Live Workshop - How to be a Film Maker

Live Workshop on Creating Copy that Sells - By Mitali Soni

Google Ads - An Introduction

Dear Learners,

Welcome back to my blog. In the previous posts, I have shown you various ways of driving visibility on Search engines by making your website "Search Friendly". Which is popularly referred to as SEO. However, as marketing landscape keeps changing, it’s important to keep optimizing and finding opportunities to show your brand when your prospects are actually searching for your product or service.

Google is a competitive space and it might take a while before your page’s start ranking for your desired keywords. Successful marketers know and relate to this fact, which is why they include Paid Search platforms as a channel to enhance visibility & eventually drive traffic that converts on your website. This essentially means that you now have opportunities to showcase your products & services right in the top search results on a mobile or a desktop device in the form of Ads!

Introduction to Google Ads

Google Ads is a platform that allows website owners or businesses of all shapes & sizes to advertise their content and products or services to people who are actively looking for them on the Google's Network. These ads are an extension to your brand content on the web which allow users to identify you and engage with you. Google allows great amount of flexibility to the advertiser to decide how their ads might look through this platform. 

What are Google Networks?

Google allows advertisers to advertise on Google's 3 major networks.

• Search Network
• Display Network
• Video Network

Let's get a bit more clarity. 

Google Search Network

As per Google, the Search Network consists of the Google Search engine, this includes all country-specific TLDs (Top-Level Domains) like google.co.in, google.co.uk, google.co.au, etc. The search network also includes Google's partner Search engines like Aol.com, duckduckgo.com, rediff.com, etc. You typically advertise on this network when you want to target your ads to people while they are actively searching for your content, products, or service. Your ads on this network might look a bit like the ones showcased below...

Google Display Network

There are millions of websites, blogs & single HTML pages on the internet. A lot of these websites wish to make some extra money by displaying ads on their pages. Google offers website owners to do just that with the help of its publisher platform called Google Ad-sense. According to World Wide Web Size Google has indexed more than 4.5 Billion pages on the internet (That’s more than the number of websites!) This is Index of pages is Google's Display network. You typically advertise on this network when you want to target your audience while they are actively engaging with the content related to your product or service. Your Ads on Google's Display network might look like the ones showcased below...

Google's Video Network

While the content on websites is growing at a great pace, video content is taking center stage & grabbing attention for the brands. At the center of video content platforms are YouTube. YouTube is also considered to be the second-largest search engine in the world. And it goes without saying that advertising on YouTube is just as important for brands as it is on Google's Search Network. 99.9% of Google's Video Network consists of YouTube. You typically advertise on YouTube, when you want to target your users while they are watching a video related to your business on YouTube or YouTube partner sites or YouTube, embeds on someone else's websites. Your ads on YouTube might look like the ones showcased below.

We hope this post helped you understand the Google Ads eco-system a little better. You can write to me with your thoughts, doubts, or suggestions in the comments section. We will be back with our next post on how to create a Google Ads account & if you have already created one, how to sign in to an existing Google Ads account! Have a great day ahead & keep learning

Cheers,

Mitul Shingadia

5 Easy Steps to Create Engaging Social Media Content

(read time: 5 min)

Dear Learners,

In the past few posts, we focussed on some SEO basics and creating content from an SEO perspective. In this post, we will talk about a few simple things you can do to create engaging content for your social media channels.

How would you feel if you create a content piece, publish it on social media and well, there are no likes, comments, or shares or not as much as you expected?

This will be a classic case of disoriented content and believe me many content creators are suffering from this problem. This usually happens when we let ourselves mislead from the core purpose of creating the content – to engage our audience.

In today’s blog post, I will take you through the steps to create the most engaging content that will bring more traffic to your website and more importantly keep your audience engaged.

So, the question is, how do we engage with our audience? By creating unique content that solves a problem or has something to offer to your customers.

Read through these 5 easy steps when creating your next social media post.

1. Research & Discover

While starting a new business or expanding your customer base, it is important to listen to your audience. As a matter of fact, you don’t get to decide what content to publish, your audience makes that decision for you. So, research your audience thoroughly.

Whatever you post on your social media, blog or website should be designed to solve a specific problem that your audience is working with. This will help you to come up with the most relevant content topics for your business.

Just understand or ask your audience what do they want and then create it.

Once you know what to write about – the rest should be easy!


2. Write an attention-grabbing headline

The headline should inspire trust and encourage sharing. They should capture your intention and reader’s interest, as it’s perhaps is the only way to create a first impression and make your users click. It is important to use the keywords to ensure maximum reach.

The better your headline – the better are your chances to stand out in the crowd.

CoSchedule free headline analyzer tool can give you an in-depth analysis of your headline.

So, take your time and get it right!

3. Write a compelling body content

Remember this, writing engaging content has only one purpose - to make the user read the next line and so on!

The best way to achieve this is by telling a story!

Storytelling is a form that connects people, draws the reader in and makes him take an action. This is a perfect opportunity for you to bring the artist out in you and tell your customers what you stand for.

The story can be in a form of infographics, carousel images or a short video followed by a call-to-action.


4. Use original content

There is a lot of content on the internet and most of the information is repetitive. It is not so bad, but a better practice is to write something new. Include your own experiences, thoughts, and knowledge.

Fresh content is the need of the hour and will certainly drive engagement and desired action.

For Social media you can include the snapshots of product offerings from your website and highlight the features or create a video on some real conversations that offer new information. Infographics work best too.


5. Create your own design template

Remember to keep in mind the likes of your audiences. Understand their choices and create what will visually appeal to them.

The key to designing your template is consistency. Be sure to use your own brand colors, themes, images, and other graphics.

The template-based video maker at Biteable is a great place to start.

Let the creative side flow!

Align with the above steps, while creating the content for your next social media post and enjoy the benefits of a highly engaged and motivated audience.

Once you get in the flow, you will find it more exciting and rewarding!

We hope you will get started on creating successful social media content right after reading this. Be sure to leave your opinions in the comments and share this with your friends. If you want to learn more about creating content, be sure to get in touch with the help of the form you see on the RHS.

Have a safe day ahead. Stay indoors. Stay happy.

Mitul Shingadia

SEO - Page Rank Explained in Simple language

Dear Learner,

Ranking on Google, driving quality traffic on most important pages on your site & tracking engagement are all very important Goals for businesses today. In my previous posts we have highlighted the importance of Content in driving your SEO efforts. We have also discussed the parameters for an SEO friendly content. While we continue in our pursue of creating quality and insightful content for our visitors on the website, its crucial to understand how Google actually evolved its ranking & rating systems of websites. There is a lot of ambiguity on this topic & will always remain for obvious reasons (Google is very secretive about its ranking algorithm) Lets get familiar with a few SEO concepts that may help you get by and formulate a thought process in your SEO efforts.

What is Page Rank?

Page Rank refers to a rating logic where Google judges you based on the quality & authority of links pointing to your page. This formed a primary basis for the Google Algorithm. However according to Google, PageRank is now not the only parameter, and as a marketer you do not want to focus ONLY on tracking your Page Rank score. In some updates Google completely ignores your page's Page Rank Score and views other parameters as quality signals. What are these parameters?

• Your website's Conversion Rate - When someone takes a commitment driven action on your website.
• Your Website's Bounce Rate - When someone rejects your website content by "Bouncing off" or leaving your page right after visiting it without viewing any more content.
• Your website's CTR (Click Through Rate) - In context of searches that happen on Google, how many times people clicked on your website when your web page was listed in the search results.

Google's Chief Engineer - Matt Cutts explains briefly the concept of Page Rank & other parameters of the Google eco-system in the below video. You should definitely check it out. This is an old video from 2012, though it clears up the concept of Page Rank

 

Is Page Rank Important for my business?

Some marketers believe Page Rank is dead, some feel it's still used by Google as a parameter to rank pages. We will never know until Google gives us a clear answer. In my opinion PageRank is a part of a much larger eco-system now which comprises of hundreds of upgrades per month Google makes on its algorithm.

How do i check my website Page Rank?

The most straight forward way to do this is to use online tools. These tools give indicative results, which means its not the actual Page Rank score that Google uses, its an estimated Page Rank score derived my the index of that tool, which calculates the score based on the quality of links pointing towards your website & links that you are pointing to send your users. I regularly use the Check Page Rank Tool to get an insight on my Page Rank Score.

Conclusion

Whether Page Rank is important or not, one thing doesn't change. You need to get links from websites with a high Domain Authority (DA). That is the topic of my next blog post. Do let me know what you think about Page Rank. Leave your opinions, experiences or doubts in the comments section. Stay tuned for the next post on Domain Authority & its impact on traffic.

LinkedIn Marketing Workshop - 9th August

LinkedIn Marketing Workshop at Mumbai

Dear Learner,

It gives me immense pleasure to announce an independent workshop on LinkedIn Marketing in association with Skillwise Solutions. I would be very happy to see you attend this workshop and take away with you a skill thats essential to growth on LinkedIn.

Whats covered in the workshop?

1. Create a professional LinkedIn Page
2. Identify why and when to create Showcase Pages.
3. Get a handy guide to the Do's & Don'ts on LinkedIn for Brands
4. Quickly create ad manager accounts & get started with LinkedIn Ads to amplify your reach, audience & brand visibility.
5. Get to know the Advertising Dashboard of the platform with various ad formats to choose from
6. Discuss a brand case study which will spark a few ideas on how you can be a pro-level LinkedIn brand! 

Event details?

Location: 91 Springboard, Bandra Kurla Complex

Timing: 4pm to 6 pm

Fees: Rs 500

To register: http://bit.ly/2M1J5NU

Please me sure to get your laptop for a hands-on experience!

Happy learning

Mitul

Live video with an awesome batch @ WeBind

Making SEO friendly content - Part 2

Hi Learners,

Welcome back to my blog. In our previous posts, we started conversations about the role of content in SEO and how to build SEO friendly content that impresses search engines like Google. If you missed Part 1 of this series, be sure to read through that first. You can find it here. Picking up the threads from where we left, lets get started with more parameters and pointers that will help us create better content for our business and our clients.

Content Variety

Lets understand this with an example. When i search for a celebrity term "Vidya Balan" on google. There are 2 different pages that Google has an option to show.

Type A

Type B

Lets evaluate components of Type A

Pros:

• Secure site (https://)

Cons:

• Url structure not relevant to my search query

Variety of content

• Headline
• Image
• Too much text in the latter half of the page. (Click on Type A to see the actual page)

Now lets look at Type B

Pros:

• Clear URL string explains the nature of the page.

Cons:

• Not secure (http://)

Variety of content

• Relevant profile & cover image
• Very relevant website menu
• Video Gallery
• Image Gallery
• Social links
• Search box for searchable content
• News and updates

From the above comparison its clear that Type B is a clear winner. This is because Type B provides wide variety of information to a user who might search for the term "Vidya Balan" and the probability of engagement is higher as compared to Type A

Take away: Google prefers pages with a wide variety of rich content on a single concept. So the next time you want to write content for your website, make sure you add every possible snippet of information your users might need to know in different content formats.

Content layout

Websites with a smooth flow of content and a neatly charted layout are liked by users and hence liked by Google. There have been pages that were popular just because they were awesome to look at! (Remember Yahoo! News home page?) Today all types of content providers are in the race to show neatly aligned content. They go as far to change the look and feel of their websites to make content reader friendly. App businesses like Inshorts started with a swipe up content culture which is now a norm in news publishing apps. Below are two comparisons of articles from Times of India and Livemint

Times of India article page

Livemint article page

Of the above two, its is obvious that Livemint article seems to be more readable and encourages the user to read more. This logic could be applied to all types of websites with rich content across diversified verticals.

With these two suggestions, you can improve the engagement of your websites by leaps and bounds while making it likeable by search engines. 

Hope you enjoyed reading this post. Do come back next week to explore more. Feel free to reach out through the contact form on the site or leave your views on the comments section. I would be happy to hear your side of the story too.

Have a great week ahead.

Happy learning,

Mitul Shingadia  

 

 

Making SEO friendly content - Part 1

Hi Learners,

Welcome back to my blog. In our previous posts we spoke about the website design and architecture related parameters that can influence search engines like Google to start ranking your website. In todays post we will go through a few (if not all) content based qualities search engines "appreciate" on your business website. You can also use the below requisites as a checklist when you are working with your content planning team. Lets dive right into it without any further ado.

Keyword Focus of the content

Google and other search engines are designed to understand web page content with the help of "keywords" they discover in the content. This can be looked at from various angles, they can appear in the Titles, headlines, part of the written text which is visible to your users, image tags, etc. Most forward looking websites do not fail to capitalize on this discovery behavior of the search engine to their advantage by creating small & highly targeted pieces of content. This might mean more pages on your website, but its worth the effort. If you want to analyse the keyword focus position of an existing web page. You can use Keyword Density checker tool to get interesting numbers on your url.

You an alternatively copy-paste text on this tool and get results too.

Content Links - Internal and External

Internal links: These are hyperlinks on the content of your website that take your users to other useful pages on your own website.

External links: These are links that take your users away from your website, to another website not necessarily operated by you.

The search engine crawler follows the pages of your websites based on the links it finds on every page. So the cardinal rule of ranking is that you do not need and broken links on your website. In case you are not sure if your weblinks are working fine, you can check this using Broken Link Check, a tool that gives you a clear idea about the link status of your website. However this is only the first step of the process, you need to carefully evaluate the content quality and genuinity of the pages that you are linking to and the ones that are linking back to you. Search engines like high quality genuine content with valuable links, hence it also gauges the quality of your page based on this parameter. Here are a few things you want to avoid...

1. Linking to a page / website with spammy content.
2. Linking to sites without any co-relation to the content of your website.
3. Linking to a page / website with thin and senseless content
4. Linking to a page with derogatory content
5. Linking to a page with content creating religious and terror biases
6. Linking to adult content
7. Linking to sites which are selling illegal products
8. Linking to sites which are prone to hacking
9. Linking to sites that are created to just serve ads, not provide information. 

To evaluate your links, you can use SEO Review Link Analyser tool to get started. Ofcourse this would require manual screening too. 

Hope working on the above two parameters keep you busy till we meet again in our next post. Do try these out and share your feedback on the comments section. You can also leave your queries and concerns on the contact us form.

Wish you all the luck with your venture.

Happy learning,

Mitul Shingadia

SEO Design & Architecture - Making your website Search Engine Friendly

Hi Learners,

Great to have you back. Our previous post was about planning a navigation strategy of your website. If you missed it, you can read all about it here. This post is highlighting factors that will make your website easy to understand and likable to search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. So lets dive straight into the factors that make this possible.

Do not have broken links

Google and other search engines do not appreciate a site that has broken links or non functional links. This not only breaks the user experience and causes loss to a business, it also hurts the trust a search engine bestows upon a website. A few reasons why broken links can hamper your ranking are...

1. Search bots follow link to link in order to "discover" content on your site. Broken links result in non indexed content which means no ranking of pages.
2. Complicated links can cause the crawling rate to slow down resulting in slower indexing / time-outs.
3. Incomplete indexes do not allow google to understand the most important and content rich pages of your website, hence it loses credibility and popularity when compared with other sites during the ranking process.

To check if your website has any broken links follow the below steps...

Step 1: Visit www.brokenlinkchecker.com

Step 2: Add your website URL to the field

Step 3: First check for distinct broken links (only instances where no redirects are defined)

Step 4: Alternatively check for every dead link

Step 5: Monitor results

If you see broken links on your site, get your developer / content writer or your SEO team to fix it. 

Be Mobile friendly

A lot can be said about it, but this post would be too short to express the importance of being a mobile centric site. According to Google India mobile report, smartphone ownership has tripled over the last 4 years. 

The best way to start being "mobile friendly" is by using site evaluation tools. Some of the most common ones are...

1. Google's PageSpeed Insights
2. Google's Mobile friendly test
3. Google Speed Scorecard
4. Google Test my Site 

Some common expectations from a mobile friendly page are as follows

• Your web pages should load fast
• Simple layout - your website should be clutter free
• Easy navigation - most important content of your site should be accessible with least efforts
• Images should fit the screen and should not pixelate
• Videos should provide a rich experience, and should be optimised for mobile screens
• Design for touch - Smart phone users use fingers to browse, hence your template should facilitate touch. like broader buttons, adequate spacing, previews, pinch zoom content and tappable links
• Shorter links

Manage duplicate content

There might be a lot of sections on your websites that have similar content. Google and other search engines do not know which versions to include / exclude from their indexes, hence they prefer a website that clearly marks content as unique or duplicate. Some of these could be, your contact us forms appearing on various pages, testimonials and reports appearing on products / services page and more. 

Read Google's version of duplicate content here. Some of the common situations are as below...

• Printer only versions of web pages
• Forum or discussion pages that are generated separately for mobile and desktop audiences
• Product page that are selling the same product but with different URLs
• http & https versions of the sites
• www and non www. versions of the site
• Copied content from other websites

To identify the status of duplicate content on your website, follow the below steps...

Step 1: Visit www.siteliner.com and submit your website URL on the tool.

Step 2: Evaluate your top website content issues as suggested by the tool.

Step 3: List down priorities from the graphs presented

Step 4: Download detailed reports and send them to concerned departments / teams to evaluate and fix

There are a few measures that you can take to control / manage duplicate content on your website. These are as follows

1. Delete copied content: Authentic content is the hallmark of a successful website. Deleting copied content and replacing that with original one is a first step towards creating an engaging site. If deleting is not and option. Be sure to place credit link below your content which points to the original owner/source of the content.
2. Update duplicate content: Enabling user generated content and working towards providing valuable links and conversation to the content works in the site's favor.
3. Adding Canonical link elements to your page. Canonical commands are used in the html structure of your page, we will discuss this further when we cover the HTML aspects of SEO
4. Provide re-directs: Google Search console enables webmasters to provide re-directs. As mentioned in the earlier posts, there are 2 distinct levels of re-directs i.e.

• 301 redirect - When you are moving permanently to a new version / domain of your website.

To add redirects to your website from the Google search console follow the below steps...

Step 1: Login to your search console site dashboard and click on settings wheel icon.

Step 2: Select change of address from the menu that drops down

Step 3: Pick the website profile on step 1 of the page and choose your website

Step 4: Choose the redirect type (301 or 302)

Step 5: Submit your site

Above three factors lay the foundation of being search engine friendly and considerably improve chances of ranking higher on SERP results

I hope you enjoyed todays post. I would love to hear back from you about what else would you like to learn about or just plain thoughts or queries. See you next week as we discuss more SEO parameters related to the content of your website.

Have a great day ahead. Happy learning

Mitul

On Page SEO & Website Architecture - Planning for navigation

Hi Learners,

Thanks for coming back. In our previous post we spoke on the importance of On-page SEO and started with a list of parameters to consider a better ranking for your search results. In case you missed the post, you can read it here.  Our focus was on the very first parameter within SEO Design & Architecture i.e. URL structure or working with SEO friendly URLs.

Navigation strategy on your website. 

In today's post we will look through a few examples of great navigation strategies implemented by some popular websites. Google likes sites with a great information architecture. It constantly indexes new content and looks for pages that tell its users the exact context of the page. In a scenario when the user wants to start navigating through your website, it becomes imperative for the site to offer a great UI (User Interface) and UX (User experience) to your visitors which results in creating a positive impression of the brand for the visitor and also prompts him to return on the site frequently. In a nutshell, the idea here is to provide your visitors with as many options to browse through your site as possible. Spoil the user for options and get him to feel comfortable being on your site.

A few basics should be considered while planning navigation for your website. Here is a list for your reference...

1. Who is my visitor? (Doctor, student, working professional, trader, house wife)
2. Where will they discover me? (Search, social media, other websites, directory listings etc)
3. How will the access my website? (Mobility devices or desktop devices)
4. What do i want them to do when they are on my site? (Purchase, register, sign-up, book)
5. How can i make visiting my website a pleasurable experience? (UI & UX)

Once i have clarity on the above basic questions (Not limited to these only, they may change as per your business need), you can start considering the navigation options for your website. Remember, "More the Merrier" though do not be pushy and desperate about it. Here is a list for your consideration...

Website Menus - Standard Horizontal & Vertical menus

Every user on your site is looking forward for an easy to understand menu on your website.

A neatly aligned and a strategically placed menus is at the heart of your navigation strategy. You want to make it easy for your users to find what you are selling in the easiest way possible.

Category sliders with Call-to-Actions

Attention spans of your users are reducing every day. You want a neatly placed category slider on the home page itself so that your users can straight away "jump" to their interested product line.

Its easy to feel cluttered in the process of adding too many product sliders. Be discreet and keep it simple. 

The Search box

Your users feel delighted when they find exactly what they desire in the search box provided by you on your site. The size of the search box though has to be based on the nature of your business and the probability of your users who would like to use search on your website.

If search behavior of your users is important to your users, then be sure to work with more search add-ons like predictive search, recommended search and search suggestions within your search box.

Bread crumbs

Well, a little something goes a long way in creating a lasting impression. While navigating through your product pages your users might feel the urge to check back with other similar products or accessories. Implementing a bread-crumb link structure allows for just that.

Remember, bread crumbs are not an absolute necessity, but they are good to have if your business relates to it.

Product Filters

Allowing your users to control search results is the best way to ensure relevancy on your website. 

Showing accurate results and adding advanced search capabilities to your business site has more than one benefits. Collecting product specific data, driving focussed traffic, lower bounced traffic etc. I will discuss them in detail in future posts.

Sitemaps

We have already discussed .xml sitemaps in our previous posts, though this one refers to the .html version of sitemaps which will be used by your users to jump from one point of the page to another point.

Generally placed on the footer section of the website. 

Best practice is to keep updating the html links of your website. Though users don't really use sitemaps on the website these days, but Google still considers sitemaps as a signal of dedication and commitment to content.

Footer Links

Google likes neat, to-the-point and a well designed website. Your Header & Footer designs are an integral part of this eco-system.

The above example is inconclusive and bad to look at.

An ideal footer design

 
With the above options for navigation and your understanding of user behaviour on your website, you must constantly work towards providing a positive navigation experience and keep adding/optimising website architecture to suit your traffic needs.

Hope you found this post valuable and a great starting point for your website navigation plan. All the best and let me know about the concerns of your website related to navigation. Feel free to leave a comment or reach out through the contact form.

See you around for the next post, where we will talk about and explore more topics related to the design and architecture of your website.

Happy learning.

Mitul Shingadia