enquiries from traditional channels after investing in AgentBots’, Aivo’s chatbot.. Powered with machine learning technology, the chatbot managed to learn from every interaction, which improved the accuracy of its answers.

2. Confining Customers to a Single Channel

If you only have one channel to provide customer support, you’re setting yourself up for disaster. When customers have limited options to get support, it could be a major cause for frustration. 

Let’s say that you only provide phone support. This means you’ll experience longer wait times and have a lot more frustrated customers because everyone is calling, regardless of the severity of their issue. 

You should deflect some of the enquiries to other channels and make customer support accessible through multiple options. 

In addition to calls and emails, set up chat support and social media support as well. But remember that social media support doesn’t just end with responding to people’s direct queries. You should also conduct regular social media monitoring to look for posts and comments where people are sharing their bad experiences. 

And even with chat support, give customers the option to use chatbots and live chats. You could start with chatbots to answer basic questions and then give customers the option to speak to an agent if their issue couldn’t be resolved by the chatbot. 

You could also have live chat agents available for a specific duration every day, while chatbots take over when your agents are unavailable. 

On top of all this, you should also provide self-service options to your customers. Have FAQ pages available for some of the most common issues so people can get quick answers for minor problems. This can significantly reduce the amount of customer support enquiries, making them easier to manage regardless of the channel. 

For instance, Amazon offers answers to multiple self-help topics to resolve minor issues.

They also offer two options to contact customer service – through chat or by setting up a call.

When you choose the chat option, you get a chatbot asking you basic questions in case it can get resolved without speaking to an agent. Otherwise, it directs you to a live chat agent to handle the issue.

3. Failing to Streamline Your Documentation

Someone calls customer service to follow up about an ongoing issue. They’ve made the call a few times before and the issue has been logged by customer support. 

However, the caller has to explain the issue and relay the same information for the fifth time, even though the company has already logged the issue. You can imagine how frustrating this scenario would be.

This occurs because you don’t have a proper system to unify all of your records and documentation. So customer service reps cannot access the necessary details at the right time, or they have to scour through multiple files to find the right one.

This makes it crucial for businesses to invest in a customer support platform that easily integrates with their CRMs so agents can quickly and easily access customer information. 

This will enable you to deliver more personalized customer service experiences. Platforms like Salesforce Starter is a cost-effective solution for small businesses to unify all their customer info. This platform will allow you to manage all your customer support tickets in one place.

4. Failing to Invest in Your Customer Service Team

Not investing in your customer service team is easily one of the most harmful mistakes that you can make. 

Maybe you’re not hiring enough people to handle customer support enquiries. Maybe you’re not providing sufficient and ongoing training to your staff. Either way, this could build up and negatively impact the customer service experience you’re providing. 

When you don’t have enough staff to handle all of your enquiries, you’ll have frustrated and overworked employees trying to deal with frustrated customers. 

Without sufficient training, your team may not know the right process to handle delicate situations such as irate customers. They may not even know what to say to avoid angering your customers or how vital their position is. 

So it’s crucial to make an ongoing investment in your customer service team. Consult with team leads to understand the unique needs of your team members. 

Perhaps you need to hire more people to ease their burden. Perhaps their equipment is constantly acting up and preventing them from doing their job well. 

You should also organize regular refresher training sessions and show your employees some appreciation when they deserve it.

Final Thoughts

The quality of customer service you provide can make or break your business. Not only does it affect sales, but also customer loyalty. So make sure you find solutions to avoid the mistakes highlighted above and start providing better, more memorable customer service experiences.

The post 4 Terrible Customer Service Mistakes You Should Avoid at Any Cost appeared first on SiteProNews.

Instagram has become a popular social media platform for brands as well, especially those who have embraced influencer marketing. Nearly 89% of marketers feel that Instagram is the best channel for influencer marketing.

A major reason for this is that the average influencer engagement rate on Instagram is nearly 1.87%. Now that you know why Instagram is important for influencer marketing, let’s look at how it can help you improve your influencer marketing strategy. 

1. Plan Your Goals

When you’re doing influencer marketing, you need to have specific goals.

You need to make sure that the goals that you set are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely) in nature. 

You also need to establish some key performance indicators based on the goals that you set. Some of the goals that you can have for your influencer marketing campaign are: 

• Increasing brand awareness
• Generating more leads 
• Expanding reach
• Getting more sales 
• Increasing website traffic

Key performance indicators (KPIs) could be the number of leads, sales, reach, or other metrics, depending on your goals. They will help you keep track of your campaign’s performance.

With the proper KPIs in place, you’ll get an idea of where you stand and what you might need to do to reach your end goals. You can also determine the ROI of your campaign through them.   

2. Find Influencers

Once you’ve set your goals, you need to find the right influencers for your brand. It’s crucial for brands to find relevant and reliable influencers who can support their mission. 

For this, you need to look for influencers in your niche. Additionally, must have values that are similar to your brand. 

It is also necessary to check their tone to see if it matches your brand’s tone. You should also check their engagement rates, reach, number of followers, and their audience. If their audience doesn’t match your target audience, there’s no point in partnering with them. 

You also need to decide whether you want to collaborate with nano-influencers, micro-influencers, macro-influencers, or celebrities. You can decide this based on your budget and the level of engagement or reach that you desire. 

Typically, nano-influencers have limited reach but high engagement levels and are very affordable for brands. On the other hand, celebrities have tremendous reach, but their engagement rates are fairly low. You also need to have a much larger budget to partner with them. 

One of the hardest parts about finding the right influencers is that there are many fake influencers on Instagram. These people purchase followers and likes to become influencers. 

However, since their followers aren’t real, it can result in very poor engagement rates. Influencer marketing fraud is so rampant on social media that nearly 63% of all marketers have faced it in the past. 

To find genuine influencers for collaborations, you can use platforms such as Influence.co.  

3. Build Relationships

One thing that you need to keep in mind when working with influencers on Instagram is that you need to develop relationships with them. When you establish contact with them, don’t pitch your ideas for collaboration straightaway. 

Instead, you should start by complimenting some of their posts or even discussing the content that they’ve shared. You should also consider engaging with them on their posts or through direct messages. 

Only once you’ve managed to establish a good relationship with an influencer, you can pitch your proposal. When you do pitch your idea to them, make sure that it’s as personalized as possible. 

You should take time to explain your brand and its values to them. It is also crucial to talk about your campaign and inform them how they would fit into it. 

Also make sure that you are as transparent as possible with your influencers. Discuss compensation and expectations openly so that there’s no friction at any stage. 

Building solid relationships may lead to long-term collaborations. The influencers will be better placed to understand your brand. This will allow them to showcase numerous products of your brand, and in some cases, they may become the faces of your brand too. 

One brand that’s made it big through Instagram influencer marketing is Daniel Wellington. The company started with seed funding of only $15k and within 4 years had revenue of $220 million. 

This success was achieved completely through influencer marketing collaborations on Instagram. They sent their watches to micro-influencers, who then posted photos of them on their accounts. 

4. Design Your Campaigns and Optimize Them

Once your influencers have agreed to collaborate, it’s time to plan your campaign. Take their opinions into account but also give them creative freedom over their work – after all, their style and content is what attracted them to you in the first place  You can, however, give them brand and campaign guidelines. 

Additionally, you should create a contract so that the deal terms and scope of work are clear on both sides.. 

There are several options that you can consider when it comes to collaborating with influencers. You can create one-off posts, videos, Stories, and even slideshows; the opportunities are endless. 

Instagram Stories perform especially well for brands. As many as 51% of brands use them. Additionally, videos in Stories perform better compared to images. They have a tap-forward rate of 5.65% more than videos.

Once your campaign starts, you need to begin tracking its progress based on your established KPIs. 

These metrics will give you an idea of how well your campaign is performing and you’ll also be able to determine what changes need to be made in order to optimize it even further. 

The best way to go about this is by using Lumanu’s tools. You can share content, audiences, and usage rights with your influencers and vice-versa.

Additionally, you can unleash the true potential of your influencer marketing campaigns through paid promotions.

You can easily see all of the content created by your portfolio of influencers and manage paid social campaigns all in one place through the Lumanu platform.. Lumanu’s tools make the entire process of creating ads and whitelisting quicker and simpler as well.

Final Thoughts 

Instagram is the most important platform for influencer marketing and using it can help you improve your influencer marketing strategy. 

You must ensure that your goals and KPIs are clearly defined. Then put time and effort into finding the right influencers and building relationships with them. Lastly, plan your campaign with the influencers, monitor the campaign’s progress, and consider optimizing results through applying paid media behind the influencer’s content.

The post How to Use Instagram to Step Up Your Influencer Marketing Strategy appeared first on SiteProNews.

In the case of B2B brands, 72% of marketers reported an increase in leads, and 51% of marketers reported an increase in sales with the help of content marketing. Whereas with B2C brands, 65% of marketers witnessed a growth in their generation of leads, and 58% of marketers saw an increase in their sales by using content marketing.

As you can see, regardless of whether your business is B2B or B2C, content marketing strategies can help you boost the ROI of your brand. 

This post will guide you with three effective and easy to implement ways to boost your content marketing ROI.

1. Humanize Your Brand

The way you present your brand to your target audience matters because it has a long-lasting impact on their minds. You need to establish connections with your target audience at a personal level, so, you need to create content accordingly.

However, make sure that you communicate your brand’s values effectively. This will help you increase the awareness of your brand among your target audience and motivate them to visit and make a purchase. This, in turn, will help you generate more revenue for your brand.

To achieve this, you need to humanize your brand. To do so, you can share engaging stories, such as some behind-the-scenes snapshots of your business. Compelling stories also help you establish emotional connections with your target audience.

To create an impact on the minds of your audience, you need to figure out where to share your brand’s stories. One of the best and easiest options is to share them on the social media platform where your target audience spends most of their time. 

For example, Intel leverages Instagram to share posts showing their engineers in action. This behind-the-scenes post of Intel gained more than 19K likes. Similarly, you can also share behind-the-scenes stories with your followers.

2. Leverage Influencer Marketing

Who else can be better than influencers to create an authentic, engaging, and relevant content for your brand? The creativity and genuineness of influencer-generated content can influence your target audience to make a purchase from your brand. That’s why 89% of marketers collaborate with influencers.

You can combine influencer marketing and content marketing for the best of both worlds. 8 out of 10 brands set dedicated budgets for influencer marketing in 2019. Also, when compared to other marketing forms, influencer marketing is cost-effective. 43% of marketers prefer to use influencer marketing for this reason.

You can ask your influencer to write an honest review of your product or service. Also, influencers can organize or promote a giveaway or contest. 

Such tactics can generate high-quality and organic traffic to your website or landing page. This may encourage your target audience to visit your website and make a purchase. Thus, boosting your ROI.

However, to successfully incorporate influencer marketing into content marketing, you need to identify relevant influencers for your brand. There are platforms like influence.co which can help you connect with relevant influencers. It’s a community for influencers, where they can show their work and connect with relevant brands.

Fiji Water collaborated with fitness enthusiast, Conrad Louis, to promote their product. The content showed that Fiji is committed to keeping your body hydrated during intense workout sessions.

3. Promote Your Content on Social Media

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are quite popular among brands. These social platforms help brands to not only promote their services and products but also to reach their target audiences.

The easy sharing buttons on these social media platforms enable the target audience to share the content with their networks. This, in turn, promotes and widens the reach of your brand. It also helps you build brand awareness amongst your target audience.

Social media platforms are effective when it comes to educating your target audience about your brand. Thus, motivating your target audience to make a purchase.

It also gives your customers an opportunity to share their opinions and reviews about your brand’s services or products. Just remember to respond to their comments. This will help you strengthen your relationships with your current customers and it can help you gain the trust of your prospects.

It’s highly recommended that you use the social platform where the majority of your target audience is present and spends most of their time. 

However, if you are new to social media, then you may start your content marketing on Facebook. According to State of Social 2018 report by Buffer, 96% of marketers use Facebook for their businesses.

For instance, Zara, a famous clothing brand, used Facebook to promote their all-new TRF collection, which is inspired by the 80s.

As you can see in the image above, the post gained more than 1.5K reactions in less than 24 hours. In the same way, you can also leverage the most suitable social media platform to promote your brand’s product or services.

Final Thoughts

Content is king; let’s make peace with it. Regardless of your niche, every brand needs to have a robust content marketing strategy. It will help you build a strong image, increase visibility, boost awareness, and increase engagement.

You can use the strategies mentioned above to generate high-quality leads and increase sales. Thus, helping you improve content marketing ROI. 

Do you know any other effective ways to boost content marketing ROI? If so, please share your thoughts in the comments.

The post How to Boost Your Content Marketing ROI in 3 Steps appeared first on SiteProNews.

The problem is that all of your competitors are also likely to focus on the same keywords. And chances are, some of them might already be ranking for relevant keywords in your niche. So, you need to focus on finding keywords that have low competition and yet, high search volumes.

Low-competition keywords are crucial because your competitors might not have used them yet. So, they can help you acquire top ranks in search engine results. They can also help you generate high-quality organic traffic to your website.

Having said that, it’s not easy to find low-competition keywords. Here are some ways you can find and select relevant low-competition keywords:

1. Start with Keyword Research

This is the first step in the process of finding low-competition keywords. You need to conduct thorough keyword research to find keywords that are relevant to your niche and business.

One way to do that is to use Google searches. You should search for your primary keyword on Google and make sure to note the results.

Say, your keyword is “diabetes health care,” you need to search for this keyword on Google. The search engine provides you with the approximate number of results available for that keyword.

If the number of available is equal to or less than 1,000,000, you can consider the search term to be having a decent search volume. This can be your first step to finding low-competition keywords with high search volume.

The next step is to conduct searches with “allinurl,” “allintitle,” and “allintext.” Perform an “allinurl” search and note down the number of search results. These are the results in which the page URL includes the keyword.

Similarly, search for your keyword with “allintitle.” The search results will include posts that have the keyword in their titles.

If the number of these search results is less than or equal to 1000, you have a chance to rank for the keyword. Performing searches using these terms can help you find low-competition keywords, which are comparatively easier to rank for.

You can also search for your potential keyword with “allintext.” If the number of search results with “allintext” are greater than the number of original search results by 50% or more, you should not target the keyword.

This exercise will help you understand how competitive your main keywords are.

2. Find Long-Tail Low-Competition Keywords

Now that you have an idea of how competitive your broad keywords are, it’s time to discover long-tail keywords. Ensure that your long-tail keywords are related to your main keywords.

Low-competition long-tail keywords can help you drive more organic traffic to your website. They can also help you drive qualified leads and can lead to more conversions. This will help you get an edge over your competitors.

Long-tail keywords usually consist of three or more words. When you search for your main keyword on Google, they appear as related searches towards the end of search results.

Say, your main keyword is “how to blog.” When you search for it, Google suggests you to also look for related search terms.

In this case, you can target long-tail keywords such as:

• How to blog for free
• How to start a blog and make money
• How to start a blog on WordPress

To simplify the process of finding low competition long-tail keywords, you can use Google Auto Suggest, Keyword Tool, and Google Search Related Terms. This can make the job easier for you.

1. Google Auto Suggest

When you type in a keyword, Google Auto Suggest will show you some of the frequently searched terms by users. The suggestions that appear here are more likely to have a high demand. Targeting these keywords might prove beneficial to improving your SEO.

2. Keyword Tool

I would also recommend that you use free tools like Keyword Tool. This tool can make it easier for you to find relevant yet low-competition long-tail keywords.

The free version of this tool allows you to generate more than 750 long-tail keyword recommendations for every term you search. You can filter the list based on your target country.

3. Google Search Related Terms

In my opinion, this is one of the most effective ways to find low-competition long-tail keywords. Just like Google Auto Suggest, the keywords that appear under “related searches” on Google also have a high search volume.

All you need to do is to search for your potential low-competition keywords and scroll down to the bottom of the page. Here you will find some of the most frequently used, related search terms for your main keywords.

These long-tail keywords can help you beat your competitors and secure high rankings in search engine results.

3. Analyze Top Web Pages for Your Keywords

Merely adding low-competition keywords to your content might not ensure high rankings in search engine results. Let me break this down for you.

You might have identified and created a list of relevant low-competition keywords. Now, it is time to analyze the top web pages for these keywords.

Check out the top posts that are ranking for your target keywords to see how your competitors have optimized their content. Analyzing the top-performing content on your keywords can improve your chances of outranking them.

You can check your competitors’ content for parameters such as Page Authority, Domain Authority, and the number of high-quality backlinks, and social shares.

This analysis will help you figure out the strategies that are working well for your competitors. You can identify their strengths and weaknesses, and use this to your advantage to secure high search results rankings.

However, you should not copy their strategies as is. In fact, you should tweak their successful strategies to best meet your business goals.

Sometimes, the biggest opportunities could come from your competitors. I recommend that you should leverage an effective competitor analysis tool such as SpyFu to turn threats into opportunities.

This tool enables you to examine your competitors’ content and keywords. You can also identify the domains that are your closest competitors and beat them one by one.

Identifying the low-competition keywords they are using can help you outrank them in less time and effort. You can target those keywords to improve your search results rankings and drive more high-quality organic traffic to your website.

4. Create Engaging Content

Now that you have analyzed your competitors’ content and identified the low-competition keywords they use, it’s time to create engaging content.

Make sure that you create content that satisfies user intent and answers their queries perfectly. I would recommend that you should follow the below tips to create great content:

• Create long-form content (more than 2000 words). High-quality long-form content can help you rank better as compared to shorter pieces. Also, include relevant visuals such as images, videos, and/or infographics in your content.
• Write short sentences and paragraphs. Use bullets wherever possible to make the content easy-to-read and grab the attention of your target audience.
• If possible, include your low-competition keywords in subheadings. This will not only help you get the attention of your readers but also help you rank better in search results.
• In addition to all of these, make sure that you create original content. To avoid any sort of plagiarism issues, I would suggest that you check your content with plagiarism checker tools such as Copyscape.

Final Thoughts

Keywords have a huge impact on your search results rankings. So, you need to perform effective keyword research and find low-competition keywords for your niche.

Make sure that you analyze what’s working well for your competitors and what isn’t. It is important to identify the keywords they are ranking for.

Targeting the low-competition keywords they are using can help you outrank them faster and drive more high-quality organic traffic to your website.

Do you know of any other ways to find low-competition keywords? Please feel free to share your preferred strategies in the comments below.

The post How to Find Low-Competition Keywords and Dominate Your Competition appeared first on SiteProNews.

While you can’t exactly cut out any of the steps in the process, you can surely streamline things a bit to make the process more efficient. 

In this post, we have listed 7 of the most effective ways to streamline your application development process. These tips will help you reduce the time and effort spent on various tasks and make the process more efficient.

So, let’s dive in deep and take a look at the best ways to streamline the application development process.

1. Optimize Requirement Gathering and Prototyping

Requirement gathering and prototyping is one of the initial stages of any application development process. And, it takes up quite a lot of time, if done manually. 

Therefore, a lot of app developers are moving away from gathering requirements on pen and paper and going digital. 

There are many ways in which you can streamline your requirement gathering process. However, the easiest and most effective way is to use requirement management and simulation software. 

This type of software can drastically reduce your requirement gathering time, as well as optimize the whole requirement management process. Some software, like iRise, also provides quick and effective prototyping to validate requirements.

Additionally, this type of software can also help improve the efficiency of your internal team’s communications, which can further reduce your app development time.

2. Build a Library of Frequently-Used Codes

One pro tip that expert developers can tell you is that you should maintain a library of all of your commonly-used codes. If you do this, then you don’t have to code and recode again and again.

It is simply more efficient to keep all of the frequently-used codes organized and at your disposal. So, the next time you need something similar, you don’t have to start from scratch again. As a developer, this is probably the single most useful tip to crank out an app quickly.

Maintaining a code library helps speed up the whole app development process and makes it more efficient.

And, if you want, you can also use some of the already-established common-code libraries for Android and other platforms.

For example, Store is a library that can be used for data storage, retrieval, and caching. And, LeakCanary is a library that can help you identify any memory leaks in your apps.

You can use these libraries for multiple apps and don’t need to do the coding for these every single time. 

Also, be cognizant of the fact that you don’t use too much of this common code. And that you actually spend some time building the core code that is unique for each app. It should be a good balance and you should use these libraries only for commonly-used, repetitive codes.

So, set up these libraries for all routine and repetitive tasks that you need to perform for most apps. These will be the tasks where you can save time so that you focus better on the core code for any particular app.

3. Design an App Infrastructure

This also works in a similar way as maintaining a code library. It lays down a foundation for all future app development, thus speeding up the process.

You can design a basic infrastructure that you customize and build on while developing a variety of apps. This will save you the time and effort required to start from scratch every time you start developing an app.

This basic infrastructure would obviously need to be modified and customized for each app. However, it can still save you a lot of time, even months, if you have a basic infrastructure ready to use.

4. Select the Platforms and Limit to Just a Few

There are a lot of platforms for app development apart from the more popular Android and iOS. But that does not mean that you have to develop your app for all of them.

You can limit your application development to just a few platforms and that will save you a substantial amount of time and effort. For mobile apps, Android and Apple have a sort of duopoly and they cover a majority of the mobile users.

So, if you focus only on these two, you will not lose out on many users and will be able to launch your apps quicker. 

5. Optimize the Testing Process

Testing your app and taking customer feedback to improve it is an essential part of the application development process. And, if you can optimize it, it will help streamline the whole process to make it more efficient.

The first thing that you can do to optimize it is to start testing from an early stage. This will help you remove all kinks right from the beginning.

Have well-established testing procedures that enable you to collect the right data and document it properly. You should have clear guidelines in place on how to conduct these tests, after researching the best testing methodologies and tools.

Use tools that can help you save time and manage the whole testing process efficiently.

6. Use Tools and Technologies to Automate Application Deployment

There are several useful tools in the market that can help you automate your application deployment and make the process faster. Tools like Docker and Kubernetes can help you quickly scale up without the need to increase your team size.

Moreover, these tools work across various platforms or infrastructure and can help you develop and deploy apps on different platforms.

These work well with containerized apps and can group app containers to form logical units that are much easier to manage. If you need clarity on exactly how these systems work, you can find several online resources. You can check out this Docker tutorial that can tell you everything you need to know before using it.

7. Build a Centralized Enterprise App Store

Enterprise app stores are centralized platforms where you can list all of your internal apps as well as approved third-party apps for your employees. This way, they can find a list of all approved apps that they can use to improve their work and productivity. And, more importantly, it will prevent them from downloading or using any apps that might not be safe for use.

This is a good way for companies to keep track of the apps that their employees use via company-owned or their own devices connected to the company network. This enhances security as well as makes it easier for your team to find the tools that they need.

Conclusion

Streamlining your application development process can help you save a lot of time, effort, and money. It will eliminate all unnecessary tasks and optimize routine tasks to improve your overall process efficiency.

The expert tips mentioned above are tried and tested ways of streamlining your application development process. Leverage these during your next app development and see the results for yourself.

If you know of any other ways to streamline the application development process, share them with us in the comments section.

The post 7 Ways to Streamline Your Application Development Process appeared first on SiteProNews.

You need to organize your website’s content and help Google understand what the user needs to see. By ranking for long-tail keywords, you can improve your website’s search rankings. 

Let’s take a look at how you can create your website’s SEO strategy from scratch for 2019. 

1. Keyword Research

This is the first and most important step in creating an SEO strategy. Start by researching keywords that your audience is likely to search for. These are the keywords you need to target for your SEO. 

Once you’ve identified these keywords, you can use tools such as KWFinder to find more information about them. You can find their variations and see their search volumes as well as the difficulty of ranking for each. This way, you can narrow down a list of keywords that you need to target.

Once you have your list of keywords, you need to dig in a little further and find long-tail keywords. These are ideally sub-topics of the keywords that you’ve identified. Long-tail keywords help you rank for exactly the topic you’ve written about. 

For instance, if you create content around the keyword “SEO,” you will find it difficult to rank for that exact keyword. Additionally, you may end up competing with your own pages in search results. 

Instead, using keywords like “how to create an SEO strategy” or “easy SEO hacks” can help you rank better in the SERPs.

Such sub-topics will create a topic cluster. Google uses these topic clusters to connect people to relevant search results. 

2. Create Quality Content

Once you have your list of keywords and long-tail keywords, you need to start creating content around them. Content doesn’t necessarily mean just articles. It can also be videos, webinars, infographics, and others. 

This content should be high-quality and should provide value to the readers/viewers. You also need to use the keywords in appropriate places where Google can find them. Add them to the headers, page titles, meta descriptions, and the URLs as well. 

Informative content which is written well will attract the attention of readers. You must also keep in mind that when you write your copy, that you do not overload it with keywords. Your articles should ideally have a keyword density of about 0.5-1%.

Write the copy for your readers and make sure that it satisfies user intent. This will help you rank better according to Google’s RankBrain algorithm. 

The length of your blog posts matters as well and is taken into account by the search engines. Longer articles usually rank higher than ones which are shorter in length. 

3. Optimize Your Visual Content

SEO of textual content might be easy. However, you also need to optimize your visual content for the search engines. 

Unlike text, images and videos cannot be read by search engines. You need to tell the search engines what they contain. This can be done using proper titles and alt tags so that the search engines can read them. 

The alt text provides information to search engines regarding the content of your media files. Similarly, the title text can be used to further describe what exactly the content is about. 

Try adding the keywords to the alt and title text as they can make your content seem more relevant to Google. Images and videos can even catch the attention of people who’re visiting your website. So, make sure you use high-quality content there as well. 

4. Build Backlinks

Google uses links between different pages and websites to figure out how they are connected. It is on the basis of these links that the search engine determines the authority of a website. A website’s content is considered more valuable when other high-authority sources are linking to it. These links are called backlinks. 

The most simple version of backlinks is natural backlinks. They are the ones that are created without you putting in any extra effort. To get more backlinks, you can reach out to the webmasters of websites in your niche. You can then ask them to include your website’s links in their content. 

Approach only those websites which have a high domain authority. Backlinks from these websites will add value to your SEO. You need to keep such SEO tactics in mind when you build links. To find the domain authority of a website, you can use the Moz Link Explorer.

Another great way of getting backlinks is by guest posting. You can write a high-quality guest post on another website and link it back to your website. This way, you’ll not only improve your SEO but also get some valuable traffic. 

5. Utilize Social Media Well 

SEO doesn’t directly get affected by your brand’s presence on social media. However, indirectly, social media does affect your SEO. When you post content on social media, it’ll be seen by your followers and other people. 

Chances are that some of them may like your content and link your content to an article on their website. This way, you can easily get a natural backlink without much effort. Another added advantage of social media is that you can get valuable traffic on your website. 

When you post high-quality content regularly, people will start seeing you as an authority in your niche. This can not only increase your fan-following but can even increase engagement and traffic to your website. 

You should also regularly interact with your audience. This is because they are the very people who may share your content and increase your brand’s reach. 

6. Measure Your Success

You need to continuously keep track of how well your SEO strategy is working. Track your progress on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis to figure out what’s working and what’s not.

You should analyze the daily organic traffic that you get from searches. Keep track of your backlinks and remove the ones which are broken. You should also check which keywords you’re ranking for and which pages are ranking under each keyword. This way, you can find out how successful your SEO strategy is. 

Final Thoughts

As we enter 2019, the digital landscape is only getting more crowded. To stand apart from your competition, you need to plan and execute your SEO strategy to perfection. You need to target the right keywords and produce high-quality content regularly. Build as many quality backlinks from high authority websites as possible. This will ensure that you will rank higher in search results. 

Do you have any other tips to share for creating an SEO strategy for 2019? Let us know in the comments section below.

The post How to Create an SEO Strategy for 2019 appeared first on SiteProNews.

The message is clear — if you want your business to grow, you need to get on Instagram. It can be a great platform to showcase your products or services and build a loyal audience base. Instagram can really boost your brand awareness and visibility.

But for that, you need to ensure that you get your social media strategy right for Instagram. Instagram’s algorithm is constantly changing, but it always favors accounts that get more engagement. 

If you get good engagement, Instagram will make sure you get more visibility. Your posts will be more likely to get featured on the Explore page if people are consistently liking and commenting on them. 

But how can you get more Instagram engagement? Let’s take a look at a five ways that have helped some of the biggest brands grow their Instagram engagement. 

1. Post Creative and Good Quality Content

Good quality content is the key to increasing your Instagram engagement. If your content resonates with your target audience, they will automatically respond to it. Good content makes your business more memorable too. So you can expect likes and comments to follow.

Instagram is a medium that places a special emphasis on great visuals. You need to make sure you are posting images with vivid colors and thoughtful, engaging composition.

To make your photos stand out, editing is also crucial. If you aren’t skilled in editing or you don’t want to spend the time editing photos yourself, you can get professional help from apps like Mendr. They have certified pros available 24/7 who will edit your photos for you in a matter of minutes. Just  upload your photos to the app and request the edits you want. Your edited photo is delivered back to you quickly.  

Instagram Stories are also a great way to capture your audience’s attention. Social media users have very short attention spans. So you need to make sure that you have an interesting hook in the first few seconds. Try to get as much action or movement in the beginning. This way you can get the audience interested so that they don’t just scroll to the next post.

A part of creating quality content also involves the art of storytelling. Good content alone never sells anything. Your audience shouldn’t feel like they are seeing promotional content when they looking at your posts. Instead, try to connect with them through compelling stories.

Microsoft’s Instagram handles have some really interesting stories. Their posts tell the stories of their partners and show how Microsoft is helping them. Similarly, they also post on Instagram if one of their employees has achieved something noteworthy. This way, they give deeper insights into the company culture. 

2. Post at the Right Times

To increase your Instagram visibility, you need to post content consistently. To maximize your reach, you should post your content at the right times. You should analyze when your target audience is more likely to be active on Instagram. If you post during that time interval, you will have a better chance of getting more engagement.

Sprout Social conducted a study to find out the best times to post on social media channels. They found out that Thursday was the best day to post on Instagram, while Sunday was the worst. Their results are based on how people responded to posts of other brands. 

Your brand may or may not follow the general trend. If you want to know the best times to post for your brand, you can use the Preview app. It will tell you your best time and day to post and interact with your audience. 

This information can be really helpful if you are planning to conduct a big product launch or make any other special announcement. The right timing can help you reach out to a bigger audience and get better engagement. 

3. Use Relevant Hashtags

Hashtags are a great way to reach out to an audience who may not be following your account. If you are using the right hashtags, you will find an audience that is interested in your posts. 

For example, if you are posting related to Wimbledon, you should definitely use #Wimbledon in your posts. Along with it, use variations of the main term too. #Wimbledon2018, #WimbledonChampionship and #Wimbledonmatch are some of the related hashtags that you can use. 

However, generic terms should always be avoided. Terms like #tennis and #lawntennis are also related, but they are too broad. So they won’t really attract users who are specifically searching for posts related to Wimbledon.

You should also check the search volume for each hashtag before using it. For trending events, the hashtag search volume is likely to reach the millions. But for other general posts, try to avoid generic hashtags with massive search volumes. Your post can easily get lost in the sea of posts that have used the same hashtags.

Instagram allows users to use as many as 30 hashtags per post. However, a survey by Sprout Social found that posts with nine hashtags get the most engagement.

You should keep a constant tab on your posts to see which hashtags are working well for you. Use them as often as you can in other posts. 

4. Host Contests

Hosting a contest on your Instagram account is an easy way to get more people to notice you. If you are giving away freebies or discounts, more people will be motivated to engage with you. To get your contest noticed, you should follow these tips:

• Create a branded hashtag for your contest.
• Encourage users to like, comment, and tag their friends on your posts to enter the contest.
• Encourage users to use your brand’s hashtag on their personal posts.
• Give away your product as the prize.
• Give discount codes to winners for future purchases.

Earthpix, an Instagram handle that focuses on travel, uses this strategy at regular intervals to grow their Instagram engagement. They partnered with other handles and asked users to follow them.

They also encouraged users to like and tag their friends in the post. This way they helped their partners get more followers while also increasing engagement on their own handle. Their post got more than 70,000 likes and 29,000 comments.

5. Encourage Users to Generate Content for You

The best way to advertise your product subtly is to get users to endorse you. Encourage users to post photos, videos, and GIFs with your branded hashtags. Encourage them to tag you in their captions and posts. This way, you can delve deeper into their network of friends.

You can also feature user-generated content on your Instagram handle. Getting featured on your page can be a motivating factor for people to endorse you. This way you can have a diverse mix of content on your Instagram.

WeWork, a company that provides coworking spaces, features posts from their users on Instagram almost every day. By doing so, they have managed to build a community of Instagrammers who are interested in their content.

Conclusion

Getting your product and services noticed on Instagram is vital to grow a loyal audience for your brand on social media. It can help your brand gain more visibility and brand awareness over time. 

The key to ensuring that your Instagram handle is attracting potential customers is to drive more engagement. Getting Instagram engagement can be a time-consuming process, but with the right strategies you can achieve remarkable results.

Are there other strategies that have helped you get better engagement on Instagram? Please share your suggestions and experiences in the comments section below.

The post How to Enhance Your Instagram Posts for Better Engagement appeared first on SiteProNews.

Studies show that on desktops, the top-ranking page in Google search results has a conversion rate of almost 35%. And on mobile devices, its conversion rate is almost 32%. This shows how important it is to improve your search engine ranking and boost your site’s visibility.

SEO helps you optimize your website so that more users are able to find you on the internet. 61% of marketers say that SEO is a top priority when it comes to inbound marketing. This means that the competition is getting tougher. You need to build your brand’s presence online by taking steps to improve search engine rankings. 

Optimization of keywords, meta tags, title tags, and URLs are some of the common ways to improve a website’s SEO. But with changes and updates in how search engines rank a website, you need more than that. That is where on-page and off-page SEO come in. And this post is going to focus on on-page SEO.

On-page SEO involves optimizing a web page through internal organization, while off-page SEO refers to external configurations. 

Here are some of the best ways you can improve your on-page SEO:

1. Maintaining Website Speed

47% of customers believe that it shouldn’t take longer than 2 seconds for a web page to load. And even a second of delay can reduce your pageviews by 11%, and your conversions by 7%. A fast loading website is the key to an engaged audience. On the other hand, a slow-loading page makes people impatient, which leads to a higher bounce rate. 

For Google, a website that loads faster gets a higher ranking in search engines. Google’s PageSpeed Insights helps you determine the total time taken for your website to load. Once you know what’s slowing you down, you can take the necessary steps to improve your website speed. 

2. Using AMP

Mobiles account for over 50% of website traffic, and this number is only going to increase in the coming years. For this, it is important that websites load almost as fast on mobiles as they do on desktops. This is what led to the creation of Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP.

AMP is nothing but a coding standard that helps websites load instantly on mobile phones. When you do a simple Google search, all the top-ranking results have an AMP tag, especially when it comes to news stories. You’ll be able to see a little lightning bolt symbol on top. 

Although it is not owned by Google, it has the company’s support. This basically means that when it comes to indexing websites, Google’s search engine algorithm will consider AMP. With AMP, websites have seen a 20% increase in sales conversions. 

3. Responsive Site

A responsive site means that the site has been designed to cater to the design needs of different devices. In 2015, Google announced that mobile-friendliness of a website will be an important criteria in search engine rankings.

Mobile search optimization is important for strong on-page SEO since there are more people using smartphones. At least 90% of people in the U.S. use a smartphone. People use smartphones for searches to buy things, to read, and to access social media. 

Desktop websites are heavy and cannot load as well on mobiles and tablets. To improve user experience, businesses need a responsive design so that desktop, mobile, and tablet users all have the same experience. The idea is to ensure that the website understands which device is in use, and then adapts to it. 

4. Creating Engaging Content

Nothing beats good content when it comes to search engine rankings. Original and relevant content gets a better search ranking. 

For Google to crawl a website, the content needs to be at least 500 words. In fact, the average length of articles on the first page of Google ranking is 1,890 words. Long-form content of over 1,000 words tends to get more likes and shares. This means more visibility in search engines.

Make sure that the content is written in a simple and concise way. People should be able to understand what you’re saying so they can stay engaged, otherwise they will simply bounce away. 

Using Long-tail Keywords for Optimizing Content

Keyword optimization is important when it comes to SEO but with long-tail keywords, your website will get more diverse and relevant traffic. There will be plenty of websites which may be using same or similar generic keywords but if you want to target your niche, you need to stand out.

A long-tail keyword may not be used very often in search engines but they lead to a target relevant audience. Long-tail keywords are valuable and more specific to a customer’s needs. Run a competitors search and figure out all good keywords that your competitor is targeting then start from there to get some traction. There could be 100’s of long tail keywords to monitor for which your website might be ranking but that are unknown to you. A ranking tracking tool like ProRankTracker can be a great help in this area.

5. Use of Internal Links

Internal links connect a web page with another page on the same website. If your web page contains 2-3 internal links, then it helps the search engine determine the relationship between the pages. A search engine crawler then gets an idea what your website is all about and then ranks your site accordingly.

That’s why internal links are important for good on-page SEO. They help a user navigate your website smoothly. And even for a search engine crawler, if there are no internal links, those web pages are left out of indexing and they simply don’t exist. A good website should have links to other relevant internal pages spread out evenly throughout the website.

6. Use of HTTPs

In 2014, Google made HTTPS encryption for URLs a ranking signal. HTTPS or Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure is basically a website security certificate known as the SSL or Secure Socket Layer certificate. 

This makes any kind of data breach difficult by making any external sharing of data almost impossible. HTTPS makes a website trusted by Google. It is very important for ecommerce and banking websites especially when more people are making online transactions.

It is believed that HTTPS enabled sites get a very minor boost in search engine rankings, but it is still important for on-page SEO, especially since Chrome puts a “not secure” mark on non-HTTPS sites. Seeing this mark could alarm many of your visitors, who could end up leaving soon after landing on your site. This will increase your bounce rate, affecting your search ranking. 

7. Use of Structured Data

Structured data is nothing but organized data. In SEO, structured data means a markup on the web page that provides more details about its content. It helps search engines to go through your website and understand what it is about.

Search engines like Google have a markup tool that can help you with structured data for your website for improving on-page SEO. Structured data means enhanced search results with more images, videos, GIFs and other styling elements. This increases click-through rates and drives traffic.

Conclusion 

Google, the undisputed market leader in search engines, has made a lot of changes in its search algorithm in the last few years. With these new factors for website ranking such as good loading speed, AMP, HTTPS, internal links, structured data, and engaging content, SEO has become all the more technical. 

Boosting on-page SEO through these techniques is time-consuming, and can be a problem for someone who doesn’t understand these technicalities. If you know more ways to improve on-page SEO, let us know in the comments below.

The post 7 Ways You Can Make On-Page SEO Strong appeared first on SiteProNews.

Ecommerce also makes it possible for people to shop from the comfort of their homes (to avoid traffic, lines and wasting time). And it has allowed budding entrepreneurs to set up businesses quickly and with a low overhead cost.

But starting an ecommerce business is not as easy as it sounds. With so many ecommerce platforms available, how do you know you’re choosing the right one?

Before making this big decision, do your research with regards to the following important ecommerce features:

Web Security

Ecommerce sites receive and deal with a lot of sensitive customer information, including names, addresses, contact details, and credit card information. Because of this, it’s important to choose an ecommerce platform that supports security measures such as HTTPS and SSL.

This is important since Google is penalizing sites that are not HTTPS compliant. Also, ensure that the platform you choose is also payment card industry (PCI) compliant.

Platform Price

There are many different types of ecommerce solutions for every need and budget. Even when you’re just starting out, the cheapest solution isn’t necessarily the ideal choice.

Colton Chorpenning, marketing lead of Veppo, made a costly $30,000 mistake when he switched the company’s ecommerce platform from their original choice to a new one, then back again to the original (BigCommerce to Shopify Plus to BigCommerce again).

Initially, he had taken a more one-dimensional look at costs, which became easier to justify when comparing performance on a different ecommerce platform.

When doing research regarding ecommerce platform costs, find out if you will be paying a flat monthly fee or if you will have to increase payments every time you want to add bandwidth, server storage, apps, and plugins. Make sure to include extra or miscellaneous costs, such as web development fees or salaries into your ecommerce platform budget.

On a final note, your ecommerce platform is what you’ll use to run your business, so don’t skimp on it.

Plenty of Payment Options

Ideally, the ecommerce platform you choose supports a variety of payment options.

Many ecommerce websites accept Paypal and credit cards as a payment option, which works for most purposes and customers. If your ecommerce website serves countries where Paypal is not accepted, you’ll have to plan for alternative payment methods.

Ecommerce Integrations

Today’s top ecommerce platforms are easily customizable. They offer plugins and integrations that can extend functionality depending on the online shop’s needs.

Some important integrations or plugins to consider for your ecommerce store include:

• Accounting software – to keep track of sales, inventory, taxes, revenue and profits
• Email marketing/automation platform – to get the word out about sales, new products, and to send abandoned cart emails
• Fraud management tools

If supported by the ecommerce platform you decide on, you can make use of Amazon Marketplace compatibility to sell your items on Amazon—a large existing marketplace.

As a general rule, choose an ecommerce platform that allows for many different types of integrations so that you can completely customize it to your needs.

But don’t forget to read reviews before an extensive integration overhaul—you’ll want to understand how these apps integrate with your ecommerce platform (and other installed integrations).

Ecommerce Scalability

No entrepreneur starts a business without the hope that it will grow.

When you’re starting out, you probably won’t be using all of the ecommerce features available to you. But that doesn’t mean that you won’t eventually make use of them. It’s nice to know that they’re there when you need them.

When choosing an ecommerce platform, make sure that there is potential for growth and expansion. But at the same time, ensure that scalability is affordable. Picking a platform that can grow with you means that you won’t have to worry about the costs and frustrations that go alongside site migration and learning a new ecommerce platform.

Customer Service

Although ecommerce shops have very low overhead costs, one of the main weaknesses of an ecommerce business is its dependence on the internet and software.

If your ecommerce software stops working or the web server breaks down, your customers won’t be able to access your shop. The longer it takes to resolve the issue, the more lost revenue potential. If you aren’t particularly tech savvy, you’ll certainly need help with troubleshooting every time this happens.

With this in mind, here are a few things to question regarding an ecommerce platform’s customer service offerings:

• Quickness in response time
• Availability—Is the service available 24/7?
• Number of communication channels—can you reach them via phone, email, social media, and live chat?
• Is there an additional cost to have access to customer service or is it included in the fee you paid the platform?

Mobile Responsiveness

Aside from the fact that more than half of web searches are done on mobile, mobile transactions account for 59% of all sessions on ecommerce sites. Thus, there is a need to ensure that your ecommerce site is mobile responsive across devices.

Mobile responsiveness is often a function of the website’s design but it’s important to understand how your ecommerce platform contributes to this important aspect of usability/SEO ranking factor.

SEO Ready

Ecommerce sites are sprouting up left and right like mushrooms and it can be difficult to differentiate yourself from the competition.

Your ecommerce platform must be SEO-ready so that your customers will be able to find you easily in relevant search results. Some important baseline SEO features include: ability to add a blog, ability to add customer reviews, and the ability to use your own domain name.

Web Hosting

Web hosting contributes much to the usability and user experience of your ecommerce site because it determines whether or not the site will load fast. Every time someone accesses your website, the data is retrieved from a server. If the server is slow, the user also experiences a slow-loading site.

According to Google research, 53% of visitors abandon a site that takes over 3 seconds to load.

Some ecommerce platforms, such as Shopify, offer to host your site as part of using their platform (you can also get a custom domain to personalize your site). Others, such as WooCommerce, are actually plugins that you can use on a self-hosted WordPress website to add ecommerce functionality.

If you opt to run your ecommerce platform on a self-hosted site, you’ll have more flexibility but you’ll also need to do all your own troubleshooting and maintenance—like backing up data and handling website downtime. A hosted site, on the other hand, is more ideal for beginners and usually comes with customer support.

Ease of Use

One of the most important considerations for an ecommerce platform is the ease of use with regards to both the frontend and backend operations. Your ecommerce platform might have all sorts of amazing features but if you and your team cannot understand how to use them, then what’s the use?

Remember, you and your team will be using the platform daily, so if you aren’t able to navigate it properly, it can pose a lot of inefficiencies. Similarly, the platform must also be easy to use on the front end to allow your shoppers a seamless experience.

In general, the easier your site is to use, the more sales you’ll have. Additionally, site usability is a ranking factor so if your site is easy to use, Google will take note.

Final Thoughts

Owning a business has never been easier (and cheaper) with the rapid growth and popularity of ecommerce sites (and resulting technologies). Take each of these features into consideration before you choose your ideal ecommerce platform.

Have you already chosen an ecommerce platform? Are there any things you wish you had considered before you made your decision? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

The post 10 Things You Need to Consider Before You Choose an eCommerce Platform in 2018 appeared first on SiteProNews.