Practical advice on digital marketing by a seasoned team

Making sense of SEO

by Team IK on July 1, 2019

This post is not for the SEO specialist or professional. It is for the website owner, who has not yet implemented SEO or has implemented this unsuccessfully and is therefore a little confused.

Two different expectations from SEO

SEO or search engine optimization is the one digital marketing service almost everyone has heard of. The need to rank one’s own website on page 1 of Google’s search results and that too rank among the topmost results on page 1 – is a deep-rooted need. SEO is the service that is believed to meet this need.

Website owners have two different expectations from SEO and the high ranking it is believed to get. One set hopes that a high ranking in search results will bring in more business while for others it’s just a prestige issue of sorts: they simply do not like to see their competitor sites rank above their own website.

Two challenges in ranking high on Google

In our experience, very few website owners really understand what makes a high ranking possible or not possible. Website owners typically believe that there is a set of techniques out there, that when implemented by experts, almost always ensures a good search engine ranking.

This however is not wholly true.

Firstly, Google has itself never said that adopting these techniques (actually practices) will definitely lead to a better ranking in the search results. Google itself doesn’t want any site to be able to “game” the search results, by working according to a simple formula given by it. Rather, Google wants sites to rank based on merit, which means sites based on their perceived usefulness by their users.

According to Google, implementing SEO techniques can at best aid in a better ranking but can by no means guarantee it. Here is what their official SEO starter guide says:

“You should build a website to benefit your users, and any optimization should be geared toward making the user experience better. One of those users is a search engine, which helps other users discover your content. Search Engine Optimization is about helping search engines understand and present content”.

Website owners forget that the website’s merit matters more than the SEO techniques. In the first place, a website needs to be built that is useful to and worthy of being appreciated by it’s users.

The second challenge in getting a high ranking in Google is that the practice of SEO appeals particularly to the techies. As the majority of the SEO techniques require tinkering to be done with a website’s code, doing this is fairly easy to learn as well for someone who’s into code. The net result is that the majority of SEO practitioners are techies rather than marketing or content people. A strategic, content-led approach gets overlooked in favour of a tech approach, though both are needed for success in ranking in search.

Thus, only two of the ten major SEO practices (as given in Google’s official SEO starter guide ) are about content:

Help Google find your content
Tell Google which pages shouldn’t be crawled
Help Google (and users) understand your content
Manage your appearance in Google Search results
Organize your site hierarchy
Optimize your content
Optimize your images
Make your site mobile-friendly
Promote your website
Analyze your search performance and user behavior

And at least seven of the above ten practices require a person comfortable with code or with web technology. (The last of the ten practices requires simple analytical skills rather than content or tech skills).

6 key factors that you can influence to improve your site’s rank in Google

Here’s our own take on what it takes to get a good rank in Google’s search results:

The website should be technically sound.
The website should be user-friendly.
The website content should be well-written.What is meant by well-written website content is a subject in itself but for the purposes of this blog post we can briefly summarize this as being content that (a) the user finds useful and (b) which is grammatically correct.
The website should have lots of content – in terms of pages, words, images or products and services – rather than less content.E.g. It’s difficult to rank high for a website of 5 pages, built around one product and having just a few hundred words and a couple of product images.

The majority of websites that we encounter, don’t meet the above four requirements. Therefore, when we are asked to do an SEO project, we work with the client to fix these at the earliest.

Here is one more important ranking factor.

5. The website content should be around one single, focused theme.
E.g. it’s not useful enough to write what widgets you make and sell, this is too broad, there will be other companies making similar widgets. Rather, you need to convey what specific benefits your widgets provides its customers and how your widgets are different and/or better than competing widgets.

Let’s say, there is a soap brand which has the most environmentally friendly packaging in the market e.g. degradable non-plastic packaging. It’s better to focus the content of the site on how this brand is going to make a difference to the world. And of course, as the demand for environmentally friendly packaging products grows, the number of searches for such soaps and the traffic to this soap website too will increase.

6. Implement the on-page SEO practices

This is about actually implementing the tech SEO practices listed above in the two challenges section – and which will require you to hire an SEO expert. (On-page is the set of SEO techniques done on the website itself).

Which are the most important of the 6 factors ?

All good sites are supposed to have good tech and good user interfaces (factors 1 and 2 above). And over the years, as we have seen an improvement in these tech and UI ratings, we believe that most sites will eventually get there. All sites will eventually also get around to hiring a SEO expert, who implements the various SEO techniques (factor 6). Therefore, for a given product or service category, in the long run the game will be often about excelling in the content factors viz. factors 3 , 4 and 5 above.

If one considers the Indian market (one suspect this applies globally too), organizations are under-investing in the content resources for their websites vis-a-vis investments in tech, UI and SEO.

Website content improvements are likely to remain largely unaddressed. Content is the final frontier. More on this in a subsequent post.

P.S.: To know about our own SEO services, visit our website.

Tagged as: challenges in digital marketing, digital marketing services, high ROI digital marketing

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10 reasons why digital just has to be your no. 1 marketing medium

by Team IK on June 21, 2019

That digital is in most major markets now one of the top 2 or 3 (along with press and TV) marketing mediums, if not the no. 1 medium, is a fact. Ad spend figures published by respected ad industry sources, all indicate so.

What is less understood are the very many reasons why digital is taking over advertising. Here is our take. We list ten possible factors.

1. REACH
More people can be reached today via digital than by any other platform.
As per the latest Internet Trends report, over half the world’s population is online.

2. ENGAGEMENT
Digital is the one medium where consumer engagement in the form of enquiries, feedback and social forwards is possible. The most important type of engagement are enquiries or leads; these are of great importance for many, though not all businesses.

3. IMPACT
Many more creative formats and creative unit sizes are available for use than are available in other media.

4. FLEXIBILITY
It is possible to start, stop, pause, restructure and monitor digital campaigns much more easily than campaigns of other media.

5. VERSATILITY
Campaigns can be set up and run optimally for any one of several marketing objectives: awareness, reach, consideration, leads, calls, sales & store visits.

6. TARGETING
The medium has phenomenal targeting capabilities. Geographic, demographic, psychographic, behavioural and content-based targeting are all possible. The width of options exceeds that available for print and other media, including we believe for TV.

7. SALES
Digital is almost the only medium where sales can directly happen (E-commerce websites). TV shopping channels are one of the very few (though less popular) alternate options.

8. MEASURABILITY
Just about everything done by consumers online is measurable. And this data is availability near instantly and is fairly granular, allowing detailed analysis.

9. AI-LED
Digital has begun actively leveraging machine learning / artificial intelligence. For example, Google, which is a leader in this field, has over the last year or so made good use of it’s expertise in enhancing the capabilities of it’s own Google Ads.

10. COST
Digital is a medium known to incur lower absolute costs vis-a-vis press and TV.

These then are our top 10 reasons why digital is every marketer’s definitive, must-use medium. If we were to add an eleventh reason, it would be that the medium has now become the most talked about and the most influential, among people who matter.

Tagged as: best marketing methods, digital marketing trends, why digital marketing

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Three bits of advice we give to would be e-commerce entrepreneurs

by Team IK on June 25, 2018

We work with several e-commerce start-ups and thus have some learning on what we think e-commerce entrepreneurs need to get right from day one. Here are three business basics which will pay back handsomely.

1. Have an innovative product
Your product or service must not be a me-too. Unless you have a brand which is established i.e. already doing well offline – that you want to take online – the product idea must be reasonably distinctive. The competition online can get murderous. If not the product itself, you need to differentiate in some other part of the offering.

Niche and novel products do well online. Due to various reasons, the Internet is good at matching such products with the right customers. Conversely, me-too products take time to carve out a market.

There are some other aspects of product strategy that are important, we will save these tips up for another blog post. Having an innovative product is the most desirable aspect of the product strategy.

2. Build the best website you can
Don’t compromise on the website. You can save a bit on marketing or other expenses but don’t go for, say, a website that an inexperienced web developer friend offers to put up at cost. Go for the best site that money can bring.

Your most important investment: the e-commerce website.

By a good e-commerce website, we don’t mean a super duper customized platform which needs a strong tech team and costs a bomb. We mean a website that allows you to test ‘proof of concept’. In most cases, this means a website which will be adequate for the first 12 to 18 months (see related point below). What’s a good e-commerce website? Too big a subject for this post. A user-friendly UI & navigation, good mobile speed and responsiveness and a feature-rich back-end are three important aspects of a good e-commerce site.

Unfortunately, 6 of 10 e-commerce websites that we encounter score a C grade or worse (grade scale A to E).

3. Have a business horizon of minimum 12 months
Have a business horizon of the above minimum duration. This is the time required to establish the business model, prove the concept and get it ready to scale to the next level.

We are often asked why 3 to 4 months or so should not be enough, in cases where the client is even willing to spend handsomely on marketing at the outset?

Due to various reasons, this does not usually happen in 3-4 months.

Firstly, most organizations starting up an e-commerce business are new to it, and they have a learning curve. Another reason has to do with customer acquisition, in particular as to what type of traffic can convert to customers. A lot of testing and experimentation is needed here, which takes time. No one formula works for each business, each customer acquisition case is somewhat unique.

Thus, new e-commerce businesses need to get many aspects of the business right, before growth happens. And this does not usually happen in a few weeks.

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