Why Is Social Media Marketing Not Enough to Grow Your Business?

 No one can deny that the scope of social media marketing in India is immense and rapidly increasing. Social media can be a powerful tool to aid your marketing efforts by raising brand awareness and connecting with a large audience. But because it is free and relatively easy to use, many forget that it is just one part of your business’ marketing efforts. Let’s look at 5 of the top reasons why simply existing on social media is not enough.

1. Social Media Is Just a Platform

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all were created for socializing. While it is a great place to engage with your audience and share quality content, it is not the centre to conduct your business. The content you present on your social media profile can be shown on your website, where customers can learn more about your products or services and purchase directly.

2. You Don’t Own Your Content

When you post new content on your Facebook or Instagram profile, the last thing you think about is ownership. You assume that since you created it, the content is yours, but sadly, you’re mistaken. Everything you share on social media- images, videos, and written content are all owned by the platform you share it on. This means that they can use it for their financial gain and redistribute it regardless of your privacy settings and without your permission.

3. There Is No Guaranteed Visibility

There are 3.5 billion searches on Google every day, so if you only focus on social media without putting any effort to increase your website’s ranking on Google, you are missing out. You can only completely ensure visibility by purchasing ad space on social media but optimizing your website for better ranking on Google is free and lasts longer. You can stop buying ads and observe your engagement rates to understand how visible you are to your audience. Along with ranking on Google for keywords that your audience is searching for, ensure that your website loads quickly and is mobile-friendly. 

4. No Support for E-commerce

Customers require round the clock support for grievance redressal, and other services and businesses are expected to be online 24*7. Social media doesn’t have the features necessary to support e-commerce. Websites can provide a portal for customers to make purchases and submit enquiries any time of the day. There is more freedom to choose the layout and aesthetic of your website, and you can custom-fit it for the needs of your business. 

5. Consumers Start on Search Engines

Any company offering digital marketing services knows that it extends beyond social media and more than 90% of all online experiences start on search engines, which is why rankings on the search engine results page or SERP should be your priority. Whenever people are looking for products or services or want to learn more about a brand, they search on Google or go to a website to find them quickly. Creating content for your website that ranks high is significantly more effective at driving traffic than posting on any social media platform. 

Within the first five years, 80% of small businesses shut down. It is important to understand where you should spend your time and money on marketing efforts. There is no one perfect strategy for all businesses, which is why a digital marketing agency can help you minimize your costs while implementing the best practices. You can get in touch with us to get started, and we can help you plan a comprehensive marketing strategy for your business.

Everything You Need to Know About Youtube’s 'New To You' Update

 With 245 million people watching online videos each month in the country, it is no surprise that YouTube is an essential part of digital marketing in India. To keep these numbers up, YouTube is constantly improving its features. The recent update is their response to a message that YouTube heard from many viewers: their Home feed feels a little stale.

Customers complained that they were receiving identical suggestions and wanted more variety in the explore category. So, YouTube introduced New To You, that as the title suggests, presents a feed of entirely new content to the users. It permits users to discover content beyond their usual suggestions and browse various kinds of videos. As the second most popular search engine, YouTube offers your brand an opportunity to attain greater exposure and engagement with your target audience, improving your SEO strategy and, in turn, boosting organic rankings.

Youtube’s New To You Improves Content Discovery

This new function by YouTube is presented in two ways- one is among the list of subjects on the Explore bar at the top of the display page, which YouTube calls "New To You on refresh". On click, users will see a completely new set of suggestions that they haven't seen before on the New to You feed.

The second can be accessed by scrolling down the feed far enough without selecting a video where they will present an option to discover something different than the usual videos present on your feed. This is referred to as "New To You on prompt" by YouTube and uncovers a new category of movies different from the usual recommendations. 

How Is New to You Different from Explore Feed?

Explore helps viewers discover content that falls under different verticals like gaming, music, comedies, etc. and is not necessarily customized to a particular user; however, and doesn't consider the user's previous pursuits. 

On the other hand, New To You is personalized and provides content that users will like and content that does not match their common viewing habits. They can find videos from new creators, which helps their content marketing efforts and these personalized suggestions are not based on their viewing history. But, the users get recommendations they will most likely be interested in, and these are exclusive to every user.

For example, if you have been watching soundscape videos recently, New To You might recommend a channel that creates mashups of vintage songs that sounds like a vinyl record being played in the other room with a background sound of drizzling rain and thunderstorm outside.

How Does This Benefit a Content Marketing Agency or Other Content Creators?

YouTube hopes that this will benefit both viewers and creators by helping channel creators access a whole new set of audiences by presenting their content to a more diverse group of viewers. This can provide brands with a broader audience to structure their YouTube marketing strategies around. It is a whole new experience for creators to connect with those who love their content but hadn't discovered them before. It's also a fantastic experience for the viewers to find new content that is not similar to their previously watched videos but still captures their interest. 

Since keyword optimization is an essential aspect of YouTube SEO, you can go through videos with the most views because the video is optimized around a popular keyword. All the videos on the New To You feed are customized to each user, aiming for a balance between content users will like and is still a little outside their viewing habits. 

If you want to be discovered by people beyond your brand's existing audience base, make the most of this update. Working with a digital marketing agency can significantly ease the process, and using their expertise can help your channel see growth. You can get in touch with us if you want to improve your brand's exposure and curate content for a completely new set of audiences.

SEO Auditing Made Easy: All the Tools You Will Ever Need

 The scope of digital marketing in India has seen drastic growth in the last couple of years. It is expected that the number of active internet users in India will increase up to 666 million by 2023. It makes sense that those companies who weren’t marketing online have started to do so.

An SEO audit looks at the infrastructure of your website, the on-page elements and the off-page essentials to boost search engine visibility. It increases the quality and quantity of your search traffic to your website, giving you a better opportunity to convert prospects. Audits need to be performed regularly for your website’s long-term success by checking errors and helping you uncover what needs to be fixed on your site to boost its visibility. 

There are many good SEO tools but choosing the one that works best for you can be difficult considering the sheer number of options available. SEO auditing is essential for your website, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. Let’s look at some of the best tools you need for successful SEO auditing and better content marketing.

Screaming Frog

While this is more of a crawling tool than an audit tool, it is one of the best choices to analyze your complete website at once. It crawls your website, presenting all the possible SEO problems with your website and reports technical issues over 30 specific parameters, including meta description, outlinks, response time and security. It provides a comprehensive report on on-site SEO performance and highlights what requires improvement. The free version includes all essentials and is the right choice if your page has less than 500 URLs.

Ahrefs Content Gap Tool

Content gap analysis evaluates existing content and identifies any gaps that can be improved upon. By providing content that fills in the gaps left by competitors, you can get better ranking results. It helps your content perform better by improving your SEO strategy, and automating the process using Ahrefs makes it even easier to identify gaps. You get a list of keywords you should be targeting, which is done by subtracting the keywords your website ranks for from the keywords your competitors rank for.

SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool

According to SEMRush, it allows you to “conduct dynamic keyword research that covers relevant keywords and remains profitable”. You can track the competitors' organic keywords, backlinks, and PPC keywords by accessing their extensive database to implement those in your SEO efforts. It helps you find new keywords and phrases that have popped up by checking your current ranked keywords against a new primary keyword search.

Google Sheets

You might be surprised, but Google Sheets is an excellent tool for any content marketing agency for SEO data tracking, particularly alongside content databases. All SEO tools offer the standard option to export raw data and reports, but no one report fits all the companies. Using Google Sheets, you can take all those exported reports and use them in a format that works best for you. Multiple users can access the file to edit in real-time, which is a real boon for remote workers. 

Now that you have learned about the entire set of tools you will need, it’s time to start auditing to optimize your page. If you are looking for a digital marketing agency that can provide the right digital marketing strategy to boost your business, get in touch with us.

5 Questions to Ask Before Choosing a Digital Marketing Agency in India

 Digital marketing helps to build brand awareness and boost conversions to acquire new customers. As traditional marketing dwindles, the digital alternative is stepping up to take its place and has already made a huge impact. More than 60% of the total global population is online, and it provides an opportunity for brands to connect better with their customers cost-effectively and in a measurable manner.

Most businesses have already turned towards online marketing. With the increased use of online marketing strategies, there’s also a rising need for digital marketing agencies. Here are the top five questions you need to ask before collaborating with a digital marketing agency.

1. Do they have a good reputation?

While searching for a digital marketing agency, it is always important to check their track records and learn more about the agency beforehand. Make sure you are making the right decision, and the company of your choice doesn’t have a bad reputation. Read reviews for that agency online or go through client feedback on their site to gain insight into their quality of work.

2. Does their expertise align with my goals?

Unless you are on a budget, go for an agency that specializes in your field. An experienced agency will provide the best services, detect problems efficiently and offer the most effective solutions to marketing issues. It is quite a risk to hand over your company’s digital promotion to an amateur in the industry.

3. Do they have the relevant experience?

Analyze the credibility and performance by taking a look at their previous works and collaborations with past clients. Most agencies display their portfolios on their website, which is one of the best ways to learn about them before even meeting. It will give you clarity on whether they can meet your expectations and fit your requirements.

4. Will they be a suitable fit for my company?

It is essential to choose an agency that understands your business goals. Understand how the agency works and know if its core values and goals align with your company’s. An agency should know the needs, objectives and goals of the company to launch a campaign successfully. They should be aware of the expectations of the clients from the very beginning. 

5. Is their pricing suspiciously low?

You don’t want to hire a marketing agency that can’t guarantee results because you will lose your investment if something goes wrong. Many times, people choose a company without being fully aware of the prices or services offered. Any company boasting super low prices most likely offers subpar services in the long run. A good agency will boost your sales, so choose wisely.

The best digital marketing agency will be able to generate leads, boost sales, and increase ROI. If you are searching for an agency to provide the perfect marketing strategy, contact Adaan Digital Solutions, your ideal digital marketing partner.

Google Rolls Out Page Experience Update- All You Need to Know

 Google tweeted that they have begun gradually rolling out the page experience update since June 15th. Remember that this update was supposed to be launched in May and had been delayed for unspecified reasons. The announcement about the update was made last November and is expected to be complete by August 2021. 

What is the Page Experience Update?

The Google update contains several signals that are meant to optimize the browsing experience for users. Google assesses each signal, which serves as a metric to measure page experience and gives a website an overall ‘page experience’ score. 

Here are each of the signals and the requirement for a good ‘page experience’ score:- 

1. Core Web Vitals

As a subset of the factors of Google’s ‘page experience’ score, there are three Core Web Vitals.

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) focuses on how long a page would take to load from a user’s perspective. The time taken from clicking the link to viewing most of the content on-screen shouldn’t be more than 2.5 seconds. Anything longer is considered “poor”. Many factors like high-resolution images may contribute to longer page loading time. 

• FID (First Input Delay) measures page interaction, more specifically, how long it takes for the page to respond after a user chooses a menu option or enters an email in a field. It shouldn’t take longer than 300ms for something to happen on a page. Removing any non-critical third-party scripts can help improve your FID score.

• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) considers visual stability, which means the time it takes for your page to stabilize all the elements as it loads. The ideal CLS score is 2.5, and a poor score would suggest that users struggle to navigate around the page.

Site owners can better understand their site’s content and how their audience responds to it on Search Console Insights. 

2. Mobile-Friendliness

How easy is it to use and navigate your website on a mobile device? This is what mobile-friendliness is all about. They crawl each website through a mobile lens to ensure the website offers a positive mobile user experience. 

3. HTTPS-Security

While this ranking factor is a minor one, site owners should have already moved to HTTPS and must provide a secure connection to Google. Transport Layer Security is vital to access websites safely on Google.

4. Security Issues

All kinds of malware, harmful downloads or deceptive pages that pose a risk to a safe browsing experience for users would result in a poor score. Google helps webmasters to resolve these issues by detecting them and recommending tailored solutions.

5. Pop-Up Ad Experience

Also known as intrusive interstitials, pop-up ads make it hard for users to access the information they clicked, which is why it affects the ‘page experience’ score. Pop-up advertisements are incredibly annoying for mobile users and cover almost all the content visible on their small screens.

This page experience update is currently only applicable for mobile search results, but the rollout will expand to desktops soon. If you are looking for a company specializing in digital marketing in India, Adaan Digital Solutions can help you pass Google’s page experience standards and improve your site’s user experience.

What is the Impact of Voice Search on Digital Marketing Services?

 Many digital marketing companies are trying to stay on top of voice technology. As a preferred option to typing, voice search makes it easier and faster to access the Internet and eliminates the effort of typing a query in the search engine. The increased use has created an urgent need for voice search optimization and one of the most important digital marketing trends. 

Let's look at the three ways consumers will use voice search to engage with the Internet and how each impacts digital marketing.

1. Replacing the keyboard with voice commands

In the same device, instead of using the keyboard for information input, we use voice commands. The response can be either displayed on the screen or vocalized by the machine. How does this impact SEO? Search engines are the gateway to the Internet, so businesses must show up on SERP. Since voice search is more conversational than traditional typing, SEO strategies will have to be tweaked to include phrases rather than just keywords. 

Even website content will need to adopt a more conversational tone, similar to chatbot engagement. To keep up with voice search, the standard website format of "About Us" and "Our Services" will have to be modified to create an interface that responds to voiced questions while keeping in mind the multiple possibilities of the flow of conversation.  

2. Using voice command devices

The market for voice devices like Alexa or Google Home is booming and is expected to rise further. For now, these devices answer simple questions like "What's the weather?" and respond to easy commands like "Play some music." But as these devices get more intelligent, they will soon be able to participate in more complex interactions. For example, Amazon's Alexa can trigger a routine on a specific command, and users can customize this to create their routine, which will be triggered by a phrase like "Good Morning" to start the coffee pot or "Goodnight" to switch off the lights.

A lot goes into making the device, and one of the challenges is to create a "personality" for the voice that would respond to the command. This includes tonality, gendering and other specifics. Amazon describes Alexa's unique characteristics as "approachable, efficient, trustworthy and natural". Brands also have to figure out how to incorporate SEM in voice devices. As for advertisements, there are some examples where the voice assistant runs a 15-second brand ad before responding to a query.

3. Internet of Things

IoT is one of the most anticipated advances in technology, and it offers some truly incredible possibilities. With chips embedded in every device or gadget, voice can completely change the way we interact with IoT devices. For example, you can talk to a device while driving or, the visually impaired can easily ask for directions for navigation.

Another typical example is asking your fridge to order supplies from your preferred store. Meaningful conversations could also be made possible. Many companies are already working on potential projects, and some like Ford, Huawei and LG let you talk to your car, phone or refrigerator.  

Voice search optimization has presented a unique opportunity for businesses to stay several steps ahead of the competition. If you think your brand or business can benefit from a revised marketing strategy, contact Adaan Digital Solutions to make the most of our digital marketing services.

10 SEO Mistakes to Avoid in the Post-pandemic World For Website Design & Development

Search Engine Optimisation is an integral part of web designing. It makes the website search engine friendly so crawlers can interpret the content of each page effectively to index them in their database. Here's how to avoid ten SEO mistakes that you might be making unintentionally.

Keeping Your Headings Short and Generic
All headings should be specific and not fragmented. They should form a complete meaningful sentence and be more than a few words, enough to cover the industry-relevant buzzwords. For example, change Web Development Blogs to Web Development Blogs for Beginners to Up Your Programming Skills, and you will be more likely to hit long-tailed keywords.
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Not Having Enough Headings
Break up your content instead of compiling it into a single chunk under a collective heading. It's best to segregate content instead of clumping it together and have more distinct headings to grab all possible searchers. It will help the reader have a better understanding of what the text contains.
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Avoiding Lists in Your Content
Both bulleted and numbered lists are great for readability and SEO. If there are more than two items or examples, break them down into a list. Featured snippets have become controversial in SEO, but lists appear at the top of the SERP. They are far easier to skim through, and you get the gist of the content covered faster.
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Not Using Marketing Terminology
Remember the optimal format for SEO title and meta description formatting, like keeping the keyword in the first half of the title and including the keyword phrase in the meta description. Furthermore, use convincing and relevant technical terms in the title and meta description because that prompts them to open the site. 
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Not Adding Keywords Early in the Content
It is better to introduce keywords earlier in the content rather than later. Try to include keywords in the first paragraph of the content, only if they can be accommodated organically to get a higher ranking. 
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Not Varying Any Keyword Phrases
While including the keywords, add variations of the same keyword phrases to reach the searches using less common phrasing. For example, trip and fall can also be written as slip and fall. A motorbike accident could be a motor accident. You may not be able to incorporate them into shorter texts, but for texts longer than 1000 words, there should be at least two variations.
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Writing Complicated Text
A larger audience can understand more readable content, and a lower reading level is vital for SEO content. Sometimes, jargon may be unavoidable, but try to replace more wordy sentences with clearer and concise text. 
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Providing Low-value Content
Content should always provide some value; otherwise, it is just a bunch of words written to fill up blank spaces. Informative, engaging content can catch the attention of readers and offer insight into the topic covered. It helps them grasp the objective of the text better and retain essential information.
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Creating Content Only for Promotions
Various pages will be focused on promoting products and services, but you need to have several core content forms for link building. This type of content is what other websites will want to link to, so you can have a group of solid backlinks for your SEO campaign.  
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Multi-purposing the Same Content
Sometimes amateurs offering digital marketing services forget that individual pages of your site also need to rank higher, not just your homepage. Hence, the content needs to focus on different aspects of your business. Instead of lumping all the information on a single comprehensive page, create separate pages with specific keywords and use internal links to support navigation. This will not only boost rankings but also provide details and more information on each topic.

This may seem like a lot of information, but the chances are, you have already made at least one of these mistakes. These are just a few issues that companies struggle with, and you can always correct them and keep them in mind. If you are looking for a digital marketing agency in India, contact Adaan Digital Solutions to create the perfect SEO strategy for your company with the help of our dedicated SEO