Don’t fret.

If you don’t have an SEO company at your disposal, it’s alright. You will live. But to save you from misery, we wrote a few mistakes common to rookies. You might be guilty of them too.

1. Not Knowing Which Type of SEO To Use

There are two types of SEO: Black Hat and White Hat.

We don’t know where they got their names, but we understand how they work.

White Hat SEO operates on methods and techniques that follow the search engine’s guideline to improve the ranking of the website. Most companies and websites with long-term, stable and sustainable goals use this. It provides growth steadily and gradually for conversion.

This squeaky clean SEO technique includes high-quality content development, website HTML optimization, and restructuring, link acquisition campaigns supported by high-quality content and manual research and outreach.

Black Hat SEO is the naughty one. It exploits the weaknesses in the search engine algorithms to have quick and short-lasting growth in rankings. It uses techniques and methods in conflict with the search engine guidelines. Some techniques of the Black Hat SEO are link spamming, keyword stuffing, cloaking, hidden text, and links. However, using these techniques may end up penalizing your website.

If you are using a combination of the two, then you are wearing your Gray Hat. Most SEO companies employ a mix of both techniques to deliver results to their clients. Gray Hat SEO also allows companies to offer affordable services because costs are less when questionable methods are involved.

There is no wrong and right way to do SEO, but it’s better to know and be aware of the types and the risks involved when dealing with them.

2. Not Utilizing Links

Links can either be a follow link or a no follow.

What does that have to do with anything?

SEO is all about putting yourself out there and having links pointing to your website earns you brownie points. Google keeps track of how many links are on a page, and if a lot of pages link to that particular page, then that page is valuable.

A follow link also allows Google to crawl on the pages. It gives your site a higher chance of appearing in the SERP. Google also has a metric for calculating link points. Link points or link juice can flow through the sites. If your site from a reputable site, you’d get a fair share of link juice. Large boosts in link juice give a higher ranking.

3. Not Checking for Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is having the same content on multiple URLs. You may be caught up on filling your website with details and information, but it’s best to do it in an organized manner. Google won’t be ranking a site with a bunch of duplicate content.

Before adding a new page to your site, check if there’s already an existing one with the same content. You can use no follow links, 301 redirects or the canonical tag to fix this.

4. Not Setting Up Landing Pages

Having designated landing pages for each keyword minimizes the probability of having duplicate content. At the same time, it increases the traffic to your site, and it puts everything in perspective. It is useful to direct users to the information they need or to the things you want them to see.

5. Targeting The Wrong Keywords

Choosing the appropriate keywords for your content is crucial for SEO. At most, choose high-value keywords that are relevant to your brand, company, product, and service. It’s best to go for keywords that are unique. Some keywords belong to a competitive niche. You will have a hard time directing the users to your content if thousands are doing the same thing.

Here’s an alternative, optimize your content for Rich Answer. Rich Answers are the results that appear on top of organic search results. It’s the first thing users will see upon searching for their query. It makes them think that information in there is reliable and highly recommended.

6. Expecting Results Overnight

SEO is an ever-evolving process that requires an enormous time investment and plenty of hard work.

Anytime someone offers you or tells you of instant results, don’t be fooled. A high ranking is not possible without influencers, capable webmasters to navigate the algorithms and understand analytics, and a [content marketing] plan.

We hope you picked a thing or two on the mistakes SEO rookies are bound to make. You may have committed a few of these, but now you know how to deal with them. Remember, SEO is a concept not set in stone. It’s always better to keep learning and stay up-to-date on the changes to the search engine’s algorithms. You will learn to catch up, eventually.

The post SEO Rookies are GUILTY of these Mistakes appeared first on Internet Marketing Reach.

This article will tell you how can you boost your search engine marketing’s (SEM)  profitability.

Let’s refresh a bit. Here’s a rundown of the terms you often encounter (in the simplest language possible):

Search engine marketing (SEM) – an Internet marketing strategy that aims to promote your website through increasing its visibility online on SERP through optimization (SEO) and advertising (PPC).

Search engine results page (SERP) – a results listing returned by Google and other search engines in response to a search.

Search engine optimization (SEO) – the processes involved in affecting website or web page visibility in Google’s organic search results.

Pay-per-click (PPC) – an Internet advertising model directing traffic to the website and where advertisers (usually, website owners) pay the publisher (usually, Google and other search engines) every time the ad is clicked by a user.

Acquisition – the process of converting a user to a visitor then to a customer.

Enhanced cost-per-click (ECPC) –  a bidding feature wherein advertisers can raise their bids for those clicks that most probably lead to a conversion.

Going back…

If you know who are more likely to buy from you, will you not be willing to spend more in acquiring these customers? Of course, you would be. Because of the features like ECPC, we cannot underestimate the power of PPC in converting a consumer into becoming a paying customer.

There remains the fact that PPC will not give you unlimited stream of prospects. This means focusing on the long-term value that PPC is helping you acquire in the first place.

Let’s take this for an example…

A conversion has an immediate financial advantage.

Average CPC: $3.00

Conversion rate: 10%

Transaction (cost/conversion): $15.00

Transaction amount (value/conversion): $30.00

Return: X2

Imagine that you can earn this much for every new customer. Now imagine if that customer has a lifetime value. When we say the customer’s lifetime value, the tangible factors are repeat sales, referrals, etc. while the intangible factors are loyalty and positive word of mouth, among others. Customers with lifetime value are what ECPC targets.

Customers are not created equal. This is a fact. Some customers will buy from you today and then disappear forever. Then, there are customers who will buy you today, the day after tomorrow, next month and so on. If you can identify which channels, ad groups and keywords to target these repeat customers, you would certainly want to invest more to these channels, ad groups and keywords.

You might think of this as an experiment, but it is not. Data showed that customers who were acquired through across various paid search terms usually differ in their lifetime value. And the difference is from 30% and up.

Put it this way. As a marketer, you should be targeting people with lifetime value, not only those who can give you immediate payback. If your SEM and thereby, SEO and PPC target only those with an initial value (first-time and one-off customers), you are leaving immense opportunities behind.

How can we optimize PPC for acquiring customers with lifetime value?

Initially, you need to track your customers’ historic spending. Compare each ad group based on this factor. Target and re-target those customer segments that have evident patterns of high long-term value. Invest more on these high-return campaigns.

Next, focus on customer-centric metrics and ditch the transactional ones. For instance, ask “who were acquired by this particular keyword?” and not “how much did I spend for and earn from this particular keyword?” Most indicators are quantifiable, but they usually give insights about both short- and long-term benefits.

Optimizing PPC around lifetime value is not without difficulties. However, you can use this in guiding your overall SEM strategy to boost acquisition and thereby profitability. Maximize every dollar you spend on bids by investing on the highest-return campaigns thereby driving long-term business value. When that time comes, you no longer have to imagine what it feels like having a league of returning customers.

Image credits: Creative Strategist | SAP | Next Level

The post Increasing Your Customer Acquisition Program’s Profitability appeared first on Internet Marketing Reach.

Online, there is a plethora of discussions about the benefits of responsive design. Nonetheless, there are only a few that tackles the benefits of putting responsive videos on responsive websites. This article aims to contribute to the meager literature regarding such.

The problem of unresponsive videos

If you think a responsive website makes all other elements such as images and videos responsive, you are wrong. There are instances when images appear ‘cropped’ thus the users only see a small portion of the image. The same goes with the embedded videos where only the play button is visible.

Simply, specific elements do not necessarily resize and fit the already limited screen space of the device used. An example of this element is iframe which is required to use when you embed video contents from external sources, for instance, such as YouTube, Vimeo and Vine.

By default, embedded videos are given fixed heights and widths. The videos are prevented from responding to the browser-related changes. The most important aspect of a responsive design is ensuring that all elements within the page are adapting gracefully to various screen sizes.

The benefits of responsive videos

Responsive design exploded in 2012, and 2013 was hailed as the year of responsive design. However, 2014 has seen more improvements that firms can manipulate at their disposal.

Below are some of the benefits of putting responsive videos on your website.

1) Reduce bounce rate

Mobile websites suffer from high bounce rates specifically when there is an evident inconsistency. Users will leave your responsive website if there are obtrusive videos, heavy video files, videos that are not playing, videos that cannot be view in full screen, etc. Google interprets high bounce rates as an indication that the website is not trustworthy enough and has irrelevant contents albeit videos, leading to a significant drop in ranking.

Responsive designs combat this as it presents all-responsive contents on the website. In putting responsive videos, for instance, there are no room for compromises on the choice of contents that the website displays. This means visitors are receiving the information that they are looking for in the first place, and thus keeping them on the page.

2) Enhance user experience (UX)

Going responsive is all about giving the users the experience that they want and prefer when interacting with websites. With this, responsive websites must still be user-friendly regardless of the size of screen that they are viewing your responsive website from.

Videos that fail to perform do not contribute in making the experience a pleasant one for the users. Designing for the users also means putting responsive elements that will work just perfectly.

3) Rank better and higher on SERP

SERP stands for search engine results page, or simply the Top 10. Google loves responsive design. In fact, Google is the biggest advocate of responsiveness in targeting mobile users. The search giant favors mobile-optimized websites when it presents results particularly on an inquiry made through a mobile device. Your responsive website will appear on SERP.

On the other hand, if anything on the website like the video is not responsive, Google might find difficulty determining whether the website is 100% mobile-optimized or not. Although mobile bots are not as sophisticated as the present algorithms, who knows, Google may not be able to crawl the entire page because of responsive-prohibitive elements.

Responsive design helps in appealing to modern users or those users who traverse the Internet using a mobile device. Call them millennials, if you want. The bottom line is they expect that a responsive website contains elements that are also responsive. As such, putting responsive videos is a surefire way of making most of the mobile-browsing experience.

Sources: Designers.Hubspot.com | SmashingMagazine.com | CSS-Tricks.com | SearchEngineJournal.com | KISSmetrics.com

Image credit: TheJTSite.com

The post 3 Hard-to-Miss Benefits of Responsive Videos appeared first on Internet Marketing Reach.