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Introduction
With the advent and rising popularity of the Internet, marketers have found it worthwhile to advertise online. There are a whole load of commercial mails which have doing rounds in the recent box to many inboxes. They are intended at promoting a product or service and generally ask for a click on a specific link given in the commercial mail. Banner ads, pop up messages are a few other such similar things that try to grab the attention of users all the time when viewing a particular web page. These are some of the online marketing strategies that marketers are adopting to reach potential customers. Technology has become predominant element in many businesses now-a-days. The internet has not only transformed the lifestyle of individuals, but has also revolutionized the entire realm of business dramatically.
For any company image plays a vital role in ensuring its survival in the market. Advertising online helps a company develop and build its brand image (Schullo, 2007). Online advertisements should be designed in such a way that the target customers can understand it easily. Besides just advertising and promoting the products on the company’s own website, it is also advisable that the firm collaborates with other websites that attract potential customers, as this would help in increasing the business. Online advertising gives the company a chance to reach the maximum number of clients globally at a minimum cost. By doing so, the possibilities of the company reaching to a larger customer base are extremely higher.
For the company to facilitate communication with its customers on a frequent and quick basis, Electronic-mail (E-mail) is the best online marketing resource (Schullo, 2007). Electronic mails have become a popular medium for marketers to reach customers, communicate on a rapid and frequent manner and promote their products and services personally to the customers. Personalized e-mails relevant to target customers are sent to persuade them to buy the product or service. However, if the market is not segmented properly, the emails may reach unrelated audiences, who may develop negative opinions about the company’s offerings. Hence, sufficient care should be taken in selling through e-mails. Personalized e-mails targeted at the right audience will leverage maximum benefit for the company.
The online marketing resource that would be of great help to the organization to keep track of the products, services and customers is data warehousing. According to this technology, it is possibly to maintain the business operations in an organized manner and also to forecast the future business possibilities which in turn would help in framing of appropriate corporate strategies (Schullo, 2007). “This technology leverages the vast quantities of information gleaned over many years and many transactions to be placed in a massive repository, with the express purpose of garnering this data for current and historical trend and analysis (Schullo, 2007).” With the help of this technology, it is possible to the database of the past can be put into a new form of service. It makes a great business sense to any organization that gets involved into online marketing. The reason for stating so is that past consumer behavior will eventually help in the prediction of future consumer behavior and trends especially in terms of aspects like preference of brands etc.
Benefits of E-Marketing
E-commerce has changed the way the business is transacted globally and has decreased the buyer-seller gap infinitely and today buyers have access to sellers seamlessly across borders. Thanks to e-commerce! Just like internet has brought in a dramatic paradigm shift in the way we work, live, and play; e-commerce today, has gone way beyond traditional B2B and B2C approach and has rewritten many a rule of marketing (Stair, 2011). Search engine optimization has created a new dimension in pull-marketing and sales strategies. Today, e-commerce contributes to sizeable parts of business globally and encompasses almost the entire range of traditional methods of doing business. It is in this context that newer methods of payments like plastic cards, PayPal, and mobile banking play a vital role in enabling commerce in the cyber world. PayPal established in the year 2000 as a marriage of convenience between two ideas today plays an immensely vital role in facilitating commerce virtually cashless on the digital super highway.
Commerce on the digital super highway is also a potential victim to various frauds and e-thefts that it requires highly secure and specialized methods of transferring monies from one party to another.
The Internet has virtually surpassed nearly all avenues that had previously been used to market brands while other marketing techniques are perceived to be cumbersome and costly, online branding, social networking and mass customization have proved handy in the contemporary corporate environment, owing to the Internet’s proximity and wide coverage. The Internet has enabled easy and quick exchange of corporate values, witnessed the prosperity of several brands globally, hence impacting positively to the company designing the brand, in terms of popularity and financial gains recorded in sales. Social media is being increasingly used these days as it can help lessen the marketing expenses of a company. It can facilitate business by reorganization of operations, cost reduction, forging customer relations, and generating revenues.
E-business can generate value for organizations if they incessantly make use of new technology to advance their marketing system and thereby meeting the consumer expectations constantly. The social media can be used to build long-term associations with clientele. On the other hand, the amount of human resources that are being deployed cannot be reduced even in case of online marketing as this also needs pretty many to work on various relevant aspects like information updating, online advertising, site designing etc.
The Social media can be unified into an organization’s conventional marketing and communication plan as it can help in effective brand building. If it is used in association with other distribution and media channels, it can contribute extensively in brand building. The Social media has completely changed the way businesses operate and also the way these work. It has also brought about a change in the way Information Technology supports business operations and other end user work related activities.
Why SEO is important on the 1st page?
1.Directly Target customers: The main purpose of getting in to search is to attract the target customer. SEO helps to speak to the customer directly. The customers search with a specific term to find the product, so if we incorporate the terms that are used by customers into our page they can access easily. This is the simplest way to attract the customers. The best way of finding the target audience is to conduct market analysis. Updating the articles and by creating blogs on the website can catch the attention of the customers. Responding quickly to the customer queries through online.
2. Branding: Development: Branding through SEO helps in increasing the sales and also the growth of the business. SEO branding leads to recognition and ultimately to buying behavior. It helps the business firms in finding the investors which gives a clear idea about the partner. It also helps in choosing the exact key words to understand the purpose behind their research. SEO is a strategic process for growth. It is a form of inbound marketing which gives potential to expand the business level of success. Strategic SEO based advertising helps to build trust in the audience.
3. Competition: Every business should know how to monitor their competitor’s success and failure. Steps to analyze SEO competition: 1. Firstly find who are the SEO competitors.2 Analyze the competitors by visiting the site. 3. Analyze the key words used by the competitors 4. Check the competitor’s back links, back links helps in determining the strength of the competitors 5. Check other SEO factors 6. Evaluate the competitor’s presence on the social media. 7. Analyze how competitors use PPC ads.
4. Customer expectation: The main aim of every marketing strategy is to meet the customer’s expectations.
Few tips for managing customer expectations in SEO:
- Explaining the entire process and outcomes that we intend to deliver.
- Set realistic timelines: Timelines need to be set as most of the clients expect results to be quicker.
- Be open to what can be done and cannot done.
- Listen to what customers are saying
- A regular report and communication is necessary.
- Habit of making every communication into document.
- Setting a realistic time line and benchmarks is very important and continuously reinforce to the client.
5. Be first to success: In order to succeed in business with better results it is important that right metrics are recorded and analyzed.
A deeper analysis in the SEO performance is needed. Rankings and traffic are the two important metrics to track for success. The three performance indicators that need to be considered for success are Rankings, Traffic, and Conversions. Keyword rankings are most common and obvious. Tracking keyword rankings overtime gives the ability to craft SEO strategy which provides the benefits. Measuring the value and quality of the traffic is essential. Conversions are defined based on the specific goals.
It is important to be quick and top on producing the information as early as possible for SEO. Need to start the work immediately without delay. It is very important to maintain a balance between time sensitive content and ever green content as they prefer both the latest information and content that holds the value over time. Time plays an important role. Be competitive and first to be on the top spot of the blog.
Best Practices in SEO
There are essentially seven best practices for effective SEO. They are discussed in detail:
Permalinks - A permalink, or the link of a permanent, is essentially a URL that denotes a particular entry in a forum or a blog after the same passes out from the front page of the website to the archives region of the site. Due to the fact that a permalink remains unchanged for an indefinite period, it is less vulnerable to the link rot. Most of the contemporary web-blogging as well as the software available for syndicating content support permalinks. There are many others websites that make use of the word ‘permalinks’; however, the term permalink is popular and highly relevant to blogging. Permalink is a hybrid word created out of the terms permanent link. Permalink, to be precise, required to be readable by users.
When the search engines come across blogs, the blog title along with the post is read, and eventually key words used in the article are picked up by the search engines, especially the key words used in the title of the blog. This, in due course, would result in a massive boost to the search engine traffic.
Keyword Density - Keywords are the most crucial elements of SEO. For any search engine, it is the keywords that aides in the search for strings that are eventually matched. Choosing the appropriate keywords for optimizing the website is therefore the first step and also the most important steps for the success of a SEO campaign. If any website owner or blog owner fails on this very crucial step, then the future is surely bouncy, and most probably the site or blog owners will only waste both time as well as money.
There are a number of ways in which appropriate keywords can be determined for the optimization of the website, and normally the ultimate list of the appropriate keywords is generate after a cautious assessment of what users online are looking for, the keywords chosen by the competitive players online, and more importantly, which are the keywords that appropriately describe the website or blog.
Call to Action (CTA) – Today, all things are happen at a dramatically faster pace – thanks to the internet and online realm. Call to Action is essentially an instruction like Buy Now, Register Now, and Add to cart, etc. Placing CTAs in various places of a website is really an amazing idea.
This is truly dependent on the type of actions that the site owner or blog owner is trying to get from the clients to perform, and how the website owner (s) would like to approach the same. A few people like “the in-your-face model with a pop-up subscription facility and really large button, others (like me) tend to take a more moderated approach and let customers decide for themselves (personally, I think this gives you a better quality of customer).”
Social Media Links - Social media marketing may be defined as the method through which websites or blogs or companies gain the attention of online users or gain more traffic to their website with the extensive usage of social media. Social media, because of the advent of internet has become an inseparable and intimate portion of almost very company’s marketing strategy. It has slowly overtaken the position of direct mails and email campaigns to various levels and has definitely replaced the direct mail campaigns. Today the paper mail campaigns almost do not exist or exist very minimally. Such is the growth of social media marketing.
Social Media is a method on the internet and web to keep in touch with friends and socialize. This essentially means that what is “liked” is automatically “shared” and hence replaces the conventional word-of-mouth. Social media gives a readymade platform for creating a buzz and a positive word of mouth.
YouTube Links – YouTube is essentially the second largest and highly popular search engine on the internet domain, and statistics reveal that 1.6 million searches are carried out on YouTube in one month. Certainly, this offers a great opportunity for bloggers and website owners to place videos related to their products or services and optimize them for YouTube. However, this is not the only reason for business to target YouTube.
YouTube is also a very rich source of links that can be very helpful for the rankings of the websites in terms of organic SEO, eventually making it a slam plunge in terms of SEO.
Placing various relevant videos on YouTube does not just help in increasing traffic to the website, but would also boost the ranking of the website. Online Videos essentially are an evidence of the quality of the website, as quality websites are regarded to have more videos when compared to the so-called ‘spam’ websites. The Video description text on YouTube is the first and the most crucial place from where free links can be obtained for websites or blogs. One of the most commonly recommended best practices YouTube SEO is to place the original link of the website in the very first line of the text while uploading a video on YouTube. This is probably the best links of the website or the blog that is available, and it gets reserved for the owner of the content.
The title tags continues to be one of the most important elements of an effective SEO strategy, primarily for one reason – title tag is the overall designation of the content present on a webpage or a blog. Due to the fact that the number of characters in a title tag is limited, there is hardly any scope to broaden its usage or effectiveness.
Robots.txt – Robots.txt, otherwise known as Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) are the text files that are used by webmasters for instructing robots, specifically search engine robots, about how to crawl and index pages on the websites or the blogs. The primary role of robots.txt can be explained as follows:
- They inform spiders on search engines the ways of interaction for indexing the content of the website or the blog
- “If you specify data for all bots (*) and data for a specific bot (like GoogleBot) then the specific bot commands will be followed while that engine ignores the global/default bot commands.”
Analysis of the Chosen Website
The most striking feature that screams loudly at every visitor on the home page are the three lines, “We boost job prospects by helping you create a strong presence; online, on paper & in person.” The landing page of the website is very well visually crafted, prompting the visitor to explore the website further through a clever mix of color schemes, visuals, as well as text. The site is optimized for SEO and care has been taken not to present plagiarized content anywhere on the site. The content is SEO rich, and sticky in encouraging the visitor to explore different aspects of the site. Another important observation is that the site encourages the visitor to subscribe to a variety of services on offer at the site. The site is also cleverly coded to ensure faster loading, using a mix of flash and other multimedia components.
The site has strong permalinks to ensure that there are no broken links and chains that get reported to search engine crawlers. The site uses just two of the social media platforms namely, Facebook and LinkedIn. Again, this sends out a strong marketing message that it is a serious site, and not proliferated child-like across social media platforms, having no relevance to its business. LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional networking site is also a clever mix of how social media has been selectively used to build a strong brand promise, without an element of frivolity. Sites like YouTube, Pintrest, Twitter, among other have been carefully and thoughtfully avoided to send a strong signal of professionalism and business attitude. The punch line that promises serious positive impact on a visitor’s career is strongly promoted by the use of just two serious social media platforms.
Conclusions and Recommendations
Gillian Lana targets prospective employment seekers in aiding their quest in finding a suitable full-time employment. There is a targeted marketing effort that is done through SEO as well as social media presence, and again, the choice of social media is restricted just to two sites namely, Facebook and LinkedIn. While there might be marketing reasons behind this, it also drives and uses various Facebook and LinkedIn campaigns to do targeted marketing in achieving its marketing objective of driving customers to the website.
One of the important things that Gillian Lana could possibly do is to have success stories and also YouTube presence. This will allow them to sell better based on references from real customers and the videos of the same could be uploaded on YouTube. Such kind of testimonies helps convincing prospective customers better, while also doing targeted marketing.
New Trends in SEO useful for the client
The commercial business sites today are greatly relying on user keyword searches and Facebook preferences as well as behavior. This helps placing ads appropriately in the target market segment, thus saving on PPC (pay per click) budgets, and these are highly recommended to take it further, thus help Gillian Lana to progress to the next step in business.
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