Whether you are a digital marketing expert or a business owner, you always need a powerful software solution to meet your goals. Most digital marketing experts utilise simple yet versatile software solutions to simplify and align their complex tasks. Here are a few powerful software solutions: SEO PowerSuite It is the best friend of SEO professionals, bloggers and online marketers. It offers four exclusive tools such as Rank Tracker, WebSite Auditor, SEO SpyGlass, and Link-Assistant. Benefits of SEO PowerSuite:

• Helps in keyword research, rank tracking, backlink analysis, on page optimisation, etc.
• Provides extensive data to analyse and improve search engine marketing efforts.
• Helps to achieve as well as maintain top positions in any search engine.

Raven This is the most versatile and effective internet marketing tool.  It helps in managing search engine optimisation, social media conversations as well as online advertising campaigns. Benefits of Raven:

• Helps to create automated marketing reports.
• Seamlessly integrates Google Analytics, Google AdWords, and Search Analytics from Google Search Console.
• Assists in fixing technical onpage issues.

adCore (PPC Automation & Management Software) It is an effective advertising technology platform for PPC professionals. Benefits of adCore:

• Helps to create and share reports with clients and managers.
• Assists in building dynamic Ad campaigns as well as bid management.
• Helps to perform A/B Testing.
• Helps you to increase your return on investment.
• Assists you to advertise on smart phones and tablets.

Qualaroo This tool helps you to collect and analyse customer insights.  It also helps you to integrate other marketing, CRMs, analytics, and website optimisation tools. Benefits of Qualaroo:

• Helps you to customise surveys.
• Assists in geographic targeting and integrating analytics.

Social Ads Tool It is a productive and robust Facebook Ads Management Platform, available in multiple languages. It provides intelligent insights to marketers so that they can improve their online marketing strategies. Benefits of Social Ads Tool:

• It provides complete technical support.
• It supports Android, iPhone, and iPad.
• Helps in analysing funnel, tracking goals, and analytics integration.
• Assists in bulk importing, exporting and editing of all campaigns.

Compete This tool allows you to create, view and export reports. It is ideal for large enterprises, mid size and small businesses. Benefits:

• Helps to analyse growth trends and manage historical data feeds.
• Assists in measuring a website’s traffic sources.
• Helps to improve the overall performance of a campaign.

So, use the above mentioned software solutions and tools to improve your operations.

Every online store owner wants to attract traffic as well as improve conversions. They use a wide variety of SEO and online marketing techniques. Here are a few online store optimisation strategies: Use a clean and intuitive website design It is a known fact that easy to understand and professional templates can make a huge impact. All you need to do is to use large and high-quality images. Tips:

• Use a carousel to show your goods
• Always display your most popular products
• Use SumAll or Google Analytics to monitor progress
• Use cleaner and professional designs
• Use visually appealing product images
• Focus on creating simple and easy-to-use navigation

Display your address If you want to improve the credibility of your online store, you need to display your address and phone number on each page. Tips:

• Display contact details on the right side of the site.
• Use map location so that users can locate your business.

Attracts visitors Free shipping, return policies, sale, discounts are the best ways to attract customers. According to a report, 44% of carts are abandoned because of high shipping costs. Tips:

• Display offers, deals, pricing, discounts, free shipping, etc. on the home page of the website.
• Detail them to explain to your visitors.
• Clearly define your customer-friendly policies.
• Provide the final price after calculating taxes, shipping cost, etc.

Improve trustworthiness of your website Use security certificates and trust marks to improve trustworthiness of your website. According to a study, online sales can increase by up to 36% when a retail site displays familiar trustmarks. Tips:

• Display logos of VeriSign, TRUSTe and the Better Business Bureau.
• Add logos of credit cards and other payment methods.

About Us Page One way to attract customers is to tell your unique story. All you need to do is to display your story on the About Us page. Tips:

• Write a story based on your brand, product or service.
• Try to connect with users.
• Use images and videos for better customer engagement.

Additional tips:

• Optimise content.
• Use better images, add product reviews and harness the power of videos.
• Create and publish infographics.
• Start a blog.
• Focus on your website’s look, feel and the overall user’s experience.
• Optimise your website’s design for conversion.
• Write more specific descriptions.
• Use bullet points.
• Choose and use keywords wisely.
• Use email marketing.

So, use the above mentioned online store optimisation strategies to improve overall conversions.

It’s a well documented fact that Google rewards sites that have a well-planned structure, relevant external backlinks, internal links as well as simple navigation. However, is it possible to attain all these in a single stroke? Of course not, as SEO is an ongoing process, you must take important steps at regular intervals to manage and improve the overall performance of a website. Here are a few tips to manage the performance of a website: Crawl your website It must be noted that it is essential for your website to get crawled at regular intervals. It can impact your website’s overall performance.  It will also help you to identify broken links, different illogical URLs, missing URLs and even orphan pages. Tips:

• Create sitemaps.
• Use XML Sitemap Generator.
• Use Screaming frog.

Check metadata If you’re familiar with the world of SEO – you have probably come across the term “Metadata” and its importance. So, for better yields, always check title tags, meta descriptions, headings, canonical tags, etc. Try to create fresh titles and descriptions for the newly added pages. Tips:

• Never use manufacturer’s descriptions.
• Keep your descriptions under 160 characters.
• Use metadata to convey extra information to search engines.
• Always update meta descriptions according to the competition.

Check website’s status It is advisable to check a site’s errors/warnings/redirect loops and fix them immediately. Also look for any web page that is not showing “200” status. (200 OK - The HTTP 200 OK success status response code indicates that the request has succeeded. A 200 response is cacheable by default. Source – developer.mozilla.org) Tips:

• Redirect all 404 error pages to a new location.
• Check Webmaster tool regularly.
• Resolve server errors.
• Resubmit sitemap whenever you add or remove any web page.

Check XML sitemap and robots file Always submit the XML sitemaps to the Google Search Console. According to Wikipedia, Robots.txt is a standard used by websites to communicate with web crawlers and other web robots. Tips:

• Create an XML sitemap that can be submitted to Google, Bing and other search engines.
• Generate an HTML site map to help visitors to navigate on your site efficiently.
• Use https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ to generate an XML sitemap.
• Use robots.txt file to give instructions about your website to web robots.
• Generate effective robots.txt files to help search engines to crawl and index your site properly.

Check the Quality of backlinks Businesses should know that quality of backlinks is more important than quantity. Marketers who manipulate links should understand that search engines can identify such bad tactics/paid backlinks, etc. Tips:

• Remove low quality backlinks.
• Avoid overusing internal links.
• Always check Google Search Console for manual penalty.
• Monitor Majestic, Moz and other tools to check the health of your website.

Bonus tips:

• Track page views and visitors to see the amount of traffic your site achieves.
• Track and monitor goals: urls, time, pages/visit, events.
• Focus on the pages getting the highest bounce rates.
• Analyse page-specific conversion funnels as well as end-to-end conversion metrics.
• Optimise the website at regular intervals.
• Identify conversion-oriented pages, like landing pages and product pages.
• Consider adding call-to-actions (CTAs) that encourage visitors to click.
• Study key metrics to analyse, segment and engage your customers.
• Always think out of the box and address problems immediately.

All the above mentioned elements will help you to manage the performance of a website.

It is a well established fact that SEO requires deep technical knowledge because a website may have many technical problems that may prevent its growth. That is why it is important for webmasters to identify and fix technical problems of a website as soon as possible. Here are common technical SEO problems: URL case According to a study, most websites have upper case URLs, whereas URLs having lower case are user and SEO friendly. Tips:

• Always choose single case URLs (preferred version – lower case) for a website.
• Use a URL rewriting module to solve the problem.
• Understand the restrictions of servers.
• Maintain URL consistency throughout the website.

A www and non-www version Many online marketers still believe that it doesn’t make any difference, if their websites resolve with both version of www and non-www. However, the truth remains it is one of the biggest duplicate issues. Google treats a www and non-www URL as separate/different pages. Tips:

• Use 301 redirection. (According to webconfs, a 301 redirect is the most efficient and Search Engine Friendly method for webpage redirection.)
• Never use 302 redirection.
• Study – https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93633?hl=en.
• If you can’t use redirections, use Search Console platform to set your preferred domain.
• Use a dash instead of an underscore in URLs.
• Keep your URLs static.

Multiple versions of the homepage It is one of the most common problems faced by many websites. The problem is the same website resolves with its default, index as well as home version, which creates a severe duplicity problem. Tips:

• Use a 301 redirect to the duplicate version.
• You can also use the rel=canonical tag.
• Use Screaming Frog to find internal duplicate pages.
• Try different methods to find duplicate URLs.

Outdated sitemaps XML sitemaps are useful for search engines. These files help bots/robots to find all URLs present on a website. However, most webmasters create them only once and never update them. Tips:

• Always keep your XML sitemaps updated.
• Remove broken links from the sitemaps.
• Create dynamic sitemaps so that they get automatically updated.

Use HTTPS HTTPS is a secure internet communication protocol that is designed to protect the integrity and confidentiality of data between a user’s computer and the website. Tips:

• Understand the concepts of encryption, data integrity, and authentication.
• Know the process of implementing HTTPS.
• Use robust security certificates.
• For more information, study – https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6073543?hl=en&ref_topic=6001951.

So, identify and fix the above given technical SEO issues as soon as possible to gain prominence as well as rankings.

As an e-commerce store owner you need to choose a platform that helps in search engine optimisation, displays good UX design and handles every element of transactions. Here are a few reliable e-commerce platforms: Shopify It is the most popular e-commerce platform among online store owners. It is simple and easy to use and can help you  every step. Shopify provides:

• More than 100 mobile-friendly store themes
• More than 1,500 plugins and extensions
• An ability to sell products on Facebook
• Live support
• Tutorials and a community forum

Benefits:

• Helps to establish your brand online
• Provides instant access to hundreds of business oriented themes
• Provides complete control over the look and feel of the website
• Provides a unified platform to run your business
• Helps to manage products and inventory
•  Fulfils orders efficiently
• Helps to track sales as well as growth trends
• Can handle marketing as well as payments (Over 70 international payment gateways supported. Source - Shopify)
• Provides secure checkout and shipping options

YoKart It is a multi-vendor e-commerce platform ideal for online entrepreneurs. It is feature-rich, mobile-friendly and provides complete support to online vendors. It provides:

• Hassle-free set up and management
• Complete support for the major payment gateways
• Customising options
• Analytics tools
• Responsive themes
• User manuals

Benefits:

• Helps to generate online traffic
• Ideal for smartphones and tablets users
• Provides multiple layers of security
• Helps to maximise online product sales
• Provides a wide variety of packages for different businesses

Volusion It is one of the finest players in the e-commerce industry. It is widely known for its extraordinary features and currently hosts over 40K online stores. It provides:

• Customisable templates with WYSIWYG editor
• Facility to sync your store with Facebook, Amazon, etc. to sell directly
• Detailed guides, video tutorials, etc.
• Live support via chat, call, social media, and much more

Benefits:

• Helps in inventory management and payment collection.
• Helps in connecting with powerful tools and applications.
• Assists in marketing and growing your business.
• Provides built-in SEO management, newsletters and a CRM system for better store management.
• Provides a rich content editor.
• Provides secure checkout.
• Helps to upload images and customise products.

So, use one of the best e-commerce platforms according to your business requirements.

As digital landscape is getting more and more complex, maintaining a good conversion rate seems to be more difficult.  But, if you understand users’ preferences and the nature of industry, you can easily increase your site’s conversion rate and accelerate your business. Here are a few ways to improve the overall conversion rate of a website: Social proof According to a survey, people have more trust in their friends, family members and peer group than brands and organisations. Hence, as a marketer, you should use customers’ testimonials to build trust. Tips:

• Collect positive statements about your product or brand.
• Ask satisfied customers to give you recommendations/testimonials.
• Use images of happy customers.
• Use video testimonials.

Create videos If you want to forge a human connection or to explain your products’ features in detail, use videos. It is a good way to establish your brand and explain/inform your users about a particular product. Tips:

• Create a video that can define your brand’s personality.
• Always create a story based video.
• Use high quality software tools to create crisp videos.
• Promote your video to the top sites.
• Always provide the script of videos.
• Integrate videos on your website.

Simplify the process of purchasing According to a survey, people now have shorter attention spans. Hence, if your website has a lengthy product purchasing process, cut it short. Tips:

• Create short registration forms.
• Use fewer steps to complete a purchase.
• Optimise your website to reduce abandoned carts.
• Help users to complete the purchasing process.
• Provide online chat feature.
• Securely manage the details of users.
• Keep your website technically sound.
• Apply KISS concept (Keep It Simple Silly).

Use relevant call-to-actions It is important to use call-to-actions at the most relevant places throughout your website. It will not only increase the overall conversion rate of your website, but also encourage visitors to take actions. Tips:

• Use words that can provoke emotions.
• Colour your call-to-action buttons.
• Create unique and direct call-to-actions.

Bonus tips:

• Create high quality content.
• Optimise landing pages.
• Optimise your mobile website.
• Make your website fast and lightweight.
• Never use distracting images, unnecessary promotional banners and text.
• Maintain the overall aesthetics of your website.
• Don’t use too many external links.
• Reduce the total number of form fields.
• Rely on A/B and multivariate testing.
• Always improve the UX by making your website intuitive, fast and aligned.
• Measure results at every step.

There are no shortcuts. So, follow the above mentioned conversion rate optimisation techniques.

SEO is not only a mechanism to gain rankings and traffic for a particular website/blog, in fact, it is more than that. It involves the widest possible elements from website’s structure to content audit. Global SEO experts focus on different types of techniques to gain rankings. Here are a few unique SEO techniques they use: Link audit According to ahrefs, a link audit is an in-depth analysis that allows us to emphasise on certain aspect of link building, and it helps us detect problems or opportunities in terms of backlinks. Link audit Tips:

• Carry out backlink competitor analysis and anchor text distribution/analysis.
• Focus on the type of links (such as dofollow or nofollow).
• Use effective link audit tools.
• Focus on improving natural link building techniques.
• Identify grey/black or white hat link building techniques.
• Identify total number of naked and hybrid anchor text.

A/B Testing According to optimizely, A/B testing (also known as split testing or bucket testing) is a method of comparing two versions of a web page or application against each other to determine which one performs better. Of course, it takes time to carry out the process, but it is beneficial for websites. A/B Testing Tips:

• Always identify your goals before starting A/B testing.
• Create multiple variations and measure results.
• Use efficient A/B testing tools.
• Use 302 redirects instead of 301s while performing A/B testing.
• Always test your subject lines, CTAs, images, layout and headings for better website performance.
• Record minor variations.

Internal Links According to Wikipedia, an internal link is a type of hyperlink on a web page to another page or resource, such as an image or document, on the same website or domain. Hyperlinks are considered either "external" or "internal" depending on their target or destination. Tips:

• Never use many outbound links.
• Formulate a better internal link structure.
• Fix broken internal links.

Errors and warnings If you want to improve the overall performance of your website, you need to focus on the errors and warnings. For that, you need to fix HTML errors. Tips:

• Access Google webmaster tools to identify and fix HTML errors.
• Use the W3C Markup Validation Service.
• Understand the difference between 403 and 404 errors.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes)

Bonus tips:

• Always provide unique and insightful content.
• Use intuitive website layout.
• Use tried and tested call-to-actions.
• Write relevant meta titles and descriptions.
• Organise your content in a seamless manner.
• Use Google My Business (GMB) because it is an essential tool for small businesses for local SEO.
• Keep your site’s structure simple and streamlined.
• Keep your URL structure simple and user-friendly.
• Optimise your website according to your objectives.
• Keep an eye on Google search algorithm updates.

So, follow these SEO tips to strike the fortune.

E-commerce industry is getting wider with the span of time. In fact, e-commerce marketing is all about innovative strategies and plans of action to attract customers. Here are a few elements to consider: Content marketing According to Content marketing institute, content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, to drive profitable customer action. Of course, it is a big challenge; however, you need to clearly define your strategy on paper to take meaningful actions. For better results, you need to:

• Carefully analyse current content marketing strategy.
• Measure the current traffic, bounce rate as well as conversion rate.
• Create and publish meaningful information for users.
• Review the results through analytics.
• Perform A/B testing on a regular basis. (What is A/B testing?) A/B testing (sometimes called split testing) is the act of comparing two versions of a web page to see which one performs better. (Source – vwo.com)
• Gather qualitative and quantitative data to write factual content.
• Focus on the psychological aspects of marketing.
• Take into account  different parameters of products and services.
• Adjust your content marketing strategies based on the outcomes.
• Use content curation tools. (What is Content curation? It is the process of gathering information relevant to a particular topic or area of interest. Source – wikipedia)
• Use these content curation tools: Pocket, Scoop.it, Feedly, Storify, Curata, etc.

Automate Email Campaigns When a customer takes some desired action like registering for an email newsletter, you should immediately respond by starting an automated email campaign. What is an automatic email campaign? An automatic email campaign is set up once and then automatically sent to a particular individual when that person meets a certain trigger. (source - Campaignmonitor) Fact: According to a study, email subscribers are three times more likely to share your content over social media than visitors from other sources. For optimum yields, you need to:

• Use an automatic email campaign to grow your business.
• Promote your blog posts through an automatic email campaign.
• Use it to promote your event.
• Include a compelling call-to-action to increase conversion rate.
• Measure your results.

Use multiple social media networks Most e-commerce marketers rely only on Facebook for social media marketing because it has nearly 1.4 billion users across the world. However, you should diversify your social media marketing efforts to gain more exposure and business advantages. For example, use Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, and Polyvore. Social video marketing According to Wikipedia, social video marketing is a component of an integrated marketing communication plan designed to increase audience engagement through social activity around a given video. You should use video marketing because it is an innovative way to grab people’s attention. In fact, it is a powerful way to convey your brand’s or product’s story. According to a report, including videos on a landing page can increase conversion rates by 80%. So, include the above mentioned elements in your e-commerce marketing campaign to gain substantial advantages.

Whether you want to improve your website’s page rank, build backlinks, attract visitor or amplify internet sales, you always need the help of SEO. It is by far the most effective way to improve the overall traffic of a website and achieve top position in search engine results. Here are a few simple, easy-to-follow techniques: Use Latent Semantic Indexing According to searchenginejournal, Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is a mathematical method used to determine the relationship between terms and concepts in content.  Content of a webpage is crawled by a search engine and the most common words and phrases are collated and identified as the keywords for the page. Hence, as an online marketer, you should include LSI keywords in your content to provide the right information to your audiences. It is also a great way to make your content more conversational. Use A hreflang tag If your website is serving international community, use a hreflang tag. It is a code, which helps search engines to understand the intended language and country. This ensures that your content is displayed in the right region. The hreflang tag also reduces the threat of duplicate content. Why should you use a hreflang tag?

• When you have the same content in multiple languages,
• You have content for different geographic locations in the same language.

Benefits of using a hreflang tag:

• Improves the overall functionality of a website.
• Makes a website user-friendly.
• Prevents duplicate content problems.

Improves crawl efficiency of a website According to online marketing experts and technical professionals, many websites struggle to rank because they have poor crawl efficiency, and the reason could be anything from poor URL structure to complex navigation. Tips:

• Use faceted navigation. (Faceted search, also called faceted navigation or faceted browsing, is a technique for accessing information organised according to a faceted classification system, allowing users to explore a collection of information by applying multiple filters. Source – wikipedia)
• Use infinite scroll.

Resolve internal crawl errors If you want to improve the overall performance of a website, you need to focus on eliminating its overall crawl errors. You can get complete data from the Google Search Console. Tips:

• Keep an eye on the internal crawl errors.
• Keep your sitemap updated.

So, use the above mentioned SEO techniques to increase the visibility of your website.

If you consider proofreading a time consuming and an outdated task, you are wrong. In fact, it is one of the most essential activities that needs to be carried out to make a piece of content flawless. If there is shortage of time,  you can use powerful online tools to make your content clear, consistent, well-formatted and of course, correct. Here are a few proofreading tools: Grammar Check Use Grammar Check to make your content grammatically correct.  It helps you to examine every piece of text to locate errors. It is flexible, advanced and easy to use. Spellcheck Plus It is a modern tool for writers whose native language is not English. It helps them to choose best words for a given context. It is free for up to 2000 characters. For extensive work, you can upgrade it. After the Deadline If you want to improve both spelling and grammar, you should go for "After the Deadline". It is designed to provide a holistic overview of your writing. It also helps you to improve content’s structure, flow as well as syntax. Proofread Bot Believe it or not, it is a simple, flexible online tool that provides quick and in-depth results. It is a great tool to check spelling and grammar. PaperRater This tool helps you to check your document for plagiarism. It is a great tool to check  your work before it gets published. Marketers use it to make their content original to gain high rankings on search engines. ProWritingAid It is a sophisticated online tool that helps you to improve your writing habits. It not only picks up spelling and grammatical errors, but also suggests alternative vocabulary, style and structure options. You can use it to identify repetitiveness, vague words, etc. Tips to improve your writing habits:

• Never use abstract words.
• Write short and precise paragraphs.
• Always proofread your content before publishing it.
• Focus on run-on sentences, comma splices, modifiers, etc.
• Use bullets instead of writing dense paragraphs.
• Always choose a trendy topic.
• Provide sufficient examples and illustrations.
• Follow grammar rules.
• Use idioms and phrases.
• Always use high-quality plagiarism tools.

So, use the above mentioned proofreading tools to improve your writing.