WHAT IS E-COMMERCE SEO?

E-commerce SEO is big. Do not take our word for it – see the stats. According to research, e-commerce sales went up by a whopping 125 percent in the first quarter of 2022 when compared with the first quarter of 2020. The same study even revealed that 55 percent of surveyed buyers said they would stick to their online shopping habits developed during the COVID-19 pandemic. That means online store SEO is huge and should not take a back seat.

Now that you have a clear idea of what e-commerce SEO is, so let us get down to understanding Shopify SEO.

WHAT IS SHOPIFY SEO?

The Shopify platform is growing at a steady pace. According to the usage statistics of the e-commerce platform at press time, there are 4,488,420 customers with live Shopify stores. Owing to the e-commerce platform’s growing market share, it is important to invest in SEO for Shopify stores. In simple words, Shopify SEO includes optimizations that are unique for the stores built on this e-commerce platform. But are Shopify stores SEO-ready? Let us find that.

DOES SHOPIFY GIVE GOOD SEO TO ITS STORES?

No doubt, Shopify brings many SEO-friendly features out of the box. But there are additional tweaks to get your store to rank higher on search engine result pages. Shopify stores give you the ability to create blogs or redirect. But Shopify stores may even create some SEO issues, including duplicate product pages that lead to duplicate content.

WHAT ARE SHOPIFY SEO BEST PRACTICES?

Step#1: Remove All The Duplicate URLs

Duplicate content is a key SEO issue that Shopify creates. Duplicate content occurs on Shopify stores in different ways – duplicate collection pages and duplicate product pages. For the uninitiated, duplicate content happens when similar or duplicate content is present on two different URLs. The thing with Shopify stores is that they allow their /products/ pages to be available on two different URL paths:

a)      Canonical URL: /products/<PRODUCT_NAME>

b)      Non-canonical URL: /collections/<COLLECTION_NAME>/products/<PRODUCT_NAME>

What is the solution? Adjust the internal linking structure. You can do that by adjusting the code present within the product.grid-item.liquid file.

Step#2: Put An End To Duplicate Paginated URLs

Shopify stores create reams of duplicate content via their pagination systems. Put simply, a duplicate copy is often created on the very first collections web page in any series. That is because whenever you are on a paginated URL within a series, the link to that very page will contain this code – “?page=1”. And the same code will be on the non-parameterized URL. The solution will be to have a developer again modify the linking structure so that the very first paginated result points toward the defined canonical page.

 Step#3: Focusing On Structured Data Should Be A Priority

Shopify has done a phenomenal job with structured data. But we are still sharing some key points to remember whenever you are focusing on the structured data for your digital store.

 a) Product Structured Data

The best part about Shopify is that most of its themes have built-in “Product” markups. These markups help in conveying key details – product name, price, description, etc. – to Google. This structured data format is a high priority for almost every e-commerce site. And Shopify has the advantage that most of its themes have “Product” markups. Every leading Shopify SEO agency believes that expanding Product structured data to the collection pages can bring massive benefits. How can you add Product structured data to the collection pages in your Shopify store? You simply have to integrate the Product structured data into every dedicated product link present in the products listing web page.

 b) Article Structured Data

Using the blog functionality in Shopify is a big yes. And if you are using this functionality, consider using the “Article” structured data. Why? Because this schema helps Google know that your blog content has an editorial theme. If you share informational content in your Shopify blog, you should add the “Article” schema. Likewise, you may even consider adding the “BlogPosting” schema – this is another structured data that can replace the “Article” schema in some instances.

c)BreadcrumbList Structured Data

Most owners should consider adding the BreadcrumbList structured data to their stores’ breadcrumb internal links. Breadcrumbs are integral to any e-commerce website because they offer the users an easy-to-use way of understanding where they are in a site’s hierarchy. Moreover, these breadcrumbs make it easy for Google to identify the store’s structure. As a trusted Shopify SEO company, we suggest putting site breadcrumbs into a Shopify digital store and then marking them using the BreadcrumbList structured data. That way, Google easily interprets a store’s internal links.

Step#4: Understand How To Take Care Of Product Variant Pages

Shopify stores create different URLs for the same products with slight variations. When that happens, duplicate content begins to occur because the core product remains the same with only slight variations in its attributes – colors, for example. But this does not have to be an SEO issue. In fact, some Shopify SEO experts believe that most e-commerce stores can benefit from a product’s variant pages. As a        Shopify store owner, you will need to ask some questions to understand whether these variant pages are good or bad for your business. These questions include:

a) Does your target audience search for a product using its variant phrases?

b) Does your business have the resources to build unique content for every variant page?

c) Can the unique content for variant pages deliver value?

However, if these variant pages are left as they are, they will start creating cases of duplicate content. Here is the bottom line – if your digital store on Shopify has product variants, then you should know whether they should have their separate URLs or exist on one page only. And if you decide on giving every variant its dedicated URL, create unique content and optimize it for the targeted keywords that best represent that variant.

Step#5: Get Useful Shopify Apps Only

Like WordPress offers plug-ins, Shopify offers apps to augment your store’s functionality. While you should hire Shopify SEO experts, you can still use some Shopify apps to improve your store’s SEO. Here are some of the best apps that help in improving Shopify SEO outcomes.

a) Crush.pics

b) Yoast SEO

c) Schema App Total Schema Markup

d) Rewind Backups

e) Yotpo Reviews

GETTING A TRUSTED SHOPIFY SEO PARTNER

Having to do so much optimization work on your Shopify store is a challenge – especially if you are managing your digital commerce business single-handedly. Our SEO experts have deep capabilities in helping businesses build scalable online stores on Shopify. In fact, recently, we helped an Australian online store built on Shopify improve its lead quality and strengthen visibility on search engines. Connect with our Shopify SEO specialists right away and discover how we can help you maximize the returns from your e-commerce business.

On the other hand, with Google Search Console, you will be able to access valuable data about your website and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) efforts. You can spot link-building opportunities, traffic data, and generate performance reports. Ahrefs is another useful digital marketing tool that you can use to track the keywords on which your website ranks, discover content gaps, and streamline your content strategy. It provides you with up-to-minute information not only on your site’s performance but also of the competitor’s.

Digital marketing trends are constantly evolving as marketers are finding better ways to reach out to the audience, while the audience is interacting with businesses through different channels including social media, emails, and videos. There has been a massive shift to mobile-first usage, so make sure that you use accelerated mobile pages (AMPs) to provide the users with a seamless experience when they access your website on mobile devices.

Building an effective sales funnel

A content strategist knows what it takes to build an effective sales funnel. Building an effective sales funnel would go a long way in converting the leads into customers. For this, one should focus on outreach programs through explainer videos, Facebook ads, infographics, and content marketing. Outreach is the widest part of the sales funnel where customer engagement and brand awareness happen. Case studies and informational blog posts help in conversion. Email series and reviews are important for closing the leads while whitepapers, surveys, and offers are critical for retention.

Addressing the needs of B2B and B2C markets

B2B (Business to Business) clients have a longer decision-making process and thus have longer sales funnels. Relationship-building strategies work better for B2B clients. B2B transactions are usually based on logic and evidence, and need input from more than one person to make a decision. On the other hand, B2C (Business to Customers) customers respond better to short-term offers, they are more likely to be emotionally based, and favor one-on-one connections with the brand.

As a trusted digital marketing company, Flexsin Technologies utilizes a mix of tools and strategies to provide you with the best outcomes that include:

• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Social media marketing (SMM)
• Programmatic display
• Organic social
• Co-marketing
• Native advertising
• Earned mentions
• Mobile marketing
• Marketing automation
• Digital messaging
• Backlinks
• Influencer outreach

Developing evergreen content for multi-purpose uses

Whether it is landing pages or your social media profile, your content needs to be informative and engaging. Also, make sure that your content is share-worthy, no matter whether it is created or curated, so that it spreads organically and is remembered. Focus on creating a library of evergreen content that can be used for multiple purposes and even across channels. Evergreen content is not time- or event-relevant but it is a key part of your brand’s storyline and core messaging. Also, it is important to have an understanding of the SEO best practices. SEO can support and reinforce your campaign by delivering high-quality content to the customers.

Create nimble and fluid structures

Take care to break siloes in the marketing teams to create nimble and fluid structures. Remember that your customers aren’t sequestered to one channel, so your marketing efforts need to deploy cross-channel functionality to engage with the customers wherever they are. The marketing team needs to include different tones, offers, imageries, and even the time of the posting, to meet the expectations of different audience on different channels.

Targeting SMART goals and working on the right metrics

As a trusted digital marketing company, Flexsin will create S.M.A.R.T. (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely) goals to guide your digital marketing strategy. Our digital marketing experts will custom design your marketing strategy and target the right metrics to help you achieve your marketing goals. These important metrics include

• Click Through Rate (CTR)
• Cost Per Lead (CPL)
• Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
• Effective Cost Per Thousand (eCPM) and
• Return on Investment (ROI)

Flexsin digital marketing company would help you have global reach with a low cost of entry. Our dynamic adaptability to your digital marketing strategy will help our teams to realize commercial opportunities for you as and when they arrive.

Last year’s radical responses to COVID-10 have given us fresh insights into game-changing digital marketing trends that will shape this year’s marketing culture. This blog will help businesses understand the digital marketing trends that will help them retain their existing clients and generate more leads, traffic, and revenue this year. We have singled out five areas where the savviest digital marketers have to focus their resources and time in 2021. Let us get started now.

5 Digital Marketing Trends Of 2021 Explained

Leveraging Social Media To Drive Engagement

In 2021, businesses should be ready to dedicate resources to social media marketing. On average, in the second quarter of 2020, social media took up to 24 percent of almost every US company’s marketing budget, which is a massive spike from a measly 13 percent last winter.

During the pandemic, marketers are prioritizing customer retention – a trend that will endure in 2021 as well. The thing is, the pandemic has skyrocketed the amount of time most people spend on the internet; this time usually includes researching products, organizations, and brands.

This type of consumer shift develops fresh opportunities for marketers to connect with new audience segments and boost their reach. Marketers are taking concrete initiatives to re-engage with existing customers as well.

For a couple of hundred dollars, a social media marketer will develop a proven content plan, post engaging content regularly through a business’s social accounts, monitor visitors, drive consumer responses, and attract new businesses. If a small business has been downplaying the importance of hiring a social media service provider, then now is the time to rethink.

Prioritizing Google Listings And Local SEO

A small business can attract more audiences by making its local listings verified and accurate across different search platforms. Small business owners who operate in a B2C model must make sure that their listings are intact; then only they will be able to draw more prospects.

When it comes to maintaining accurate local listings, businesses cannot deprioritize the importance of Google My Business or GMB. With GMB, a business will have to offer valuable information regarding its name, address, operating hours, etc., to the targeted audiences.0 By including geographically defined service areas into its local listings, a business will make sure it will show up in searches with the “near me” key phrases.

However, sometimes a business may feel that it is very unproductive to limit its service areas. Nonetheless, it is important to understand the fact that most search engines, including Google, prefer relevance in their algorithms.

That is why having defined a business’s service area will help it show up for any searches that are done keeping local markets in mind. When a business keeps its listings-specific data updated, it will quickly convey to its prospects and target audiences about any modifications in the business hours or any other upcoming promotions.

Communicating To Share Availability Status

As per a McKinsey report, the lack of availability of products or services is the key reason why customers switch their brand allegiance. Digital marketers can help overcome this challenge in a couple of ways. The most common solution is to quickly communicate the availability status of servicing hours or real-time stock levels.

Besides, companies should always set clear and reasonable expectations as far as sharing product or service availability goes. For example, if a business has high-volume items, it should make sure to put a banner on the site indicating when the key products will be back in stock.

Also, if a business is not collecting its customers’ contact information, now is the best time to gather this information and build a solid subscriber list. With a subscriber list, a business will be more proactive when it comes to notifying its prospects and customers about the availability changes.

Capitalizing On The Power Of Voice Search

As of now, voice search is not included in Google’s algorithm. Having said that, voice search is influencing the current search results, too. Moreover, voice search queries often deliver a different set of results when compared with text-based search queries.

That is why it makes sense for businesses to stay on their toes by incorporating voice search components. By taking this approach, a business will make its content consumable especially for those consumers who prefer voice searches instead of text-based ones. Experts believe that voice search has become such a big phenomenon that brands are readily developing content that is fully optimized for voice.

A business should craft content in a more conversational and direct way so that it can seamlessly get synced with the voice search queries. That way, a business will experience more traffic by remaining relevant to more consumers.

Building Interactive Content

Bringing interactive and informative content to its social media channels and website will help a business provide an incredible level of value to the consumers. Interactive content will help prospects engage well with the brand.

For instance, a realtor business will have to add an effective and free-to-use mortgage calculator on its website to experience a traffic surge. By providing a free mortgage calculator, a realtor will not only help visitors calculate mortgages but also glean important data about the prospects. This kind of information will eventually help fine-tune the buyer persona and offer-targeting too.

A few other proven examples of interactive content marketing feature quizzes, assessments, polls, games, surveys, contents, and interactive videos. Among these options, contents are a battle-tested way of astronomically boosting a business’s reach and visibility at a high pace.

The Way Forward

These digital marketing trends may not represent the whole list, though. However, if a business is starting to plan its digital marketing strategy for this year, these trends will definitely help it get started effectively.

Most CMOs and digital marketing managers can dramatically improve their chances of successfully doing conversion just by shifting resources to local search and social media. If these strategies are implemented well on time, it will design personalized content initiatives and boost customer engagement in the long run.

All in all, these trends will help businesses design and deploy a digital marketing strategy that will help boost site traffic, generate leads, grow sales, and expand the customer base like never before. Just in case catching up with these trends gets too overwhelming, a business should leverage the expertise of digital marketers. A digital marketing company will always have a proven track record of delivering result-driven campaigns.

COVID-19 has forced governments to impose stay-at-home measures and to shut down brick-and-mortar stores. The pandemic has changed people’s online shopping behavior. Now, people are more interested in trying e-commerce outlets because they bring a contactless shopping experience for the most part. And these online shopping habits will likely stick in the post-pandemic world as well because customers would not like to compromise on their security.

However, the real challenge lies for businesses that want to embrace the e-commerce marketing channels from end to end. The adoption curve for traditional retail stores is steep as e-commerce marketing is a different beast altogether. Which is why, in this explainer, we are unpacking how the coronavirus pandemic has transformed e-commerce marketing and what can businesses to do remain relevant.

Explaining The COVID-19 Effects On E-Commerce Marketing

The Popularity Of Global E-Commerce Marketplaces Gaining Momentum

To practice social distancing more efficiently, traditional shopping outlets got shuttered. Shutting down physical retail outlets meant more and more businesses became digital by embracing e-commerce. The growth of e-commerce became more evident as older people started using online shopping. To top it all off, even the population in mid-tier cities also resorted to online shopping. In short, every e-commerce marketplace’s popularity has gained immense momentum and has forged online shopping habits too.

Cart Abandonment Came To An All-Time Low During The Pandemic

At the time when the US got affected by COVID-19, the cart abandonment rates got dropped significantly. Lower cart abandonment rates mirror the buyer’s mindset during the higher-intent days including Black Friday. However, the shopping intent of buyers during the pandemic days is basically limited to purchasing essential items such as face masks, hand sanitizers, latex gloves, and other items. Other than that, e-commerce enterprises whose delivery models are fueled by innovation have also risen as new market winners in these challenging times.

The Average Conversion Rates In The US Are Rising As Well

In the US, the average conversion rates increased too. Since COVID-19, the average conversion rate shot up by an astronomical 112 percent. Some research studies point out that the conversion rate stood at 1.14 percent at the start of the pandemic in January. However, that rate increased by 62.8 percent by going all the way to 3.07 percent.

These trends show that the transition to e-commerce is the way forward for many outlets. But most physical stores are facing difficult times to adapt to the new normal of e-commerce business models.     Of course, making the shift to e-commerce has its own challenges for a traditional store that has remained untouched by the world of online marketing. For those traditional stores, we, at Flexsin, have become a trusted digital marketing growth partner that helps make the transition as seamless and quick as possible.

Flexsin Is Empowering Physical Stores To Transition Into E-Commerce

As a global digital marketing company, we have digital marketing specialists that have kept a close eye on how the e-commerce landscape has evolved since the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world. In these difficult times when the normal supply chain has been disrupted, our team has helped conventional stores build a solid presence online. Our digital marketers with deep e-commerce expertise are enabling mom-and-pop stores and big retail chains to harness the power of online shopping. In a way, we are helping traditional stores go digital and deliver not just products but top-class safety in the form of contactless and cashless.

We are consistently working with conventional retail outcomes, with B2B and B2C audiences, to craft digital marketing strategies. Empowering businesses to embrace e-commerce, we are helping them not just survive but even thrive amid pandemic and beyond.

If you own a traditional retail chain or have an e-commerce outlet that has to make some tough choices in the world of online shopping, then we are here to help. We have experience-backed expertise in enabling conventional businesses to navigate the COVID-19 crises with confidence. Our experience in understanding the e-commerce segment has been helping businesses like yours deliver the right strategies that mix convenience, contactless, and co-innovation.

Businesses will need to tune their SEO strategies for success in 2020 by aligning with fluctuating user needs and their evolving behaviors. Google, the world’s leading search engine keeps updating its algorithm to dominate the search industry. Last year, it reported more than 3200 updates, including 10 major ones. So, you also need to adapt to these algorithmic changes and changing search behavior of the users to stay ahead and rank high in 2020.

Here, we have come up with 8 top trends that a SEO services company need to follow in 2020 to keep you ahead of the curve.

1. Conversational voice searches – Search the way you speak

With the growing use of mobile devices, voice searches are becoming popular among the users. Voice searches can be done not only on smart phones but also on home-voice assistants such as Amazon Echo, Samsung Smart TV and Voice Pod. So, the organizations will need to implement conversational voice searches in their SEO strategy to reach out to a wider audience and rank high in internet searches.

2. Click through rate (CTR), dwell time and user satisfaction level

As people are becoming accustomed to getting information on their fingertips, click through rate (CTR) and dwell time, or the length of time a user lingers on a webpage before bouncing back, will become vital for your SEO strategy in 2020. The two metrics differ in that while the CTR tracks the number of people clicking a link, dwell time tells about what people do after clicking a page, not the number of people who clicked it. Both of these metrics are important to know about the satisfaction level of the users, and whether they are able to find the information on your webpage that they are looking for.

3. Optimize for local SEO

Businesses will need to focus on location-based searches for promotion among the local customers.  Local searches account for nearly half of the all online searches, so your business need to appear in searches when the buyer is close to the location you offer your products and services from.

To rank in local searches, do the following:

• Optimize your Google My Business and Apple Maps Listings
• Optimize your website content for local search keywords
• Make a responsive and mobile-friendly website as most of the local searches are done on mobile
• Create local landing pages for your website to rank for different locations
• Keep updated Name, Address and Phone Number (NAP) information on your website

4. Rich content with videos and snippets

You need to enrich your content with video containing storylines of the situations that can be linked to your audience, as video content has enjoyed increasing popularity for years among the uses, along with blogs, podcasts and AI content. You need to create content for the users who mainly consume videos. This will help your audience stay tuned with your website’s content. You also need to follow the structured markup and standards with Google and other search engines for snippets that they look into your website.

5. Visual search

When we buy offline, we use our eyes or visual search to choose a product. Internet visual search translates this to the online world. It is done by using images instead of text for searches. The image will be scanned by the AI to understand its elements, and based on that; user will be presented with the results of the product they searched and also other similar ones. Google and Amazon are among the top visual search platforms that can understand human faces, places, animals, plants, and much more. Businesses will need to optimize their products for displaying on Pinterest and Amazon for better visual search results.

To optimize your visual search:

• Submit images in the sitemap for the search engine crawlers to access them
• Apply schema markup for easy comprehension of your image
• Use high quality images only for easy readability by crawlers
• Optimize alt text for better understanding of your content

6. Content diversification and SERP marketing

You need to optimize your website for all other search elements in addition to the traditional organic text searches, such as knowledge graph, related videos, People Also Ask, and visual results, as Google is building up to be an ultimate resource to provide comprehensive answers to any search query by the internet searchers. This is known as search engine result pages marketing or SERP marketing. To dominate SERP marketing, you need to analyze your current opportunities and set up your content collaboration strategy, incorporating content diversification, to come up with quality content assets in various formats. With content collaboration, you can empower your marketing with more benefits, including enhanced trust and shares by users.

7. Optimize for mobile and voice search

Consumers spend a large amount of time on their mobile, three and a half hour on an average each day. In view of this changing user behavior, Google has introduced Mobile First Indexing, wherein it predominantly uses the mobile version of a page for indexing and ranking. If your website doesn’t look good on a mobile or there is less content in its mobile version, it may lose rankings both in mobile and desktop searches by the users.

• To optimize your website for mobile and voice searches, do the following:
• Structure your content with H2-H3 subheadings to address questions behind user queries
• Provide quick answers below each subhead for the search engine to grab and feature
• Optimize your featured snippets as only one result is read out to the users

8. Semantic search and intent optimization

Google no longer provides results based on the exact-matching keywords. It doesn’t use actual strings for words being typed by the users in the search box. Instead, it looks at the “query intent” and does analysis of the possible search intent of the user to come up with the intended results they are looking for. So, your old-school content development methods that focus on a single keyword string won’t benefit you any longer to be discovered by your target audience. You need to provide content to the searchers that they want and solves their problem. You can consider using semantic search tools, such as Text Optimizer to cluster a user’s search query into related concepts and entities. The tool can help the content creators build sentences based on common co-occurrence analysis of the terms that you select to target.

These were some of the SEO services company tips that digital marketers and webmasters can implement in their search engine optimization strategy for 2020. At Flexsin Technologies, we keep our marketers and content creators always updated of the latest SEO developments, tricks, tools and strategies, and can implement innovative internet marketing strategies to help our clients outsmart the competitors. Get in touch with Flexsin Technologies to bring success your online business in 2020, leveraging the experience and skills of our SEO experts.

In white label digital marketing, your products and services are rebranded under your own name by your white label partner. It covers a wide range of digital marketing practices, such as SEO, social media marketing, web design and development, and content marketing. White label can level the playing field for small businesses to compete with the large ones by providing them the necessary capabilities and competencies to compete.

Raise your profile online

A white label digital marketing services company will help you raise your profile online. If you are a startup or a well-established brand and looking to level up your digital marketing efforts, hiring a social media manager, advertising specialists and web designer could add up quickly in terms of salary. A bad hire would cost you even more. However, you can instead hire a white label digital marketing company’s entire team of experts for a set monthly cost or project cost for the duration you need their services. This way, you would be able to scale up in a cost effective way.

With a white label agency, you can provide the service fulfillment needs of your clients by reducing their vendor clutter and providing them one-stop solution for all their digital marketing needs. You will be working with a single partner team and won’t have to juggle between multiple freelancers.

Fill your schedule your way

By outsourcing to a white label marketing partner, you will be able to free up more of your time that you can utilize to focus on your core business model and fill your schedule with the tasks that need your involvement. The agency will use tools to generate analysis on your competitors to draw insights and develop strategies to outperform them.

With a white label service partner, you can easily expand your offerings without developing product line or services yourself.

Some of the widely used white label services include:

• Digital marketing
• Search engine optimization
• Social media management
• Reputation management
• Brand strategy
• Conversation rate optimization
• Sales support
• Digital brand strategy
• Responsive web designing, and
• Customer loyalty program

Do your own branding as a reseller

Rather than spreading your resources and employees too thin, you can focus on your core business competencies with a white label partner as they will be taking care of all that you have little skills, resources or no experience at all. As a reseller, you need not need develop your own solutions that can force your customers elsewhere, you can just take the help of a white label agency for the services and products you need, add your own branding and identity to them, and get back to business.

Expand your offerings to clients

With a white label marketing company, you can expand your current marketing offerings by meeting the specific fulfillment needs of your clients, such as to run PPC or social media campaigns for which you do not have adequate resources and skills. You work with the best qualified professionals for the job with up-to-date knowledge, and also have access to the best tools and technologies.

You need not take on the time consuming process of marketing analysis, branding and developing new products and services with changing client needs, or spend money to provide a whole new offering to your clients. The team at your white label partner will help you scale up as and when needed, and hence you can stay competitive leveraging on the expertise of your white label agency.

White label is no longer limited to tangible products only, online automation tools are also being white labeled that allow businesses to automate specific communications and processes.

A white label solution is perfect for you if you are:

• A startup with no fulfillment team
• Want to offer new products and services you don’t have resources for
• Want to scale up but the tedious fulfillment is hindrance for you
• Want to expand your team without the associated overhead costs

Objective analysis of your strategy

You need a trusted white label digital marketing company to make you successful especially if you do not offer specialized services that are essential to your marketing efforts. Also, if your marketing strategy isn’t delivering the desired results, it’s the right time to approach a trusted white label marketing company that can offer you an objective analysis of your current strategy for the best outcomes from your digital marketing initiatives.

Basket of offerings under your own brand

As a trusted white label digital marketing partner for numerous businesses, Flexsin Technologies has the right pool of people to do highly effective digital marketing for your business with measured outcomes. By partnering with Flexsin Technologies, you can add a variety of digital marketing services to your basket of offerings under your own brand. We will also provide you regular reports on your ROI and progress of you client’s business, and you would be in the complete knowhow of how Flexsin provided value to you and your valued clients.

You need not spend money on digital marketing tools and solutions that already exist with us and we have gained mastery over. You will get access to the talented pool of experts in the specific space where you need focused solutions, that too on flexible engagement terms.  We will follow your guidelines as we represent your brand as a white label digital marketing partner agency.

Receiving quality traffic from Google is important for any business that is planning to make it big in the online world. But obtaining high-quality leads from the search engine giant means that businesses have to understand and implement new features rolled out by it every now and then.

To make things even more interesting, Google consistently launches new features. These new features mean that a business will have to optimize its site so that it can leverage them while keeping an eye on how the competition is deploying them. One such powerful feature from Google is its featured snippets.

Google’s Featured Snippets Decoded

First of all, let us address the elephant in the room. What is Google’s featured snippet?

Enterprises know that Google is packed with results that go way beyond plain links. When people search for something, the first thing they see is featured snippets. With each passing year, featured snippets are gaining more popularity.

A featured snippet is a short section of text that appears on the top part of Google’s search engine result pages or SERPs. Also known as an answer box, the featured snippet is aimed to provide the information that precisely answers the search query entered by a user.

The content appearing within the featured snippet is pulled by Google from web pages present in Google’s index. Some of the most common varieties of featured snippets comprise tables, lists, definitions, and steps.

Because of their location, Google’s featured snippets are considered as the prime real estate in SERPs.

Why Getting Content Published In Featured Snippets Is Important

Featured snippets affect SEO in more than one way.

First of all, featured snippets give the ultimate opportunity to receive more clicks from organic search results without even ranking high on Google.

As a matter of fact, most SEO experts call the featured snippet box as the #0 position in the first SERP. Why? Because it appears even above the conventional #1 spot.

As per a study published by a leading search engine news site, the featured snippet section receives the click-through rate of closely 8 percent. To be more precise, up to 19.6 percent of people interact with the organic search results while 8.6 percent of the searchers click with the featured-snippet section.

The bottom line is simple: If an enterprise is able to get its content published within the featured snippet section, it will give its website’s click-through-rate (organic) a powerful boost. One more thing to note before writing featured snippets: Google likes short and sweet content to be published as featured snippets that can be anywhere between 40 and 60 words. So, enterprises have to keep in mind to adhere to this limit and make their content ultra-readable.

Now, a business knows exactly how beneficial it is to get its website ranked on Google. So, it is time to discover the ways by which an enterprise’s content can get published in the snippet section.

Ways By Which A Website Can Get Ranked In Featured Snippets

Use Google To Uncover Different Snippet Opportunities

Businesses must leverage Google to unravel different snippet opportunities. Based on analyzing these opportunities, the business must optimize content that can successfully answer some of the burning questions of its audience.

The best way for an enterprise to get featured in snippets is when it starts thinking like its audience. The business will have to think that what sort of questions a business’s audience will ask, in the first place. For example, the enterprise must put itself in the shoes of its consumers and see what kind of questions they are likely to ask.

Once that due diligence is completed successfully, the business will frame content that answers these burning questions. For understanding the most important questions to be answered, a business must keep tabs on its industry news and then craft engaging content pieces to either cover or explain those red-hot news topics.

Kick-Start The Campaign With Keyword Research

Multiple studies have confirmed that the lion’s share of featured snippets is usually trigged with the help of long-tail keywords and phrases. As a matter of fact, the more the number of words typed in the search box, the higher is the probability that a featured snippet will appear for that specific keyword or phrase.

There are many keyword research tools present in the market that can help businesses search the most searched business-specific keywords. Once the hottest industry-relevant keywords are finalized, the business can frame content to answer some FAQs related to a specific keyword.

When an enterprise is initiating keyword research for featured snippets, it should factor in multiple question-specific search queries. For instance, it should incorporate a lot of words such as “why,” “how,” “what,” “when,” and the like. Why? Well, because these queries are the easiest and most natural to get typed. Also, the keyword research for snippets must always be having an informational intent.

No Featured Snippet For A Keyword Does Not Mean No Snippet Opportunity

Most of the time, a business may find a search query for which no featured snippet exists. But just because there is no featured snippet for a search term, it does not mean that Google does not need any featured snippet for that keyword. The reason behind this no-snippet phenomenon could be that Google does not have any quality content to feature in its answer-box section.

It may happen that a business may feel that a specific keyword must have a keyword snippet. If that is the case, then the business must understand the search intent behind that specific keyword. When all is said and done, the enterprise must create content around that keyword; the content must answer a lot of questions around the keyword.

Specialized Optimizing Techniques For Putting Content In Featured Snippets

Beginning With The Traditional On-Page SEO

The fact is that there is no specialized markup or magic button that will make sure the website gets featured in the #0 spot of SERPs. It is a no-brainer that businesses must begin with deploying traditional SEO best practices. Why? Well, because being featured in the answer box is all the more possible only when an enterprise’s website has a high ranking for a specific search query.

Focusing On A Single Question

As we have already mentioned, Google likes its answer-box content to be short and simple. But that does not mean the blog posts tackling a hot question related to a specific industry needs to be short. In fact, as per several SEO studies, Google prioritizes long-form content, which is also referred to as cornerstone content. So the actionable tip here is to stay focused throughout the long-form content on a single question, which is the most burning one. And break down the entire piece of content into logical and easily digestible paragraphs.

Unlocking High Web Visibility With A Strategic Digital Partner

Could an enterprise use these tips to really optimize its content and web presence to the extent that it gets featured in the answer box? Well, the answer to this question depends on who is asking. The thing is that if an enterprise has the experience and expertise to optimize its web content to get published on featured snippets, then it will be okay.

However, if the enterprise lacks either the experience or expertise, then it will be better to take the assistance of a qualified SEO Services provider. That is where we, at Flexsin, come into the picture. We have a team of digital marketing experts that have rich category experience in assessing intricate SEO frameworks or developing and deploying an SEO strategy from scratch.

The team has deep experience in helping clients’ web presence reach the first SERPs of leading search engines including Google, Bing, and Yahoo. The enterprises must get connected with one of our SEO consultants right away to discover how to unlock next-level web visibility for their websites.

If your business sells internationally, then you need to have a robust global SEO strategy in place. Global SEO is the process of organizing and optimizing your websites pages and marketing strategy to allow the search engines easily identify the countries and the regions you are targeting.

Demographic expansion is crucial for the growth of a business. To target the global audience, you need to strategize your global SEO effectively. A good global SEO strategy is possible, you just need to have the right planning and approach appropriate to your unique situation.

Do not confuse the search engines with different versions of content

Countries have different languages and often there are many languages within a country. You may have duplicate content in different languages for your website, however, you need to ensure that the search engine is not confused with different versions of your content; else your site’s indexing may be negatively affected.

Here are some useful tips to target a specific country

• Use a country-specific domain
• Specify your target location in the Google Search Console
• Host the website locally
• Register with Google My Business
• Include the street address of your business on your website
• Get links from the country specific websites

Make alternative website versions for different languages

There are about six billion people worldwide who do not speak English as the first language, and you may be missing on this massive market if you have an English-only mindset. So, make alternative version of your website in a country-specific language. You need not translate your whole website; you can have a default English website with alternatives in other languages, such as Spanish, French, Canadian or Mandarin. However, before doing this, you need to be sure that your products and services are wanted in that region. A good place to know about this is looking at the Location and Language tabs under Geo in Google Analytics. Also look at the competitors at SEMrush for the languages and regions they are targeting.

Decide on the domain and other technical aspects

Also, before going international, make sure that your website is structured for international content. You need to decide about the right country code top level domains (ccTLD}, subdirectories and subdomains for the language or country you are targeting, for example, Spanish version of your website could be like es.websitename.com. You can also choose to create a single landing page that can replicate easily across your target languages. This will provide you a good landing page for PPC while you will be able to target valuable SEO keywords in multiple languages without much investment.

Make sure that you have the correct domain for your global SEO needs. ccTLDs will default to a specific location while other top-level domains can be geo-targeted for specific countries.

Do not machine-translate localized keywords

Do localized keyword research because that is what global SEO services providers do. However, do not machine-translate keyword research. You can use Gengo online translation service or consider hiring a native to do keyword research for you. You can either start your keyword research in the desired language from scratch or use the keywords of your original site. Also, assess the search volume of your new keywords; you may be surprised of what you’ll need to rank for your new international market.  Also, do not assume that high-volume keywords will remain the same across the geographies even if language is the same as your original market. This is especially true for the bigger markets such as the USA. You may find that keyword search volume is different for New York, California and Pennsylvania.

Optimize for search engines beyond Google

Do not look only at Google, it would be a big mistake as other search engines such as Yandex (Russia), Baidu (China) and Yahoo also enjoy a large share of search marketing, and each one of them runs on a different algorithm. As such, they have different ranking factors, some focus on keyword percentage in the content, while others may emphasize on social signals or meta keywords for ranking. Bing does not support determining the version of the webpage to serve while Google and Yandex do. Popular search engines such as Google keep evolving their algorithms to match the psychographics of their target audience to help them find the content they want. You can use hreflang tag generator tool such as Aleyda Solis to generate hreflang easily and quickly.

Keeping the above points central to your global SEO strategy, you can achieve success in the international markets that you have targeted.

In today’s web landscape, ecommerce businesses deploy the latest SEO strategies for receiving quality organic traffic. Because of that, many online stores want to improve their SEO strategies that factor in not only desktops and laptops but even mobile.

Mobility Is The Future

Search engine experts now believe that more and more people are getting mobile-savvy. Which is precisely why, it is mission-critical to deploy ecommerce SEO hacks that are responsive to mobiles and other gadgetry. After all, the future resides in mobility and in engaging smartphone users. All these SEO efforts will pay off many e-store owners in the long run for sure.

Despite their growing importance, SEO strategies for ecommerce are challenging to build and implement. Why? Because there are constant search engine algorithm updates alongside many industry jargon. That way, enterprises face a big roadblock to unlocking high organic growth on search engines.

Before discussing performance-driven search engine strategies, it is time to take a deep dive into some metrics that show why investing in ecommerce SEO makes sense today.

Ecommerce SEO Fast Facts

Some online stores still have their reservations when it comes to investing in SEO. For motivating those stores to prioritize SEO like never before, here are some hard-hitting numbers that cement the importance of having an ecommerce-centric organic growth strategy in place.

• Over 92 percent of online experiences are initiated through search engines alone
• Nearly 62 percent netizens shop online today
• Almost 16 percent of the organic traffic converts into leads
• According to a leading marketing platform, 44 percent of people begin their buying journey on Google search engine.
• As per a study conducted by a leading SaaS company, 39 percent of the traffic received by ecommerce sites is from search engines alone.
• One of the largest business news syndicates declared in its report that over 23% of ecommerce orders are attached to organic traffic.

Buried deep somewhere in most e-commerce sites, smart webmasters will find options for increasing conversions and sales like never before. How? Well, through optimizing online stores with SEO best practices depending on their needs.

Up next, world-class SEO practices that are worth implementing.

SEO Best Practices That Drive Traffic And Business For Ecommerce Stores

Keyword Research Takes Center Stage

First and foremost, the ecommerce marketing team must pinpoint search terms that come with high value. Being the foundation of any campaign, the right keywords can optimize category and product pages.

If that was not all, it is true that the keywords short-listed will influence technical SEO as well. That is basically because the site’s architecture and URLs factor in these keywords. Which is why, keyword research is important for making any SEO campaign a success.

But researching keywords for an ecommerce outlet is different from a traditional website. How? Well, because traditional websites may care about information keywords and eventually invest in them. On the other hand, ecommerce keywords are tailored around hardcore product searches.

To put it simply, informative keywords are all about information. But when it comes to researching keywords for ecommerce, stores will need to focus on those words that show extremely high buyer intent. What is more, online outlets must analyze the competition and use dedicated keyword tools such as Google Keyword Planner for preparing their list of most searchable keywords.

A Clean Site Architecture Matters

The site’s architecture includes how many pages the store has organized. As far as SEO goes, this architecture must be factored in by webmasters for improving the site’s usability. The importance of having a clean architecture becomes all the more important for ecommerce outlets.

Why? That is because the number of pages in a big online outlet is way more than any traditional website such as a blog or a local clothes outlet. Having so many pages, the ecommerce outlet’s architecture makes it faster and simpler for not just search engines but even users in finding different pages.

When it comes to designing or revamping a site’s architecture, the outlet’s marketing team will have to keep in mind two battle-tested rules:

• Rule #1: Keep things across the website scalable and simple to the core
• Rule #2: Make every page on the site just three or fewer clicks away from the homepage

Prioritize On-Page SEO

Once the site’s architecture is all set up, it will be time to completely overhaul the product and category pages from stem to stern. In any ecommerce website, these two solid webpage categories drive a lot of traffic and sales for the store.

As a matter of fact, someone searching for “Buy Shoes Online” is not that likely to purchase as someone searching for a “Blue Nike Walking Shoes Size 9” keyword. Also, the online outlet’s team will have to focus on:

Fixing Duplicate Content Issues

Sometimes two different webpages include the same content; only the URL changes, in that case. Which is why, it is unnecessary to have two URLs having identical content. Here is where the canonical link will come into play.

Through the canonical link, the team at the online store will make sure that Google and other search engines only index one of the two pages with identical content.

Finding Orphaned Or Deep Pages

The thing is that an online store’s category pages and product pages should be easily accessible to all the visitors with zero downtime. Which is why, the golden rule has always been that the homepage should be just three clicks away from any page on the site.

Following this rule, however, becomes easier said than done for large ecommerce websites. So for big ecommerce players, it is a given that the webmasters should make sure any important (deep) pages should not be more than three clicks from the homepage. No matter what happens.

Fetching Keyword Cannibalization Mistakes

Keyword cannibalization happens whenever a single website intentionally or unintentionally targets similar keywords across different pages or posts. Most SEO specialists believe that this behavior can confuse search engines.

Which is why, webmasters believe that keyword cannibalization will make it hard for a search engine to decipher which page of an ecommerce site it should rank for a specific keyword. Resultantly, neither of the pages will get ranked for the targeted keyword.

Technical SEO For Ecommerce

Focusing on technical SEO is important for every site out there, especially for the ecommerce ones. It is because ecommerce sites have many pages; and if an ecommerce website has more pages, the chances are that a technical SEO issue will arise.

To top it all off, most ecommerce pages don’t have that many backlinks on them. That means technical SEO often provides the winning edge on the first page of SERPs. For instance, if an ecommerce store is aiming for the coveted #1 rank on Google, then a technical SEO issue in its architecture will stop it from reaching that first position.

Because of that, regularly doing technical SEO site audits is a must. In general, site audits comprise:

• Checking the overall site architecture
• Examining the URL structures
• Picking the right sitemaps (XML or HTML)
• Analyzing the log files
• Optimizing the crawl budget (checking how many pages of the ecommerce store were crawled by the search engine’s bot)
• Proactively using the canonical tags for finding duplicate webpage content
• Using Robots.txt on many resource pages such as cart, checkout, finish order, and login
• Redirecting out-of-stock pages for improving the usability

Ecommerce Content Marketing Practices

Content marketing, if done properly, can rake in lots of targeted traffic and eventually business. But the real deal is finding the right content marketing strategy for the ecommerce website. When it comes to applying best-in-class content marketing strategy, these are some basic steps that an ecommerce outlet must take.

Finding Where The Target Audience Spends Time

Once an ecommerce store knows its target audience, it has to zero in on the social channels where it is likely to spend time. For instance, if an ecommerce store specializes in selling dog food, then it will make sense to jump to Reddit’s dog food community.

Creating Amazing Content Around The Interest Of Prospects

Over there, the store’s marketing team can come to know how the target audience speaks and can get actionable insights into what they are interested in when it comes to buying dog food products. The content marketing team of an online store can create amazing blog content around these keywords and phrases frequently used by customers.

Connecting With The Right Digital Marketing Growth Partner

DIY-ing the entire SEO for the e-commerce site is a promising option only if the in-house marketing team has experience-backed expertise. If that is not the case, then implementing so many SEO best practices will definitely get confusing and intimidating. Unless there is a growth partner offering scalable Digital Marketing Services.

Ecommerce stores that lack the experience in SEO must consult a trusted digital marketing partner that will help them achieve impressive organic growth without breaking a sweat. That digital marketing partner, offering store-specific SEO services, is none other than Flexsin.

Having a team of ecommerce SEO specialist, Flexsin offers a wide range of SEO plans and packages that can be tailored as per the client’s needs. From carrying out SEO assessments to finalizing SEO strategy and implementing it for the ecommerce store, Flexsin’s team of search engine specialists transforms ecommerce businesses into well-known online brands.

Talking of search engines, Flexsin has deep expertise in putting a store on the top SERPs of leading search engines including Google, Bing, and Yahoo. In case any ecommerce website wants to unlock true organic growth for its online brand, it should connect with Flexsin and take that one step toward leveraging SEO tailored for ecommerce.

There has been a growing need of ‘Ecommerce checkout optimization’ ever since the prospective buyers have been observed leaving their transactions unprocessed on the checkout page. Wondering why?

Is your checkout page clumsy or it’s designed too poorly to convert a prospect into a customer? Irrespective of any reason, the wisest consideration would be ‘ecommerce checkout optimization.’

Having an optimized ecommerce checkout page is one of the key requirements. It has an immense effect over your existing as well as potential customers. Below we are putting out some of the prevalent reasons why more and more prospective buyers are leaving the checkout page without making the transactions –

• Forcing account creation (registration)
• Checkout area is not much self-contained
• Overlong and multifaceted process
• No auto-fill activated
• Complex and unintuitive checkout page design
• Hidden shipping/delivery costs
• Uncertainty of customers’ credit/debit cards safety

How can an ecommerce business benefit from digital marketing solutions?

The goal of digital marketing services is to reach customers at those moments that trigger their ‘interest nerves.’ Therefore, customer electronics agencies not just ensure that consumers get to spot their televisions in the stores, however also that these televisions keep displaying vivid high-definition images. This is exactly why Amazon.com started providing targeted product suggestions to the consumers already registered with them and likely to buy, a decade ago.

Marketing keeps looking for these instants, or what is otherwise known as the touch points, when audiences are open to influence. Today, ‘touch points’ are discussed through “funnel” i.e. a metaphor —customers start with a series of brands in mind (i.e. the wide end of the funnel).

Marketing then methodically cut that move and number through the funnel, and latterly they emerge with the one brand they have made up their mind with. However today, the funnel concept cannot seize all touch points and essential purchase factors occurring out of the eruption of product choices and virtual channels, together with the growth of a judicious, in-the-know consumer.

There is a dire need of a more sophisticated approach in order to allow the marketers route this milieu, which is simpler and lesser linear. ‘The consumer decision journey’ is what the millennial marketers have termed it. This very approach is applicable to all geographic marketplaces which have various kinds of Internet access, media, and also an array of product choices.

The funnel metaphor looks like this -

• Awareness
• Interest
• Consideration
• Consideration
• Intent
• Evaluation
• Purchase

Awareness 

Awareness is placed on top of the marketing funnel. Prospective consumers are attracted into this juncture through consumer research, discovery and marketing campaigns. Trust and well-analyzed leadership is recognized with advertising, events, content (infographics, blog posts, etc.), trade shows, direct mail, webinars, social media, viral campaigns, search, media mentions, and many more. Lead generation happens as data is gathered and leads are drawn into a lead management system to nurture down the funnel.

Interest

Once leads get generated, they move to the stage called ‘interest.’ In this stage, company interests are carried forward, along with its products, and all types of useful information and the research it offers. There you get the opportunity to build a relationship with your potential customers in your lead database and release their positioning. What marketers do here is nurture those leads through content and emails that are focused on around brands, industries, newsletters, classes and more.

Consideration

In this very stage, leads convert into marketing eligible leads and are considered as potential customers. Marketers then send potential clients more information on offers and products via automated email campaigns, when continuing to encourage them with embattled content, free trials, case studies, and more.

Intent

In order to reach the intent stage, potential customers are expected to reveal their interests in purchasing a brand’s product. It happens through a survey, post a product’s demonstration, or at the time a product goes into the shopping cart on an ecommerce website. It’s sheer a break for the marketers to build a strong case explaining why their product is a better choice over million others.

Evaluation

In this stage, customers or buyers are finally making a decision about whether or not they should buy this brand’s services or products. Generally, sales and marketing walk hand-in-hand as they move on to encourage the decision-making process and sway them to successfully checkout.

Purchase

Your customers are now on the checkout page! ‘Purchase’ happens to be the last phase in the marketing funnel. This is where a potential customer makes final decision, whether or not should they buy and become a customer. This is where sales take place, resulting in transaction. If the buyer ends up shopping with all positivity, they will lead referrals to your ecommerce site.

To sum it up

While it is very much of importance for ecommerce owners to focus on the sale always, to not forget that their customers are scattered across various fields is as well important. If you could herd them through the right gates utilizing right ecommerce checkout optimization and marketing strategy, you can expect a much more reliable customer pipeline.

Citations are important for improving the digital presence of an enterprise. Every solid local search marketing strategy is built over the robust foundation of citations. But what are these citations? A business gets a citation whenever it is mentioned anywhere online. If a business has more citations, its chances of appearing at the top of the first page of search engines get higher.

Now, let us dive deep into citations and their role in today’s digital marketing landscape. Followed by that, let us explore how linked unstructured citations can supercharge a business’s growth in today’s highly competitive digital landscape.

A Brief Guide To Citation Building

Before we begin analyzing the interesting world of citations, it is important to review a few facts.

• According to 90 percent of experts, hyper-accurate citations are very important if a business wants to crush its competition in local search rankings.
• As per 59 percent of digital marketing specialists, citations are becoming more and more important every year.

Here is the easiest part about building local SEO citations: A business has to state the obvious such as its name, address, phone numbers, business hours, website URL, and the like. But here is the million-dollar question: How will a business share these important fragments of information with its targeted audience and search engines at large?

A business will have to do a lot of structured and unstructured citations for that.

A structured citation is when a business’s critical information (name, address, phone number, etc.) is posted on a listing directory such as Yelp, Yellow Pages, Foursquare, and Bing. Whereas, an unstructured citation happens when a business’s address, name, phone number, or website is mentioned in a PR, blog, or social media profile and not on a traditional directory or an IYP site.

With many citations, a business will build its prominence in the digital world. The digital prominence gained by a business helps leading search engines such as Google in determining the company’s local ranking.

So, up till now, it is clear what a citation is along with its two popular types. Now it is the time to dig deeper into the world of unstructured citations.

Unstructured Citations Build A Powerful And Prominent Web Presence

While a business generates local citations, it is important to get them on websites, blogs, or articles that are relevant to it. When an enterprise earns this kind of unstructured citations, its chances of conquering local search engine and Google’s organic results improve by a wide margin.

The best unstructured citations are those that include links. After all, the more links a business gets, the more credible it becomes in the eyes of search engines. In short, more links make powerful domain authority.

So, here are a few points that a business must keep in mind before doing unstructured citations.

Some of the most crucial factors while building unstructured citations include:

• Industry relevance
• Local relevance
• Domain authority

Besides remembering these three points while doing unstructured citations, here is one other thing. Whenever there is a mention of a business’s name, ZIP code, URL, phone number, or city in an unstructured citation, these details need to be accurate. The failure to maintain accuracy while posting these data points during an unstructured (and even structured) citation can lead to losing lucrative business opportunities.

Now, let us wrap our heads around the rising importance of linked unstructured citations for a business.

Linked Unstructured Citations Are Growing In Prominence

Recently, a Local Search Ranking Factors survey took place where one of the biggest takeaways was local links. Why was that? Well, let us find out.

Get The Competitive Edge With Linked Unstructured Citations

Undoubtedly, Google has become one of the most dominant forces for shaping an enterprise’s local consumer experiences online. So a business should do whatever it takes to get the links because Google is taking actions to keep as many users on its interface rather than sending them to a company’s website.

When a business gets more and more links, it has Google’s attention. That is because links influence ranks within Google’s and other search engine’s interfaces. Which is why, most enterprises must move beyond doing conventional structured citations for impressing mighty search engines. For this reason, more and more businesses are earning linked unstructured citations on a range of relevant websites and other online media outlets. Enterprises must remember that structured citations are table stakes for every local business in today’s ultra-competitive online landscape. However, it is the unstructured citations that deliver every business the winning edge in tough local markets.

A Cost-Effective Way To Drive Traffic

Nowadays, Google is trying hard to monetize local search results. A case in point: Google’s Local Service Ads (LSA) plan; it is lead gen existing between service area businesses (housekeeping and plumbing companies, for example) and Google.

Smart local brands, including brick-and-mortar stores, will work toward building lead generation and traffic outlets that are not dependent on Google. In short, when a business is doing a good job with linked unstructured citations on highly relevant and hyper-local publications, it will drive traffic without paying a hefty fee to Google.

Finding The Best SEO Partner

For doing relevant linked unstructured citations, getting links, and building awe-inspiring domain authority online, a business will need a dynamic SEO partner. That is where Flexsin kicks into action. Being a trusted digital marketing company, it has optimized client websites into ROI-driving machines for over a decade now. Whether it involves building quality links or doing unstructured citations, the company has in-depth expertise in managing every aspect of SEO and digital marketing. Get in touch with one of its representatives and make the most of today’s digital marketing space.

That is why digital marketers strategize to the extent that their campaign targets the right audiences. While analyzing audiences, a marketer uncovers game-changing insights into their demographics, device, locations, interests, preferences, budgets, and other metrics.

In short, marketers analyze audiences for gathering actionable consumer insights. And when marketers execute an insight-driven strategy, they create nearly accurate buyer personas and transform a campaign into a revenue-generating machine.

But the real deal is targeting the right audience on Facebook. How to do it? In this post, we’ll uncover the steps for finding mission-critical insights into Facebook audiences.

How Facebook Empowers Marketers To Target The Right Audiences

After the infamous Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal, Facebook has cut back on much of the functionalities of its Audience Insights and Facebook Analytics.

But Facebook is still a powerhouse of insights, which can still be used for collecting actionable insights into targeted audiences. It is just that a marketer should know where to look at.

First, let us figure out how to use Facebook Audience Insights and social media optimization strategies for targeting the right audiences. Then, let us dive deep into a gold mine of insights that Facebook Analytics provides.

Facebook Audience Insights

Audience Insights refines audiences based on a variety of data points including device, gender, location, demographics, and the time at which the user is active. That way, creating ads with more qualified engagement gets simpler. Audience Insights is especially beneficial when a marketer has fleshed out the buyer persona and just wants to fine-tune it.

Choose Audience Insights from the top toolbar.

After choosing Audience Insights, marketers will get two options.

• Everyone on Facebook
• People connected to your Page

In case marketers choose Everyone on Facebook, they will get audiences from all over Facebook. They can segment on the basis of age, interest, location, gender, etc.

For instance, with the help of Funnels, a marketer will notice whether the audiences who comment on posts end up visiting the site or not. With such insights, you can create result-oriented top-of-the-funnel strategies. With Facebook Analytics, marketers can gather deeper, sharper insights into what an audience does on their page. Now, this is something that Google Analytics cannot do.

Lifetime Value

Located in the Activity section, Lifetime Value helps gather insights into analyzing the behavior and buying patterns of targeted audiences.

In this section, the marketer can analyze different patterns of a customer journey. This analysis can eventually help the marketer answer any number of questions related to engagement points, channel attribution, churn rates, and process/product/price issue.

Down to the left, a marketer will be able to access the week when a user’s first interaction with the brand happened. From top to bottom, you will have the data from initial events of those users. This chart gives high-quality insights into the way targeted users interact with a brand. By following these two tools in Facebook Analytics, any marketer can mine insight-driven audience data the easy way. But there’s one big mistaken that marketers face when they are finding audiences through Audience Insights or Facebook Analytics. It’s known as audience overlap.

With a Lookalike Audience, marketers find a brand-new way of reaching newer audiences who are likely to buy from a business as they are very similar to its existing customers. Once Lookalike Audience is formed, a marketer can compare it with the existing audiences. That way, the marketer will uncover the exact percentage of overlapped audience for an ad campaign.

Once marketers know the percentage overlapping, they can refine the ad campaign so that it targets the intended audiences better. All of this will eventually prevent audiences from facing any kind of ad fatigue and will avoid your brand to receive bad press on Facebook.

New challenges, innovative formats, and fresh ways of engaging are all set to make 2019 an exciting year for social media. The world of social media is relentlessly changing and bringing trends, ideas, and even unspoken rules every year.

In many cases, these changes are not that sudden or unexpected. Instead, they are gradual and mostly predictable. For instance, nobody was surprised when Google decided to pull the plug on Google+ a couple of months early.

The bottom line is that these trends will force digital marketers to rethink the way they use different social media platforms. Since these trends are integral, this post is carrying the ones that will be popular in the coming year. Most of these trends have already made their presence felt while others are evolving slowly.

However, just before jumping on these trends, let us do some number crunching.

Facts And Stats That Matter

The year 2018 has been packed with massive digital transformations. Right now, there are close to 4 billion internet users across the world; on average, every user spends 6 hours online daily. And that is just the beginning. The digital landscape’s explosive growth is simply unstoppable.

Today, more than 5 billion people own mobile devices; over half of those devices fall under the category of smartphones. Nearly 3 billion mobile users are present on social media. A recent report, which was published by a leading Californian software firm, found that most enterprises are taking the social train. Here are some interesting figures from the same report showing the importance of social media for businesses.

• Facebook is used by 96 percent of businesses.
• Almost 89 percent of businesses are on Twitter.
• Up to 70 percent of businesses are on LinkedIn.
• Nearly 70 percent of businesses use Instagram.
• The power of YouTube is explored by 57 percent of businesses.
• Close to 85 percent of businesses plan to develop more video content than they generated last year.

Besides the report that we just discussed, there has been another research undertaken by a leading market research company in the UK. This research states that we spend almost 2 and 15 minutes daily on different social media channels.

As per a report published by a top American online community for marketers, customers spend from 20 to 40 percent more on the enterprises engaging with them through social media.

Another research from a market and consumer data provider gives the insights into the most popular social media channels in January 2018. According to the research, Facebook has 2.2 billion users, YouTube has 1.5 billion users, WhatsApp and Facebook have 1.3 billion users each, and WeChat has 980 million users.

It is interesting to note that among the most popular social media platforms, three are messenger applications. The number of social media users in 2021 will reach up to 3.02 billion—and the social media channels will be popular with Generation X, Generation Z, Millennials, and Baby Boomers.

All these facts and figures reveal a very clear-cut picture: Social media has to be integral to a business’s marketing mix in the coming year. That being said, social media is still an evolving beast as it has a lot of new features popping up time and again.

Here is the ultimate low-down on the top trends that will take social media by storm in 2019.

When AR Will Go Social

The first trend in the list says that a great deal of social media will be transformed by two realities, augmented and virtual. Augmented reality is closely similar to the world of virtual reality. It is because these technologies enable what a consumer sees in the computer is easily augmented by a lot of other elements.

A great example of AR going social is through Snapchat’s facial filters. These filters have sponsors on the screen’s corner, and a few people can create their own geofilters as well.

Focusing On Generation Z Should Be A Priority

Social media technology and Generation Z are evolving together. To be precise, social media has become a daily reality in the lives of Generation Z. So, as Generation Z is growing older, social media has to focus on the people belonging to this specific generation.

The people from Generation Z are slowly getting out of college and are beginning to work. Eventually, they will have the money to spend on the marketplace. Most retail stores have embraced the facts about Generation Z and its tremendous buying power. That is how these stores are coming up with events and pop-up stores that have started receiving massive coverage on different social channels.

While it is completely true that social media marketing is more and more progressive and changes every time, it will be very important to stay in touch with the needs of Generation Z. Plus, it will be more important than ever to understand how this particular generation is using social media while it grows older.

Fresh Social Mediums That Will Rule 2019

Video Is The Best Bet

One of the most dominant mediums on social media is Instagram Stories, an idea that Instagram took from Snapchat. Around 200 Instagram users use this program once every month. YouTube and Instagram are top platforms where a business can easily build a solid presence. One other platform that Generation Z likes a lot is Houseparty that uses the power of group chats for taking socializing to a whole new level.

That is to say, video, whether live or recorded, is soon becoming a powerful social media tactic that nobody can afford to ignore. It will just get more and more apparent in the coming time. As per a leading US software development company, 43 percent of social media users will want to see more and more video content coming from marketers. What else? Businesses have started publishing 18 videos every month, on average.

Chatbots, Messengers, And Live Streams

Other key mediums are chatbots, live streams, and messenger applications. Especially, with chatbots and messenger apps, the lines of communication existing between customers and businesses have become wide open and more sophisticated.

For example, if customers happen to land on a specific business page and see anything they are interested in, then marketers can easily connect with them through chatbots. This way, the customers will be able to initiate a basic conversation that could lead to a sale.

Facebook Messenger has a massive user base. But it is not the only messenger application in town. No doubt, the popularity of different messaging platforms is already exploding. WhatsApp, for example, enjoys 1.3 billion monthly active users; likewise, WeChat has close to 963 million monthly active users.

Moreover, with the integration of chatbots and artificial intelligence, a business can seamlessly improve customer experience and engagement.

Influencer Marketing Gets Big

Influencer marketing is also one of the biggest social media trends that businesses have to watch out for. In the web, there are a lot of well-known social media stars and micro-influencers who are not that big a star but are influential on their level.

In fact, micro-influencers can be more and more helpful to an enterprise’s social media marketing as they are usually regular people that the customers can relate to. That means hiring an influencer or spending on influential marketing makes complete sense, nowadays. One pro tip: YouTube is one of the most robust mediums for putting influencers to work.

User-Generated Content

This format of content generally includes videos, photos, and memes generated by users. This content adds a very personalized touch. Because, today, it is not at all enough to sell a product. Instead, today, consumers are more interested in the story that backs a product. In short, user-generated content personalizes business products or services in ways that any business cannot simply do.

A Sneak Peek At Upcoming Social Channels

Vero

One of the main competitors of Instagram, Vero is an application that enables people to share movies, TV, books, links, places, music, and whatnot. Business, through Vero, can build an awesome profile; it is a great tool for artists who just want to release their art and share it with a lot of other people.

Most importantly, Vero does not have any ads. That is, Vero is all about content and nothing else. What else? When a business shares content through this application, it will have four options: close friend, followers, and acquaintance. This way, virtual socializing begins mirroring real-life privacy. This particular development will bring to this platform a very solid customer base.

TikTok (Formerly Known As Musical.ly)

Coming from the world’s Eastern Hemisphere, this app was built in China and it is structured for replacing Snapchat. TikTok is different from Snapchat because the former focuses on video content that is 15 seconds to 1 minute long.

The uniqueness of this platform is that, here, businesses can pick any soundtrack for accompanying the video. What is more? The enterprises can even use a variety of speed effects and filters, too.

With the help of TikTok, a business can easily create short-length video content, which is called live moments. (Live moments are basically nothing more than GIFs with music.) With fresh ways for editing snackable, short videos, TikTok brings to the table a host of opportunities for businesses that are interested in developing exciting, new videos. With the help of these videos, brands will engage with audiences better.

Social Listening Will Matter The Most

Social listening is basically the process of monitoring or crawling the web and social platforms. By doing so, businesses are in a better position to find all the mentions of their brands or any other important keywords in the social feeds.

This process even includes untagged brand mentions on different social channels. It includes scouring the social media turf for any mentions of industry-relevant keywords or key phrases. By analyzing these key phrases and keywords, a business will know who all are really interested in buying its products. With this process, a business will also know what customers think about its brand and its reputation.

Currently, the major goal of social listening is reputation management and customer service. So, using social listening for these two specific causes is expected to rise to even bigger heights in the future. But the real trend of 2019 will be using this specific procedure for generating leads and selling socially.

The Bottom Line

Overall, social media is all about building connections, relationships, and lasting engagement. With these trends present in a social media marketing mix, a business will optimize its strategy and will seize newer growth opportunities.

In short, these trends, if implemented by the book, will let a brand make the most of its time on social media channels. However, it is important to note that you should not jump on the bandwagon just yet. It is because some of these trends will not fit well in a specific business model. So, a business should check its business model first.

In case a brand needs assistance in decoding the deep science that drives these social media trends, get in touch with Flexsin Technologies. The company has deep expertise in making these trends the mainstay in a brand’s marketing mix.

The Facts That Matter The Most

As a matter of fact, 89 percent of North Americans are online as of August 2018.

As consumers are going digital, businesses are embracing online marketing. These days, marketing a business does not just mean putting an ad on a television or print media. Instead, it means giving value on social media. (A fun fact: As of October 2018, nearly 3.3 billion people are using social media.)

According to January 2018, nearly 24 percent of 5,700 international marketers revealed that they see social media as a big consumer hub. Which is why, they spend a lot of dollars and efforts on making this new medium an important part of their strategy.

Now, it is safe to imagine the powerful reach a business will have if it starts marketing online. That brings us to the top trends that will change the way a business embraces digital marketing.

The Trends That Revolutionize Digital Marketing Forever

Interactive Chatbots

Chatbots have been in business for quite some time, now. Combining the use of voice, messaging, and text, this technology converses with consumers and has been used much before virtual reality. But, this year, it is rightfully taking the spotlight.

As per a report released by Grand View Research, the global chatbot landscape is expected to experience a compound yearly growth rate of close to 24.3 percent starting from 2017; it is even projected to touch the $1.25 billion mark by 2025.

Recently, a leading American technology company surveyed 5,000 consumers located in six countries. As per the survey, more than 67 percent of the surveyed population used chatbots for accessing customer support.

Different messaging applications such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger use sophisticated messenger bots that are designed to push out services and products. This way, such an application can not only promote different brands but also offer its users highly personalized customer service.

The key reason behind this technology’s high success rate is simple: It answers consumers’ questions as quickly and accurately as possible. Chatbots are engineered to collect data about all their users; this data is, then, fed into enhancing the quality of interactions between users and chatbots.

Every leading digital marketing services provider is using the power of chatbots in improving its clients’ engagement rate on social channels such as Facebook.

In short, this tech definitely offers businesses a more responsive and efficient way of dealing with their clients.

Voice Search

More and more netizens are on the go these days. That is why the use of voice commands and voice search is skyrocketing. Bringing more power to voice search is the fact that companies, today, are rolling out their dedicated voice assistants.

Long story short, voice assistants are enabling mobile users to access high-quality information online. With the help of these assistants, web users can perform certain everyday tasks like never before. A case in point: In 2018, voice assistants’ use in the US alone has grown by 128.9 percent when compared with what was happening in 2017. The same research points out that roughly 35.6 million people in the US use this tech at least once every month.

While the growth of voice search is definitely positive, it will always be a big challenge for companies to use this tech online. Unlike the conventional online searches, voice search will give the spot to only the topmost answers or content.

What does all this actually mean for digital marketers, then? Well, it means they will need to optimize the content to suit the demanding needs of voice searches. For example, due to voice search’s rise, more and more digital marketing companies use keywords that are long sentences or complete phrases.

Plus, content strategies are getting changed because of this specific trend. For instance, today, people prefer going through a piece of content that is written in plain, conversational English. This way, digital marketers will be able to churn out content that is friendly in terms of voice search.

AI And Blockchain

Blockchain is disrupting the way the world interacts with financial systems and finances. Best of all, this technology’s power is not just limited to these sectors. Today, blockchain has entered the world of digital marketing.

This technology successfully lets its marketers keep track of where their ads are being placed. Also, this technology lets brands know whether a consumer interacting with them is real and not just any other automated bot clicking on their ads and eating their PPC revenue.

This way, blockchain technology successfully lets digital marketers access the most accurate and reliable consumer data. What is more? The consumers can also benefit from the transparent nature of this new breed of blockchain-empowered digital marketing.

Through blockchain, consumers can control how much and which form of data they give an advertiser. All in all, when consumers’ trust increases in the whole blockchain-cum-digital marketing process, the likelihood of them making a purchase also surges.

Right now, there are a couple of digital marketing agencies that will let a business keep tabs on its marketing efforts with the help of blockchain. This way, a business will make sure its digital marketing efforts are going in the right direction.

Being With The Right Digital Marketing Partner

In order to incorporate these latest and greatest trends in its digital marketing strategy, a business will have to make sure it is associated with the right growth partner. Such digital marketers will not only tailor result-driven strategies but also ensure a business steals the show every time it is on the internet.

Why has online branding become imperative?

It may take a while for you to realize that brand building is one of the best business moves you will ever make to promote your business especially to sustain. Today, it’s more imperative to focus on how to make your business sustain. Sustenance is becoming challenging as many businesses are migrating online. With the competition mounting, you will want your organization to rank high and stay so.

Why does your business need aggressive and exclusive branding?

• To build a brand online means creating awareness of what you, as an entrepreneur and your organization stand for.
• To build a brand online means giving opportunities for the creation of likeability and also to stand-in the progress of audience base.
• To build a brand online means elevating your credibility as you want to be ‘out there’ for the world to find you.
• To build a brand online means allowing yourself to win trust which happens to be the most important segment of sales process? An effective branding will lead to higher number of prospects coupled with profits and customers.

How can we help you build brand awareness?

Brand awareness simply means when people start considering your business and service whenever they need a service or product of similar kind. Whether these people are on Twitter, Facebook or in the remote neighbourhoods, they will remember your brand and keep it spreading across.

OUR THREE EXCLUSIVE BRAND AWARENESS METHODS –

Uniquely designed blog

The key to turning your business into a memorable brand is by making a remarkable first impression. We will have you a blog designed that will do it. Our teams of creative writers and designers always stay a step ahead to ensure a great mix of your content and design. Although, having an exclusively designed blog won’t cover it all up, however will make a good first impression, of course.

A logo that stands out

We don’t believe in a fantasy world, but make practical world stand apart. Designing a unique logo never means it has to be extraneous. Your logo will be the one and only face of your business, hence it must speak for it. We approach your customer community with a character logo.

Create you a tagline

Taglines are phrases that allow your audience understands what your business stands for the minute they click into your website. Taglines must work best as it comes to retaining the visitors for long and eventually turning them your earnest customers.

HERE ARE FOUR BRAND BUILDING SOLUTIONS WE PROVIDE –

Let’s get started with your DIFFERENTIATOR

It may sound trite, however if you can’t differentiate the features of your business from your competitors’, then you’re not worth the participation. Never let your business have an equal or negative value. The more your business sounds different, the longer days you can expect in the market. Hence, we make your business ‘a differentiator.’

Let the LOGO speak

Designing a logo may sound fun, but this takes a lot of considerations, from target audience to kind of service or products on the offer, we analyse, consult and design. There is a fine line between marketing and brand building. While marketing means launching and establishing a business across various channels and territories; branding means ‘constant promotional efforts to make that business sustain and loved for an indefinite time.’ The logo serves as the face of your business quality and standard. It, with time, inhibits in the mind of people and so it lives there forever. Your ‘logo’ must be unique and much personalized.

An INSIGHT turns into brand

A brand is born out of an insight that addresses your target market gap to only extend your business to compound product categories. The advantage of outsourcing ‘brand building solutions’ from an established digital marketing company is that regardless of your market knowledge or expertise, they offer you an insight and then work out on it to align with your business goals. Whether you already have an insight or in seek of an insight, established brand solutions and services companies help you both ways.

PERSONALIZATION is Key

There are many campaigns and there is ‘one campaign’ – You need to decide whether you want to be an assembly product or sing a different tune. Make a note that it’s been quite a long since the Internet took over manual representation. People have tried and tested the internet way and they are only attracted to unique content nowadays. Personalizing your brand building campaigns will sure add to the conversion rate.

Working with us

We consult, cooperate and co-craft a renowned brand from a very distinctive product. We design campaigns out of a unique consumer insight, so it can address a gap in the market and also ensure higher ROIs. Our brand building solutions assures you of sustainability, viability and profitability.