Data
mining is the computer-assisted process of digging through and analysing
enormous sets of data and then extracting the meaning of the data. Data mining
tools predict behaviours and future trends, allowing businesses to make
proactive, knowledge-driven decisions. Data mining tools can answer business
questions that traditionally were too time consuming to resolve.
To
be able to get a completive edge on your competition, data mining is something
to consider
Customer behaviour
Customer
behaviour is analysing the behaviour of customers throughout a site from
landing on a page to purchase.
Benefits:
Insight into your Competitors- View interactions
users have made with your competitors to better understand what targets and
users want. With this knowledge you will be able to change and adapt your brand
and better fit your strategy to suit what customers want or to what competitors
are doing well.
Top-Line Summaries of
Emerging Category Trends and Dynamics- provided to you on a monthly basis.
Improve your Efficiency- This is done by
automated reports, report generation, reduced staffing levels and training
costs, and better reporting tools.
Decision Making- The data collected
and displayed by reports can further be used in your decision making process.
Having the ability to further dive into data will help you make more accurate
decisions for your brand, adapt easily and quickly and drive the business forwards.
This will help, as you will be able to find out what sections of your company
are doing well or what sections are doing poorly.
Predict Customers Behaviour- Using information
you will collect you will be able to analyse and predict customer behaviours
and actions. This will allow you to provide content that is both relevant and
useful to customers.
Improve Quality of Data- Data collected
through reports and systems will provide you with a new standard of content.
Using these reports as a guide, you will be able to see what content is working
or not working which, needs adapting and what content needs further
development.
Improve Business Involvement- Involving yourself
with your company and clients will allow you to better establish your role in
today’s market as well as informing you about what actions are being performed
throughout your company’s online platforms.
In-Depth Analysis of
your Market and Opportunities –It will outline for you the trends inside
your industry. This will explain to you where new opportunities lie and who is
already latching on to them how they are capitalising and what actions you
should take.
Insights about your Category
and Customer-It will
show you how your customer behaviour impacts your sales figures and how to rectify
it to maximise profit potential. This will allow you to see the customers
buying journey from landing on your site through to purchase, with this data
you will adapt your platform to increase conversions.
We here at Digital Propeller (We provide Professional SEO and Business Intelligence Services) have decided to share some information about one of our influence, Bill Gates. We are trying to improve ourselves by ‘’Heading in the right direction’’. Bill Gates has prided himself in sharing things he has learned/ learning through his foundation work and other interests through Twitter.
In this article I will discuss what we think of Bill Gates and his work. Bill is always looking to innovate the future in any way he can. His beliefs range from human welfare to classroom and teachers. In case you are unaware Bill Gates is the co-founder of Microsoft, Microsoft has helped millions of people to express themselves through the digital world. Bill Gates has become so successful from his development with Microsoft that he has been included in “Forbes list of the world’s wealthiest people”.
Even with this amount of money he still has time for people in worst situation than himself. We are aiming to be like this by promoting strong leadership within our company. He became successful but still shows money doesn’t make a man; it’s the choices he makes. He has shown us that anyone can shape the future if they believe and try hard enough. We believe change the future with help of young people because we believe “Young people are the future!”
We aim to use the things we have learned from Bill Gates to help us further develop our digital branding, social interactions and intelligence, People are the key to success because with people there would be no business.
Most of Google’s rank algorithm is shrouded in mystery. We have to take them at their word when they say social media isn’t a ranking factor (not directly, at least), and guess where factors that used to matter (like keywords) stand. Rarely do they come straight out and tell us what the more than 200 ranking signals are and where they stand in the hierarchy.
Yesterday, during a Q&A session Andrey Lipattsev, a Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google, named the two other top signals in response to a question by Ammon Johns.
Those two signals? Links and content.
That means the top three ranking factors, according to Google, are RankBrain, links, and content. Andrey also stated there was “no order” when asked for clarification on the order of importance.
You can watch the full Q&A session below. The discussion about ranking signals begins around the 30-minute mark.
So, What Does It Mean?
We’ve known for a long time that content and links matter, though theimportance of links has come into question in recent years. For most SEOs, this should not change anything about their day-to-day strategies. It does give us another piece of the ranking factor puzzle and provides content marketers with more ammo to defend their practice and push for growth.
Originally published at www.searchenginejournal.com on March 25, 2016. Original publication written by Danielle Antosz, Digital Propeller claim no ownership to this article. If you found this information useful, you can check out more of her articles here!
Are you creating a positive experience for your customers?
Your audience is the most important aspect of your digital marketing campaign. A trend you’ll see continue to rise in 2016 and beyond is designing a user experience. As you’re designing a website or mobile app for your brand, ask yourself if your users will have a memorable experience and whether your message will leave an impact.
User experience testing and practicing is no longer optional. As quickly as a user finds your website, they will just as quickly bounce and move on if they don’t have the experience they hoped.
It starts with usability, cleanliness, and the value it brings to your audience. But it’s so much more than that. All aspects of your website contribute to the overall experience.
Every business and every website you interact with has their own way of expressing themselves. How are you going to make sure your voice is heard and your customers find what they need on your website?
User Experience Defined
If you ask Google what user experience is, they answer your question with “the overall experience of a person using a product such as a website or computer application, especially in terms of how easy or pleasing it is to use.”
In terms of evaluating your user experience, analyze how your visitors are interacting with the site. How do they navigate across the site? Look at how they consume content and how the design is working.
What’s appealing your customers? UX design works when you allow your customers to complete actions or find information as quickly as possible. When complying with the definition provided by Google’s answer box, you have the capability of expanding your business by appealing to new, pleased customers.
Guide the user through the funnel, helping them to achieve their goals while exceeding your goals.
Aspects Incorporated Into the Experience
When you land on a website, what’s the first thing you’re looking for? Accessibility, usability, value or credibility, or a heading tag showing what the page is about. All of your customers are looking for something unique. The experience starts with a usable design, appealing to the emotions and behaviors of your audience:
Appearance
Tone of Voice
Visual Design & Layout
Consistency
Clear Call to Action
Page Load Speed
In order to truly draw your users in, explore the use of clean concepts paired with appealing images and powerful content. Avoid any distractions that negatively affect engagement and are not necessary to your end-user.
Make sure your users can easily find relevant information to quickly make decisions. The ability to interact with your brand and your website captures attention and leaves your users with a positive experience. All elements of the interface make up the design. Establish trust for your brand by simplifying your interface, offering easy navigation, and quick answers to any concerns your visitors have.
Always continue to look for ways to improve the end-user experience. Test data sets and gather feedback from your customers, family, and friends.
A/B Testing
You may think that your design is appealing and attractive, yet your traffic and conversions haven’t increased. You never know how your visitors will be interacting with your brand. Test different variations of page designs to see which performs best with your audience.
Look at various factors and leverage how you can increase visibility of particular elements to gain more interaction. Which elements need to pop? Your call to action, contact information, icons, and heading tags. Make sure they stand out.
What Should You Test?
Look at aspects of your site that have a high impact on your visitors.
Alter the color schemes and the wording of your call to action buttons. Use clear icons, attractive colors, and different fonts for your text. Focus on the user. Your users are looking for two things from your website:
Simplicity
Helpfulness
Test your landing pages and see which designs draw the most attention and interaction from your visitors. There are many tools and software you can use for your A/B Testing. Try Optimizely to see which areas of your website have the highest engagement levels.
The purpose of A/B Testing is to find issues and problems, and eliminate them from your design. How are you going to increase performance of your website? A/B Testing gives you the information you need to identify any problems so you can increase click-through rates and generate business.
How Do You Generate Business From User Experience?
A first impression makes all the difference. Perception is everything. Enhance your marketing by focusing on UX design.
Be consistent across channels. Make sure the experience between desktop, tablet, and smartphone remains the same. As close to 75% of your consumers are accessing your website on a mobile device, your mobile experience should enable action triggers that increase conversions.
Create a buyer persona for your brand to look at your website from a conversion and user standpoint. Applying UX design to your marketing campaign benefits greatly from user personas, laid out by MarketingProfs.
Once you have a positive perception through user experience, you’ll add positive associations and enhance your reputation. Decisions to buy your product or request your services depends on customer experience. When you optimize the experience, you’ll stand out ahead of your competitors. Optimizing your site will result in:
Reduced Bounce Rate
More Page Views
More Contact Boxes Filled Out
Increased Sales
When your website performs efficiently and is clear and concise, action will be persuaded. In turn, business will be generated.
The SEO Relationship
Your SEO campaign and UX design go hand in hand. Going back to the aspects of page load speed and a clear, simple CTA, these factors matter too in SEO.
As outlined by Search Engine Watch, SEO has as much to do with how users engage on a site as it does with rankings. Higher traffic and better user experience leads to more links, shares, and higher rankings.
Your SEO will benefit from a pleasurable user experience, but only if the two are aligned. Optimizing your on-page factors with highly relevant and compelling content, together with a user-friendly and appealing design, leads to successful digital marketing.
Be sure to avoid both UX and SEO issues with redirects or re-branding your business. Focusing too much on UX can result in a dip in rankings and traffic. On the other hand, too much focus on optimization and not experience will increase your bounce rate and hinder user engagement.
With the same business goals in mind, make sure your SEO staff and UX team work together to find the balance that results in increased traffic and conversions.
Identifying Problems
Are you failing to gain traffic and revenue from your website? Put yourself in the frame of mind of your target users. Understand what they’re looking for and why they’re visiting your website.
What are the issues you’re dealing with? Look into the analytics of your website and landing pages, searching for key metrics that help you identify problems. Analytics for customer journeys enables you to find opportunities for improvement and quickly correct any problems.
Time on Site
How long are visitors on your site? Are you capturing their attention long enough to make your voice heard? Design and experience keeps visitors interested. If they aren’t staying on your site now, enhance and simplify the design and get them to stay.
Bounce Rates
An optimized UX design encourages visitors to explore your website. Without a captivating design, your visitors will lose interest and bounce. Think about the last time you updated the design. If it’s outdated and doesn’t pop, your visitors won’t view you as a credible source for information or trust your services.
This leads to a high bounce rate (when a user lands on your site and immediately leaves). Consistent updates will help lower your bounce rate. Do this effectively by updating your content, improving page load speed, and offering simple navigation.
It all begins with an investment in a design that provides trust.
UX Surveys
You should never stop testing and gathering information about your website. Feedback surveys can deliver valuable information that will help you design a more appealing website for your users. As laid out by KISSmetrics, keep the surveys short and ask only what you need to know. Offer options to garner the most truthful results and feedback.
User feedback is key. According to MarketingProfs, “You can’t create a satisfying user experience without actively and consistently gathering user feedback.” Surveys help put you into the minds of your consumers and learn how your site impacts them.
Use this information to identify issues and create a positive experience.
Exit Pages
It’s always good to look at all angles. A few quick exits may not be cause for alarm. Your competition could be visiting your site and leaving without converting. That’s not a problem with your design.
Looking further into the exit pages, determine whether important pages of the conversion funnel have a high exit rate. If so, you should be concerned.
Analyze each page with a high exit rate. Does it offer value and present your information in an engaging manner? Is there potential to give your users further value on these pages?
A good design will solve your problems and the problems experienced by your customers. Through simple navigation and usability, your design will attract the right audience and establish the trust that leads to further business.
Brands Doing it Right
Get an idea of the types of designs that provide a positive experience. Think about your goals and your target audience, providing an easy solution for increased conversions. Here are brands that have seen success after adjusting their design and interface for the best UX possible.
Virgin America
Reinventing the flying experience, Work & Co simplified and redesigned the Virgin America website in 2014 to simplify the booking experience. It’s a clear structure that is not cluttered so your eyes focus on the important information.
All of your needs are above the fold for easy booking and no distractions. Travelers are busy and Virgin America created a design that responds beautifully to their behaviors. It’s responsive, loads quickly, and meets the needs of travelers quickly with its basic nature.
Airbnb
When you visit Airbnb, you’re looking for a place to stay. The design is welcoming, easy to use, and offers convenient navigation. Wherever you’re going, Airbnb lets you know right away that they have the destination you’re seeking.
For new users, you can browse all available host houses before logging in and creating an account. The team of designers at Airbnb look to impact all aspects of your journey. From the mobile app to the website, each visit is personalized and invites you to keep scrolling.
High engagement leads to more interaction, more returning visitors, and more conversions. The focus on UX is a leading factor that helped grow the company to over $10 billion.
LA Times
As one of the leading sources of news in the entire country, the LA Times shifted to a focus on experience. The bold design puts the focus on multimedia and it’s fully responsive, transforming how its users consume news.
Reaching the user with their interface and the advertiser with their design improves the experience for all visitors. They set the standard for today’s news consumption with its mobile-first design that is visually striking and simple to navigate.
The company responded to a shift in the industry and appealed to their users by providing a design that connected with the tendencies of their audience. They looked at the problems both readers and advertisers were experiencing, and developed a responsive solution that solved those problems. It has resulted in more engagement and more page views per visit.
As UX stays on the road to a multi-channel and multi-device accessibility, you’ll have new opportunities to design an interactive app or website. Give your users a sense of control with an empowering UX and take some advice from these brands to give yourself a competitive advantage.
Key Takeaways
Creating a memorable user experience results in a significant ROI for your business. UX is a benefit to your brand. The best way to attract repeat customers and grow your business online is by continually testing. Test daily, weekly, or monthly.
Your first impression needs to resonate. Appeal to your visitors, and focus on optimizing the experience and the value of your site for increased exposure to the right audience.
Find out what’s connecting with your audience and deliver a desirable design. Do just a little more than the rest, and explore new ways to personalize your brand. Through your website and mobile app design, think about the experience you are providing. This will lead to more downloads, more visits, and more interaction with your brand.
Use multiple approaches and methods to deliver your message to your audience. Provide easy navigation with a clean design that drives engagement. Engage users with top of fold elements to keep them scrolling through your site.
Designing an excellent experience is crucial. The internet is too crowded to blend in. The more consistent of an experience you create, the more you’ll reach your audience. The experience will always be present. How are you going to make that experience positive?
Image Credits
Featured Image: Image by Gabrielle Frake. Used with permission. In-post Photos: Images by Gabrielle Frake. Used with permission.
Disclaimer; This article was originally written by Ryan Clutter for Search Engine Journal. We do not claim any ownership of the content. If you enjoyed reading this you can check out more of Ryan Clutter’s articles here!
Ryan Clutter
Ryan Clutter is a Content and SEO Specialist at 1SEO.com Digital Agency. He works for clients in numerous industries, creating relevant content through comprehensive SEO strategies. He has a passion for helping others and achieving the best results for a winning online marketing strategy.
If you’re just in Yelp or the Yellow Pages, you’re not truly “local” yet. You’re missing out on
audiences native to a particular city.
Yes, you have to be in these big directories. But marketing in the true local web means creating campaigns relevant to audienceswhere they live.
In this piece, I’ll outline our team’s recent findings on the anatomy of the true local web,
with a focus on how “Web National” brands and app developers can organically access local customers in any community.
What is the “true local web?”
The true local web is composed of websites that are published by actual local organizations,
as opposed to websites that are created by national publishers that don’t have a real
local presence. In other words, these are websites published by entities with actual
addresses in the city you’re trying to market to.
The true local web includes not just local retail or service businesses within a given city,
but other organizations, as well. It includes the nonprofits. The arts. The news publishers,
bloggers and events native to a location.
Who should care about the true local web?
There are three types of businesses vying for web traffic in CITY X:
Businesses local to CITY X
National chains with brick-and-mortar locations in CITY X
“Web National” businesses that serve CITY X without a brick-and-mortar location (think Uber)
When you write about “local marketing,” most people assume you’re talking about
the first option above, maybe the second. The thirdgenerally gets ignored, even though
it’s arguable that these organizations are most in need of true local web connections.
“Web National” isn’t a ubiquitous term yet, but we’d argue that it’s a distinct category,
separate from other national brands.
All three business types care about web traffic and search engine rankings within CITY X,
but their strategies for getting there are going to vary.
The true local web is more easily accessible for the local business owner. She already
knows people on various town committees; maybe she bowls with local bloggers on
Tuesdays. Even if she doesn’t already have these connections, they’re easy to pursue
because she’s already a local in her target market.
True local marketing — local businesses are already there.
National chains with smart marketers will encourage their brick-and-mortar store
employees to leverage their local connections. Supported by their national advertising
and PR strategies, each unique location doesn’t have to spend much on local marketing,
thanks to the “rising tide” nature of these big chain businesses.
But how do “Web National” organizations solidify their place in the market?
They haven’t yet curated local connections, nor do they have physical storefronts
and signage to draw in customers. For these reasons, web national organizations
may need the most help accessing the true local web.
True local web engagement for traffic & rankings
If the true local web is an online manifestation of a city, then partnerships with these local organizations are the way to access true local web traffic and to influence local PR,
social media and search rankings.
A bit about true local partnerships
Local sponsorships are the bread and butter of a community. But to find them, you have to take the time to look in the breadbox and dairy drawer!
Sponsorships are the crux of the true local web. They allow local, chain or web national businesses to join community efforts, often including a myriad of advertising for one’s dollar.
We often see local sponsorships overlooked because they’re complicated and disjointed. Each organization is unique, with its own price points, benefits and requirements. But the benefits for local visibility make them worth pursuing.
True local social media marketing
Going local with social media means attracting pages and influencers that are region-specific. This could mean individual bloggers and local celebrities, or it could mean Meetup or Facebook groups focused on a particular city.
As with sponsorships, they’re disjointed, but they also provide a way to meet potential customers without the noise of traditional marketing tactics. When you have to dig for a true local fit, there isn’t as much competition.
True local social media opportunities can be found by connecting with nonprofits, clubs, events and organizations looking for monetary or in-kind donations. Even partnering with a nonprofit for an employee volunteer day can secure social media mentions to the organization’s local following. These activities are also primed for storytelling, which is why web traffic can also be served by public relations.
True local PR
Local news is alive and well… online.
Local journalism isn’t dead. But it has moved online. The upside is that there are now many more options when it comes to outreach — a more liberal company may even consider bloggers as members of the press. After all, many of them cover a beat, share local news and hold themselves to legal standards.
But as with finding and coordinating partnerships with organizations, working with local press can be a messy enterprise. In our experience, local journalists are spread thin, and they don’t often have time to evaluate every unique pitch from an unknown source. There are two best practices for securing local press, and both could be considered part of a long-game strategy:
Show up. The upside of “true local” is that journalists in a given city won’t be hard to track down. They’re wherever news and community can be found. The more a brand is involved with community goings-on, the more chances brand representatives have to meet and greet the reporters covering these events.
True local blogger engagement
Topical searches for bloggers are not new, so why not search for online influencers who live in a particular location? Try using advanced operators to search “about” pages for mentions of your target city, and see who comes up. (For additional ideas, we’ve discussed some great tactics for finding local bloggers in the Citation Labs Local Webinar.)
Local blogger engagement can work for one-off campaigns or as part of a larger event (see below). While not all bloggers in Dallas consider themselves “Dallas bloggers,” with the market saturation of online writers over the past decade, many are looking for a way to stand out from the crowd. And local blogging can be a real money-maker.
In-person engagement: Where true local tactics link together
Event engagement is as local as it gets. Events may come with a booth, tickets or a table at the dinner party. And it’s a tactic primed for creative thinking. Local presence can drive so much more than awareness; a presence at these events can be used to:
generate app downloads;
sign up new customers;
hand out coupon codes;
engage with local bloggers and press; and
reward existing local customers.
If you’re at an event, you should be doing everything you can to drive potential customers to meet there. Web national organizations that can’t afford to send a rep to CITY X may even recruit a local customer to be a brand advocate in the area. What better way to reward frequent customers than to give them free tickets to local festivals?
Additionally, if you spend money on local advertising, why not let people know that they can come meet you at an event?
“We Are A Proud Sponsor of the BBQ Festival! Come Get a Dessert At the ACME, INC Booth!”
If you design your event engagement properly, there might be a case for local press or bloggers to be there. There are a lot of ways to weave these pieces together by being physically in a location, at a specific event. Oh yeah, and you’ll most likely get a link and social media mention from the event, too.
Welcome to the neighborhood.
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
Disclaimer; this article was originally written for Search Engine Land by guest author Garrett French, and we do not claim ownership of this article or it’s contents. If you enjoyed this article, check out Search Engine Land for more like this!
Garrett French is the founder and chief link strategist of Citation Labs, a link building agency and campaign incubator. He’s also the founder of ZipSprout — Citation Labs’s sister agency focused on local marketing. He’s developed multiple link building tools, including the Link Prospector and the Broken Link Finder. He also co-wrote The Ultimate Guide to Link Building with Link Moses himself, Eric Ward. Garrett and his team lead monthly webinars on enterprise content strategy and promotion from the Citation Labs Blog.
Friday, 18 March 2016
Blurred Lines: When Marketing, PR, and Content Overlap
From social selling to new opportunities with mobile advertising, every marketing organization now has a cornucopia of channels through which to work its magic.
Yet, different channels and opportunities demand different skills, and the effort needed to coordinate all the necessary components and team members is immense. It can be confusing at best, unproductive at worst.
Let's take a simple example: an infographic.
You've compiled the information and applied beautiful design. Now what? You probably have 10 different channels to send it through. Should one person own every channel and strategy for promotion? I mean, it's just a simple infographic, right?
The answer is "no," and here's why.
Your content marketer who created the infographic may not know the ins and outs of expertly targeting social media to drive traffic to the infographic. Your social media maven may not understand why including a link in your email campaign to the infographic is critical to nurturing certain leads. And you might think that blasting the infographic out to a list of media contacts will get the it reposted by top bloggers, but you wouldn't be nearly as successful in securing media coverage as your PR teammate would.
Aly Saxe is CEO of Iris PR, a cloud-based SaaS platform designed by PR pros for PR pros.
