Our mission since 2005 is to publish independent articles, podcasts, and seminars that help ecommerce merchants. What follows are the most popular articles that we published in March 2019, recognizing ...
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If you want to publish your content in more than one language, the most common approach is to create a multilingual website. As you’d expect, WordPress boasts a number of excellent purpose-built multilingual/translation plugins to help with this. In this article, we’ll be exploring and comparing: WPML, qTranslate XT, and Polylang — arguably the best,... View Article
The post WPML, qTranslate X or Polylang – The Three Most Popular Multilingual WordPress Plugins Compared (2019) appeared first on WinningWP.
As I work with clients to improve conversion rates, average order values, and market share, content strategy becomes critical. Without compelling content, it’s nearly impossible to be successful in ecommerce. In this post, I'll describe the benefits (and challenges) of compelling content.
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Written By: Aniqa Anwar, Jocelyn Chen, James Corr, Michelle Noonan, Kevin Rutter, Sayf Sharif, Annmarie Stockinger, and Kia Street.
DATA SAMPLING is a process used to analyze a subset of data, in order to try and more quickly understand the entire data set.
…The post How Google Analytics Data Sampling Works, Why it Matters, & How to Solve for It appeared first on Seer Interactive.
5 Enlightened Ways To Use Google Trends for Keyword Research was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
Keyword research tools are useful — until they don’t have enough data for your keywords.
You need to select phrases worth targeting. Sure, search engines understand concepts that are semantically connected and don’t just match keywords anymore. But when you write a webpage or design an ad, you still need to know which words to use that will do the best job conveying your concepts to searchers.
Many keyword tools lump variations together, like singulars and plurals. And they may ignore regional differences altogether.
So you may be left in the dark, just guessing.
Enter Google Trends. This surprisingly flexible and free tool can shed light on your keyword research. It gives relative search volume data — helping you choose between close alternatives, discover regional preferences and more.
Here, I’ll show you five ways to use Google Trends to make enlightened SEO keyword choices.
Your keyword research tool may not show differences in terms across a region or a country. Or it may look like the search volume is too low for you to worry about some keyword candidates. Sometimes that’s true, but sometimes it’s not.
As an example, what should you call something to put on the bed of a truck? If you’re on the East Coast, you’re likely to use the term “truck cap” or “camper shell.”
Looking these terms up in SEMrush provides keyword volume data and difficulty scores for the queries. You can also see a few alternative terms. However, there’s little or no information for these variations in a standard keyword tool.
Data from SEMrush provides a good starting place but may not give the full story. (click to enlarge)
As a result, you might be tempted to just write about truck caps and camper shells, and leave it at that.
Don’t stop there! If you enter all of the keyword suggestions you find into Google Trends, you’ll see a bigger picture.
That’s because people in different regions search for different terms. You can look at the chart by subregion to see this clearly.
Google Trends can show terminology differences between regions. You can view any country’s data here. (click to enlarge)
So if your website targets the Pacific Northwest, you’ll want to include truck canopy. And in places like Montana and Illinois, you’ll want to talk about truck topper, too. These make sense for those markets.
Which of those two images would you rather use to make a case for your keyword and content recommendations?
You might wonder why the other keyword tools didn’t show any meaningful data for the alternative search terms. It’s likely because their data is based on nationwide searches. But we know it’s important to speak the language of our customers. So use Google Trends to help find keyword ideas for unique content by region.
Language and search behavior change over time. How can you make sure your content reflects these changes?
Case in point: We used to call ourselves an “digital marketing” company. Several years ago, Google Trends confirmed that “digital marketing” was declining as a search term. “Digital marketing” was rising. So we updated our site to reflect how people were searching for our services.
Trends let you visualize swings in word usage. (click to enlarge)
By the way, “digital marketing” no longer fits our services as it’s become a very broad term. What we really do is provide great consulting services for “search marketing” (SEO, PPC, content, and social), but we do not do email or CRO or reputation management or PR and so on. So our keywords have evolved again.
Sometimes trends swing quickly and permanently.
For instance, Google AdWords rebranded to Google Ads in July 2018. A month later, Google Ads had already overtaken Google AdWords in relative search volume – which the trend chart shows.
Language changes can happen quickly. (click to enlarge graph)
Searchers change terms and adapt their searches faster than you (or your boss) might think. So plan to check Google Trends regularly. Watch for competing trends and update your content accordingly.
Do you ever notice a big shift in your website analytics data and wonder what’s going on?
There may be times when you don’t have enough historical data to know if your site is seeing an expected change in visits, or if something unusual has happened, maybe in the world at large.
Look in your analytics and Google Search Console data for organic traffic to your landing page for a particular keyword. Also look in Search Console for organic search queries related to your term. Compare this to Google Trends for the same searches, and you can get a more detailed understanding of your site in comparison to larger search trends.
Keyword search volume tools often lump results together. “Donut” and “doughnut” are listed as having the same search volume in SEMrush. Google Keyword Planner won’t even give volume results for the spelling “doughnut” – even though “doughnut” is the preferred spelling by the Associated Press (which guides most blog and newspaper writers).
Data from SEMrush (click to enlarge)
But using Google Trends, you can actually compare spellings to see how much search volume each variation gets.
Use Google Trends to confirm how to spell keywords. (click to enlarge)
More importantly, notice the annual spike in search trends for all these donut-related terms?
Scroll down to the Related queries section, and you can see searches related to National Donut Day in the U.S. (the first Friday in June). Aha! You have a new content idea for your site’s donut silo.
Related queries can give you clues for content needs. (click to enlarge)
Don’t forget daily and realtime search trends. Google Trends lets you change the length of time for your research to just the past day, past 4 hours, or even the past hour!
When there’s an out-of-season spike in visits to your avocado recipes and your PPC budget for those related terms is spent by lunch, the trending searches can point out the avocado recall announcement and give you terms to add as negatives in your campaigns.
Google Trends can get confused, however.
Searching for “dish soap” and “soap dish” shows identical search interest over time (you can’t even see the blue line below the red in the chart below). Yet they are two very different terms, and their results in a Google search are completely different.
On some comparisons, Google Trends can’t tell the difference. (click to enlarge)
Search volume from Ahrefs confirms that there is a difference in the terms, as you would expect:
(click to enlarge)
Another workaround for this Google Trends glitch is to use a plural for one or both search terms, when it makes sense.
You can see that the trends for “dish soaps” and “soap dishes” are distinctly different.
Google Trends distinguishes the plural versions. (click to enlarge)
Similarly, “marketing technology” and “technology marketing” also show identical search volumes in Google Trends.
When your common sense tells you that can’t be right, you’ll want to verify with another source. This could be as simple as performing a search in Google. Or you can look at comparison search volumes in another keyword research tool to see if searches really are identical.
Remember, you are not your target market. You might be in your pickup with a truck cap and eating a donut, while your reader is driving around Seattle with a truck canopy and trying to find a doughnut.
Use Google Trends to shed light on your keywords and help you know exactly what you should call things when.
Like this article? Please share it with others who can benefit from these keyword research tips!
Site speed is tricky for search engine optimization practitioners. It’s a ranking signal for Google and a key factor in a customer's experience. But few SEO pros have the development chops to improve speed. One option is to use Google's Lighthouse, a site auditing tool.
The post SEO: 4 Tips from Lighthouse to Improve Site Speed appeared first on Practical Ecommerce.
Building a decent e-commerce store is easy, but growing a successful e-commerce business is much harder. To develop a rewarding e-commerce business, you need a web store built on the fundamentals of experience, know-how and constant improvements over time. It’s the same as running in a marathon: you need to carefully prepare so that you don’t run out of fuel in the middle of the race.
E-commerce store design is one such preparation. Compromises on the design aspects may cause both immediate and long-term effects. It doesn’t matter if you rely on an e-commerce store builder, a marketplace script, or developing the store from scratch, you will always go through the website designing phase. Sometimes you need to revamp the whole thing, while other times a little tinkering on the color scheme does the job.
Modern e-commerce website design is not just about offering a great user interface (UI), but also great user experience (UX). It goes way beyond the artistic beautifications and incorporates business goals and heightened user satisfaction.
So how do you design an e-commerce store that entices customers and removes the hurdles to your conversion funnel?
Be it website design, a mobile app, a landing page or just an ad banner, web designers follow certain fundamentals that create an an easily navigated path to the product, for the target audience, and within your marketing plan. This article aims at explaining these four basic fundamentals.
UI design trends tend to be rather volatile. They come, stay for a while and then suddenly disappear for good. However, when choosing a UI design for your web store, rather than paying attention to the latest trend, you should focus on the most important factor in every e-commerce store: trust factors.
Be it an e-commerce store or even a physical shop, customers purchase when they trust your business. If they find that your website has bugs, design flaws, or seems even a little bit suspicious, they will waste no time hitting that X icon to close the window. So how can you instill trust factors in your e-commerce store design?
You can do that by incorporating three major trust indicators. Integrating these components will let your customers know that they are buying from a real person, instead of just a faceless brand, who is accessible and answerable if things go wrong.
A dedicated section on your store that displays your contact information is not just a design component but a necessity for any business. Nothing will make customers bounce back to the search engines more than a missing ‘Contact Us’ tab. A little difficulty in finding your contact information, and whoosh! You lose a potential customer.
There are three ways to integrate contact information:
Tip: You can integrate Google Maps on your website to show the GPS location of your physical office, like this optometrist, Positive Eye Ons:
Learn More:
A clear return policy helps eliminate any confusion or second thinking because it lets customers return the products if it does not satisfy them. When confronted with a non-returnable item, especially when it’s a more expensive product, many customers will opt for another e-commerce site that allows them the peace of mind, a.k.a. trust and confidence in the site, to easily return those products they don’t like.
A competent e-commerce store builder or marketplace script offers strategic ways to highlight your return policies and return process UI.
Security indicators are the trust seals you need to display on your e-commerce store. These seals come as visual badges to showcase the security and safety of financial transactions and there are various payment gateway integration options. Other seals you can display are the badges of antivirus software, secure web hosts, and SSL certifications:
These trust indicators are particularly handy when your store is new and you have no customers yet. Put these trust badges in strategic places to be sure that every potential customer sees them, including:
The user experience is totally a phenomenon of perception. In other words, users establish a perception, or an opinion, in the first few seconds of landing on your site. In addition to various other aspects of UX enhancement, that also means visual appeal.
People base the majority of their first impression on the visual appeal that your site has (or doesn’t have). It can impact whether they see your site as professional with high-end features or as an amateur site with silly beautifications. To give the best UX to your customers, you need strategic placements of high-quality images on your site.
From the banner to the menu of categories, from the product description to the entire product page, you need a professional approach to your images. Here are some key tips you should follow in the design of your website:
Learn More:
Mobile is no longer an option when it comes to business websites. It has become a necessity of UX optimization as well as e-commerce SEO. There are three reasons for this:
However, most e-commerce sites are developed on a desktop-first approach and do not optimize them for mobile viewing. And as a result, they are losing a lot of sales.
There are two ways to achieve this:
The first approach depends on your investment budget. However, you can make your website mobile responsive in three ways:
The only fundamental of easy navigation design is ensuring that users can find products and other content quickly. A flawless navigation boots the user experience – and sales! The architecture of the navigation totally depends on the theme you choose for your e-commerce store builder or marketplace software.
Choose a theme that makes the flow easy and flawless right from the homepage with these tips:
I am a fan of Amazon’s navigation panel. They not only place the featured links strategically, but also dedicate a whole left side-bar for product categories:
You cannot achieve a perfect e-commerce store design in one sweep. You need a more continuous and evolutionary approach. Follow the above fundamentals in each evolutionary stage of your web-store. Track the trends, A/B test the experimental designs, analyze their effects on your conversion rates, and then select a perfect modification. The best design always includes some of the latest trends and all the best browsing habits.
The post The 4 Fundamentals of E-commerce Website Design appeared first on Single Grain.
Bounce rate is the percentage of site visitors that land on your website and leave before viewing a second page. You can easily determine your website’s bounce rate by setting up Google Analytics.
Now, if you’re thinking this isn’t such a big deal and that as long as they visit your website, irrespective of how long they spend on it or how many pages they view, they at least know your business exists, that’s not good enough. The longer visitors stay on your site, the more time you have to turn them into subscribers and customers. But how can you convince users to stick around longer and visit more pages?
Luckily, there are a number of easy and free ways to improve your website’s bounce rate and grow your business.
Creating content consistently is one of the best ways to keep users around longer and get them to view multiple pages. Useful, engaging content will drive traffic to your website. Once that traffic is there, they’ll stick around, keep reading, and eventually become a subscriber or customer if you have a wide array of informative blog posts for them to read. In fact, according to HubSpot, companies that published 16+ blog posts per month got about 4.5 times more leads than companies that published zero to four monthly posts.
So, create a content plan that’s consistent and offers something for everyone. Not everyone prefers written content, so include a mixture of formats such as written, video, infographics, audio recordings, and more.
Another important tip for your content: Practice effective internal linking. Relevant and useful internal links sprinkled throughout your content can guide users to more of your awesome content and keep them reading.
Speaking of a mixture of formats, to improve your website’s bounce rate, be sure you add eye-catching images and videos to your website. Many users won’t spend a lot of time reading your website content, so you need to grab their attention with images and videos.
Add a large high-quality image or video to your homepage to grab the attention of viewers as soon as they see your site. Most websites do this while keeping everything else on the page simple, like the Panera website for example.
If you don’t have the means to hire a photographer, you can find a ton of stunning, free stock images on a site like Unsplash.
You may not have realized it before but your website speed is important for improving your website’s bounce rate. In fact, according to Google, 53 percent of mobile site visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. And for every extra second that your page takes to load, the probability of users bouncing dramatically increases. So, don’t make your website visitors wait.
You can use a site like GTmetrix to test the speed of your site. Not only will it tell you what your site speed is, but it’ll also give you advice for improving it. If you’re running your website on WordPress, it would also be wise to download and install some free plugins like WP Smush and W3 Total Cache to help boost the speediness of your site.
As you’re attempting to improve your website’s bounce rate, don’t leave it up to chance. You should be A/B testing everything in order to determine what’s working and what’s not. You might be surprised by the small things that can cause users to abandon your website. It might even be something as simple as the color of your call-to-action button.
So, perform A/B tests, or split tests, of every aspect of your website. Does your bounce rate improve with a popup on your homepage or does it get a bigger boost on another page? Does one font convert more visitors over another? Does showing or hiding a progress bar help or hurt your bounce rate? When we say A/B test everything, we mean everything.
Did you know that over 70% of people who leave your website will never return? If you don’t start to improve your bounce rate now, that’s a lot of potential leads and customers your business is missing out on. One effective way to stop those users in their tracks and get them to stay on your website longer, and eventually convert them into subscribers or customers is by utilizing exit-intent popups.
Exit-intent popups are able to track when a user is about to leave your website and send them a targeted message at exactly the right time. Your popup can encourage website visitors to subscribe to your email list, download your lead magnet, or even offer a discount if they purchase. So, not only can exit-intent popups improve your bounce rate, but they can also boost your sales in an instant.
Got more points to share on improving bounce rates? Share them in the comments.
Syed Balkhi is an entrepreneur, marketer, and CEO of Awesome Motive. He’s also the founder of WPBeginner, OptinMonster, WPForms, and MonsterInsights. Syed can be found on Twitter @syedbalkhi.
The post Five ways to improve your website’s bounce rate (and why you should) appeared first on Search Engine Watch.
If you want to add extra credibility to your posts, the more data you’re able to provide the better. However, this raises an issue of how best to present this data. Endlessly listing your figures and statistics makes it hard for users to comprehend your message, and of course, it’s boring. Most people find data... View Article
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Online retailers have the opportunity to transform every new visitor into a long-term, loyal customer who makes dozens or even hundreds of purchases over several years. What follows are four inexpensive marketing ideas to help your ecommerce company make the next sale and earn more profit from existing customers.
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Here’s a secret: Even the most seemingly effortless storytellers work for it – formal training, study of storytellers they admire, perfection through retelling, etc. Get their best advice to improve your brand’s storytelling. Continue reading
The post 5 (More) Secrets of Great Storytellers appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
Snapchat will turn 8 years old this year. And, to put it simply, the platform is struggling.
Am I a Snapchat hater? No.
I would love to see Snapchat succeed.
We need MORE competition in the social media platform space, not less. But my honest take today, is that Snapchat is struggling to make money and compete with other social networks. To such an extent that they’re survival as a platform is definitely on the line.
Even Twitter, who is famous for their stalled user growth for several years now, is making more progress in DAU growth the last few quarters than Snapchat today.
Twitter, also, is profitable.
I had a great chat with Edgar Alvarez at Engadget last month for an article he was writing about Snapchat’s identity crisis. I think he got a lot right in his piece, but I wanted to expand a little on what Snapchat can actually do to recover.
We’ve never had a social network like Snapchat, in many ways. But their biggest unique attribute currently is they are not as SOCIAL as other traditional social networks. Their future success relies on fixing that one issue.
If Snapchat focuses on becoming a better SOCIAL network, they can still do some cool things. They can still grow. They can still compete for a larger play of ad dollars.
Before I dive into some specific suggestions for Snapchat, let’s look at why these changes are needed.
First. Snapchat is not growing. This chart shows you their user growth plateau. They seem to have stopped the bleeding in Q4 where user growth was flat, but clearly this is not a thriving social network in terms of growth.
Second. Snapchat is running out of money.
They are losing a couple million dollars a day. They only have enough money to last them for a year or two. That’s their window, and that’s just to NOT run out of money before they have to take on more investment in late 2019 or 2020. The money issue alone means they will need a billion dollar investment or need to be acquired.
Third. Snapchat is the best, free R&D department Facebook never asked for.
Snapchat says they are a camera company. And every cool camera feature they roll out is great. But the camera company is not making money. This is why they need to focus on how to be a better social network. In the meantime they are innovating for other, more SOCIAL social networks to reap the benefits.
Fourth. Snapchat is mainly used as a private chat app and as a private creator tool. And, those features don’t make as much ad money as public social network features. At least not yet. This focus on chat and the camera is where they started, but those roots are will drag them down if Snapchat does not change.
Bonus. I’ll also add here that Snapchat seems to value innovation over all other business items. While this makes a really interesting platform, it might not make the best business. They show signs of starting to turn that corner, but the question is are they doing that fast enough? So far, it doesn’t look like it.
The biggest example of Snapchat’s business immaturity is the treatment of their Android app. It’s been listed, since before their IPO over 2 years ago, as one of their main challenges to growth.
Meaning, they keep saying “our Android app is so bad people don’t use it and leave the platform because of it.” How can a company know this for years and still not have a workable fix rolling out? Especially when international growth is so important for Snapchat and relies largely on Android users.
It’s simple. Social networks require a few basic functions to work well. We know this because there are several profitable social networks out there to learn from.
It needs to be easier to search for, discover, and learn about other users. If users want to stay private, they can. Instagram, Twitter, even LinkedIn have strong discoverability with plenty of privacy options. If you can’t easily find other people and accounts to connect with, the “social” part of the social network is hard.
It also needs to be easier to search for content. For stories this can be from hashtags, from copy in the stories, from location info. Something.
All social networks have a feed. A stream. A column (or row) of content to browse easily. Snapchat’s story browsing works well, but because of the limited discovery it focuses on either very close connections (chat friends) or very broad to no connection (brand publishers). They are missing the interesting middle of content from a broader universe.
Instagram needs this too.
But Instagram has their post feed full of comments to fall back on.
Being able to browse public or semi-public comment threads is a major ingredient of any social network. It’s what creates real discussions. Discussions drive engagement, connection, friendships, learning. You know, all the parts of a social network that make it SOCIAL.
Yes, yes, I know. Snapchat is private. I don’t care. Snapchat already gives users the option for a story to be viewable to “everyone.” So this is not actually such a big leap as it may sound. Snapchat has also done a decent job helping their publishers stories show up in more places.
They just need to continue to do this for all content on the platform (that users choose not to make private). And encourage public content in a way that is more discoverable.
There are rumors that Snapchat is looking seriously at this. You can share certain public stories outside of the app already and they will stay live for 24 hours to 30 days depending on the content. Even semi-permanent content is a nice leap. But, again, just roll this out to all content as an option.
This is a problem for the story content format across all social channels. Stories are harder to create. They require more resources from people and businesses. Social networks can make the value proposition for creating story content more attractive by simply showing story content in more places for a longer amount of time.
If I had to guess, I think Instagram will solve this first. They’ve already created permanent story highlights on profiles.
The biggest benefit here is that businesses and creators will get a much larger return on their content. It will get shared more. Be seen more. Get linked to, etc.
This requires permanent stories to work. Snapchat has toyed with making stories embeddable, but this is not available for all content yet. And it does not really make sense unless you also allow stories to be permanent. Embedding stories means other websites, blogs, media companies can promote Snapchat content for them.
Snapchat stories could be embedded by the NY Times or other major media channels. This exposure would be great for awareness and promotion on the platform, as well as increase discoverability.
Yes social networks are mainly mobile machines today. And honestly, this one is probably the most optional item on the list. But being able to access a social network on desktop opens up a ton of discovery for the rest of the world.
If Snapchat did this it would show they have clearly turned the corner from a chat app with cool camera features to a real social network. We see glimpses of what this could be on story.snapchat.com, but it is not the full experience.
For stories to be more shareable across the web, you need a web link for each piece of content. Otherwise, you’re excluding billions of people that could learn more about Snapchat.
This is another story format issue that all social networks can fix.
Stories are harder to navigate visually than a photo or text post. We don’t know what is in them before we browse. The fix for this is already out there luckily. Video previews.
If you hover over videos on YouTube you will see it. They animate a small section of videos at a low frame rate to help you get a better idea of what you’re getting into visually. Or just preview the full video. TikTok has tested a couple versions of this on the web with their embedded video browsing and main web feed (see below), without the hover needed.
Many of these suggestions will scare die hard Snapchat users and maybe have scared Snapchat themselves.
I assure you though, the platform will thrive with these changes. One of the many ways I know this can and will work is because recent social media upstart TikTok has made a lot of these changes already, and better than many of the social networking leaders that came before them.
TikTok’s global growth seems destined to make them the first truly global social network and first new social platform since Snapchat itself. If Snapchat does not adopt these changes, they will be replaced by TikTok and others.
Often times you may find data discrepancies between your backend system (where website conversions are tracked manually) and data in Analytics platforms like Google Analytics (GA). Sound familiar? Then, read on!…
The post How to Diagnose Google Analytics Data Discrepancies appeared first on Seer Interactive.
Nearly 2,000 marketers of businesses of all sizes responded to create the State of Social report by Buffer and Social Chain. The report itself is worth a read, but I was most interested in are the charts shared towards the end – the data points Buffer didn’t analyze. There are 4 social media trends that deserve a second look, plus some context to understand their meaning for your consideration in 2019.
Let’s interpret this response through the lens of a marketer:
The social media channels that executives know about (and therefore want to see business accounts for) are Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
A second tier of channels is specialty platforms, which are LinkedIn & YouTube (and Pinterest, maybe). These are not useful to everyone, but could be impactful with a correct approach.
You might have an account, or think it would be worthwhile to have one, on IGTV, Snapchat and WhatsApp (if you had any idea what content work or audiences to reach).
And then there are Twitch and TikTok, which you’re keeping an eye on, mostly because your teenager is on them non stop.
Old habits die hard, which can be used to explain why businesses are still omnipresent on Facebook and Twitter. These are the legacy platforms of social media marketing. The claims of Twitter’s demise started to ring as Instagram’s popularity took off, but the end of the tweet is not in our sights.
That’s not to say that Twitter hasn’t had trouble along the way. Yet underneath the trolls and bots, there remains an active, vibrant community. Twitter users in the US are more likely to be urban, educated, and higher-income.
Twitter users in the US are more likely to be urban, educated, and higher-income. #socialmedia
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We go to Twitter when something is happening – breaking news, live sports, events, TV premieres and political debates. It’s the top online source for real-time content. We also go to Twitter to share our experience with a brand or service – often to complain or to ask for assistance from the very brand or service itself.
Twitter works exceptionally well for these personalized interactions, so I struggle to understand how most of our Twitter feeds are still RSS feeds in disguise. Marketers could – and should – use Twitter to connect directly with key audiences.
Marketers could – and should – use Twitter to connect directly with key audiences
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Over half of marketers admitted they do not have a documented social media strategy.
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Over half of marketers admitted they do not have a documented social media strategy. They are caught in the cycle of publish and pray. Reactionary social media marketing is not a strategy. Neither is creating an editorial calendar two weeks in advance, and echoing the same content across every branded account, without regard to the audiences there.
What’s worse: 100% of businesses that are doing on-the-fly social media are at risk for losing any semblance of their plan, not to mention their institutional knowledge and decision makers if key social contributors leave the company, or can’t get to work.
In our view as consultants to the world’s most interesting brands, more and more companies are coming to us asking for a documented social media strategy with a roadmap they can implement. Even though these companies have established social accounts with a decent audience size, and are sharing and boosting content regularly, they are embarking on their very first strategic plan for using social media marketing.
The transformations that can happen when you start thinking about social media with purpose and desired outcomes are worthwhile. Unsure of how to start? Try auditing your recent social media posts, and those of 2-3 competitors.
Don’t take this chart at face value. The question is worded in a way that marketers cannot indicate a preference in which engagements are most meaningful. Case in point: 2/3 of marketers say that likes, comments and shares are the engagement metrics they value the most.
Not only are these answers vague, but they are meaningless. Not all interactions in social media are created equal. Pizza eaters will understand – pepperoni is the most popular pizza topping, yet it also appears on lists of least-favorite toppings. We all assign different values to things, even when we share appreciation for them. A Facebook comment could be more (or less) valuable for a marketer than a share on LinkedIn. It depends on the goals anchoring a social media strategy and what outcomes are being worked towards.
What marketers define as meaningful engagement in this response seems to emphasize the vanity metrics (i.e.: likes, shares, comments) that appear on a weekly or monthly social media report. But you can’t use engagements to fund payroll. Social media has to do more than make your reporting look good.
The second most popular answer, “an interaction with the brand”, is meaningful. Bingo. Get your audience interested, intrigued, or inspired enough to have an interaction – which can become a conversation if your brand is equally active and willing to engage.
Marketers have to get better at social commerce.
Social media has tremendous influence over the research and interaction stages of any customer journey. We discover new products because the people we follow are posting about them. My local Facebook group is full of posts asking for recommendations on landscapers and handymen. 30% of consumers say they would make purchases through Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter or Snapchat.
Yet over half of marketers say they are not planning to increase the use of social features to drive direct purchases this year.
Let’s look at why a plan for social commerce is important. Consider that younger generations are more prone to impulse buys. Buy buttons and shoppable tags decrease customer friction. Shoppable posts increase marketers’ ability to attribute social media touchpoints in the customer journey.
Forget swipe left and right; audiences are getting in the habit of swiping up to purchase in Snapchat and Instagram. In Messenger, WhatsApp and WeChat, brands are turning to chatbots to personalize an automated checkout experience for customers. Multi-level funnels are being reduced to two steps: discovery and purchase. It’s time to understand the options each social network offers to drive sales, and to start experimenting with features like shoppable tags and AI-powered checkout.
These are the four charts that caught my attention when reading the State of Social 2019 report. Be sure to read Buffer’s analysis of the key trends they identified. Check it out here.
The post Your 2019 Social Media Strategy: 4 Trends You Can’t Ignore appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.
“We have a big existing on-premise user base and I believe all of them will move to the cloud,” said Oracle CEO Mark Hurd. “In fact, I was with a large group of our users just last night and they’re all going to move on their time frame. We don’t put a time frame on it, but this thing is moving at a pretty good speed. It will not move linearly, it will move geometrically. When we get to a certain point you will start to see a geometric move in the market and it will be significant.”
Mark Hurd, CEO of Oracle, discussed the huge growth in the cloud applications market and he expects Oracle to lead that market in an interview on Bloomberg:
The apps market is about a $125 billion market. It has two pieces to it. First is back office, which is what we call ERP. This is basically your financial systems, procurement, manufacturing, supply chain, and HR. That is really 70 percent of the applications market or around $85 billion. Second is the front office market which includes marketing, sales automation, service, etc. add up to $40 billion. A very interesting phenomenon is that as the on-premise applications market moves into SAAS it actually grows exponentially. Now the applications market is doing all of the server work, all the operating systems, and all the database work. It’s the data center, it’s the people. So the market will actually grow from $125 billion and probably triple just as it moves to SAAS because it’s taking share from the other parts of the IT market. The applications market I predict will actually become more like $400 billion as it goes forward.
We think it is an amazing opportunity. We are growing our applications market over the last 8-12 quarters more than double-digit. The market itself is growing and we are gaining substantive share. We are the leader in ERP. If you go back to Gartner, IDC, and the analysts we are leading in HR now as well. These are very attractive and robust markets. Our customers want to modernize, want to spend less, want someone else doing the work, and they want someone else assuming the risk. We are extremely bullish about our position in the market.
We have rewritten our application base for the cloud, for SAAS. We have been doing this for years and we’ve invested a lot of capital. We are deploying our capabilities all across the globe. We are extremely excited and bullish about not just our current position. here is going to be a leader in this market and there is no one today with more than 50 percent market share. In fact, the highest application percentage of any company in any segment is sort of mid-20s. This generation will see a leader that is much more material than that and I volunteer us to do it. In most segments, the leader has 50 percent plus.
We have a big existing on-premise user base and I believe all of them will move to the cloud. In fact, I was with a large group of our users just last night and they’re all going to move. They are all going to move on their time frame. We don’t actually put an end of life. We have a competitor that does that, but we don’t do that. We want them to move at their pace and we want them to feel good about it. We don’t put a time frame on it, but this thing is moving at a pretty good speed. It will not move linearly, it will move geometrically. When we get to a certain point you will start to see a geometric move in the market and it will be significant.
>> Watch the full Bloomberg interview with Oracle CEO Mark Hurd.
The post All of Our Customers Will Move to the Cloud, Says Oracle CEO appeared first on WebProNews.
Almost anyone running a B2B or B2C business knows that Google and other search engines like quality links, and could consider them as one of the top ranking factors.
So, if you want your website to rank higher than your competition on search engines, a proper link building strategy is not debatable.
However, if you’re going to implement link building in your 2019 digital marketing strategy, you have to do it the right way.
Search engines shroud their algorithms in secrecy, so the SEO and link building industry is flooded with many myths that will never get you results but can get you into a lot of trouble.
To avoid investing resources into wasted link building efforts, pay attention to these nine link building myths that won’t get you anywhere in 2019.
This myth started to get really popular in 2014 when Google’s Matt Cutt said,
“Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company. So stick a fork in it: guest blogging is done; it’s just gotten too spammy.”
Because of how direct and stern this warning by Cutt was, it’s understandable that many people believe that guest blogging is genuinely dead.
However, Cutt later clarified this statement by saying that what he meant was spammy blog posts for the sake of SEO purposes was dead.
This means that publishing relevant and resourceful blog posts on authoritative sites for building links, exposure, branding, increased reach, and building a community is still very relevant in 2019.
This is a prevalent myth that contradicts the fundamental idea of link building in 2019. To rank high, you need to get top authority sites to link back to your site. To get these sites to feature your link, you need to provide relevant content for them. Moreover, whether or not that content is related to your niche or not, it still improves your ranking.
So, when your site receives a non-relevant backlink from a non-relevant niche, Google will not frown upon these links.
Many people still think that building tons of links to a single piece of content could negatively impact their keyword rank. Again, this link building myth contradicts itself because it goes against the idea of organic link building.
If search engines do not penalize highly original and valuable webpage that other websites link to because of how helpful and informative their content is, why would they consider a piece of content with tonnes of backlinks spammy?
However, if your links are low quality (from spammy content networks and directories), you could be slapped with a manual penalty or significant link profile devaluation.
It’s sad, but many marketers still believe this. Link building, like other digital marketing strategies for social media marketing, blogging, and others should be consistent. Not only because it helps you maintain your position above your competition in search queries, but also because it helps you with the following:
Link building is not just about increasing the volume of links to your site; it also exposes your business to new customers.
The truth is there isn’t a “one size fits all” for search engine ranking. There are about 200 ranking factors related to UX, mobile usability, technical performance, query intent, and many more.
Google’s ranking factors are very dynamic. According to Google Webmaster John Mueller, the search engine focuses on a particular query intent to select its ranking factors.
So, while link building is a valuable ranking factor, Google algorithms find a balance between its 200 ranking factors before displaying results to a search query.
When people talk about this myth, they usually mean either of these two things:
Both statements are wrong. In the first instance, a post that has been linked back to by high authority sites will rank higher than others which have not. There are tools like website auditor which can be used to check the individual ranking value of your site’s posts.
As for the second statement, Google’s John Muller confirmed that their search algorithms take into account the position of a link on a webpage it appears.
So take advantage of link positioning. SEO experts like Bill Slawski and Rand Fishkin recommend positioning your links higher on the page because the higher a link is placed on the page, the more it weighs, and the more value it passes to the pages it links to.
While high-quality external links are one of the most important ranking factors, internal links also play a huge roll in helping you rank higher. This is because linking from higher to lower ranking pages can give a massive boost to weak pages. Interlinking related content on your website also creates what search engine experts call a “topic cluster”.
In 2019, topic clusters are significant because when a search query is made for a particular topic and search engines find relevant topic clusters on your website, your site will be considered an authority in this field and will automatically rank higher than other sites with relevant single pages.
Image links are not bad for SEO. However, too much of anything is never a good idea. And this applies to image link building. While there are no penalties for using image links, stuffing your image alt tags with keywords to manipulate rankings is against Google’s guidelines.
Before Google started using AI and machine learning to understand images, people had to stuff their alt tags with text to ensure the pictures appeared in relevant search queries. However, in 2019, both text and image are translated into the same language in coding.
Many people are convinced that getting a link back from pages like Wikipedia will automatically give them a higher ranking authority because of the exceptionally high domain authority Wikipedia has. But sadly, digital marketing has as many facts as it does fallacies.
Information directly from Google’s Garry Illyes tells us that Google ranks Wikipedia just like any other website.
Wikipedia is ranked just like any other website.
— Gary "鯨理" Illyes (@methode) December 16, 2016
Don’t allow the fear of spamming keep you from harnessing the many fantastic benefits of implementing a link building strategy.
Also, although Google’s dynamic algorithms are usually hidden, SEO and link building agencies like seopow study them every day to let you know what’s a fact and what’s a fable.
The post Debunked: Nine link building myths you should ignore in 2019 appeared first on Search Engine Watch.
This is no joke. On Monday, April 1, 2019, WebDevStudios (WDS) and our entire team will be dedicating the entire workday to Five for the Future (5FTF). We continue our passion for paying it forward, giving back, and playing active roles within the WordPress community.
As we’ve done in the past, we will share what types of WordPress tasks and projects we’re contributing to on that day via Twitter. Be sure to follow the hashtag #5ftf to keep up with us.
Take a look at what we accomplished during our last 5FTF day, March 1, 2019. It’s always a lively and productive time at WDS! Interested in joining us? Check out our Careers page for an opportunity that appeals to you.
Another #5ftf day @webdevstudios! Today's adventure involves creating a @gatsbyjs powered WordPress theme. #Gatsby #WordPress pic.twitter.com/I1ah99ankS
— Greg Rickaby
(@GregRickaby) March 1, 2019
Today is another #5ftf WebDevStudios! Today I’m working on a plugin for WordPress using the Discogs API. My focus is learning more OOP and an excuse to spin some records while I work.
— Chrispian H. Burks (@chrispian) March 1, 2019
It's #5ftf day at @webdevstudios! So much to contribute, so little time. My sidekicks are clearly ready. pic.twitter.com/9pHpw1bIKf
— ᴊᴏᴅɪᴇ ʀɪᴄᴄᴇʟʟɪ (@Jodie_Riccelli) March 1, 2019
Not only is it Friday, but its also #5ftf day at @webdevstudios — I'll be working on the much anticipated blog post about rushing your website development project. pic.twitter.com/NHGv4mBatz
— Cristina Holt (@cristinaholt416) March 1, 2019
Got #WordPress questions? Come on over to https://t.co/BQnTMKjBD9 and get WordPress answers! Doing #5FTF with @webdevstudios today on @StackExchange ! pic.twitter.com/yArHBpmQKo
— Zach Owen (@znowebdev) March 1, 2019
It’s #5FTF day at @webdevstudios and I’ve been working up an appetite as we continue to improve and add to our wd_s starter theme. Time to refueeeellllllll pic.twitter.com/dbf1pAEXni
— Corey M Collins (@coreymcollins) March 1, 2019
For #5ftf @webdevstudios I'm working on a #gatsby website called “Write UX” which provides UI writing tips to designers and developers. Here's a sneak peek!
(https://t.co/duLwN7rgJx coming soon) pic.twitter.com/JqNZEcPakN
— Cameron Campbell (@bezierer) March 1, 2019
WP-Strava 1.7.1: Created unit tests, fixed some bugs uncovered by said tests, added a "Hide Activity Time" option. Was able to close multiple support tickets
https://t.co/W9zFaHG8Mq All care of @webdevstudios commitment to #5ftf
— Justin Fœll (@justinfoell) March 1, 2019
The post No Foolin’! It’s Five for the Future Day on April 1st appeared first on WebDevStudios.
