Is SEO & Digital Marketing Working For Your Business? Are You Getting What You're Paying For?

It really amazes me to see how many businesses are being taken advantage of by some of these so called digital marketing agencies by either charging an exorbitant amount, or just not providing the quality and service they said they would do.  Which is why it's so important for business owners to choose the right partner to work with.  Ask your web developer or digital marketing specialist what exactly you're getting in exchange for your hard earned money.  Pay close attention.  Can they easily breakdown and articulate the scenario in easy to understand math and English?  Are they charging for too many hours?  Some will throw in a lot of startup costs or extra hours for things that may not even make sense.  To avoid this, make sure to ask a lot of questions to help you determine the value.  You should never feel pressured when making a decision.  Especially when it's someone you'll be working with.

Find someone who can really help.  Ask yourself  "what am I expecting out of this?".  "Is it reasonable?".  And "is it mutually beneficial?".  Then compare what you're getting with some competitors to see if they might be a better fit for you.  It's always a good idea to weigh your options every now and then, so that you can gauge what's going on at the moment and how it can affect you.

Some of the most common mistakes I see from websites are SEO related.  But what really irks me is when I scroll down to the bottom of the page and see that they outsourced the project, and there's still so many fatal errors hampering their search engine results.

Here's just a handful of some of the more common errors I encounter.

-Meta description and H1 heading missing or incomplete
-Image tags and alt attributes missing or incomplete
-Website uses URLs with www and non-www subdomain. Can cause duplicate content and bad links
-No favicon!  This one is really amusing :)
-Not enough words or content on the page
-Page takes too long to load.  It's recommended to get your site to load in under 0.4 seconds for search engine robots to find you quicker and easier, as well as offer a better user experience
-No https redirect.  This will result in the user going on an unsecured website where information can be tracked and stolen

Well as said, there's much more than that, but those are just some of the more common ones I see all the time and these things are what search engine algorithms are analyzing on a regular basis.  Competition is steep, so the easier and faster it is for search engines to crawl your web pages, the higher the rank you will achieve naturally.

So what about you guys?  Are you coming across a lot of these similar issues?  Or are there other issues that come up frequently?  Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Also, you can find out more about SEO and digital marketing and how it can help your business in 2019 by visiting our website.

How to Use Pinterest for Business: "Getting Started" Guide for Beginners

FACT: the half-life of a Pinterest pin is 1,600 times longer than a Facebook post.

FACT: the average Pinterest user spends 14.2 minutes pinning every time they log in.

FACT: Pinterest was the fastest growing social network in 2014, growing by a whopping 97 percent!

With numbers like these, it’s easy to see what a powerhouse Pinterest has become.

It's growing like mad & the engagement rates are off the chart! And most importantly, your content has a longer shelf life on Pinterest.

Imagine your best content popping up in the Pinterest feed 4 or 5 months after it was first pinned! This is common occurance on Pinterest.

Compare that to the fast-paced Twitter stream or the hyper-competitive Facebook news feed and you'll quickly understand the value.

Can you imagine the benefits of a social network where your content doesn't lose steam in the first few hours -- but can actually get MORE visibility over time & still be sending traffic months after it was published?

Welcome to Pinterest!

There are so many reasons to love Pinterest.

And the success I've experienced on Pinterest over the last several years is why I’m sooo excited to announce the launch of Post Planner’s presence on Pinterest.

But there are so many misperceptions about Pinterest marketing:

-Only women are on Pinterest
-People only pin food & wedding content
-My target audience isn’t on Pinterest
-I don’t have time for another social network

Not true... any of them. Every business can gain a captive audience on Pinterest with the right visual content.

If you have a story to tell & want to reach a whole new audience, then Pinterest is for you.

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Original article written by Rebekah Radice,

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The Future of Digital Marketing

According to Forbes, there are over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created every day. It’s impossible to wrap our head around the present-day figure, and it’s only getting larger by the month.

For product owners and marketers, data can be a good thing. It has helped them better understand their customers and create more engaging experiences that fuel retention and revenue. But as they’ve also learned, too much of a good thing can be bad. We’ve reached a tipping point where we’re drowning in data. These days, we are inundated with so much data it’s become impossible to identify what data is helpful and make good use of it.

At the same time, customers are demanding a more and more personalized experience. This presents a catch-22, where marketers need to use data to deliver the type of personalized experience our customers demand, yet they get bombarded with so much data it can be paralyzing. As a result, the customer experience is suffering at a time when their expectations have never been higher.

The solution to this conundrum is digital intelligence. Over the next few years, marketing platforms have to develop new tools and techniques that will make it easier for marketers and product owners to use data and deliver a personalized experience to every customer.

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Original article written by Aaron Sawitzky.

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Keywords & Your Digital Marketing Strategy: What Do You Need to Know?

One of the most common digital marketing goals these days is to measurably increase online visibility. Whether your customers buy on your website or at your brick and mortar store, a strong internet presence helps consumers find, learn about and ultimately purchase from you.

As you scour the internet for online marketing tips, you’ll see advice about blogging for search engine optimization (SEO), creating effective landing pages, using compelling imagery and more. But when it comes down to it, there’s one vital element to digital marketing that can make or break all these tactics and strategies: keywords.
How Do Keywords Relate to Digital Marketing?

The right keywords are vital to your digital marketing strategy!

When a potential consumer goes to a search engine like Google to look for something, they type in words or phrases to guide their search. These are keywords: the key terms website users enter to find what they’re looking for.

Sounds easy enough. Users type in their keywords and your business comes up, right? Well, not exactly. Search engines use complicated algorithms to try to help their users find helpful and relevant results. These algorithms use a wide variety of factors such as website credibility, how often the site publishes and keywords used on the website itself.

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Original article written by Emily Sidley.

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You Get What You Pay For: Prioritizing Quality In Digital Marketing

Almost every service or product you pay for has a cheaper alternative. The same goes for many services in the digital marketing industry, including web development, app development, SEO, branding and design.

My company is in the digital industry, and we often encounter clients that mention they’ve found a much cheaper alternative overseas and ask us to match their pricing. We know how the story plays out. The client goes cheap, doesn’t get what they expected, gets frustrated, wastes time, wastes money and usually ends up starting from scratch.

Remember, cheaper does not mean better. The old adage “you get what you pay for” is supremely evident in web design and digital marketing. Here are five ways to get what you pay for in the digital marketing industry:

Value Quality

Most people won’t know the difference between a solid line of code versus a poor line of code, but everyone can tell when something doesn’t work right or look right on your site. This doesn’t mean that you have to go for the most expensive option out there, but you should find a balance between cost and quality that works for you.

Quality can be hard to judge and easy to fake. Ask questions to offset this knowledge gap. Ask for portfolio examples, referrals, case studies and anything else you can get your hands on to see the quality of the work firsthand. If the firm you’re hiring to do your website, logo or marketing materials doesn’t have good branding themselves, run.

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Original article written by Joel Mathew, Fortress Consulting.

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5 Email Marketing Tools For Startups

Traffic generation techniques and driving branding through digital marketing has been talked about so extensively already that we do not need to review them any more.

Almost any startup can learn to use Google Ads, Facebook Ads, content and organic search engine optimisation (SEO) to get traffic at the top of their funnel. These are great ways to get the word out and making the brand visible.

However, in order to nurture your leads and keep your customers engaged, you need to master email marketing.

Email marketing remains the most powerful channel to communicate directly with the people who want to hear from you. This includes your blog’s content audience, your customers, people who want to work with you in the future, and your leads for the products and services you plan to sell.

When people sign up for a service, the most important initial communication, like login details, receipt of purchase, etc, is expected to be communicated over email. This also includes sending out relevant and personalised content so that you have your subscribers’ undivided attention.

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Original article written by Deepak Kanakaraju, OptinChat.

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Artificial Intelligence Can Now Copy Your Voice: What Does That Mean For Humans?

It takes just 3.7 seconds of audio to clone a voice. This impressive—and a bit alarming—feat was announced by Chinese tech giant Baidu. A year ago, the company’s voice cloning tool called Deep Voice required 30 minutes of audio to do the same. This illustrates just how fast the technology to create artificial voices is accelerating. In just a short time, the capabilities of AI voice generation have expanded and become more realistic which makes it easier for the technology to be misused.

Capabilities of AI Voice Generation

Like all artificial intelligence algorithms, the more data voice cloning tools such as Deep Voice receive to train with the more realistic the results. When you listen to several cloning examples, it's easier to appreciate the breadth of what the technology can do including being able to switch the gender of the voice as well as alter accents and styles of speech.

Google unveiled Tacotron 2, a text-to-speech system that leverages the company’s deep neural network and speech generation method WaveNet. WaveNet analyzes a visual representation of audio called a spectrogram to generate audio. It is used to generate the voice for Google Assistant. This iteration of the technology is so good; it's nearly impossible to tell what’s AI generated and what voice is human generated. The algorithm has learned how to pronounce challenging words and names that would have been a tell-tale sign of a machine as well as how to better enunciate words.

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Original article written by Bernard Marr, Forbes.

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How To Staff The Hybrid Cloud

The IT team at Perkins+Will used to support a sprawling SAN environment for its complex commercial-building renderings.

When the Chicago-based architecture firm – which has 2,500 employees in 30 locations around the world – outgrew its SAN environment, Perkins+Will chose to migrate away from on-premises data centers and edge devices to a cloud-based storage system. Suddenly CIO Murali Selvaraj faced a difficult challenge: How to restructure the firm's 50-person global IT organization to meet the needs of the hybrid cloud.

The new environment, Nasuni Cloud File Services, backed by Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), only required three full-time people, leaving the rest of IT with far more time on their hands.

“We are not a firm that fires people willy-nilly,” Selvaraj says. With no industry best practice for how to rethink staffing in this new era, Perkins+Will charted its own course, following a cultural philosophy Selvaraj sums up this way: “When people are happy, motivated, and educated, they adapt to new technologies and we get the best out of them.” His task was to reimagine IT, drawing on time- and cost-savings of hybrid cloud, to add greater benefit to the business.

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Original article written by Sandra Gitlen, Network World.

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Keyword Research in 2019: Modern Tactics For Growing Targeted Search Traffic

In 2019, it’s estimated that every minute there are 150 new websites coming online. While many of these won’t be long-term ventures, a large percentage will eventually find themselves looking to organic search engine traffic to grow their reach.

This invariably leads people to the task of keyword research; uncovering the search terms most likely to result in prospective customers.

With increased competition it’s imperative you don’t just focus on the traditional sources of keyword inspiration that every other business uses.

In the past year alone I’ve personally helped hundreds of business owners grow search engine traffic to their websites. This responsibility drives me to succeed in one key area: Finding relevant search terms to target that their competitors have likely missed.

In this article, I will highlight some of the most overlooked ideas and sources of data to reveal words and phrases relevant to your business that are high in intent but lacking in competition.

If you can find the keywords your audience are searching for, but your competitors haven’t found, you can leverage a huge advantage to increase traffic and engagement on your content.

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Original article written by Glenn Allsopp, Tech Crunch.

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How AI and ML Are Changing Digital Marketing

The majority of industries are already making use of both AI and machine learning. Many enterprises are leveraging AI-powered business analytics and intelligence systems to guide their own digital transformations, something that will become increasingly important with the impending arrival of the Internet of Things.

Marketers are also using AI and machine learning in incredible ways. There are four specific examples already taking place that show just how versatile and powerful these two technological concepts can be when applied properly.

AI Is Helping Businesses Create Better Content

The major way that AI and machine learning are benefiting brands has to do with the insight it provides which enables them to create better content. Major publications are already using this to take existing data and combine it with keywords to create unique content that attracts visitors to a site. News publications like the BBC, CBS and even The New York Times have been doing this for quite a while. You’ve probably read an AI-powered story from The New York Times in the past without even realizing it – that’s how good this can be.

Things haven’t reached the point where you can have AI craft a 1,000-word nuanced opinion piece on a complex topic, but we’re probably not too far off. Still, organizations use these tools as a way to offload certain basic content creation duties so actual humans are free to focus on bigger and more important things like OTT content or videos that still need that “real” touch.

An Email Marketing Revolution

AI and machine learning are also benefiting organizations in terms of maximizing their email efforts. Marketers of all types use AI to not only personalize campaigns based on preferences and past user behaviors but also to even automate things like A/B testing (testing two different versions of an email to see which one is better).

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Original article written by Guest Writer, IoT For All.

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