How to Optimize Your Content Strategy with Social Listening

Social media has grown drastically in the past decade. With several successful social networks, accompanied by the continuously broadening user base, the data and insights available through social listening can drastically help improve your marketing efforts.

If you aren't familiar with social listening, sometimes called social media monitoring, it is the practice of collecting tweets, Facebook shares, blog posts and much more, sorting through the data, and finding key insights and trends related to your product, service or industry.

Companies engaging in social media often leverage tools such as Sysomos, Radian 6, Hootsuite and others to "listen" and utilize this data to help inform their social strategy.

But social listening can actually do much more than inform your social strategy. It can help you find new keywords to target via paid search, find new networks or websites to run display ads on, and it can also help you optimize your content strategy.

Optimizing Your Content Strategy Through Social Listening

Having rich, unique, engaging content has become a solid way to help grow your business and audience. How that content is used is dictated by your business model, but the fact is, content plays a role in getting users to your website and getting them to come back for more.

One area where agencies and companies struggle is determining what content should create and provide to their audience. That's where social listening comes in.

Each day, millions and millions of tweets, status updates, Tumblr posts, and any other forms of social postings touch on a wide array of topics. Chances are, they are talking about your product, service, or industry. By understanding what is being said, you can help craft your content strategy.

For example, let's take a look at an industry such as yoga equipment. Through the social listening tool Sysomos, we can see that the term ‘yoga' was mentioned over 12.5 million times in the first half of the year across the most popular social networks.

We also can see that a significant portion of the conversation is happening on Twitter. So let's dive deeper into that specific channel.
When using social listening tools, you can dive all the way down to specific blog post, forum post or even a tweet or status update. You also can look at trending information to understand what types of conversations occur most frequently.

In the case of yoga, various other terms are mentioned frequently alongside the term yoga. Due to the very broad nature of yoga, many people on Twitter are talking about products, working out, fitness and even some things that may not be related to your business. The great thing with social listening tools is you can constantly update your query. If you feel some of terms shown aren't relevant to your business, you can update your query to not include those terms.

This is the just the tip of the iceberg. Through social listening, you can understand who your most influential tweeters are related to your product or service. From there you can review the content they share, what questions they ask, and help inform what content you should have on your site.

Making Recommendations from Social Insights

Continuing with the yoga theme, if your business happens to sell yoga equipment, you can easily see there are significant conversations occurring around what type of equipment to buy. People new to yoga as well as aficionados both use social media to gather information prior to purchasing new mats and other gear.

While you could jump on your blog and create the next Top 10 Yoga Poses to Lose Weight post, your time may be better used creating something your audience is asking for.

By creating reviews and comparison shopping information related to your products, you answer their needs. Strengthening your product descriptions and providing insights on how specific gear matches up with body weight/size could help sway those users to making the purchase through your site.

You also can get an understanding of what format your audience wants content in. Instagram and other photo/video based social networks contain a significant amount of conversations related to yoga.

Search for #yoga on Instagram and you'll be bombarded with more than 5 million unique posts from this year. With many users sharing pictures of yoga poses with pristine backdrops, a company selling yoga products could potentially follow suit, and feature their products within the photos and videos they share.

Summary

This type of thinking is applicable to almost all businesses. If you understand what your customers are saying, what they need, and how they want to get it, you can craft the right content that meets their needs.

Unfortunately, just publishing great content isn't enough. You must also leverage social listening, content marketing, and SEO to ensure your audience reaches your content. But having an understanding of your audience and what they need is the first step.


Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2356681/How-to-Optimize-Your-Content-Strategy-With-Social-Listening

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Google Penalty Costs eBay Big Time

Back in May, when Google launched a new version of the Panda update, some quickly noticed that eBay seemed to be taking a hit in the rankings. It turned out that it was apparently at the hands of a manual penalty rather than Panda.

The penalty was related to weird category pages that eBay users were unlikely to actually land upon navigating the site, making one (Google alike) wonder why they even existed.

This week, eBay reported its quarterly earnings with a 13% increase in revenue. That could have been higher if it wasn’t for the Google penalty. Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land points to some comments made by eBay CFO Bob Swan during the company’s earnings call:

Marketplaces delivered $2.2 billion in revenue, which grew 6%, GMV grew 8%, and operating margin declined 340 basis points. It was a challenging quarter. As John indicated, we got off to a good start, but we had significant obstacles late May.

The combination of the cyberattack and the Google SEO had an immediate and dramatic impact on GMV growth. June GMV growth was 7% driven by slower active buyer growth and lower conversion. In light of these events, we have made significant investments to get eBay users reengaged, including couponing, seller incentives and increased marketing spend . . .

He later indicated the “SEO changes” could take a while and “cost more” to recover from. The company reduced its full year revenue guidance by $200 million. Swan also blamed the cybersecurity/password reset debacle for some of the trouble, but clearly the SEO issues are the biggest problem for the company currently.

You can find the transcript of the call at Seeking Alpha.

It goes to show that not even the big boys are immune to the wrath of Google.
Source: http://www.webpronews.com/google-penalty-costs-ebay-big-time-2014-07

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5 Advanced YouTube SEO Tactics to Drive More Traffic to Your Videos & Website

It's no secret that YouTube is a traffic source with almost limitless potential.
There's only one problem:
It's a very crowded place. In fact, according to YouTube, there are more than 100 hours of video uploaded to the site every minute.
Considering the deluge of content you have to compete with on YouTube, the obvious question is: "How do you get people to watch YOUR video instead of the millions of others?"
The answer? Video SEO.
I bet that most of your competition lazily uploads their videos and hopes that one of them "goes viral." Needless to say, this rarely (if ever) works out.
But if you take the time to optimize your videos for SEO, you'll get significantly more traffic than your competitors.
Let's jump right in.

A Brief YouTube SEO Primer

Before we dive into how you can use to optimize your videos for YouTube, let's go over some of the most important ranking factors that YouTube uses.
It's not nearly as complex as Google's famous 200 ranking signals, but YouTube's algorithm is no joke. It takes dozens of signals into account for ranking videos in YouTube search and for suggested videos, like this:

This infographic by Tag SEO sums them up quite nicely:

I know that's a lot of information to process, so let me give you the Cliff's Notes of the most important signals that YouTube uses:

• Title tag information
• Audience retention
• Keywords in description tag
• Tags
• Video length
• Number of subscribers after watching
• Comments
• Likes and dislikes

With that, it's time to show you five ways that you can leverage these signals to get more traffic to your videos...and ultimately to your site.

1. Write Super-Long Video Descriptions

Remember that YouTube and Google can't watch or listen to your video (yet).
That means that they heavily lean on the text surrounding the video to understand your video's topic. That's why it pains me to see extremely brief video descriptions like this:

Why is this such a crime?
Well, the more YouTube knows about your video, the more confidently it can rank it for your target keyword.
But more importantly, YouTube uses keywords in the description to rank you for super-long tail keywords.
For example, I published a video on YouTube a few months back called "SEO Strategy 2014: How to Rank in Google Today." My description for that video is a hefty 291 words. Almost an entire blog post, really.

That long description – along with some other techniques I'll show you later - helped the video rank quickly for it's target keyword, "SEO strategy" (currently number three in YouTube).
But it's also ranking for quite a few long tail keywords, like "infographic seo strategy" (number one), because the keyword-rich description includes words like "infographic" and "seo strategy":

Bottom line: Make sure your video descriptions are at least 200 words.

2. Optimize Around "Video Keywords"

Ranking in YouTube is great, but ranking your video in YouTube and Google is even better.
Although Google gives YouTube videos an inherent edge in the SERPs, that's only true for certain keywords.
These keywords are called "Video Keywords" because they tend to have video results on Google's first page.
For example, any keyword that includes "cute cats" will almost always have a few video results:

This makes total sense if you think about it.
Someone searching for "cute cats" doesn't want to read an article like, "10 reasons cats are so darn cute." They want to see cute cats playing, eating, and sleeping!
On the other hand, someone searching for "ankle sprain" wants to read about symptoms and treatments. Google knows this and shows those searchers a block of 10 text articles:

Bottom line: Before deciding on a keyword for your video, check to see if there are video results on the first page. If so, that's a keyword you should strongly consider because you can potentially get your video ranked in Google and YouTube.

3. Get More Video Views From Online Communities

Online communities like Quora and LinkedIn groups are fantastic places to funnel traffic from.
The thing is, most communities don't take too kindly to someone dropping links to their content all over the place.
But they're usually open to people sharing helpful YouTube videos, like yours!
Because the number and quality of your video views is one of the most important YouTube ranking factors, getting views from targeted communities works wonders.
Just find a question in the community that your video could help answer. Then provide some value and suggest that people watch your video if they want more information:

Bottom line: Share your video liberally on online communities. This will hook your video up with the type of quality, high-retention views that YouTube likes to see.

4. Encourage Subscribing and Linking

Because YouTube's algorithm doesn't use backlinks, it puts A LOT of weight on user experience signals. If people enjoy watching your video, expect it to crush it in YouTube search.
Subscribing and liking are two of the most important user experience signals that YouTube uses.
When someone likes your video enough to subscribe after watching it, it sends a strong message to YouTube that you have a killer video on your hands.
Likes are much less important, but they still count.
You can ramp up both of these user experience signals by asking.
At the end of your video, give people a strong call to action that encourages them to subscribe.
Marie Forleo – a master of YouTube marketing – asks people to subscribe at the end of every video:
(Skip at 4:55 to see how it's done)
And I'm confident that her gentle push has contributed to her multiple first page YouTube rankings and 93,000 subscribers.
Bottom line: Ask people to like, comment, and subscribe in every single video.

5. Create Keyword-Rich Playlists

Don't leave your YouTube channel an unorganized mess.
One of the easiest ways to get more YouTube search traffic to your videos is to organize your videos into playlists.
A keyword-rich playlist gives YouTube deeper information about your video's topic. And like we saw with your description, more text-based content=more views.
For example, FitnessBlender, which gets more than 100,000 views on every video, has their channel organized neatly into keyword-rich categories:

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One Easy Trick to Convert Website Visitors Into Leads

Fifteen years ago, I got a beautiful bound journal. I remember the month and year because the first entry in that journal is dated September 21, 1999.

My intention was to journal every day – I've heard from many successful people that the journaling habit is a crucial part of their success formula.

My second and third entries were also from that month. The fourth entry was made in August 2001, and looks like a page of notes from a prospecting meeting. The fifth entry is from 2009.

Clearly my plans for daily journaling had not panned out.

Then, on January 27, 2014, I picked up the journal and decided to get serious this time. Since then, I've written at least a page a day with only four exceptions.

I used a simple trick to turn a source of frustration and shame into a pretty bulletproof habit. And once you understand it, that same trick can be deployed on your website to get more visitors to convert into leads.

Tiny Habits

BJ Fogg, PhD, has developed a system of habit formation called "Tiny Habits." It's kind of the opposite of the New Year's Resolution.

Instead of making a giant, hard change (like suddenly going to the gym three times a week or giving up cigarettes or yes, writing a page a day in a journal), you implement a tiny habit by identifying the ultimate desired behavior and making the very smallest step in that direction that you can possibly make.

Fogg's flagship example is flossing. He notes that people find starting to floss hard. It can hurt, our gums can bleed, it takes a couple of minutes, the floss can get stuck between our teeth, and so on.

Rather than try to increase our motivation for an unpleasant and difficult behavior, Fogg suggests simply making the behavior much easier.

So instead of flossing, here's his formula for a tiny habit: floss one tooth.

Write One Sentence

My new journaling strategy: Every day I wake up and write one sentence in my journal. There's no quality assurance either: I'm fine with, "Here is my one sentence for today."

And here's what happened: I wrote one sentence.

And since I had already opened the journal and uncapped the pen, I wrote a second one. And a paragraph. And a page. It was really helpful to see my thoughts unfold, my insights come out.

Next day, one sentence. And then the rest of the page.

And so it goes. Each day, I write a single sentence. Sometimes that is all I write, if I'm in a rush or not in the mood. But most of the time I write a page or two.

Should We Focus on Motivation or Ease?

Fogg developed "Tiny Habits" after seeing the implications of his behavior model: that behaviors occur given sufficient motivation, ability, and a trigger occurring simultaneously. The harder the behavior, the higher the motivation required. The easier the behavior, the less motivation.

We search marketers spend so much time analyzing our markets, sleuthing our prospects' fears and desires, and honing our copy, that we naturally default to amping up motivation.

The art of copywriting is all about motivating people to action. Features and benefits, social proof, psychological triggers, urgency, scarcity, and the whole toolkit are there to make our prospects want it more.

But search marketing, although a descendant of the old sales letters that tried to sell anything and everything through the mail to the uninterested masses, is actually a very different beast.

Search marketing is driven by desire. I search for "healthy meal delivery" because I already want vegan meals delivered to my home. Yet the ads and websites triggered by my search are spending most of their real estate on convincing me that I want their product.

For example, BistroMD.com has gorgeous food photos and lots of copy about how much weight I can lose easily and deliciously. But their primary call to action is to order a week's worth of food for $159.95.

I don't care how easy it is to receive, store, reheat, and eat their food. Spending $159.95 is hard for most of us when we don't know if it's a good idea.

Inviting Your Website Visitor to Develop a Tiny Habit

Instead of motivating your prospect to do something hard, why not work the other part of the equation: ability?

BistroMD.com could offer a days' worth of food as the first call to action. Cheaper, simpler, less risky. And that one day, if pleasing to the prospect, can easily be converted into a larger habit, just as my single-sentence journaling easily grew to its natural size. Writing wasn't the hard part; starting was.

And with many of our products and services, once folks get a taste, and develop a tiny habit, they'll increase their order size and frequency to its natural dimensions as well.

So next time you try to increase your conversion rate, try this: make one thing easier for your prospect. You may find that approach becomes a habit.

Source: searchenginewatch

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Intro to ecommerce website design

If you were thinking about the growth of your business and have decided to start selling your products and services also online then you might want to know a thing or two about eCommerce website design that brings your business to success. The difference between e-commerce websites and regular websites is the features and functions that are required for it and also they are likely to cost you more to produce such a website rather than a regular one. The time spent to plan the e-commerce website is the best investment that you could make and which will guarantee the success of your online business. If you create a good plan then you can save a lot of time, expenses and also do some risk management that will prevent the appearance of future crises.

If you are not savvy with programming and website design, then most likely you will be required to hire someone to do this for you, either in the form of a freelancing website designer or a website design agency. Regardless where you hire the person from, a website designer should be able to give you sound advice and assistance so that the final design of your website is also the suitable one for your brand. Before deciding what person to hire ask the applicants to send you their portfolio and study their projects with attention and the way they build e-commerce websites before.

The most important aspect of your e-commerce website is for it to look professional and trustworthy. You are in a business and business means an exchange between you and your target audience. If the seller doesn’t look trustworthy, then of course that people will not spend their money there as they would be afraid of being cheated. This is why the last part of the feedback process is to ensure that the website designer you work with creates a professional look for your e-commerce business.

Source: siliconindia

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How to Delete Negative website Reviews from search engine: Safe Brand

If you have not been proactively checking your brand online, then this is the right time to do so. With the advent of the internet, most potential customers will probably do some "Googling" or searching about your site in the internet before actually visiting your site to purchase whatever products or services you offer. This is where the tricky part comes in; without you knowing, some irate customer or competitor might have written something negative about your site, and it is showing in Google's top page or any other search engine result. This literally kills your sales even before it actually starts and you are unaware of it.

Think of what other potential customers will do when they see that particular review about your company.

Word of mouth takes a new trendy courtesy of the internet, and with how fast one can access the internet, your company might be losing millions of sales and even prospective suppliers who can give you discounts. So what are you going to do about it?

Do Your Research

Your company's brand is its most treasured asset. It is therefore crucial that you take matters in your own hands and that starts with researching yourself. Search your company for keywords that you want to be found. If you find a negative review about your company, then you might want to talk with the moderator if it is a forum or the web administrator to have it pulled down especially if the reviews are false or accusatory. More often than not, contacting the web master or moderator would resolve the issue.

Worst Case Scenario

The worst thing that could happen is if the moderator or web administrator refuses to pull down the review. This can happen especially in forums or review sites where the moderators have limited powers to do so. If this happens to you, then you can try out several of the tips below before you launch a lawsuit against the reviewer. A lawsuit is not only costly but also ineffective as you would lose valuable time and money that you can re-allocate elsewhere.

What to do?

If the webmaster refuses to remove the negative review, you can ask them what to do to overturn the review. More often than not, they would suggest some options including contacting the reviewer and remedying the problem. If the reviewer refuses, you can comment on the site and explain your side of the story so other viewers would be able to know your side and judge you for that.

One of the best things that you can do is to polish your company's image so that the cracks will appear so small that nobody would bother checking it out is to join professional networks in your industry and make connections not only with your peers but also with prospects that are interested in your product and services. Aside from professional networks, you can also open a social media network for your company such as a FB page or a Twitter account. The two sites have a high percentage of users and since these rank high in terms of authority, they can pass some link juice and also help push down the negative review to oblivion.

Another thing to do is to make use of some reciprocal links with other websites in your industry. This is especially effective if the site is considered an authority site in your niche. Google loves sites that link to relevant sites. Do not link with other sites outside of your industry as this would look spammy and Google might slap your site with penalties.

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