Why Accelerated Mobile Pages Matter From SEO Point of View

We have been reading and hearing a lot of 'Mobile First' slogans for quite some time now. The idea of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a major part of this large mobile phone compatibility plan.

So, what is AMP all about? It’s an open-source project backed by Google, Twitter, WordPress and other publishers to encourage the creation of mobile-optimized content with pages that load fast on mobile devices. This initiative is taken to boost the mobile responsiveness of web pages and do away with a majority of desktop website elements thought to be completely unnecessary for a mobile site. In short, it is AMP that is optimizing the browsing experience of mobile phone users with a fully standardized mobile version of a given site.

Greatest opportunity for publishers

Those sites that produce large volumes of content on a regular basis stand to gain the most from AMP. It is not advisable to convert every landing page and service page into AMP; this can be counterproductive and wreak havoc on conversions. Rather, what Google wants is publishers convert article and blog sections into AMP.

SEO boost from AMP

Your SEO activities get a boost from AMP in that search engine-optimized content in an AMP format shows up first on Google search on a priority basis. Page load speed also plays a paramount role in SERPs. The faster a page loads, the higher Google ranks it. Therefore, this is another area where AMP comes into play from SEO point of view.

No dearth of supporters

Just how important AMP is today from SEO viewpoint can be ascertained from the full support it receives from media giants like BBC, New York Times, and Washington Post as well as networking service providers like LinkedIn and Pinterest.

Enhanced visibility of sites

Mobile friendliness enhances the visibility of sites and is thus good from SEO perspective. AMP also has an in-built visitor behaviour tracking system that throws valuable insights on customers, which is important from consumer analytics perspective.

Greater viewability of sites & higher customer engagement rates

With AMP, Google has set the right kind of standard for mobile-friendly sites, and it is truly something that no Internet marketer who is serious about optimizing their pages would like to ignore. According to DoubleClick Ad Exchange, more than 80% of publishers realized higher viewability rates after embracing AMP. Similarly, 90% plus publishers reportedly enjoyed greater customer engagement through higher CTR.

Helping build brand authority

Last but not least, when a product or service is displayed in the Google carousel at the top of SERPs, it creates a good impression amongst visitors and maximizes the trust quotient. Furthermore, it helps build brand authority too. Again, only a code like AMP can bring about such positive results.

You may go for partial or full AMP for your website depending on your requirement, but whatever the case may be, AMP is definitely not something that SEO professionals can afford to ignore. Invest in AMP and see your ROI improve dramatically. A countless number of companies are adopting AMP as we are talking. So, what are you waiting for? Go ahead and do it.

Read more at: Virtual Employee Article

5 Advantages of Outsourcing PPC Management Services

If you have a website that commands attention and interest, it is also necessary that you remain at the top of search engine rankings. PPC management and SEO are significant for any business. Additionally, in this era of constantly changing trends and high competition, PPC in particular now demands a higher level of expertise to work properly. The most trusted option is to outsource PPC management services to an agency, which can run a specialized digital marketing campaign for your business.

In this article, we discuss 5 benefits of outsourcing PPC services:.

1. Lower Cost

The cost of outsourcing PPC services is much less when compared to managing an in-house team for the same. When you outsource the services to a specialized firm, you can remain assured that the task will be handled by a bunch of thoroughly trained professionals who have a comprehensive understanding of all the technicalities involved in PPC services. On the other hand, managing an in-house team requires you to put up with all the overhead expenses and this makes it a far costlier proposition.

2. Access to Innovative Techniques

For a successful PPC campaign, there are several tools that you can use for keyword research, landing page designs and bid management. Specialized PPC agencies constantly look for new techniques and designs to get more trusted results for their customers. Availing the services of such specialized agencies is always more beneficial compared to conducting the research in-house.

3. Availability of Trained and Knowledgeable Professionals

PPC advertising is changing constantly. Successful PPC campaigns require you to adhere and quickly adapt to varied modifications. Precisely, it requires PPC specialists to stay abreast of the evolving requirements. When you outsource PPC services, you always have access to trained and knowledgeable experts who are highly experienced in PPC management and who undergo constant training to get a job done as required.

4. Holistic Approach

When you consider an agency to outsource your PPC services, it is always a better option to invest in one that follows a holistic approach. For instance, you can always look for a specialized agency, which focuses on PPC, SEO, and digital marketing. This always helps ensure that the different teams work together in achieving the common goals.

5. Complete Time Management

It is vital for the PPC campaigns to be monitored multiple times a day. When a website is successful online, its owners have to work for multiple hours each week, managing and writing new advertising copies. In short, there is always a lot to do and there is less time. Thus, when you outsource your PPC services, you literally buy the agency's wealth of knowledge in handling PPC accounts, strategies, platforms and techniques. The quality and innovation that PPC professionals bring to the table are endless and without any additional charges.

A trained and knowledgeable PPC team can handle all the required activities and run a campaign on your behalf in accordance with the instructions given by you. Moreover, established PPC agencies have good knowledge of what works for your business and can also advise you on SEO, landing pages, email marketing and social media pages. By outsourcing PPC services, you can remain assured that all the marketing activities are working together to yield the most suitable results. 

Read more at: Virtual Employee Blog

Five Most Common Online Marketing Mistakes You Need to Avoid

Having a sound digital amrketing strategy is imperative for online success. If the same old mistakes are holding you back from making it big, it is important that you take note of them and ensure they do not recur.

Here are 5 major mistakes business leaders make in their online ventures:

Undefined Goals

Generic objectives such as ‘making more money’ or ‘engaging customers’ won’t keep let you make much headway. You need to set up specific goals such as increasing the number of leads generated by your website from 5000 to 10000 per month or make the lead conversion rate increase by 15%.

Tangible, measurable goals will help you devise an appropriate strategy for yourself. Different marketing methods such as SEO, PPC and mobile marketing are available online. Your goals will enable you to determine the right marketing medium, set a budget and stick to it.

Not Using Analytics

You need not hit and try when a plethora of analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Coremetrics, HubSpot and much more are there for you. You can use any of these to provide critical data about your website. These insights will let you know of the pages on your website that are most popular, the keywords that are bringing visitors to your site, the most effective online marketing channels and a lot more.

Thanks to analytics, you can have precise information on how your website is performing. Armed with the required tools, you can frame an effective strategy for attaining your defined goals. Performance can be reviewed on a regular basis and the marketing tactics can be adjusted accordingly.

Not Using Customer Personas for Content Creation

Before you initiate marketing of any sort, you must know who you are marketing to. Understanding your target audience and building customer personas prior to content creation will help develop effective content. You need to do adequate research to find your prospects’ pain points and their expectations from your products or services.

Knowing your audience and their specific problems will help you communicate with them effectively. You need to conduct a detailed research for having a crystal-clear picture of your target audience. This will help you determine the best ways to address their requirements and expectations.

No Call to Action

Great that a stream of visitors swarms your website every day! But how will it benefit you if they leave without doing anything? They won’t if you advise them about the action they should take. You can’t just create a website and expect that people would purchase or download stuff on their own.

Be explicit about the action that you would like your visitor to take. Should they proceed to purchase something, or call for the consultation? Specify.

Same Special Offer for Everyone

Having a one-size-fits-all approach is a sure-shot recipe for failure. It is like going to a restaurant where you can order just one dish. If you find this abominable, how can you think of offering something similar to your visitors?

You need to come up with offers that appeal to your prospects at the various stages of the buying cycle. For instance, someone in the initial stage may appreciate an offer for a free download of a white paper, but someone on the verge of purchasing will find a free trial better.

If you have been guilty of making these mistakes, you need to take out time to mull over them and build an optimal online marketing strategy.

Why Accelerated Mobile Pages Matter From SEO Point of View

We have been reading and hearing a lot of 'Mobile First' slogans for quite some time now. The idea of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a major part of this large mobile phone compatibility plan.

So, what is AMP all about? It’s an open-source project backed by Google, Twitter, WordPress and other publishers to encourage the creation of mobile-optimized content with pages that load fast on mobile devices. This initiative is taken to boost the mobile responsiveness of web pages and do away with a majority of desktop website elements thought to be completely unnecessary for a mobile site. In short, it is AMP that is optimizing the browsing experience of mobile phone users with a fully standardized mobile version of a given site.

Greatest opportunity for publishers

Those sites that produce large volumes of content on a regular basis stand to gain the most from AMP. It is not advisable to convert every landing page and service page into AMP; this can be counterproductive and wreak havoc on conversions. Rather, what Google wants is publishers convert article and blog sections into AMP.

SEO boost from AMP

Your SEO activities get a boost from AMP in that search engine-optimized content in an AMP format shows up first on Google search on a priority basis. Page load speed also plays a paramount role in SERPs. The faster a page loads, the higher Google ranks it. Therefore, this is another area where AMP comes into play from SEO point of view.

No dearth of supporters

Just how important AMP is today from SEO viewpoint can be ascertained from the full support it receives from media giants like BBC, New York Times, and Washington Post as well as networking service providers like LinkedIn and Pinterest.

Enhanced visibility of sites

Mobile friendliness enhances the visibility of sites and is thus good from SEO perspective. AMP also has an in-built visitor behaviour tracking system that throws valuable insights on customers, which is important from consumer analytics perspective.

Greater viewability of sites & higher customer engagement rates

With AMP, Google has set the right kind of standard for mobile-friendly sites, and it is truly something that no Internet marketer who is serious about optimizing their pages would like to ignore. According to DoubleClick Ad Exchange, more than 80% of publishers realized higher viewability rates after embracing AMP. Similarly, 90% plus publishers reportedly enjoyed greater customer engagement through higher CTRs.

Helping build brand authority

Last but not least, when a product or service is displayed in the Google carousel at the top of SERPs, it creates a good impression amongst visitors and maximizes the trust quotient. Furthermore, it helps build brand authority too. Again, only a code like AMP can bring about such positive results.

You may go for partial or full AMP for your website depending on your requirement, but whatever the case may be, AMP is definitely not something that SEO professionals can afford to ignore. Invest in AMP and see your ROI improve dramatically. Countless number of companies are adopting AMP as we are talking. So, what are you waiting for? Go ahead and do it.

Read more at: https://www.virtualemployee.com/articles/digital-marketing-resourcesVirtual Employee Article

4 Ways To Optimize Twitter Ads To Boost ROI

Often, marketers tend to ignore the power of Twitter, but they forget that it’s an incredibly powerful  social media platform. It has more than 300 million active users and there are 1 billion unique visitors on it. This is enough to highlight the power it commands. Paid promotions drive traffic on Twitter if ad campaigns are seen by people scrolling through millions of tweets. So, you will have to make sure that your Twitter ad campaign is optimized perfectly. This will help you get the highest return on investment.

Here are 4 tips that will help you optimize your Twitter campaigns:

Paint a broad picture

Twitter advertising does not happen in isolation; it should be planned and executed in tandem with other social media strategies . The basic rules that work well in the case of other paid ad promotions also work for Twitter.

First of all, you should determine the objective of your campaign — whether you want to drive holiday sales, increase app installations or boost the number of followers. It is not that you have to set only one goal; however, having a pre-determined objective will help you measure your ad performance.

Test your tweets

When you’re clear about your objective, try to learn about the type of content that appeals to your audience. This directly affects your Twitter ad score; so, make sure your ads are broadly relevant to a particular set of audience. Test by tweaking the different components of your tweet. Here is how you can conduct a simple A/B test:

• Create two different tweets that are essentially the same, but let one key element be different.
• Send out two versions of the same Twitter copy at the same time.
• Review and analyze the Twitter data.
• Repeat with different element changes.

Testing gives valuable insights that you would have otherwise failed to notice. This is how it helps you obtain maximum ROI. You can judge whether your target audience likes stats, quotes, or questions and figure out the time of the day when they are highly receptive to your tweets. Don’t shy away from changing your strategy if something is not working.

Target right options for better ROI

The most crucial part of a Twitter campaign is selecting the right interests and followers that really stand out. Find out the interests that are working for you and identify those that are leading to more engagement. This will help you eliminate poor performers and get more bang for your  buck.

Experiment with bid price

The bidding price seriously affects the performance of Twitter ad campaigns. While starting a campaign, make sure you are ready to bid for each defined objective. The higher the bid, the greater will be the chances of someone seeing the ad that you promote after they have fulfilled your criteria. Twitter suggests a bid price to get the best result, but you can afford to deviate from the suggestion to find your own sweet spot.

Summing up

Using the above tips will help you boost the ROI of your Twitter campaigns. You just need to focus on defining your goals, choosing the right ad format, and crafting engaging content. This will help you increase the ad score of your Twitter campaigns.

Read more at: Virtual Employee Conversion Rate Optimization

5 Quick and Trusted Tips for Social Media Optimization

For many years now, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has been made optimal use of by numerous businesses to increase the ranking of their website. While the importance of SEO is immense, these days, SMO (Social Media Optimization) has emerged as another phenomenon that has become an important factor in search engine rankings. SMO is, in fact driven by a simple concept - implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more visible in social media searches and is conveniently linked to pages that matter.

In this blog post, we have shared 5 quick and trusted tips for social media optimization. Let’s take a closer look at some of them:

1. Integrate Social Sharing Tools

It is always important to integrate social sharing tools in the architecture of your site. Direct links to your website on your social media channels are helpful. Additionally, you can also choose to add social media sharing buttons to your company’s blog posts. It has often been observed that the links on social media channels are of a higher quality because social networking sites have more authority on the web. If, for instance, you have a Facebook page that is brand new, it is probable that it might rank well in SERPs.

2. Create Your Social Media Profiles Accurately

Creating your company’s social media profile may seem like a simple task. However, it is one of the most critical areas wherein businesses tend to fail. It is important to understand that search engines prefer profiles that are filled completely. Such a profile also gives a more professional feel to others in the same network. It is also important to ensure that the contact information in your social profiles is exactly the same as it is on your website.

3. Make Use of Keywords

Just like SEO (Search Engine Optimization), keywords also play an integral role in SMO (Social Media Optimization). Keywords, in fact, play a key role in keeping your content relevant to the target audience. Be it your blog, ad campaigns or your website, keywords help you in reaching out to your potential customers.

4. Align and Structure the SEO Keywords

If you wish to offer maximum exposure to your social media profile, optimizing your keywords and profiles is important. You need to structure your keywords and target phrases in your social media profiles in an accurate manner. Effective use and alignment of keywords will help your website rank higher in search engines.

5. Let Your Content Travel

SMO is not just about making changes to a website. In SMO, when you have content such as video files, audio files and PDFs, it is always better to post them on relevant sites. By doing so, you can ultimately generate links back to your site.

Apart from the above-stated tips, there are multiple rules and techniques that are slowly getting uncovered. Social media can, in fact, be one of the greatest tools for increasing a site’s organic search. Our tried and tested tips will definitely help to improve your site’s traffic.

Read more at: Virtual Employee

How to Choose Professional Writers for Your Content Requirements

In this digital age, content lies at the core of your success. Website content, blogs, newsletters, brochures, social media posts – content decides the destiny of your online success.

High quality content means more effective sales copies, which culminates into better lead generation. You can have your writer create marketing copies that make you stand out among your competitors. As a business manager, your goal should be to create relevant content that is of global standards quality wise.

Impressive Content Keeps Your Visitors Glued to Your Site

Informative and impressive content keeps your visitors glued to your site, conveys to them your marketing message and convinces them to buy your stuff.

You can triple or quadruple the number of readers by consistently producing valuable content, exactly what your readers are expecting. Having a clear insight into the minds of your readers will help you develop such content. You need to discuss with your writers the audience you are targeting. Detailed demographics and analytics will help them form a mental image of your target audience, which is so necessary while creating targeted content. Your marketing team needs to work in close collaboration with your writers to help you get content that really works.

Why You Cannot Be Overly Liberal While Hiring Writers

To ensure your campaign is successful, you have to hire competent writers. You cannot go on hiring any writer who walks into your office and there are many reasons behind this, some of which are as follows:

• Not all writers are good writers
• Many are not familiar with content marketing and copywriting principles
• Their style and tone of writing may not match what you are looking for
• Some may struggle when it comes to meeting deadlines
• You need to take a comprehensive test of every candidate to get an idea about their writing ability.

Ascertain Skill Level of Candidates

Most people gauge the skill set of writer by asking for samples of their writing, or by having them write impromptu on a given topic. However, just asking them to provide a sample of their writing or write a blog will serve little purpose. A competent technical writer may produce substandard blog posts. You need to choose only those candidates who have the required skills you are looking for.

For instance, if you require someone for writing brochures, call only those people with prior experience in this kind of writing. Take into consideration things like selection of theme, fluency, readability, grammar and spelling.

Discuss Headlines

If you are able to successfully find a good candidate, well and good, but don’t start rejoicing immediately. They may have the writing skill and adequate knowledge about your product or service as well, but you need to find out whether they will be able to meet the deadlines you set for them. If your requirement is somewhat complex and there are tight deadlines, you should discuss this with candidates beforehand.

Summing Up

Hiring content writers is an important business process. The competency level of the writers you hire will have a profound impact on the success of your marketing campaign. Bring in excellent writers to increase the chances of your success exponentially.

Read more at: Virtual Employee

Six Chosen Tips for Targeting Audience on Instagram

Instagram has grown in popularity considerably and there are many business managers today who look ahead to building a solid presence on this platform for engaging and connecting with their target market.


These 6 tips will be useful to them in achieving their purpose:

Make Hashtags a Part of Your Posts

Hashtags (#marketing) are an important element of Instagram posts. Using hashtags enables users lying outside an existing group of followers find an image. Key posts show up when people search with relevant industry-related hashtags. Popular hashtags have the best chance of getting searched for. However, less popular yet highly-relevant hashtags can also be used effectively. Regardless of the strategy you have employed, try to use at least one hashtag with each post.


Be Part of the Instagram Community

Like other social media sites, Instagram works best when used for forming relationships with other users. Posting images in one’s own vacuum will do little good. What a marketer needs to do is form a community around photos and participate in communities that are already present there. Hashtags enable marketers to connect with users who are outside their reach. They may link and comment on other users’ images to engage with them. A good strategy is to participate in Instagram campaigns that have been designed for a bigger cause.

Keep the Frequency of Your Instagram Posts to an Optimal Level

Marketers often ask how often they must post on Instagram. There can be no hard and fast rule for this and it totally depends on your audience. Most brands post on Instagram around 1.5 times per day. However, contrary to a misconception, high frequency does not result in lower engagement. Starters may begin with once a day and gradually increase the frequency of their posts.

Post Content in Line with Your Brand’s Mission Statement

Images and videos posted on Instagram contribute to a brand’s identity. What is put on Instagram is inextricably linked to a company’s image. One must be selective while picking content for Instagram promotion. For instance, all the content that Starbucks posts is inspirational and heart-warming. It is perfectly in sync with their mission statement – ‘to inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.’ This is more effective than random shots of coffee.

Promote Entire Profile

The Instagram profile of a business impacts the number of people who are likely to contribute to the click-through rate of a site. The images and descriptions used in the profile must be in sync with the brand’s vibe. The content must have a link back to the business website. Creating a landing page specifically for Instagram visitors can be helpful. Marketers may add a brand-specific hashtag to their profile so that it becomes obvious who/what it is referring to. They must also include the physical location of the business in the profile.

Use Right Tools

Marketers must use tools that help them save time and get better insights about the platform. For instance, Iconosquare allows them to access account through a web browser, find content that is getting maximum engagement, and track followers. Schedugram works well when it comes to scheduling one’s posts.


Wrapping Up

Instagram enables businesses, regardless of their size and industry, connect effectively with their audience. Proper strategies enable them to enhance the impact of their investment on this social media platform.

Read more at: Virtual Employee

Why Should You Care About Machine Learning in SEO

Machine learning is the latest buzzword in the world of technology; so it’s naïve to think search engines would remain unaffected of this new phenomenon. Google’s search engine algorithm ‘RankBrain’ is already using it. However, the question is — how will it impact your website? Is there anything you can do to insulate your website ranking?

The problem with this question lies in various hidden assumptions. The first assumption is — machine learning is something you can optimize and the second one is — what does this mean in a traditional sense?

What Google wants to achieve through machine learning

This is not a simple answer. It also entails the biggest insight on what’s happening in the digital world. It tells us what lies in future and how the machine learning technology fits in the whole scheme of things. The purpose of this is quite straightforward — Google is trying to generate more money. Were you expecting a feel good answer? If yes, you’ll certainly be disappointed.

Here is how it can help Google increase its revenue

There are a variety of ways in which Google can increase its revenue. Some of the more obvious ones as follows:

• ·         Increase the number of users
• ·         Increase the frequency of returning visitors
• ·         Increase the revenue generated per user
• ·         Decrease the bounce rate
• ·         Increase the options for users to complete their action

Google knows that it can succeed only when users rely on it consistently and frequently. It also needs to increase their area of influence since that will increase its ability to advertise to a wider set of audience. And wider presence also means more revenue for Google.

So what machine learning is about

Before we delve deeper, having a brief understanding about machine learning will be important. It would also make it clear what Google wants to achieve out of the machine learning technology. This will help you understand the full-scope of this novel thing. So we will discuss about machine learning within the confines of Google search.

Machine learning is a form of artificial intelligence that enables machines to learn and adapt continuously based on certain data or signals without any external help. They develop and grow themselves, and not with the help of a programmer. Earlier, programmers used to sit and hammer out different ways to plug the gaps in a ranking formula when its weaknesses start being exploited by pesky.

Let’s imagine a scenario

What will happen if a machine learning algorithm is given the ability to add a new ranking factor on its own and also create its own success metrics with the goal of helping Google earn more money? This is where it can impact your website.

So… what do you do?

The answer is simple: Help Google make more money. This does not mean you should invest more in AdSense. With the advent of Google Home and voice search and mobiles surpassing desktops, the days of organic SEO is nearing its end. So, the idea of appearing in the top 10 results will soon become more outdated.

Dave Devices, a famous columnist, says, “We are heading to a world where machine learning will facilitate such rapid adjustments to algorithms and such customization of individual results and understanding of context that the only requirement of a result is that it meet the user’s needs. Not that it’s organic, not that it has links — just that it meets a need.” This is the only thing you need to do.

Summing up

Keeping up with every micro search engine algorithm is not possible. The only thing you can do is understand the technology and see how users are taking to it.

Read more at: Virtual Employee

Four Ways Your Internet Marketing Campaign Can Make Maximum Online Impact

The inability to draw viewers online is highly annoying for businesses. It becomes even more frustrating when the big names in the industry get all the hits they want, but your website struggles to make even the slightest impact.

Your online success depends on how you drag your website out of obscurity.

1. But how would you do that?

All the common efforts – building an email list, writing long posts, active social media promotion – are all very good, but they will succeed only when you have devised a conscious strategy regarding how you are going to stand out.
You need to sort out how you can look different from your competitors, and have something worthwhile to talk about. Being just another Average Joe won’t take you anywhere.
In fact, before you even launch your website, you need to devise a strategy on how to draw attention and imprint yourself in the minds of visitors.

2. Create a Unique Impression

You need to carefully craft your public image to create a unique impression. The important figures in history always made a conscious effort to do this and you have to do the same in order to stand out. Do some brainstorming with your staff to determine how you can form a distinct perception about your business.

3. Understand Your Audiences

Recognizing your target audiences is not enough; you need to understand them well also. You only need a tiny portion of the world to pay attention to achieve fabulous success, but you need to market ultra-efficiently for that. Keep yourself confined to talking about your niche and the people interested in what you are selling. Anyone who has a genuine need for your products, posts etc. will be the best audience.

4. Connect With Your Customer Base

Branding yourself successfully is the key to success. Research the emotive and rational needs of your customers. Your brand must address these needs to help you connect with your customer base. Talking about things that your customers want to hear is more effective than merely promoting your products or services. Create your story by sharing how your stuff will help them and solve the problems they are facing.

5. Use Social Media to Good Effect

Social media is a potent tool so far as website marketing is concerned, but you must know how to use it to good effect. Post your story on every social profile your audiences are active on. Working on sundry social media sites is impractical; a better strategy will be to determine the sites that are frequented more by your audiences and prepare a customized strategy accordingly. Retain the human element in your branding exercise and share the real you. Users want to connect to you on social media and an unreal persona will fail to keep them engaged.

Wrapping Up

You can use the Internet effectively to create goodwill for your business among your targeted audiences. While some trial and error may happen as you implement these strategies, sticking to the road map will nevertheless enable you attain success in the long run.

Read more at: Virtual Employee