The Top Underrated Digital Marketing Opportunities Most Businesses Overlook

It seems as though every brand has a strong presence online. Therefore, standing out from the crowd can be highly difficult.

With social media feeds updated every second and news articles published constantly, gaining some traction is a success for most.

However, you might be thinking of other ways to boost your visibility. Rising above others is one way to get noticed, but how can you diversify your marketing efforts?

Sometimes the best way is to apply an overlooked digital marketing technique.

Here are some of the most underrated digital marketing opportunities to improve your brand awareness.

1. Featured Snippets

Many businesses often ignore the steps of claiming the prized spot of a featured snippet.

Featured snippets are relatively new to the Google results page. They are small excerpts lifted from pages. Normally, they appear near the top of the SERP (search engine results page) — and they show up in response to an information request.

Google implemented these excerpts to resolve a user’s problem without the need to load a hosted website. Featured snippets significantly enhance the user experience. Plus, it builds trust and credibility for the site source.

Take into account that featured snippets aren’t always in the first spot of the results page. Instead, it acknowledges the language and concept of the excerpt, the page’s authority, formatting — and the most relevant answer.

Take advantage of the featured snippet by optimizing your content in natural language and identifying the context of that language. You could also consider using Schema markup to help search engines understand your content and obtain a higher chance of getting featured.

2. Offline Marketing Channels

Most businesses often don’t think about creating a strong digital marketing strategy offline. They separate digital marketing from the traditional methods because they believe it’s the only way.

With traditional marketing, you might think of having a beautifully-designed sign to attract customers outside your store. Or, maybe you’d spend time sending mail-outs to promote your brand.

Yet, it’s possible to give your traditional marketing strategies a digital twist. You’ve most likely seen standard approaches like leveraging Snapchat to offer coupons. Other methods also include QR codes or app pairing — where an app brings up online reviews instantly when you tap a phone against a product plate, for example.

Plus, paper can also do wonders for your digital marketing strategy. For instance, if you’ve created a blog post you’re proud of, you could print it out and post it at local coffee shops.

Just be sure you’ve got a URL labeled clearly, so it leads back to your website or social media profiles.

3. Virtual Reality Video Content

Of course, video conquers when telling a brand story. People connect more deeply with engaging content than the posts you see on social media feeds.

However, why not give your audience something more to experience? With the tools available at the hands of businesses, most overlook the opportunity to market with VR (virtual reality) video.

360 degrees-video is an emerging technology that businesses have the potential to use for sharing brand moments and connecting with customers.

With it being available on YouTube and Facebook, businesses can expand their content to 360 degrees-video — bringing a new depth that photos can’t capture.

If your business is all about connecting with your audience, consider posting VR-compatible video content to enhance your interaction.

4. Voice Search

Voice search is one of the most recent top investments of Google and for a good reason. The rise of mobile devices largely spurs virtual assistant technology. Therefore, voice search is becoming more commonplace for users.

With that in mind, many businesses often overlook content optimization for voice search. However, it only calls for small restructuring in your content.

For instance, you’ll need to shift your keywords in favor of longer phrases and include direct answers to queries rather than simple restatements.

Consider using the “People Also Ask” section in a Google search to find keywords and phrases to improve your search engine rankings.

You may also see other changes in the future. These might include improved natural language processing where the algorithm can dissect sarcasm, background information, intonation, etc.

For instance, an intonation could deliver optimistic content versus pessimistic according to a specific topic.

Therefore, you’ll need to understand your audience more efficiently than ever to take advantage of this digital marketing opportunity.

5. Gamification

Gamification is a gaming technique used to improve customer engagement. If you’re thinking of ways to connect with more prospects, build brand awareness and increase conversions, gamification is it.

You can gamify practically any stage of the customer journey. Contests, incentives and scoring systems are a great way to interact with potential customers. Yet, it helps to consider your goal and audience interests before building an entire campaign.

Once you have those ideas in place, you can develop a gamification approach and its incentives.

Remember, it’s always best to keep things simple. Too often, you’ll see a great campaign, but too many rules and conditions apply to participation.

6. Native Advertising

The native advertising market is rapidly growing, and now is the time to take advantage of it. According to ADYOULIKE, native advertising spending will jump by 372% from 2020 and be worth over $400 billion by 2025.

Native advertising is a paid form of advertising involving a seamless ad design on the platform they appear. Unlike banner ads, native ads are less intrusive and don’t affect the user experience.

However, many businesses are missing the opportunity to improve their content output.

Native ads are typically on social feeds, below articles and eCommerce sites. While building an effective native ad campaign takes time, the effort is worth it. These ads have higher click-through rates and are often more engaged by consumers.

To optimize your native ads for the best results, ensure you establish clear goals, choose the right advertising platform — and align the campaign content with your goals.

Own Your Digital Marketing Endeavors

While these are the most underrated digital marketing opportunities, there’s also no one-size-fits-all solution to growing your brand. Often business owners use social media as their go-to digital marketing strategy.

However, you have plenty of ways to drive great results. Consider testing different approaches and running campaigns others haven’t thought of yet. Your marketing efforts won’t go unnoticed as you stand out from the crowd.

Eleanor Hecks is editor-in-chief at Designerly Magazine. Eleanor was the creative director and occasional blog writer at a prominent digital marketing agency before becoming her own boss in 2018. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and dog, Bear.

6 SEO Trends That are Bound to Rule the Coming Decade

Optimizing and ranking your website pre-2010 era was pretty easy. You’d just have to follow simple steps like getting your website up, throwing in a bunch of keywords, writing a bit about the topic, and Voila! Google would start ranking your website on top.

However, that’s not the case anymore. Also, due to the internet revolution, the number of websites that compete with each other to rank higher exploded. Due to these reasons, it started getting difficult for search engines to crawl and index the massive database of the internet.

Today, the Google search index contains hundreds of billions of web pages and is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes. Thus, it needs a formidable way to evaluate and rank each page.

The evolution of Search Engine Optimization as seen in the last decade that ended with 2020 was, if described in one word, stellar.

Search Engines, especially Google have improved their quality and user experience by shifting their focus from keyword-oriented to quality-oriented results. And as the days pass by, SEO will keep getting evolved as and when new trends emerge.

Meanwhile, let’s see some of the SEO trends that are bound to rule the coming decade.

6 SEO Trends That Will Dominate the SERP Ranking for Coming Decade

1. Content Quality & User Intent

Yes, content quality has long been here and affects significantly on the SERP rankings. However, many websites haven’t adopted this as their SEO mantra. They are still focused on short-term SEO gains through building backlinks, optimizing technical SEO, or doing digital PR.

However, these are not suitable for long-term SEO gains. Also, due to the massive size of the database, the Google algorithm will only rank pages that offer remarkable quality on a consistent basis.

Websites creating generic content will have lower chances of ranking than the ones that publish unique, quality content on topics not covered by others previously.

One way to adopt this in your competitive content marketing strategy is by researching well for the user intent of your target audiences to scour unique topics. Now, organize and prioritize these notions by relevance and cover them one by one.

The quality content doesn’t necessarily have to be SEO-friendly but it must fulfill the users’ intent and their expectations. And if the industry leaders are to be believed, Google has long been working to detect the intent behind every search users make.

Thus, considering the value of content quality and user intent it encapsulates, this trend is bound to rule the coming years as a SERP ranking signal.

2. SEO Automation

From admin workflows to IT services and marketing, automation has proven its effectiveness. SEO practices such as website audits, competitor analysis, search intent detection, and many others have already been automated. And from 2022 onwards, it’ll become more widespread as more SEO professionals around the world increasingly adopt automation with open arms.

Driven by AI and machine learning, SEO automation can intelligently do technical audits to scour issues by content type. Also, many SEO experts utilize SEO automation as quality assurance for their SEO services.

Moreover, AI-powered automation tools monitor potential SEO issues in real-time and warn as soon as possible to eliminate and resolve them beforehand. The SEO automation trend is continually picking up the pace. And it has gone from ‘nice to have’ to necessary when dealing with larger and more complex sites.

3. Mobile & Page Experience

Not so recently, Google had announced the mobile-first indexing for the whole web. And recently, it has started implementing a page experience update that aims to rank sites with better user experience scores for both mobile and web.

Thanks to this update, the entirety of the mobile and web, from the discovery phase to engagement, everything will correlate and be in sync to offer the best possible page experience.

The ripple effects of mobile-first indexing and page experience updates will cause a massive re-organization in the SERP ranking that we all can witness in the coming years. Thus, brands should start preparing their website from the onwards to not lose any significant SERP rankings.

4. SERP Localization

As per Brightlocal’s Consumer Survey, consumers that use Google for local business evaluation increased from 63% in 2020 to 81% in 2021. Also, the following graph shows that 21% of consumers use the internet every day to find information about local businesses and 99% have done so in the last year.

(Image Source)

From these statistics, we can idealize that Google will focus more on presenting localized content in the SERP results over the next few years. Already, the location-specific pages or content is outranking those who ranked at the top and focused more on global reach.

This will keep on picking up and become more obvious in the coming decade. Thus, websites with global target audiences will have to necessarily form a local presence to rank higher on localized SERP.

5. Metaverse Marketing

Metaverse marketing may seem like a new trend in the marketing sphere that’s thought to fade away with time. However, it has come a long way from being just another buzzword to a revolutionary strategy for marketers.

Metaverse can be conceptualized as the successor of the internet that we enjoy today. It brings the capabilities of the internet, virtual reality, and augmented reality together. As per Statista, there will be around a billion AR active users in 2022, which is supposed to cross the 1.7 billion mark in 2024.

Just like how brands optimize their web presence to get found on the current internet, they’ll have to find different ways to optimize their presence on the next generation of the internet i.e. Metaverse. A visual content strategy will play an important role in getting found on the Metaverse.

Audit your content strategy to find and optimize it with new content types and can implement AR, VR, and 3D experiences to leverage Metaverse marketing.

6. Voice & Visual Search

As mentioned in the previous point, visual as well as voice search will take precedence over the normal search approach.

As per one report, more than one-third of Americans use a voice search feature while 71% of consumers prefer making a voice search over typing. Another report projects that Google Smart Speaker Sales will hit 140 million in 2025.

This foreshadows that Google will prioritize the sites optimized for voice search and will feature them in the snippet results or show/speak when searched using smart assistants.

The same will apply for the visual search. After the introduction of Google Lens, the search engine giant is becoming better at interpreting SEO-optimized images day by day. The image recognition software will enable users to search for products and other things on the web.

Also, Google Discover uses images for tailored results. Thus, it’s predicted that normal search may start to resemble a lot more like Discover results filled with visuals.

Conclusion

Trends are known for their quick appeal when they appear first in the market. Many of those trends become obsolete after a certain period or when they are no longer relevant to the market. However, the above-mentioned SEO trends have been here for a few years now and we believe they’ll continue to be relevant in the coming years.

As more research and development are being conducted in the same direction, many of the trends listed in this article will go mainstream and rule the coming decade. Thus, brands need to sharpen their knowledge horns to drive sustainable and meaningful growth in the near future.

Author Bio

Hazel Raoult is a freelance marketing writer and works with PRmention. She has 6+ years of experience in writing about business, entrepreneurship, marketing, and all things SaaS. Hazel loves to split her time between writing, editing, and hanging out with her family.

Guide to All Different Types of Videos

Should all marketing videos need to be professional productions to convert consumers? Or does a sneak peek at a new product in a series of social media stories fit the bill? 

When it comes to video marketing, as long as your videos offer your target audience value, education, or entertainment, they’re all contributing to your marketing and conversion efforts. 

But what kind of videos are suitable for each section of the marketing funnel? 

The truth is some video types overlap different areas of the sales funnel. A branding video might lead directly to a sale if the customer is engaged enough. 

So what types of videos are suitable for different business goals? 

Brand Awareness And Promotion

At the top of the marketing funnel, the awareness stage is the first step towards guiding your prospect towards a sale. 

Any videos in this stage need to grab attention, hook potential customers in, and persuade them to find out more. 

Brand Videos 

Any new customer coming to your website wants to know if you align with their needs and values. Brand videos help highlight the culture and values of your business

Authenticity is high on the must-have list of consumers, so humanizing your brands has never been more important. 

You can show authenticity and humanize your brand with content like behind-the-scenes footage, employee highlights, or short spots about company culture. Short introductory videos on your home page, along with stories and short videos on social media, help customers get to know you and increase brand awareness. 

Pro tip: Don’t produce videos for the sake of it. Have an end goal in mind. Viewers will tell straight away if you aren’t being sincere. 

Explainer Videos

When a potential customer lands on your website, they have a specific problem and look to you to solve it. 

Explainer videos are great because website user attention spans are short. So by grabbing attention with a video that highlights the solution to their pain point, it keeps users on the page longer. 

Furthermore, research shows that brand videos convince 84% of people to buy after watching—excellent news for awareness, promotion, and conversion goals. 

Pro tip: Focus on one or two points to hold your audience’s attention and place the video on your home page for maximum visibility. 

Product Videos 

Educational and instructional videos improve the user experience of the consumer. Better still, they tell the viewer all the benefits of your product. 

Using product videos is a chance to show off and differentiate your product from others on the market. It’s a golden opportunity to catch buyers in the awareness stage and show them why your brand is the solution they’re seeking. 

Pro tip: Product videos shouldn’t be longer than 30 seconds to hold attention. 

Customer-Focused Videos To Increase Conversions 

Once you have your potential customers engaged, it’s time to shift them further along the sales funnel and aim to convert to a sale.

And the best way to do that? 

Use social proof. 

Customer Testimonials 

One of the best ways to get a conversion is through customer testimonials. 

Authentically sharing a customer’s opinions can increase trust in your brand. In fact, 88% of consumers say that video testimonials make them more likely to buy. 

However, a word of caution. 

Customer testimonials should never be fiction. Consumers can see through staged reviews (think the cheesy customer testimonials you see on TV adverts), which destroys credibility. So only use genuine customer views. 

Pro tip: When asking for a testimonial, provide the customer with a structure to guide them. By asking the right questions, you’ll get answers that highlight the benefits of your product. 

Case Studies 

Video is the perfect medium for case studies. It highlights the emotion of your customer and adds authenticity to the study. Sometimes the written copy isn’t enough to portray customer satisfaction in the effective way a video can. 

Pro tip: When creating video case studies, think about: 

  • What is the end goal for the case study? 
  • Who is your target audience, and does the case study target their wants and needs
  • Does the case study highlight the benefits of your product?
  • Have you structured the case study with carefully constructed questions? 

Faq Videos

Perfect for answering common customer concerns and questions, FAQ videos are quicker and easier than scrolling through written questions. It also shows your consumers that you care about their needs and want to help them.

Equally, having an FAQ page boosts your SEO and ranking as Google tends to prefer video content. 

Pro tip: Points to include in an FAQ video could consist of:

  • How to set up and how to use the product
  • Information about warranties
  • What to avoid when using the product
  • How to store the product 
  • Information about returns and exchanges

Use The Correct Type Of Video For Your Marketing Goals And Watch Your ROI Rise 

There are many other video types out there, including corporate expertise, recruitment, and webinar videos. Which video you choose to use depends on your customer research – match your video to where your target audience hangs out online, what content they want to see, and what video style best suits their needs.

Author Bio:

Torrey Tayenaka

Torrey Tayenaka is the co-founder and CEO at Sparkhouse, an Orange County based video marketing production agency. He is often asked to contribute expertise in publications like Entrepreneur, Single Grain and Forbes. Sparkhouse is known for transforming video marketing and advertising into real conversations.Rather than hitting the consumer over the head with blatant ads, Sparkhouse creates interesting, entertaining and useful videos that enrich the lives of his clients’ customers. In addition to Sparkhouse, Torrey has also founded the companies Eva Smart Shower, Litehouse & Forge54.

Clear Reasons Why You Need Digital Marketing

Your company is more than likely already aware of the various benefits of having a strong online presence. Digital Marketing seems to be the process that encompasses this entire concept, ensuring that you are able to catch your target audience’s attention through many different means. Clear reasons why you need digital marketing are all over the web, but it doesn’t hurt to have a list of reasons to make it easier for you when time is short and deadlines are looming.

There are many benefits to hiring an agency for digital marketing services, including the fact that agencies have tools and resources which you don’t. If you’re not sure about whether or not to hire an agency, here are reasons why you need one:

Agencies Have Experience

An agency has been working with different types of businesses, new and established, for many years. They’ve seen what works and what doesn’t work. You can take advantage of their experience by leaning on them for advice and guidance. Agencies know the market and won’t make mistakes that could end up hurting your online brand.

Agencies Are Creative and Innovative

Agencies have a lot of creative talent in-house, and they’re constantly striving to be at the cutting edge of online marketing strategies. They know how to create appealing, engaging adverts that will really get your brand noticed. If you want to increase your website traffic and leads, hiring an agency that specializes in digital marketing is the best way to go.

Agencies Know the Latest and Greatest Techniques

Digital marketing agencies don’t just know more about digital marketing strategies, they also have a better idea of what works and what doesn’t. Agencies are constantly up to date on the latest trends in the industry, meaning that they’re able to give you advice as well as implement new ideas for your company.

Again, agencies are always striving to be at the cutting edge of digital marketing. They know all about popular online strategies and what has worked in the past. You can take advantage of their knowledge by asking them how to improve your online marketing strategy.

Agencies Have the Right Tools and Resources

Agencies have access to the latest software, including social media apps and website analytics plugins. They can track your progress at all times, which will make it easier for you to see what’s working and what isn’t. This is especially important if you’re paying an agency per project or by the hour – it’s in their best interest that you get the right results.

When you hire an advertising agency in Egypt, you get access to a range of different tools and services which make your life easier. For instance, an agency will have specialist software that allows you to track the effectiveness of every single action that takes place on your website. This allows you to measure the effectiveness of each digital marketing strategy that you employ so that you can be sure that every dollar is well spent.

Agencies Help you to Scale Your Marketing Efforts

When you hire an agency, you’re hiring experts who know how to handle marketing for your business. If there is a demand for your product or service then agencies will be able to ramp up your marketing efforts without any extra input on your end. They’ll handle the whole process from start to finish and you’ll get more people visiting your website. If you’re spending time writing content for your blog or creating ads, then it can be tough to keep up with the demand for this content. Hiring an agency allows you to scale your marketing efforts so that greater quantities of high-quality content can be created quickly and easily.

Agencies are a Team of Highly Talented Individuals

Digital Marketing Agency in Egypt is a team effort, and individual employees need to have a variety of talents. Digital marketers need to be creative and artistic as well as highly intelligent and analytical. They also need to know about SEO, content marketing, online advertising, and much more besides. This can be a tall order for one person, so hiring an agency allows you to take advantage of the talents of a team. An agency solves all of its clients’ digital marketing needs under one roof, so there are no problems with communication. You get to work with a dedicated team of professionals who are experts in every area of digital marketing, including social media, SEO, and paid advertising.

You need Digital marketing agency in Cairo and advertising agency in Egypt because it is an effective way to reach new customers, grow your business, and compete with other businesses. It can also help you better understand your customers so that you can create content and products they will love. If you’re not sure if digital marketing is right for your business, contact us and we would be happy to discuss your specific needs.

Author Bio: Hamza Abbasi is a keynote speaker on social media strategy, LinkedIn marketing & social media marketing trainer, MediaHicon digital marketing author, and MediaHicon SEO consultant for global organizations.

5 New Types of Content for 2022

The success of your business depends on a properly structured marketing strategy. To make your marketing and content plan effective, following recent trends and bringing them into your digital marketing activities is a must. Your task is not only to attract many new customers but retain regular customers, keeping them involved in your content. Thus, we recommend implementing new types of content to your blog. 

Are you willing to know what these types of content are? We have prepared a compilation of top trends of content creation in 2022 that will boost the conversion of your website.

AI, VR\AR Innovations

Traditional ways of creating content and interacting with customers are supposed to be non-efficient and kind of outdated. Therefore, businesses of different specializations are willing to adopt innovative technologies like Artificial Intelligence. AI technology is capable of deeply analyzing the business data from internal and external sources in order to learn their customers better and provide them with the content and services they expect. AI-based content can be generated within several minutes, providing scalable analytical research and high-quality content. AI-generated content doesn’t exclude the mistakes within the text, so it is vital to check it properly before posting.

Other innovations that will be adopted by many companies in the near future are augmented and virtual reality for the purpose of increasing the content traffic and conversion, and improving the overall performance of corporate websites. These technologies help create interactive and engaging content, completely new for their regular and new customers.

Guestographics

Guestographics is considered to be one of the most effective digital marketing methods of promoting your content and increasing the credibility of your brand. This trend has appeared in 2018, but it only starts gaining momentum and being used by numerous marketers in different spheres. Have you ever heard of this tool? Basically, guestographics combine three different marketing tools – guest posting, link building, and infographics creating. The text is converted into infographics, making the text a visual type of content. The flow is simple – you look for credible websites that are interested in posting your content with links to your corporate website. You provide them with unique and engaging visual content using free plagiarism software to attract more potential customers to your company.

Guestographics can contain a bigger amount of text than we used to see on the images within articles. What is more, the number of infographics can prevail to make the content visually appealing and more convenient to read. Modern readers don’t like spending time reading the whole article, as they are willing to find out the answers to their questions. So guestographics are easier to perceive and show the main point of the content.

Video Testimonials

The block with testimonials is a must-have for businesses of all directions, with no exception. Testimonials from your previous clients show the quality of your services and make your brand trusted and reliable on the market. Sometimes the testimonials blocks look really unsightly and don’t provide any value to your potential clients. Video testimonials are a new trend used in marketing strategies. Recorded reviews for your customers give them the ability to describe your cooperation in detail, prove the existence of clients, and provide the opportunity to contact them to find out more information about the partnership with your brand. 

Another great benefit of video testimonials is the ability to share them on different social media accounts, making them notable and attracting more users to your profiles. If you own a young brand and only start building relationships with your future customers, video testimonials are obliged for your marketing strategy. Even if the amount of the client base is not really extensive, you have to start somewhere to prove the reliability and credibility of your company.

Behind the Scenes Content

Despite the industry of your business, we know that the competition is rather high. It is pivotal to find your key differentiators and uniqueness to stand out from your competitors and attract your target audience. Some brands think that they have to show the ideal picture of their services or products, avoiding any content about failures and issues they face on a daily basis.  

Behind the scenes is a new marketing flow that enables companies to tell their customers about everything related to their daily processes. A lot of people will be curious to find out more about manufacturing, main specialists and their responsibilities, concerns you struggle with, and solutions to the troubles you commonly choose as a director. When people buy an expensive dress, for instance, they are curious to know why the price is so high. By showing them the prices of fabrics, average salaries for staff, and all processes related to dress creation, your customer will have a clearer picture and prove the high price they see on labels. By the way, such tiny details as labels also require investment, which can make the price even higher, and your customers need to understand this as well.

Podcast Recordings

Marketing is changing and evolving, providing customers with various types of content. It is a great way to offer your readers different options on reading your content, considering the way they perceive the information better. The podcast is another modern method to attract your regular and potential customers to your brand. This format is ideal for busy people who don’t have much free time reading the articles and can listen to your content on the go or when they are occupied with other tasks at the same time. 

Podcasts can be related to the topics on your blog, but you cannot just convert your articles into audio format. It has to be something fresh and unique, followed by a particular script. You can invite the outstanding specialists in your industry, the professionals from your team to discuss the internal processes more to show trust to your target audience. A small tip from the writing service Rated By Students is to properly choose the speakers for your podcasts to provide listeners with valuable content, not just useless conversation. 

Bottom Line

Following the latest marketing trends is pivotal for your marketing strategy in order to keep up with the competitors and stay in-game. Although, all these digital content innovations aim not only to promote your brand, but also to increase content traffic and conversion. Your content must provide valuable insights and solutions to the troubles of your regular and new customers.

 The decision of what article they will read next depends on their needs and concerns they want to overcome. Your task is to make your content easy to perceive, modern and interactive to make the reading a pleasant process for your audience. 

What new types of content did you like most of all?

Author’s Bio:


Max Mitchell is the latest alumnus of our content marketing department. He is very passionate about typing, creating complicated spreadsheets, and consuming an inhuman amount of caffeine. Nevertheless, he is also the creative type of individual who will always find a new perspective on topics of interest.

The Benefits of Technical SEO

Nowadays, having a fully functional website is of the utmost importance.

Modern consumers have high expectations, needs and demands. If the website they’re currently browsing cannot meet those expectations or needs, consumers will simply bounce right off.

Fortunately for web owners, there are ways to provide their potential customers with whatever they want.

This is where SEO (Search Engine Optimization) comes in. SEO is a marketing strategy that allows companies to meet consumer needs when it comes to a seamless browsing experience while promoting their businesses online.

You’re basically hitting two birds with one stone. The process in charge of meeting consumer demands is called technical SEO. As its name suggests, technical SEO covers every aspect of a website’s functionality, such as page speed, security and so on.

That being said, most consumer pain points are related to website performance and functionality. For example, pages that take too long to load irritate consumers and force them to bounce.

Technical SEO takes care of such issues and ensures that search engines, such as Google, look favorably upon websites that have consumers’ best interests in mind.

With that in mind, here are a few benefits of technical SEO.

Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

1. Improved website speed

As mentioned above, page loading time is one of the major pain points for consumers. If your pages aren’t loading fast enough, you will lose a lot of traffic and potential customers. The main reason is that modern consumers simply don’t tolerate sluggish websites.

That said, even if it takes one second longer for your pages to load than what consumers expect it will result in a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, 11% decrease in page views and 7% decrease in conversion rates.

This can have a huge negative impact on your bottom line. Page loading time and overall website speed are part of the technical SEO domain.

There are plenty of things you can do to improve your website speed using technical SEO techniques alone. Here are a few examples.

  • Server file compression.
  • Code minification.
  • Browser caching.
  • Image optimization.
  • Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) for mobile optimization.

With technical SEO, you can eliminate all the issues that can slow down your website and page loading time. This will improve customer experience and give your rankings a much-needed boost.

After all, website speed is, in fact, one of the major ranking signals. The fact of the matter is that page loading time affects user experience the most.

Search engines, such as Google, want to provide consumers with the best results possible. That means that they’ll check not just the accuracy and value of information but also factors that will affect browsing experience like website speed does.

2. Mobile optimization

As you already know, the number of mobile users has grown significantly over the past few years. As of 2021, the number of mobile users worldwide reached 7.1 billion. That number is expected to reach 7.49 billion by 2025.

It’s safe to say that most online consumers are browsing the web using a mobile device. Search engines, such as Google have been aware of this trend for some time now. This is why Google released their mobile-first indexing update which will give favorable rankings to mobile-friendly websites.

Once again, technical SEO can help you optimize your website for mobile devices. One of the ways it can help you is by ensuring that your responsive design is properly implemented and fully functional.

Some of the best marketing companies advise that all companies should focus on optimizing for mobile, especially if they are leveraging SEO. The main reason is mobile-friendliness will not only benefit your SEO efforts but also help your company acquire more leads and more organic web traffic.

Technical SEO makes sure that your website features and content are performing well on mobile devices. That way you guarantee an exceptional browsing experience to all customers, regardless of which devices they might be using to browse your website.

Technical SEO will also help you test various other features on your website to help you determine if they are mobile-friendly or not. It can even also help you implement the best practices that will ensure that your entire website is, in fact, mobile-friendly.

Photo by Ilya Pavlov on Unsplash

3. Page indexing

One of the main benefits of SEO is improved online visibility. However, search engines must be able to crawl and index your pages so that they can rank them properly.

Moreover, search engines must be able to understand the context of your pages so that they can match them with user intent. That’s why you must ensure that search engine crawlers can do their job so that you actually benefit from SEO. Technical SEO is also responsible for this part.

Every time you add a new page or an individual piece of content, you have to ensure that those pages and content are properly indexed.

In addition, you want to avoid redirects, errors, broken links and other inconveniences that will prevent search engine crawlers from doing what they do best. That’s why technical SEO is mandatory.

Here are a few ways technical SEO can help you with page indexing and other factors.

  • Help you track and fix server errors.
  • Help you prevent loop redirects.
  • Helps you identify URL blocking by robots.txt files.
  • Helps you identify “noindex” tags.
  • Helps you fix 404 errors.
  • Helps you locate and fix duplicate content.

When you eliminate or fix the most common problems that hinder search engine crawling, you can boost your rankings and allow search engines to properly index your pages.

4. Website architecture

Website or simply site architecture is very important to both your users and search engines.

From the user’s point of view, site architecture represents website navigation and content hierarchy that allows them to seamlessly browse your website and find what they’re looking for with ease.

On the other hand, search engines use your site architecture to navigate the pages and determine should the page be indexed or not. It also helps search engine crawlers understand the connection between your internal links.

The more pages your website has, the more important site architecture becomes.

Technical SEO can help you create an ideal architecture that will meet the needs of both users and search engines. Here are a few examples.

  • Categorizes and organizes the pages on your website.
  • Helps create SEO-friendly URLs for seamless navigation.
  • Focuses on creating sitemaps to help crawlers with page indexing.
  • Creates internal link hierarchy to point search engine crawlers towards pages with more authority.

This allows you to retain your audience’s interest by providing them with additional content that’s easy to find. It also creates breadcrumbs that enable seamless navigation for both users and search engines. That way your pages get properly crawled and indexed while your audience enjoys high-quality content.

Photo by Stephen Phillips – Hostreviews.co.uk on Unsplash

5. Website security

Website security is an important ranking factor and it’s also vital to customer experience. This is especially true if you process consumer-sensitive information, such as names, addresses, emails, credit or debit card information etc.

To ensure that websites will take security seriously, Google made having HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) a major ranking factor.

Websites that don’t have HTTPS would get penalized by Google. To transfer from HTTP to HTTPS, a web owner would have to purchase a TLS/SSL (Transport Layer Security/Secure Socket Layer) certificate from their hosting provider.

However, this migration can and does cause a lot of issues with your website. Fortunately, technical SEO is there to ensure everything is working as properly as it should. Here are a few things technical SEO can help you with.

  • Ensure that the same functionalities remain after the migration.
  • Monitors the changes in URLs and uses canonical tags to remove duplicate content.
  • Helps you test everything after the changes have been made.

Having proper security measures is vital. It prevents your website from being blacklisted and it shows your customers that your website is, indeed, trustworthy.

Technical SEO is there to ensure that your security measures are in place and that everything is working as it should.

Closing words

Technical SEO is a big part of on-page optimization. It ensures that your website functionality and performance are up to the task. Many of the factors that technical SEO deals with are also ranking signals.

These factors affect user experience in more ways than one. That’s why Google considers technical SEO to be an essential aspect of your overall SEO strategy, alongside on-page and off-page SEO.

After all, Google wants to ensure that they’re matching search queries with the best results possible.

By optimizing your technical SEO regularly, you’ll be able to ensure that your website is highly functional and that it performs exceptionally well. This will meet the needs of both search engines and your customers.

In other words, your website will not only end up on the first page of search results due to favorable rankings but it will also be able to provide your users with everything they want or need.

Author’s Bio

Christopher is a Digital Marketing specialist, Project Manager and Editor at Find Digital Agency and a passionate blogger. He is a dedicated and experienced author who pays particular attention to quality research and details. Focused on new web tech trends, he starts the day scrolling his digest on new digital trends while sipping a cup of coffee. In his free time Christopher plays drums and Magic: the Gathering.

Google is slowing down your life

This is of course absurd with all the speed of search and efficiencies Google has brought to our modern lives, but is it? For decades, Google has been rewarding web pages with higher ranks for forcing you to spend more time and click more buttons to get what you wanted before you leave the site. 


This has given rise to some of the ubiquitous and annoying web trends throughout history.

Endless slide shows, recipes that only come after clicking buttons and scrolling to the end of what I can only assume is the author’s life biography and the complete unabridged history of this particular recipe are in opposition to a successful interaction. The proof in the pudding shows an exasperated shopper standing in the baking aisle for 5 minutes, endlessly scrolling through just to see if they need baking soda or baking powder. Another user surfs and scrolls through a gauntlet of unnecessarily garrulous content just to get a simple answer to a question. 

When I tell my clients the minimum word volume is 500 words, with 1500 words as best practice on a landing page, they glaze over. They balk and say, who is going to read that?!? No one, I explain, just Google. It’s for SEO. No human wants to read that volume, but Google does, and if we want your media to reach human eyes we must first please the algorithm. 

Google, you are hurting us with your endless maze of SEO tricks, through 1000 paper cuts into our time and our efficiency. 

So much weight is put onto time spent on the page, it’s become an obstacle to actual function. The best websites I visit are the ones I leave with the highest bounce rate because They serve me what I need and send me on my way. Can we start rewarding that? I know you are capable of doing this without rewarding high bounce spam pages. I know this is a possibility. No, go get your most promising Googlers to fix this mess 

Yours in frustration,
Tired of scrolling

How to Conduct a Content Marketing Competitive Analysis

Basically, the competitive analysis of content marketing within your business aims to make your content and service unique on the market. It entails holding deep research on the industry market and exploring all industry-related content of your direct and indirect competitors. You need to know what they offer—the ranges of services or products, what selling and marketing strategies they follow, how many customers they have and their retention percentage, what reviews they mainly receive.

 After all this information is collected, you are capable of defining the key differentiators for your content marketing and taking advantage of them.

Why Is Competitive Content Analysis a Must?

To make sure your marketing plan is relevant and is going to bring success to your business, an analysis of your actions is obliged. If you still hesitate, then we will provide the key reasons why you should obviously consider content marketing competitive analysis. Here it is:

  • being aware of the effectiveness of your marketing campaign—compare the results from the previous months to the current situation to monitor the growth and development;
  • detecting the weak sides—thanks to analysis, you will know what content needs changes to increase conversion;
  • keeping your content relevant and standing out from the competitors.

Pro-tips on How to Perform Content Marketing Competitive Analysis

Before diving into the competitors’ content investigation, you have to clearly understand the aims and tasks you need to execute during this process. It can take a lot of working hours, but you need to stay concentrated on successful results. 

Know Who Your Competitors Are

Competitor exploration has to be as deep as possible. Direct competitors are entire companies or single specialists that offer equal ranges of services or products like your company. Indirect competitors are even more dangerous than direct, as such companies propose services that are different from yours but can correlate to the demands of your target clients. The more companies you will find for analyzing, the more effective results you will receive. Of course, it depends on industry specifics as your specialization is quite narrow, then the research may not bring the result you expect. 

Be Aware of What Content Your Competitors Write

You need to consider literally everything—all platforms where they publish their articles, the topics of posts and their sizes, what type of services they offer, what types of content they write, what and how many interacting elements they add. The process of content analysis is scalable and partially overwhelming. Do not be afraid to spend plenty of time on competitive content exploration, but focus on your initial goals and tasks. After all, information is collected, you can compare your current content planning and make adjustments if needed.

Consider the SEO Strategy of Your Competitors

The traffic and ranking of articles are defined by the SEO optimization of the content. To make the analysis more advanced, you need to explore the SEO action your competitors mostly prefer. To say a few words about what SEO includes: 

  • articles URLs
  • length of titles
  • number and length of heading and subheadings
  • number of words, meta description, meta tags
  • the structure of articles
  • interacting elements
  • alt text under images
  • number of internal and external links
  • texts of CTA, etc.

SEO also includes adding topic-related keywords, and their variety also matters. Each competitors’ articles can be easily checked via Google Analytics or Ahrefs to see what keywords work better, how much traffic and clicks the post has received. 

Learn the Key Content Format

The demands of modern customers are changing and growing on a daily basis. Now they expect much more than reading a common article on the blog. They want to feel valuable to let you offer your services or products to them. When analyzing your competitors, learn what formats of content they most prefer. Along with blog articles, it can be:

  • PDF industry or subject-related reports where all vital information is collected within one document;
  • Webinars to familiarize people with their brands more deeply;
  • Podcasts with the participation of famous personalities in the industry;
  • Educative videos from company specialists;
  • Survey and quizzes for diluting content.

All these tools are used to engage readers more and make them want to stay longer on the website. 

Let’s Take a Close Look at CTA (Call-To-Action) Buttons

No blog article can deal without CTA buttons spread across the text. These buttons are responsible for enabling readers to take action and contact your company for further cooperation or making a purchase. CTA contains some little text compared to the entire article, but according to writing service BestWritersOnline, this piece of content is supposed to be the most important part of the article. 

Check out what words and phrases your competitors used to enhance potential customers to fill in the contact form. Should it be a short expression that calls to action, or a long quote? Should CTA be added at the beginning, middle, or end of the post? Or should it look like a small note or a huge banner on your website page? You will be able to create working CTAs when you will find out the answers to these questions. 

Find Out the Number of Content Specialists

To produce a certain amount of content per month, you need to hire a certain number of content specialists to execute your marketing plan. To avoid wasting time, money, and effort, find out the dependency of the amount of content to the number of employees according to your competitors. 

Do you need to hire more Juniors to write more articles at low prices, or do you need to hire fewer but more experienced content writers producing high-quality content? Due to the custom writing service TrustMyPaper, your choice must be based on the market and competitors’ research to make the marketing strategy effective. 

To conclude

Content marketing competitive analysis is a repetitive task that needs to be executed at least two-three times a year. After the information is gathered and processed, it is high time to create an action plan. Analytical data is not enough to implement changes in your marketing strategy. Based on the research, you have to write down a precise plan of the following steps you and your marketing team have to execute to make the content of higher quality. 

The more qualitative your content is, the more probability to receive new customers you have. Your marketing strategy should correlate to the needs of your target audience and may require changes even every month. Your task is to quickly respond to these needs and demands. 

Author’s Bio:


Max Mitchell is the latest alumnus of our content marketing department. He is very passionate about typing, creating complicated spreadsheets, and consuming an inhuman amount of caffeine. Nevertheless, he is also the creative type of individual who will always find a new perspective on topics of interest.

How to Connect Woocommerce With Your Facebook Shop

Marketing and advertising are the main factors in the success of online businesses and social media have played a great role in promoting an online business. A few platforms on social media have given a real boost to this idea such as Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and many more.

Out of these marketing platforms, advertising on Facebook gained popularity in no time because of its effectiveness in enhancing social media strategies.

Whereas, WooCommerce has made selling products and services much easier.

WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin hence it offers great SEO (Search Engine Optimization) capabilities and adds value to your business website.

You can also hire SEO professionals for better SEO Optimization that help to boost your business sales.

In this post, we will explain how to integrate Facebook Shop with the WooCommerce store to get the best of these platforms. 

Facebook to WooCommerce Plugins

It is very easy to integrate WooCommerce into the Facebook shop. This process is facilitated using several plugins. 

If you are looking for more plugins for WooCommerce, then check out our Best WooCommerce Plugins for your store.

For now, we will look into step by step procedure to implement Facebook for WooCommerce (by Facebook) plugin so you may have a clear idea as to how to connect the WooCommerce store to Facebook Shop.

Step 1: Create a Facebook Pixel

Facebook Pixel lets you collect data that helps you track Facebook advertisement activity and increase your conversion rate by running targeted advertisement campaigns. 

For this, you need to open Events Manager and login into your account.

Select Connect Data Sources from the menu on the left

On the pop-up menu select Web, and then click on Connect

Next open, Facebook Pixel>Connect. Now, enter a name for your Pixel, enter your eCommerce Store’s URL, and click on Continue

Next, use the Headers and Footers plugin to add the Pixel code. This Pixel tracking code can be pasted into the Scripts in the Header box. Once done, click on Save and WordPress will add this Pixel code to your online store.

Step 2: Setting up Facebook Shop for WooCommerce Integration

The Facebook for WooCommerce plugin lets you connect your online store to Facebook. Click on add to cart and follow the instructions to download the .zip file

On your WordPress dashboard, click on Plugins> Add New. Now upload the .zip file and select Activate plugin. Next, connect this plugin to your Facebook account by navigating to Marketing> Facebook> Get Started.

Your Facebook page will open in a new tab on your browser. Select Facebook Shop in the pop-up that appears and click on Get Started.

Now, choose the account where you want to manage your business assets, product catalog, ad accounts, and your Facebook Page. Once you have selected, click on Continue. Now choose the Facebook Page you want to connect your WooCommerce store with and then select Continue again.

Step 3: Facebook Shop Configuration

The next step is to create a new catalog or use a pre-existing one. Creating a catalog helps you to manage your inventory, by adding titles, images, and product descriptions.

Now, select the Facebook Pixel which was created in the previous step, and name your eCommerce account. Now confirm that you want to associate your Facebook page with your eCommerce store and click on Continue.

Facebook will show you an overview of your settings. Re-check your settings and once satisfied, click on Continue.

Now a pop-up will appear so you can check all the features and information that WooCommerce will have access to. Changes can be made to these features but keep in mind that any changes made will affect how the store functions. Once, everything is reviewed, click on Next.

This links your store to the Facebook platform, after this the tab will reload and show your store’s URL address for confirmation. If the URL is correct, select That’s My Site.

You have successfully, now connected your Facebook page to your WooCommerce Store.

Step 4: Manage your WooCommerce Catalog

Use Google Product Category (GPC) Taxonomy to map each WooCommerce category to a Facebook category. This will enable Facebook to apply a default GPC rate to all your products automatically once entered.

You can provide a primary and secondary GPC in the Default Google Product Category section (Navigate to Marketing> Facebook> Product Sync tab). 

However, you can change the settings for individual products by going over to Products>All Products. Go over to the product you want to make changes to, click on Edit. Now on the subsequent screen, select the Facebook tab and use the Google Product Category to change the default settings.

You can also customize the image and description of each product that appears in your Facebook Shop.

Step 5: Creating Product Sets

Creating a Product Set means dividing your products into categories, this may be based on style, seasonal trends, or age category.

This helps customers to navigate through the shop easily and explore similar or related products.

To create a category Go to Products> FB Product Sets. Enter a name and description for the Product Set and assign a category. To manually sync, go to Marketing> Facebook> Product Sync and then click on Sync. 

Conclusion

To conclude, adding your WooCommerce store to Facebook will enhance user experience and improve your sales process through better SEO strategies. You will be able to better analyze ad campaigns and performance as well as sync products and categorize to improve customer interaction.

5 Ways Blockchain Improve Digital Marketing and Advertising

At present, the advertising industry is going through a transition all over the globe. It is happening as ads are coming more into digital marketing. Moreover, the entire industry is experiencing the effects of technological advancement.

You must know how the blockchain can improve both digital marketing and advertising in such a backdrop. If you are a business person, Read the article to know the reasons for initiating blockchain technology to enhance advertising and digital marketing business.

You can expect the overall development of your business and a financial boost in the minimum time. Moreover, for best results, you should take a course in blockchain and understand the basics. Well, for now, take a look at the following points.

Five ways in which blockchain can improve digital marketing and advertising

With blockchain technology, the present advertising industry would wholly turn digital in the future. As a result, it would mix more with digital marketing. However, there are other improvements that it can initiate. Check them below:

1. Enhancing consumer transparency

If the blockchain setup comes into the advertising industry, it can enhance consumer transparency uniquely. With the help of this technology, consumers can track their data and see how it is used. So, they can judge the credibility of a company.

On the other hand, the marketers (both from ad and digital marketing backgrounds) can get exposure to massive amounts of data. So, they would easily make proper business decisions for the overall betterment of the brand.

Although, as per the present situation, blockchain has just merged with marketing. Not many companies have started using it, but the prospects can be outstanding.

2. Fraud prevention in the ad industry

With a proper blockchain setup, frauds in the ad industry would dramatically minimize. As per the recent data from Juniper Research, the fraud cost of the ad industry is likely to be $22 billion in 2022. However, it was $19 billion in 2019.

So, you can again consider it an improvement blockchain can bring to the digital marketing and ad field. As a result, all marketing companies can store consumer data safely. Moreover, they can also validate and retrieve the data when necessary.

The best part of the blockchain is its set of tools. These advanced tools include contract oracle. It helps a company to find flag sites and instances of bot infiltration. This is how it can detect fraud in the ad industry.

Finally, as per the overall benefit, blockchain would help the marketing companies and advertisers to make better digital marketing strategies. This would happen due to proper ad budget flow among the correct sites with simple clicks.

3. Blockchain intensifies data security

Data security has become a grave concern as a significant part of global business has shifted to the digital world. It is essential for e-commerce websites. Media giants like Google and Facebook have also turned into victims of data leakage in the past. In such a scenario, smaller business entities are thinking of securing data.

Well, blockchain technology can come into play here. It ensures all customer information goes through a verification process and remains public. However, the identity of the people remains private.

This way, it can also improve data security in the advertising and digital marketing section. For example, the personal details of any customer or executive would never leak if the blockchain is present.

4. Blockchain dissociates middlemen

At present, both digital marketing and advertising services are costly. The main reason behind it is the presence of middlemen. Nevertheless, blockchain ensures dissociation of the middlemen and makes the business process end-to-end.

Blockchain technology can enhance a transparent connection between publishers and advertisers and vice-versa. In such a scenario, the publishers would not keep any hidden charges, turning the entire process affordable.

Generally, the publishers have to keep the cost of the packages high as the middlemen eat their profits. However, the future would be different with blockchain.

5. Better lead generation

The primary pillar on which every ad campaign stands is its relevance to the audience. It enables a high conversion rate, thus, making the campaign successful. Now, it is evident that with better conversion rates, the number of leads would increase. You would be amazed to know that blockchain can enhance lead generation.

It becomes possible as this technology automates all ad campaigns. Generally, blockchain uses some specific rules for it. So, it rarely fails. It gives importance to the advertising metrics to reach the target mass. As a result, the conversion rate increases simultaneously with the number of leads.

One of the major benefits of blockchain technology is its ability to focus. If you incorporate this technology, expect to judge your audience on a few criteria. This ensures they get the right ad in affordable pieces. So, you can earn more profit as a publisher. There would be no chances of fraud, and all subscriptions to your business platforms would be genuine.

Present scenario of the ad and digital marketing sector

When it comes to the present scenario of the ad and digital marketing industry, you can find blockchain technology slowly sneaking in. As of now, no massive change has taken place, but the future is expectedly promising.

The main reason why the blockchain is taking time to merge up with the ad and digital marketing industry is its newness. Not many people know it, and the others do not see how it works. Moreover, the ad publishers and digital marketers are reluctant to incorporate it into the business process.

Final Words

The future of the ad and digital marketing industry would be much more diversified than it is today. In such a scenario, blockchain technology can prove its relevance. However, as of now, the companies incorporating it can expect to become more credible. This can lead them to profit and carry out digital advertising work with ease.

Furthermore, the blockchain market is also expected to develop in the years to come. This can also become a reason for its enhanced sales.

Author Bio

Alisha Jones is an online entrepreneur by profession and passionate blogger by heart. She is on a mission to help digital businesses grow online. She shares her journey, insights, and experiences at Online Health Media & Follow The Fashion & Wp Blogger Tips & Tech Net Deals & Search Engine Magazine & Social Media Magazine. If you are an entrepreneur, digital marketing professional, or simply an info-holic, then this blog is for you.