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SEO Progress and Strategies Reporting – Useful Tips & Guidelines to Professionals

September 11, 2017/0 Comments/in SEO /by Brahmadas R

SEO Progress and Strategies Reporting

This post related to SEO Progress and Strategies Reporting. Everyone knows SEO about generating huge traffic and sales for the businesses by improving the ranking of the website. SEO is changing at a jet speed with the release of new algorithms by Google very often. Interestingly, the Google is updating the algorithm over 500 times a year.

There are various blogging and content strategies that the company has to embrace to defeat all your competitors and stay ahead. To improve the website ranking, companies adopt link building technique. It is crucial for the SEO expert to conduct SEO audit to detect the underlying issues. Especially the technical issues on the website that is taking a toll on the website ranking.

The job of SEO Expert

The expert is to present the performance of the website and the SEO audio report to the boss and tell them the areas that you want to improve in the website and how these optimizations will improve the website ranking. You need to tell in the language that is easy for them to understand. The role of SEO is to analyze the website and communicate about the same to the manager or the CEO of the company.

Undoubtedly, after hiring an SEO professional, the first thing that they would ask is the number of qualified leads or inquiries that they can generate by making the website SEO friendly. How much amount they can save on promoting the product and in acquiring new customers is the next question asked by the CEO or your manager.

Basically, it is challenging for the SEO experts to convince the boss who has no knowledge on why it takes time to generate leads by embracing white hat SEO techniques. Few of the bosses who are alien to the world of SEO will ask the below questions to the newly hired SEO expert is :

• How sales have been improved in the present year compared to the last year by optimizing the website using SEO techniques
• Why the website ranking is slighting pushed down
• When they research with an industry related keyword similar to your business, then why the competitor website is appearing first.

You need to be ready to give explanation to all these queries

When there is a dip in the Google search engine ranking of your website due to release of new Panda and Penguin update and when you try to explain the same to the boss, then would not be in a position to listen to your explanation. All they expect is results.

Undeniably, it is stressful for the SEO consultants to send the SEO reports to the boss who has no knowledge on SEO. Basically, the person who has knowledge can understand the fluctuations in the SEO results every month. Undoubtedly, not every individual can understand about organic traffic, domain, page authority and other SEO terminologies.

There are three advice that you can take to get rid of headaches from the bosses who do not know anything about SEO
• You need to be able to think in your boss perspective. The person thinks always in the business and marketing levels
• You need to use marketing terminology to convert the SEO results into business level of thinking
• Create an easy to understand SEO report to showcase the SEO results to your boss
The only thing that a boss expects from a marketing guy, especially SEO expert is business.

People are ready to listen to whatever you say only when it generates business. So, it is not feasible for you to communicate in SEO language that we usually needs to use business terms to explain about the progress of your business. You need to tell them how many inquiries you are receiving every month due to on-page and off-page optimization of the website.

Different phases in SEO Progress and Strategies Reporting

There are different phases in SEO Progress and Strategies Reporting.

Awareness Phase

In the Awareness phase, the prospective client will get to know about your products and services. They are educated about your products through ads and promotions. There are traditional ways embraced by the companies to advertise about their products including giving ads in TV, newspapers and distributing pamphlets. The amount spent on traditional advertising to acquire new customers and retain the reprising ones is called as Customer Acquisition cost (CAC).

The role of SEO is to bring a sea of potential traffic to the website by getting quality back links to your website from industry websites to improve the website ranking on renowned search engines. When the ranking of your site increases for a specific set of industry keywords, then it gives maximum visibility of your website in organic search results. Therefore, customers can know about your brand with ease.

Consideration phase

In the Consideration phase, the customer would dive in-depth to learn about the company and why they should buy your company product over rivals. For that, you need to create an informative and appealing landing page that is embedded with rich content, images, and call to action button that will compel the target audience who land on your website to take a desired action after reading the content on the site.

The best landing page will help you get scores of traffic and qualified leads. The content and images in the web page should inform the website visitors about your products. Moreover, the testimonials and reviews posted on the website will improve trust in your brand and motivate the potential audience to buy your product or avail your service confidently.

Decision phase

In the Decision phase, the customer decides to buy your product or take your service. In this phase, they verify whether or not their decision is correct. The testimonials and videos uploaded on YouTube will let the customers to lock the decision of buying your products. In the blog posts, you can tell how using your product will solve the problems of the customer briskly. Undeniably, this will compel the customers to take the decision of buying your product.

Sales phase

In the Sales phase, the customer will buy the product or avail your service. Basically, sales phase is the final phase of the marketing funnel. In this phase, the efforts put in by the marketing team to push the prospective client into a marketing funnel and convert them into a potential customer will be paid off. The amount spent by the businesses in marketing their products will be gained in this phase. The higher the number of sales, the higher would be the ROI.

This helps you to identify what exactly your boss is expecting. More importantly, this person wants to know how much profit they are reaping in return for the amount investing in digital marketing.

SEO Reporting should be in line with Marketing Goals and terms

After analyzing the website thoroughly, you can tell your boss how much traffic you can improve for the website within the given time span and how many number of clicks you can expect and from the clicks, how many leads you can generate and improve over the past month. You can use business terminology to gauge the success of your SEO tactics such as ROI, profits, customer acquisition cost, etc.

In SEO, you can move the website to the first page of the search engine results page where the customers will find your products with ease. This reduces the amount you spend on acquiring customer besides gaining a huge profit. Furthermore, this helps businesses to earn huge profits and each stakeholder can get a meaty share.

The answer that you can expect from an SEO expert would be Last month, the website was ranked in 8th position and in this month the website ranking has been moved to 3rd rank in the search engine results page. The SEO can also tell the client how much efforts they have put to improve the ranking of the site despite of fierce competition from the rivals. You need to show supporting data of how much time it took for you to increase the traffic.

There is another wonderful way to communicate the SEO Reporting results to your boss

Undeniably, it takes a lot of time for the businesses to gain trust of the audience by promoting their business embracing traditional advertising methods such as TVs, papers, pamphlets, and other promotional ways. Conversely, SEO takes a little less time over traditional advertisements to boost the brand reputation in the online world. No business wants to earn a short term reputation instead they want to gain foothold in their niche and want to get continuous inquiries about their business even down the line.

SEO techniques will help you reach the target audience globally that is otherwise impossible for you to reach with the newspapers and television (traditional ads). This way, you can completely cut down the customer acquisition cost and let you earn huge profits on your investment in the long run. Every business wants to stand out from their rivals and gain good brand reputation in the online world.

Users Advantages

You can track the SEO results and show how the SEO strategy embraced by you is reaping beneficial results for the organization. You can also show improve in sales revenue compared to last year to your boss. If you keep optimizing the website with the target keywords, you can improve the site performance in no time. If you have integrated Google analytics to your website, then you can generate the performance reports every month and show it to your boss. You can show the increase in traffic, leads and the performance of ad campaigns that you have started.

You need to set a Goal tracking on the Google Analytics program to show the progress of your goals to your pesky boss. Ideally, setting up a goal is a part of SEO campaign to count the number of qualified leads you got. Using Goal tracking you can create a personalized template that lets you to measure the quantifiable results. The goal of a website could not the number of people who have come till the shopping cart or number of people who have filled the inquiry form and submitted it.

Create a template to report your statuses

You are publishing interesting blog posts every day with catchy headlines and informative content, thus it is helping you to boost your brand reputation in online for the industry keywords you have chosen.

You need to use the same templates that you started using every month to depict the results. No one likes to see the data in different formats every month. More importantly, if you have changed the data arranging format, you would need to explain your boss about the new format. You need to use bullet points to tell the facts and reasoning. Try to put everything in a concise manner rather than cramming with huge content.

How do you inform about your brand reputation for a set of keywords to your boss

The comprehensive report will let you inform your boss about the website performance clearly and give up-to-date about what are the steps you are taking to improve the site performance. A boss may be your manager or the CEO of the company. Basically, boss needs a piece of information to show how their team is putting efforts in boosting the site reputation and improving the sales revenue.

The SEO Strategies Reporting that is prepared properly will explain about the progress of the website and SEO campaigns to the boss in an understandable manner without you explaining line by line of what is in the report. You need to send this report on a regular basis to let your boss know about the site performance from time to time and avoid headache from them.

Your report should contain the traffic of your site, Key Performance Indices (KPI) collected from Google analytics and keyword performance.

The boss looks for the following things in a SEO Reporting.

1. Health of the SEO campaigns
2. Progress of SEO campaigns in terms of marketing funnel

Interesting blog posts created by you and submitted in government blogs to get quality backlinks for your website.
Optimization is done on the content and image among the total number of web pages.
Number of sales that you have generated from organic traffic and the sales you got through social media

3. What you did to reinforce your SEO campaigns like how many posts you have published and setting goals in the Google analytics
4. Days you are ahead from showing the results
5. Further actions you need to take in the project
6. Penalties that you were imposed by the search engines for not updating the site with the latest Google algorithm changes.

If you like to put the data in a visual format, then you need to collect the social media metrics. They are number of tweets, re-tweets, likes and shares you got for your post and depict the percentage in bar graphs.

Sending the reports to your boss regularly will help him/her to assimilate the status of your SEO campaigns easily. You need to explain your efforts you are putting in to take the website ranking to the first page of search results to your boss in a compulsive way.

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Most Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid

July 26, 2017/0 Comments/in SEO /by Brahmadas R

Introduction

When you are thinking about content marketing, then there is one most important thing that you keep in your mind, called optimization of your website and different blog post. No doubt that search engine optimization is changing day by day. However, it is still one of the most important agenda in the minds of sales managers as it not only helps in bringing new traffic but it drives the traffic towards the sales of the company.

The two main reasons behind the introduction of the new SEO methods are the development in the working of search engines and the diversion of the customer’s or user’s mindset. However, just by thinking the fact that you are using SEO for your website will not help you to be at the top of search result. It is crucial that you do the SEO properly and makes sure that you do not fall into the trap of incorrect SEO methods. These lame or bad SEO techniques will not only take away your traffic, but it will also be the reason behind the bad reputation of your website.

It is not on your hand that if the SEO technique you are using is good or bad. Some bad SEO techniques are unavoidable even if you are using the testing optimization approaches. Testing optimization strategies are based on the real time, and that is the way they are hard to predict, and hence the detection of the SEO mistakes become difficult as well.

Here we discussed about some most common seo mistakes which takes place in your content and by reading this article you can avoid in future.

Top ten common SEO mistakes to avoid

We know that SEO techniques are evolving day by day and certain practices are quite useful. However, certain practices are there that may have a bad effect on your website in the long run and hence below we are reviewing such harmful practices. These mistakes, if pointed out earlier, while you are implementing the SEO on your website, can have a fruitful effect on your business.

1. Selection of the Wrong Keywords

After content, it is the keyword that plays a major role in your SEO technique. However, sometimes people make a blunder by choosing the way too much generic or a keyword that is not preferred by the users or the traffic your are targeting. This mistake is made while you are choosing the long tail keywords. While you are thinking about the fact that you need a long keyword to reduce competition, you miss the most important factor in the preference of your customers.

Will the targeted new keyword be able to get the more traffic? Are you picking the right keyword? Thinking about these two queries and using the tools like AdWords Keyword Planner, Google Trends, SEMrush and Moz Keyword Explorer and so on can help you to have a boosted traffic with the help of the correct keyword.

2. Stuffing the Keyword

There is no doubt that in the earlier days, when the search engines were not that much evolved, stuffing keyword in your content helped in getting traffic. However, today the scenario has changed completely. Today keyword stuffing is neither crucial and nor it is a good SEO technique. Search engine think of keyword stuffing as a fraud and this practice will not improve a thing and will have a bad impact on your reputation

With the help of the LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing, Google has become smart and can recognize your content and keyword without the overuse of the target keyword. Hence this practice should be eliminated so that it will not hurt your SEO practice.

3. Presenting a content without focusing on keyword

No doubt that content is the king while we are talking about SEO. However, if you know about SEO, then you must know about the fact that it is not the content but the keywords that are used by the users to get the certain result. It is not the content but the keyword that is searched by the search engine for indexing. Hence producing an irrelevant content or the content that is not focused on the target keyword can hurt your SEO practice. You are not asked to write millions of pages to get the highest rank, but you are invited to write a relevant content on a certain keyword.
This mistake is the result of the different mindsets while you are writing the blog, trying to use different styles on one blog and not focusing on the demand and perspective of the users. Google want to give the user a result that can help them. Hence, if you produce the content while thinking about the keyword and make your content helpful for the users, only then Google will index you and make you come on the top of the search result.

4. Presenting Plagiarized Content

The term Plagiarism stands for the content that is not unique and has been copied from a privileged web site. Such content is already present on the servers of the search engine, and hence if you will be using the same content for your website, it will be considered as a fraud and will lead you to be down in the list of indexing. Copying the content from some other website and pasting it on your own is considered as the spam and highly discouraged.

You should spin the content and make it meaningful and unique. Alternatively, you can create a new content of your own by investing some time in researching and writing in your language. This will help you in having a boosted rank on the search engine index.

5. Forgetting the Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, meta keywords and image tags

HTML plays a crucial role, and the content that is typed within the <Head> tag that is <title> tag and the Meta tags play an important part in the SEO techniques. However, most of the people forget to use these practice and publish the content without using these crucial tags. Although the search crawlers will come to the website for indexing even when you are not using the tag, however, the time taken by them to reach to your website will be way too much that you can even think of. The potential of your content will be depleted, and performance given by your SEO practice will not be up to the mark.

Image or any media is important as it is the best way to express. However, do you the fact that the search engine cannot feel those expressions unless you tell them to feel? Yes, alt tag or the image tag that have the content about the real feeling behind the media helps the engine to crawl and index your website and media.

6. Do not using the Quality Links and anchor text

Link building is one of the most important practices when you are practicing SEO. It does not matter if it is the inbound links or the outbound links. As long as they are keyword focused and relevant to your website, they will be fruitful. However, this practice is avoided or forgotten by the people. However, back linking to the reputed sites and using the simple, understandable and keyword relevant inbound links can help you to have a solid reputation in the search engine. If your URL has the keyword that the user is looking for will help to increase your clicks, and the user will spend some time on your website.

Another important and missed part is the use of anchor text. If you are stuffing “click here” in every line that it will not only be considered as spamming, but it will also hurt the quality of your content. Using the relevant anchor text will not only help you with indexing but improve your content quality as well. Hence you should not forget about the anchor text while you are posting an outbound link on your website.

7. Using internal link everywhere in your content

Internal links are the most crucial part of your website. While a person comes on your website, it will click on the internal links while he is reading the content on your website or out of curiosity. Clicks on internal links are good for your rank. However, most of us use the internal links in the content even when they are not relevant and don’t have anything to do with the blog or the article that we have posted.

This practice is similar to the keyword stuffing and is considered as spam. Instead of doing your website a favor, this practice will be considered as a fraud, and you will have a bad reputation online. So one must use the internal links only when they are required and when they are relevant to the content.

8. Not investing time in making your website fast and mobile

Today, most of us use mobile instead of laptops or computers. Most of the online shopping and surfing is done on mobile and even the search engines after the Mobilegeddon update knows about the website that is mobile friendly and website that is not. Hence if your website is not giving a quality performance on the phone and is not easy to understand, trust us, Google will never let you be on the top of the search ranking. Hence you must invest some time in making your website design mobile friendly. If you do not want to havecon the search engine, you must give your users a smooth mobile experience.

Another important factor is the time taken for the website to load. No one wants a slow website that is taking ages to load and hence your website should have a good or quick loading speed. You can use the tools like Pingdom and GT Metrix so that you can analyze the speed of your website and improve it. Keep the point in mind that “A slow website will always have a slow SERP.”

9. Underestimating the power of social media

Social media is the places where the people will similar interests communicate with each other and share the different ideas. Hence in SEO social media can play a crucial role if we target some of the influential people who can spread our market to the target audience. This social perspective can not only promote our business, but it can bring more people whom we were not targeting at all. Sharing content on the social media will not only help in targeting the audience but search engine as well.

Posting blogs on the sites Digg, Reddit, or Quora, without using the power user or the influential person can also make some noise about your website and lead to a good exposure among users and search engines.

10. Forgetting About Analytics

Last but not least, is about analyzing the progress. We all know the fact that SEO will not give result in the first go. You will have to be patient and make sure to give your best shot in every SEO practice. However, without analyzing the results of the SEO practices, you will never be able to improve or know if you are going in the right direction. Setting a regular review of your website can give you the significant optimization results.

With the help of the primary tools like Google Analytics and Google Webmaster, you can measure the performance of your website and get an overview of where you need to improve.

Conclusion

Today, SEO is one of the crucial parts of marketing. However, these ten mistakes are not only common, but people do not even bother to have a check on them. However, reading this article about “most common seo mistakes to avoid” you can get ideas about how can we make a quality content. It will not only help in improving the SEO technique, but one can get the best possible results on the search engine index.

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10 Incredible Content Creation Tips to Turbo-Charge Your Content Marketing Strategy

October 15, 2016/0 Comments/in Content Marketing, SEO /by Maryam

Could you characterize what precisely is “High-Quality Content”? All things considered, it can’t be clarified plainly as there are such a large number of methods for composing content and every visitor likes to read different types of content- some like descriptive and some like to read only the highlight points.

Creating quality content that is tempting to the audience out there is the most critical variable in making your website stand out like hot chicks! Considering that there are so many bloggers taking part on the web, it can be a quite a challenge crafting content that has the top notch substance, to the point that’s noteworthy as well as feed the visitor’s needs. Obviously, blogging nowadays is not all that simple and you need to surpass such a large number of obstacles to get on top.

Secrets to Creating Killer Content – Content Creation Tips

So here I give you certain insider facts that are not privileged insights but rather hot tips that can make your content and SEO strategy better than average and emerge from the group.

1. Charming Blog Headlines

This is the one that catches a visitor’s eye when he’s going through Google’s search results. Since this is where he is going to begin judging what’s on your site, the headline should interest the visitor, so he clicks on to your site.

Regardless of whether the nature of the content is extraordinary and upgraded to the best, all endeavors go futile if the user is not going to click onto your site/blog.

Other than containing a fascinating feature, it ought to appear rare and if possible, even weird and negative. You can have a go at utilizing numbers, power words (or adjectives) like “important”, “unbelievable”, “fantastic” and trigger words like “what”, “why”, “how” and “when”.

Invite the visitor with a promise and deliver your content based on that promise.

2. An Interesting First Paragraph

Now the visitor has seen that great headline and has clicked into your site. He has begun reading the principal section, the first paragraph.

What he needs there is something that conveys the promise made by that dazzling headline. A few bloggers do the strategy of making astonishing headlines and after that compose a content that is absolutely boring and dull.

The result? It’s an immediate press of the “Back” or “Close” button on the user’s browser. One out of ten individuals look down through an online blog entirely and read the whole article.

After the headline, your duty has increased more. You have to snare the visitor who’s trying to run away from your site with a powerful content that describes in a simple and brief way, what you will be discussing in the coming paragraphs of your blog. This section of your blog is where the visitor figures out if reading this entire content is worth his time and attention and you can’t afford to lose it with boring sentences.

3. Express What You Know Best

Obviously, the matter in your blog ought to be enlightening and fill in the blanks of the user. It should give knowledge into some new regions in the niche which you are blogging/selling on.

It’s best to compose on what you have solid knowledge about. If by chance, which is highly likely, you are composing something new or something that is not your specialty, do an intensive and broad examination on the subject before you write the content.

4. Pass on something special like a story

A story-line always interacts with a reader. Attempt to make a few stories that match with your content in some or the other way. This can catch the user’s psyche and if he or she has gotten some experience like the one in your story, he is intrigued to go further and read more.

5. Pick a Target Audience

Despite the fact that positioning higher on Google is important, it is much more critical that individuals who click on to your site like you and trust you. When they believe you, they will hear whatever you say and take what you bring to the table for them.

Making trust in a vast crowd is not all that simple and I agree it’s a Herculean task. But be sure to particularly address and speak out to each one of the guests who is searching for what you are blogging about or those individuals who are now in the same field as you are in.

Devote all your efforts to offer them the answers to their questions in a proficient and conversational style. It is best to keep 10 out of 100 guests connected with you as opposed to making a decent attempt to get a 100 out of the billion individuals on the planet to go through your site.

6. Create content that is shareable

After you have figured the group of people that ought to visit your site, you have to figure out how to make content that is convincing and sufficiently enticing to make individuals share that on online networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

Research on existing content online that has been shared significantly on online networking and take notes on the quality points the content has got to offer and makes it shareable.

On that note, construct something new based upon your insight and as your individual writing style.

7. Add links to other powerful websites from your content

Backing your content with links from high-power sites (like Wikipedia) enhances your reader’s trust in your website. Give credits to an influence blog or website that has given you thoughts to create content for your site.

Connecting to such authority websites increases your Page Authority significantly and you are giving your visitors all the right reasons to stay associated with your blog.

8. Your content must compel them to make a move or take a step they haven’t done before

In spite of your content being of shareable worth, it ought to be one that initiates some sort of activity from the reader.

A content that challenges the reader to explore a new territory or do something that’s different makes your content an actionable one.

9. Have an incredible website design

Since individuals skim a content whatsoever, an awesome content should be presented with great design. The use of pictures which gets the user in touch with any of his feelings or by arousing his interest can expand the engagement rate for your article rendering it a converting piece.

10. Attempt to make Timeless Content

An immortal or timeless content, basically, is one which is intriguing and is significant for a long stretch of time. If your content is ceaselessly new and applicable, odds are that the content will get more linked and voted for popularity. So try and create content that’s immortal and evergreen.

Do you like this blog post about Content Creation Tips?. If yes, please feel free to share your ideas. Hope this post give some impulse for easy content creation for your marketing purpose.

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KPIs and Metrics in SEO: 15 Ways to Measure Your SEO Success

October 8, 2016/0 Comments/in Internet Marketing, SEO /by Maryam

When you start an SEO campaign for a website, eventually you will realise you need some sort of measure to check your performance. Certain fussy clients who can’t quite see the impact of your SEO campaign request for progress reports and performance website analysis. So how do you illustrate your success to them? Or what means can you use to check and measure what difference your SEO activities are making?

It all boils down to one thing: You’ve got to keep track of what you are doing. There are lots of elements you need to track on but where do you start? A successful campaign uses a control system to measure whether your SEO campaign delivers results. KPIs are one of them.

Read on to find out what are KPIs in SEO and some of the metrics that actually give you insights into where you have reached along your goal path. Besides, analysing your goal outreach, KPIs help in efficient reporting, improved performance and client satisfaction.

What is a KPI?

KPI is an abbreviation for “Key Performance Indicator”.

KPI is a metric that is used to ascertain your actual performance against your business objectives.

So, in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), KPIs are metrics used to measure your performance against your SEO objectives, which could be ranking number 1 for the different business keywords on Google, increasing the time spent on the site, getting more conversions and sales or building your subscriber list.

Metrics could either be expressed in numbers or in ratios (percentages). So we actually have “number metrics” and “ratio metrics”.

Page views, the number of visitors to a certain page in a given period, number of sessions are number metrics. Whereas, bounce rates, conversion rates are ratio metrics as they are represented in percentages or ratios.

So What’s the Difference between a KPI and a Metric?

Just the context. Basically, metrics are just a value of some sort. It can be the number of page views, unique visitors or conversion rates. But KPI adds a business value to that metric.

KPI is whether the metric is changing over time and whether it’s increasing or decreasing and in what direction.

So generally, a metric becomes a KPI when it impacts your SEO Campaign significantly. You can greatly increase the conversion rate on a website by optimizing the site for keywords, good design and so on.

How to Find Your Relevant KPIs For an SEO Campaign – KPIs in seo

To precisely quantify your SEO success, decide what you are really trying to achieve from your SEO campaigns. How do you want the end-result to look like?

1. First, identify what the client’s business is about and its specific objectives. It can be increase in conversions or an increase in the number of orders. Also do a competition analysis on the relevant keywords. It’s because a higher competition can take a long time and requires larger work volume before you actually start delivering results.

2. Translate those specific objectives into measurable goals which can be expressed in numbers or percentages.

3. Tie your KPIs with these goals.

For instance, your client’s goal may be a 10% increase in net sales for the next 3 months. Then your KPI is the net increase in the conversion rate for the website for that period.

If your client is a publisher or a blogger whose main source of income is from the Adsense Ads displayed across the site, then the relevant KPI may be “pageviews”.

If you are unsure as to whether a metric translates to a relevant KPI, measure its impact on the client’s business. It can be an increase in sales (conversions), income or subscriptions.

If a significant increase or decrease in a metric causes a corresponding increase or decrease in costs, revenue or impact the cashflow of the client’s business, then consider that metric a KPI.

Universal SEO KPIs

As your clientele expands, the number of performance reports you have to create also increases. Consequently, your headache can soar too! So here are a few universal KPIs to make your life simpler. These KPIs can easily be measured using Google Analytics Dashboard for the website, Google Search Console, Moz OSE and Alexa Ranking tool.

We have categorised the KPIs for SEO into four:

Awareness: How is your site performing in terms of SEO? How much have the rankings increased for the keywords in a certain period, say 3 months?
Content Performance: Are people visiting your site consuming your contents?
Engagement
Conversions

KPIs for Measuring SEO Performance/ Website Awareness on Google

Ranking changes for the marketable keywords (Keywords that aid in conversion)
Ranking changes for secondary keywords (Keywords that bring traffic but doesn’t help that much in converting)
Increase in organic traffic (number of clicks)
Number of impressions
Increase in brand search traffic: Brand search traffic comes through a search in which the keyword is your brand name
Changes in Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA)

KPIS for Measuring Content Performance

Number of Page Views
Increase in number of sessions, unique sessions
Percentage of Returning Visitors

KPIs for Measuring Engagement

Average number of pages per session
Bounce Rates
Average session duration
Average Time Spent on a particular page
Social Action taken, such as a Twitter share or a Facebook Like

KPIs for Measuring Leads and Conversions

Leads and conversions on a website can be tracked by adding the relevant landing page for “Goal Tracking” on Google Analytics.

For an E-commerce Website: If you add the shopping cart page under “Goals” in Google Analytics, you can track the number of times an item was added to the shopping cart. If the item proceeded to the “Payment” page, it is a conversion. If the item was added to the shopping cart but no further action was taken, it was just a lead but not a conversion. Herein, you can suggest factors for converting those leads into customers.
For a Service Website: The “goal” can either be a visit to the Contact page, the Pricing page or filling out an enquiry form. The number of people visiting the Contact page or filling the form is termed as a conversion KPI for the website of a service company.
For an Adsense Publisher: The conversion will be the number of clicks on the ads displayed on the publisher’s website.
For a Blogger: The increase in newsletter signups, the number of ebooks or PDFs downloaded from the website or the number of subscribers would be a conversion KPI for a blogger or a news website.

SEO is a never ending process. The algorithms change, the number of competitors change and more and more clients come in requiring digital marketers to monitor campaigns on a continual basis. Being digital marketers and SEOs, we identify those areas of the site which can be improved more.

KPIs are a huge part of SEO and can give you suggestions as to how you can improve those areas on the website and optimize it for conversions. What worked in favour of SEO before doesn’t anymore. Google has evolved the job of an SEO professional a lot and all of this means that it’s a bit harder to prove the ROI to your clients. These days, reporting has a bigger value attached to it. It can help you perform great and also is a means to make your client realize the true worth of your SEO campaign.

KPIs help in managing your campaigns better, which in turn converts you from a simple SEO professional to a strategic business partner who clearly provides value in all your services. Of course, each business is different and can have their own KPIs, in addition to the ones above.

What set of KPIs do you use to measure your success?

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10 Interesting Facts about Internet Marketing

September 28, 2016/0 Comments/in Internet Marketing, SEO /by Hena

What makes Internet Marketing unique?

Planning to step into the world of Internet Marketing ? This is why you should try it. Just a glimpse into some of the very interesting facts on Online or Internet Marketing. The domain of Internet Marketing is vast. But every marketer has to get acknowledged with some basic concepts first. Like it’s said, first things first!

#1 Attracts Attention On A Large Scale

These days people spend more time on the Internet than on any other service. The exposure is quite larger here as compared to other media of marketing. The various forms of internet marketing such as blogs, social medias, etc make it a lot easier to communicate with people. Customers get to know about each new product in the market instantly.

#2 Efficient Time Management

The marketing strategy enables to share advertisement campaigns simultaneously on different platforms. Time effectiveness is a key feature of Internet Marketing. Millions of customers can be handled simultaneously without degrading customer satisfaction. This way the task is less time consuming and tedious.

#3 Cost Effective Service

Ever thought what it takes to start with internet marketing? Well, it takes up only a few of your ideas! Yes. Less or no apital investment is required. All you need is some good blog writing skill and you are almost there. Compared to the traditional marketing methods, internet marketing paves a path to a cost effective service.

#4 Wide and Global Reach of Customers

It is much easier to introduce the products in the market on a global and wider prospectus. This can be done without actually doing all the hectic travelling. Once the product is introduced, it can be at your doorstep within a single click. The modern era of shopping is addicted to these online shopping free these days.

#5 24*7 Service

Internet marketing is available on a 24*7 basis. In other words, your online campaign doesn’t work on the basis of any time schedule. It is available on the net from the moment you upload it online. Any user can access it the moment they switch on their system. This makes the task all the more simpler. Bid good-bye to the time constraints!

#6 Quick and Easy Accessibility

Everything is just one click away. Whether it’s fashion or home appliances or gadgets, just select your choice. The service is swift in action. There is no nag-nag of those salesmen or risk of travelling. Enjoy a happy home shopping experience!

#7 Easy Catch-Up

It is often difficult to save every retail retailer number on your phone. The visiting cards also do not help us much. Only beacuse we misplace them too soon. On this context, internet marketing makes it easy. Every retail information is available on the Internet. All you have to do is just take the retailer website and get the contact information.

#8 Online Payment Service

With the evolution of internet marketing, internet banking also made it way into the digital world. These days payments are mostly made digitally. This ensures quick and instant payment service over the net. The bulky bundle of cash is an old story now.

#9 Machine Learning Solutions

Customer behaviour based options are kept in front of us. This is the new era of technology called Machine Learning Services. Now even the bots can understand and play as per our choice. The systems can automatically configure based on customer behaviour. Options are set as per each user style. In the following days, this can lead into a new form of internet marketing.

#10 Long Term Services

The service starts once the ad is put up online. Even after the product is sold, the campaign remains. This attracts more user demand. There is no time-period for how long the service can last. It provides a long-lasting and continuous affect on the customers.

This is just a sneak-peek into what Internet Marketing can do. I hope this gives you an idea about just what you are looking for. Have a happy Online Marketing experience!

Fresh Penguin Update 4.0: Now Real – Time and Page Specific

September 23, 2016/0 Comments/in SEO /by Maryam

After the third update on October 7, 2014, Google today rolled out a new Penguin update, which will be the last update for this algorithm. Google uses about 200 signals to bring you the aptest search results in front of you. This is the 4th Penguin Update, making it known as Penguin 4.0. Google has announced that Penguin will be part of their core algorithm, one of the 200 signals they use to process search results.

A Little Background on the Google Penguin Algorithm

The Google Penguin is an algorithm, more like a filter that Google uses to capture sites that have lots of links from spammy websites The algorithm also punishes those websites having an unnatural link building process, aimed at acquiring too many links within a short period.

Key Features of Google’s Penguin Update 4.0

1. It’s real time

Previously, if your site got penalized by a Penguin update, you had to wait for the next data refresh to happen in order to see your site rankings improve. However, with Penguin 4.0, the data refreshes happen regularly. So once you have removed all the bad quality links pointing at your site, you just have to recrawl and recache your website and the rank improvements would be visible almost immediately.

2. It’s now more page-specific

The previous Penguin updates punished the website as a whole. If you had just two or three pages having lots of spammy links, rankings for the entire site would get affected. As given below, Google announced the latest Penguin update to be granular.

Hence, it’s interpreted that Google Penguin would penalize the specific set of pages or a section of the website and not the whole website

3. Changes will be visible faster

Owing to the real-time nature of Penguin 4.0, you can see your site rankings improve quickly as soon as it’s recrawled and reindexed, should your site get penalized.

Why is the Penguin Update 4.0 Awesome

1. Easy recovery: Webmasters whose sites were hit by the Penguin Update need not wait any longer. They can see their site rankings improve quickly as soon as they have disavowed the spammy links.

2. Since it’s granular, you don’t need to worry about your whole site getting hit and not getting any of your pages listed for different keywords. The Penguin Update 4.0 targets only those specific pages where the spammy links point to.

The arrival of Penguin 4.0 comes as a good news for webmasters, digital marketers, and SEO Analysts, especially because of its real-time aspect. On the flip side of the coin, it is also a warning for all blackhats to keep themselves on their toes and not practice in getting links in an unnatural manner or from spammy sites. You can find more info on Google Algorithm by visitng Moz website.

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13 Experiences That Only SEO Analysts can Relate To

September 23, 2016/0 Comments/in SEO /by Maryam

Being an SEO Analyst is awesome. If you love challenges, this is the place to be in. The job of an SEO Analyst is like a roller coaster because one never knows when Google’s Algorithm changes. Google is said to change its search algorithm 500-600 times every year! So you never know when your site rankings could go up or in the worst case scenario, go down!

So I just decided to whip up a post about the common experiences we SEOs face.

Here are those moments and experiences that only SEO Analysts can Relate to. Have fun!

1.When a client hands over an internet marketing project with keywords that have got huge competition online

2. When you did an SEO Audit (Website Analysis) and found that the keyword is too tough to rank for

3. And then you start with your SEO Activities- On Page and Off Page Activities, Content marketing, Link Building and Social Bookmarking!

4. When you just finished the off page activities and created blogs after blogs, taking so much effort

5. And now, you wait for the keyword to start ranking

6. You are still on the wait…

7. After the long wait, your website finally starts to rank for the keyword on Google

8. A few days later, when your site is ranking FIRST in Google!

9. And a few days later, when your site rankings go down due to some change in Google’s algorithm

10. And when you see your Spam Score has increased because some site that’s got a low Page Authority is linking back to you

11. When you get annoyed and have lost all hope

12. When the site suddenly ranks on Google after you get a link from a site that’s got high Page Authority

13. And when someone asks how you do all this

Ultimately you do it because you enjoy it! The best part about our jobs lies in the variety of business people you get to meet and work for! And of course, when you win!

I hope you have enjoyed this hilarious post. And in case you aren’t an SEO Analyst already, here’s a guide in case you are looking for ways to get started with a career in SEO. Stay tuned for more awesomeness!

21 Cheap Ways to Advertise Your Small Business Fast

September 13, 2016/0 Comments/in SEO /by Maryam

What’s the best way to promote a small business? How do you get the word out about your business on a shoestring budget? Whether you are a small business or a startup looking for low-cost, effective solutions to publicize about your products and services, here are some quite inexpensive strategies that you can use to advertise your small business.

How to Advertise Your Small Business on a Budget

1. SEO your company website

We can bet that about 80% of your target customers might be Googling. Hence, you can’t overlook getting listed up in the right place where your customers are looking for you.

So get your site geared up tow show up online on Google as well as on mobile devices. Find out the marketable keywords related to your products and services and optimize your page to get listed on Google in those keywords.

2. Create a Facebook Page for your business

With about a whopping 1.6 billion users (that’s a third of the entire number of people on the planet!), Facebook is the place to establish a presence on in if you are looking for growth! You can start a Facebook page and use it to post photos, offers and discounts about your products and services. This way you also get to advertise without paying a single penny as well as connect with your customers.

3. Try Sponsored Ads on Facebook

Once you have crossed the threshold of getting a significantly large number of likes on your Facebook Page or if you know that your posts are creating a good interaction among the audience, you can try using Facebook’s paid features. Depending on your goal, whether it’s getting more number of likes or more website clicks, you can boost your posts or pages using paid options to reach a large number of people. The catch is that you get to choose the target region and the type of audience you want to show your ads to.

4. Invest in Google AdWords or PPC Ads

Paid Ads on Google which are created using Google AdWords can be a great way to show up online instantly in the keywords that people regularly use in search. Since it involves setting up a bid rate and managing your budget full time, it’s suggested that you outsource it to PPC Experts who are qualified and trained to maintain multiple accounts in different niche.

5. Start a company blog and promote your business using great content

I don’t think I even need to say this, but I might get guilty if I didn’t mention the importance of some kickass content! If you yourself are able to create it, it would be great! (Free is, of course, great, right?) If writing isn’t your cup of tea, you can always consider the influential bloggers in your niche and contact them. Everyone loves Top 10 lists, Best Practices, Tips, Do’s and Don’ts. Here’s the ultimate content marketing checklist I created, so you can get started. We have also published the 10 quick editing tips to create awesome content, which can turn any garbage to gold.

6. Take advantage of Press Releases

If your business does something that’s worthy of showing up in the news, never hesitate to report it in a press release. It can be your best media reference online and also generate publicity for your business at very minimal costs, with no fuss. There are dozens of press release websites online that you can take advantage of, including PRLog and Newswire.

7. Shoot your own videos and start a YouTube channel

You won’t believe how mind-bogglingly huge YouTube is! It’s got over a billion users online (one-third of the world!) and every minute, more than 100 hours of videos are getting uploaded in here. For some of us, YouTube is that platform where we can watch movies on a holiday, how-to guides, reviews of new gadgets and smartphones or even watch normal people unboxing and reviewing them. So if you can shoot awesome instructional and “how-to” videos or create simple Vlogs relevant to your business offerings, you can market yourself without spending big bucks. Hire a film student to do it for you or you can even shoot it with an old iPhone. It doesn’t have to be a DSLR camera itself.

8. Promote your business on Twitter

Did you know that this micro-blogging giant has about 350,000 Tweets being sent out every minute? So not having a business profile on Twitter could be one huge mistake. Tweet, tweet and tweet about your products, new arrivals, offers discounts or simply about what made your day awesome. Give your favourite customer a mention and thank him for being so awesome with a 140 character message. That could be one sure fire way to getting a dedicated number of followers who could be your potential customers.

9. Get locally listed

As the stats mention, local searches lead 50% of the mobile visitors to visit shops in a day. And 68% of the people use the “Get Directions” or “Call” buttons shown on local listings on Google. Many of us drive down the road to your shop using the directions as shown by Google Maps. So, make sure you get listed locally on Google as well as on the local online directories like Yahoo! Local, Foursquare and so on.

10. Repurpose your blog content into Infographics, Videos and Slideshare posts

Recycle your blog posts and convert them into an eBook. Or transform your blog posts into infographics and Slideshare posts. Since picture-based posts are proved to have 600 times more engagement than text posts, infographics have even beat videos to be the most shared content on the internet. As for Slideshare, it’s known as the “YouTube of PowerPoint slides”. So you can transform your long form content into sales assets with slides in here. Besides another fun way to transform your content is by making a video tutorial about your products, DIYs and video reviews.

11. Get branded through Instagram and Pinterest

Pinterest is now the second social networking site in terms of growth, which is about 57%. Most of the Pinners in Pinterest are into art and craft and 88% of them are proven to buy the stuff based on the pins they see. Boasting billions of pins, this is where you as a business must showcase your products, especially if they involve food and drink, art and craft, home décor, DIYs, fashion, technology, cars, holidays and events. Same goes for Instagram, that’s booming with about 400 million users, 75% of which are located outside of US.

12. Use LinkedIn Ads to get linked up

With over 400 million members worldwide, LinkedIn is another professional network you should be having your profile in addition to Google, Facebook and Twitter. If you are a B2B company, LinkedIn is a great platform to connect with business users. LinkedIn Ads allow you to target your audience with characteristics like geography, demographics, job title, location or the LinkedIn groups they belong to. Being able to design an ad copy that’s tailored to the type of audience you are targeting, can help you achieve higher conversion rates and hence, better ROI.

13. Design Flyers and Distribute them

Get help from that creative, designer friend of yours and create compelling-looking flyers and get them printed at an inexpensive rate. Distribute them to the people walking nearby your shop doors, give them away to apartment complexes, your friends, fix them on as many cars and other vehicles as possible or just throw them around the street!

14. Email Marketing

Emails are a very cost-effective system to advertise your business, especially when you are adding a new product line or a service to your existing business. It can also be used to invite people to come shopping especially by sending them promotional offers or coupon codes. Build an in-house mailing list of your existing customers or from your Facebook and Twitter followers. Communicate with them by sending them out emails once or twice a month. Anything more than that could put you on the spam list.

15. Online Contests

If you can cough up some money for a prize, you can get a large number of participants to follow you. They could be your potential leads! Organize online contests which centre on your product or services. Having a tight budget? Don’t worry, you don’t need to give super expensive prizes. Two tickets to a movie or a sporting event, a makeup kit or some back-to-school gear supplies like some fancy backpacks, markers or an art set could be attractive enough for getting a lot of participation.

16. Create Surveys

You can create interesting polls and surveys asking people to vote what they like best about your products, what motivated them to buy it. Offer them a discount or a coupon on completing the survey (as given by Kentucky Fried Chicken). You can also use these surveys to understand where they work, their age group and their income scale. You can also use the information to formulate your marketing campaign and also build a valuable email list of your potential leads.

17. Vehicle Advertising

Go for a magnetic sign on your car or van, especially on the back of your vehicle. It is a very visible form of small business advertising. As your vehicle goes down the road, certain customers may copy down the address and phone number from it as they drive nearby.

18. Bench/Bus Stop Advertising

Transit advertising can help you reach a massive part of your target audience. Get into an agreement with the local transport service to know more about the possibilities of advertising in benches and bus stops.

19. Ask your customers to review you

Online reviews on sites like Yelp and Google can make or mar your business. If you are confident that your customers are satisfied, ask them to rate you and submit a review. As you receive more of the 4 to 5-star ratings on reviews online, you will be the business that everyone wants to buy from. It’s a powerful tool to increase your credibility and trust among people about your business.

20. Collaborate and Cross-Promote

Expand your marketing outreach and surge your advertising power by joining forces with another business, that’s not your competitor. Get together and sponsor events together. This way you get to meet new people and expand your customer base. Add social media contests to the mix along with advertising your business quite a bit on each other’s websites too.

21. Offer coupons and giveaways

Once in a while, especially when it’s a festive season, send out coupons or promotional codes via emails, flyers and let people know that you are giving them some massive discount they need to make use of immediately. This sense of urgency can create a huge sales rush, so be prepared. Giveaways can also be announced especially for those loyal buyers or consumers of your products and services. You can organise a giveaway for people who make the biggest purchase or for people who sign up for your services in a given time limit. Online giveaways can be an awesome way to promote your site.

Conclusion

To conclude, advertising is all about finding out where your customers are hanging out and reaching out to them then and there. Every niche has got an opportunity to promote its business online. The key is finding out that appropriate mix that works fruitfully for you and channelling your resources optimally for it.

Have more ideas to promote or advertise your small business on a shoestring budget?

Do you have an idea that we missed out here? Let us know about it in the comments below.

Google Update: Penalty for Sites with Intrusive Mobile Interstitials

August 26, 2016/0 Comments/in SEO /by Maryam

As announced by Google on its official blog, they are rolling out a new penalty update from January 10, 2017. This new algorithm update will punish those mobile sites that irritatingly pop up interstitials in front of the user trying to browse the site.

Google had previously rolled out an update on September 2015 targeting mobile interstitials that ask users to install a new app. Ever since Google had been focusing its research on the user experience due to interstitials in general.

Google mentioned this new algorithm change will rank the pages with interstitials way too lower than they did once ago. Google’s new update is actually a replacement of the penalty for mobile app interstitials rolled out in September, last year.

But that’s not it! Google says they are committed to “helping users find the content they are looking for”. So it will be tackling those intrusive interstitials by giving them negative rankings in search results. According to Google, these pages “provide a poorer experience to users than other pages where content is immediately accessible.” So after January 10, 2017, pages where the content is not easily accessible (that is, content which is present on the page and able to be indexed, but not viewable by a user due to an intrusive mobile interstitial) will have its rankings pushed down on search results.

Clearly speaking, Google won’t be negatively listing all sorts of mobile interstitials.

Sites that will be affected by the new Google Update

Here are some examples of non-accessible content pages with interstitials that Google will be punishing:

Sites that pop up a new window (the interstitial) that covers the entire content when a user immediately gets on the site from search results to view it
Sites that display a compelling, standalone interstitial that a user has to accept or forcefully dismiss
Sites that use a layout where the top portion seems to be a standalone interstitial, but the original content has been inlined underneath

But not all interstitials would be punished, as Google says. There are sites would not be affected by the Google’s new algorithm change.

Sites that won’t be penalized under the new Google Update

Examples of sites that wouldn’t get affected by Google’s new ranking signal:

Sites that show interstitial as part of a legal obligation, such as for age verification or cookie usage
Sites that show login dialog boxes, under which lies content that’s not indexable publicly. This is in regards to sites that contain private information that could be in the form of an email or the unindexable content behind a paywall
Sites that use a reasonable amount of screen space to display banner ads, which can easily be removed by clicking it.

This new Google update comes across as an incredibly great news for mobile users and webmasters, who found such popups annoying.

Once again, Google has announced that content and the intent of a search query will still be a major ranking signal, whatsoever. And this new signal would be one among the hundreds of signals used to gauge whether the site is worthy of being included in search results. The good part is there is plenty of time for webmasters to gear up and see if their sites have got “intrusive interstitials” and remove them.

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10 Quick Editing Tips to Create Awesome Content

August 14, 2016/3 Comments/in Content Marketing, SEO /by Maryam

Whether you are a bestselling novelist or a small online blogger, you have got to edit your work. Your first draft is always a garbage of your thoughts disorganized and points that are uncertainly stated. Ever since writing dawned, it started with chaos and was restructured to end in order. Editing is such an important part of writing that you should be dedicating a big chunk of your writing time. While you go through your first draft, you need to check if your content is the best you have to offer and whether it’s got a flow or a rhythm going on in it.

Every writer creates a piece of content with a goal. For most of us, saving time while also polishing our writings is the main goal. Here are ten quick editing tips just to help you achieve this goal of presenting your best work in no time.

Write Awesome with these 10 Quick Editing Tips

So you have just finished writing your first draft and now it’s time to edit before you hit that “publish” button. But before you edit, I suggest you run away and leave off that piece you have been writing. If you were to do it all in just one sitting, you are committing the big blunder of letting all the errors fool your eyes into believing they don’t exist. Talk about ghosts in your content! When it’s time, wear those horn-rimmed eyeglasses and use these quick editing tips to make sure that you have hit the right notes and end up with the perfect final piece of content.

Tip #1 Skim the cream off your content

People read quickly these days and skim your content as much as possible without going over each and every word. So why not make it easy for your audience by keeping your content crisp, brief and fat-free? For your readers’ sake, don’t add so much fat into content by dragging out your sentences. Break up your content into bullet points with interesting benefit-driven sub-headers.

Take a look at these sentences and see the difference when reading them without the bolded words.

Every single person should read.
But the real issue here is people have a short attention span.
You are going to have to keep your writing short and brief.

Don’t you feel that these sentences are better off with the bolded words?

Tip #2 Use commas only wherever needed

In the English language, there are lots of rules to be followed when using punctuation. Even the usage of the little comma is subject to so many rules and regulations. Don’t over-complicate commas by putting them here and there like mayo on your sandwiches! The idea is to read your sentences out loud and if you feel that a certain sentence is longer than ordinary, break it up with a comma. Alternately, use commas on those spots you feel that the reader is going to stop reading.

Tip #3 Remove Empty Filler Words

The use of phrases like “here is”, “it takes” and “there is” takes the focus from the nouns in a sentence. They require other filler words to combine with them like who, how and when. Such phrases also stretch your sentences longer than necessary.

If your sentences contain a lot of these phrases, then it’s time to rewrite them.

Here are some examples so you can teach yourself to rectify them:

It’s fun to read- Reading is fun
There are many people who love to read- Many people read
Here are some DIY ideas for you to try- Some DIY ideas for you to try are

If you have already given a little description on the subject, then it’s okay to use words like “here”, “it” and “there”. For instance: I love being an SEO Analyst. It’s a great profession.

Tip #4 Replace weak verbs with strong ones

Certain words can reduce the impact of what we are implying. Look out for those words and replace them with strong, powerful verbs. It can drive home the point you are stating through your content, besides making it interesting.

Certain examples:

She had gone from Greece to Rome- She traveled from Greece to Rome
Dominos is giving out coupons- Dominos offers coupons
Make out a plan- Create a plan

Tip #5 Use Powerful Adjectives

Avoid using so much of “really” and “very” when you are describing something. Many people use “very good”, “really bad” to emphasize something while speaking. It looks good when you speak but when you write it down on paper, you get to see the difference. Words like “very” and “really” sound inadequate and are so much less of an intensifier than they ought to be. Keep in mind your reader’s time is precious. It pays not to waste his time by being as concise as possible. Get straight to the point with confidence using power words.

Really bad- Dreadful
Really good- Exceptional, Marvelous
Very Huge- Enormous, Tremendous
Very impressive- Catchy

Example: 5 Marvelous Benefits of Data Entry Service Outsourcing

When you use power words, remember to deliver your readers something that’s in pace with those adjectives. Don’t charge up your audience’s expectations and then give them some mediocre content to read. I gotta tell you, it’s a crime!

Tip #6 Use contractions

Contractions make your writing sound more friendly, conversational and informal. You don’t want your reader thinking that he’s reading a newspaper or a textbook. Examples of contractions are it’s, I’m, you’re, gonna, wasn’t, haven’t and so on. They are easy to pronounce and make your post easy to comprehend. So do me a favor and use as many contractions as you can in your post and connect better with your readers.

Tip #7 Remove those unwanted ings in your posts

“I am writing about…”, “She was running to…”, or “We are thinking about…” When you see so many ings in your copy, think twice about whether they are really needed or not- simply because you probably don’t.

You can get rid of an “ing” and say “I write about…”, “She ran to…”, or “We thought about…”. This gets your copy clear and easy to read.

Tip #8 Use Bullet points that match up

Talking about breaking up sentences, you might be doing it with bullet points. Bullet points state points quick and clear (like a bullet!) without much fuss. They are popular for breaking up long content and making your copy more readable. When using bullet points, make sure it matches up to the blog post title as well as the surrounding content. Many of the writers do the mistake of creating bullet points that are completely different and totally not related to each other.

For example, in a post that’s titled “5 Mistakes that could ruin your interview”, here’s a bullet point that actually goes along:

Forgetting to prepare a formal introduction

Here’s one that doesn’t go along with the title (because it’s not actually an error- you are suggesting what is to be done, not the mistake):

Prepare a formal introduction

If you are writing a post with a title that goes “5 Tips for Instant Success at Job Interviews”, you should be laying out “tips” in your bullet points.

Another quick tip for bullet points is keeping them symmetrical as possible. If your first bullet point finishes in a line, make the rest of them finish in a line. It’s good to the eyes and hence, easy for the reader.

Tip #9 Unpack longer sentences

A simple guide to writing better is to use one idea in a sentence. Long sentences make your writing a drag. Hunt for those long sentences in your copy and fix them as follows:

Eliminate unnecessary words
When you see a comma, think twice about whether it could be a full stop
If you see the words “which” and “that”, think if you can start a new sentence
Rewrite and rephrase

Tip #10 Track your mistakes while editing

As a final piece of advice, keep track of the mistakes you make. It can be a spelling mistake too. Certain words are hard to spell correctly. For example, I tend to add an s after onward. So when I edit my posts, I keep an eye out for onward so I can make sure I was not butchered again. When you keep a list of your writing mistakes, it becomes an important reference resource. It just helps the task of editing in future a lot easier and is a sure fire way of not making the same mistakes over and over again.

In Conclusion

Grammar is something you might hate right now. But a good writing that encompasses good grammar earns so much respect and credibility from its readers. (Personally, bad grammar is my pet peeve!)

If you care about your readers, you must edit your copy and proofread it over and over again. Tweet it!

It’s key to making your content marketing strategy work out great for the long term. Have more editing tips that worked out for your content? I would love to hear it over your comments.