Top 10 Local SEO Mistakes You Should Avoid in 2020

Unquestionably, Local SEO is essential if your business focuses on the customers in the regions its products or services are based in. After all, who makes hot chocolate pudding in London and sells it in Paris. Unless, of course, the chocolate shop has grown significantly and opened a new branch in France as well.

Besides, half of all Google searches seek local information. Therefore it’s necessary to take care of your local SEO so that your business pops up in front of your target audience when they search for products or services related to your business.

However, most of the business owners usually make the following 10 local SEO mistakes when they attempting to take the nuts and bolts of local SEO optimization into their hands, that will jeopardise your efforts and give your competitors the advantage.

Top 10 Local SEO Mistakes

So, without further ado, go through the following list like a checklist to determine you’re not doing these mistakes in your local SEO optimization.

Let’s get started with the most common local SEO mistakes and how you can avoid them.

  1. ☑️ Not Claiming Your Google My Business Profile

When you consider SEO, you immediately think of your business website ranking in SERP results. But, there is a twist with local SEO.

For example, search for “nearby restaurants”, you’ll see a big map in the upper right corner and with that, you’ll see information (name, address, phone number, reviews, etc.) for nearby restaurants listed in the main search results.

Here’s the interesting thing, this information is collected from each business’s Google My Business Profile, not from their business website. So, you need to create your business listing on Google My Business, if you haven’t done this already. Click here to create your Google My Business listing, it’s absolutely free to set up and shouldn’t take more than 15 to 20 minutes.

 

Once your GMB profile is set up, you need to verify your business profile so nobody else is able to edit your profile in the future. Also, ensure your business listing includes a proper and unique description of what your business does, categorized properly, your business contact information is correct and you upload relevant pictures of your business.

  1. ☑️ Having Duplicate Business Listings

Another common local SEO mistake I see businesses do is having duplicate Google My Business Profiles. We all know, Google really hates duplicate content in its search results. Because it gives bad experience to the users who searching to see the same information twice in their search results. Not only that, it’s a waste of Google’s resources to analyze all of those duplicate information and store them.

That’s why having duplicate listings is against Google’s terms of service. Every business should only have one Google My Business profile. You can use the Moz Local Search tool to find the duplicate listings by simply typing your business’s name and address. If you find any duplicate listings for your business, then contact Google to get them removed as soon as possible so they don’t impact your search rankings.

  1. ☑️ Not Filling Relevant Categories is a Big Local SEO Mistake

Usually, on Google My Business and other local citation sources, they often provide a list of relevant “categories” to describe your business. These categories are like sections of the Yellow Pages, the more categories you advertise in, the more likely your prospects are to find your business. So, you should always add as many categories as you can find that are relevant to your business.

Also, be careful when you choose your categories because it’s against Google’s terms to include irrelevant categories. You add up to 10 categories in your Google My Business profile, so, review the categories selected by the top-ranking local businesses and choose your categories accordingly.

  1. ☑️ Website Not Optimized for Mobile

Local SEO and mobile go hand in hand because nowadays more and more people are using smartphones to search for local businesses on the go. Personally, I do this often.

That’s why it’s really important to have a mobile-optimized website; otherwise, you will push your audience towards your competitors who have the mobile-optimized website.

Google has already moved to mobile-first indexing, which means that your mobile-optimized website will be the primary website Google analyzes for ranking purposes. And since July 1, 2019, Google has enabled mobile-first indexing by default for all new websites. So, if you haven’t optimized your website for mobile yet, you need to build a mobile-optimized website in order to compete in the local search results.

  1. ☑️ Missing Primary Contact Information On Website

Go to your website’s contact page and make sure all your contact information is correctly listed. Especially, ensure your business’s Name, Address, and Phone number are listed as text rather than the image so that Google can easily read your contact information and verify its accuracy.

Google doesn’t want to show inaccurate information in its search results. That would damage their credibility, and eventually, they would lose their loyal users. So, one of the key measures Google considers to verify your contact information is to compare the information listed on your business website versus the information listed on your Google My Business profile. If your website and profile aren’t containing the same exact contact information, you’ll need to edit your website or your Google My Business profile to make them well-matched.

  1. ☑️ Inaccurate NAP Information On Online

NAP is an abbreviation used for Name, Address, and Phone number. As I stated above, it’s crucial to have the same contact information listed on both your business website and your Google My Business profile. But, it’s not ending here; Google takes a huge step further and compares your contact information listed on your official website versus your contact information listed on other websites across the internet.

That means you should have the same NAP information on every single webpage that lists your contact information. Especially I’m talking about business directories since those are the websites most likely to display your contact information publicly online. Again you can use Moz Local search tool to find out whether your business has any inaccurate NAP information listed on the web.

  1. ☑️ Missing Important Citations

A citation is simply a mention of your business NAP information on another website. In the above point, I emphasized the importance of consistency of your NAP information across all your online citations. Well just because you have accurate NAP information doesn’t mean you’re doing it right.

There are possibilities for you to miss out the vital citations that are hurting your Google ranking. Here also you can use Moz Local search tool to check if you’re missing any important citations. If you find that you’re missing some citations, and then simply add all of those important citations of your business to the websites.

Okay, enough of Google My Business, NAP and citations. Let’s have a look into other Local SEO mistakes that are easy to fix.

  1. ☑️ Low Quality, Thin Content On Website

Your business website plays an important role in how high your business will rank in the search results. And when it comes to websites, search engines are starting to more heavily weigh the amount and quality of content on the websites. That means your business website should have high-quality content about your business, your products /services and other essential information.

For Local SEO, you should also ensure to add local keywords, phrases, and content as localized content helps you to send more signals to search engines about your geographic focus. High-quality content about your business, with local keywords, help your business to appear higher in local searches.

Google’s mission is to give searchers the most relevant results that are most likely to answer the queries. Generally, websites with more content offer more detailed information than websites with less content. That’s why it’s so important to go through all your key webpages and ensure they have a minimum of 500 words of relevant content.

  1. ☑️ Not Receiving Customer Reviews

Many businesses won’t make a rigorous effort to get their customers to give reviews about them online. They usually think asking for reviews will make them to receive negative reviews, or it’s not worth the effort when customers can do it themselves. But, there’s no silver bullet solution to make your customers give reviews. All you can do is ask your customers via email, over the call or in-person and make it easy for each customer to write a review.

In the above mentioned 3 approaches, I’ve found that asking via email along with a link and directions is the most effective approach because you’re leading your customers straight to it to leave their reviews. Getting positive reviews will be a slow process, but with time you will receive them and that’ll give you a real competitive advantage which is hard to replicate.

  1. ☑️ Not Active On Social Media is a terrible Local SEO Mistakes

Many local businesses do not use social media to its full potential. But, Social media activity is one of the many ranking signals Google uses to rank businesses. I know, there’s some debate about this, whether or not social media has a direct impact on rankings. However, you can’t deny that social media is a great way to get exposure and generate a buzz about your business.

Besides, if you’re already making good content, social media is the best way to promote your content to get it visible to your target audience. While social media isn’t a main factor of local SEO success, still it’s a mistake to totally avoid social media.

🔔 Conclusion

It’s an art and a science to getting your local SEO to work right. Luckily, avoiding these common local SEO mistakes can ensure your business will be publicized to your potential customers in your local region. It can also help you to convert them into real customers.

If you avoid making these Local SEO mistakes or if you fix them all, you will have a competitive advantage on your competitors, it will help you to get higher rankings than them, your business will appear in more searches than them, and you will convert more sales than them. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Do you want to attract new customers in your local region? Want help with Local SEO? Let me help you!

Adaptive Marketing: Why Marketers Should Use it?

Today’s consumers mandate personalized and authentic buying experiences on their preferred channels, in ways that matter to them.

The internet, somehow, takes the model of tailored marketing to a completely new level. Static and periodic marketing approaches aren’t working anymore, then; what’s more? The huge quantities of data formed by our connected digital world allow a high level of personalization that has never been possible before. And, this is the basis of adaptive marketing.

Let’s move on to our today’s topic adaptive marketing!

  1. ???? What is Adaptive Marketing?

Adaptive marketing is a personalized marketing approach that allows brands to build more personalized and authentic relationships with their customers, based on the feedback they gathered from numerous data points. It not only allows marketers to adapt personalization in their messaging but also in the products and services. As a reward, brands get more sales, long-lasting customer loyalty, and sustainable business growth.

  1. ???? An Introduction to Psychographic Branding

The psychographic branding method can help brands to foresee how different types of personalities would interact with their brand and their products/services, also allow them to create a mix of tailored micro-messages based on universal personality types, and assist them to bring a marketing strategy closer to the individual level.

Most of the marketing tools are designed to answer the typical questions like what, when, who and how. But, without violating the privacy of people, psychographic branding can find answers to the question “Why?” Besides, psychographic branding can be used in an ethical way in marketing that can help brands to define sub-target groups of their customers based on their personality type.

  1. ???? How to Use Psychographic Branding in Adaptive Marketing?

The way to build an adaptive marketing strategy incorporating with psychographic branding is a 2-step process:

⚡ Define what your brand means to people

⚡ Tailor your messages for each personality type that they can easily receive and process.

☑️ Define What Your Brand Means to People

Your brand represents a common meaning to its audience and that meaning is actually your brand itself. However, it’s not your logo, your brand experience or even your products; in fact, they all are just proxies that remind people of what your brand means to them.

Actually, your brand meaning is the ultimate value that you offer to your customers and it determines how people see you as a brand. To find out the meaning of your brand, first, you need to understand why people use your brand’s products or services and how does it connect with their psychology. By defining what your brand means to people, you can provide a more transparent brand experience for your customers.

☑️ Tailor your messages for each personality type

As I mentioned above, every brand represents a meaning to its audience. But, the audience can be divided into smaller groups based on their personality type and still share a connection with a brand for different reasons.

These personality types would give direction to how people receive your message and process it to make their ultimate buying decisions.

According to psychometric tool DISC, there are totally 16 types of personalities in the universe: 4 primary personalities and 12 combinations personalities of the primary personalities. To make it easier, today, I’ll explain the 4 primary personalities and how you can tailor your messages for each personality type.

✅ Dominant Personality

The dominant types of people always focus on the results and they want to make the final decision, so they tend to ignore the method and process.

The best way to attract these kinds of people is to embrace a direct approach in your marketing strategy. No process explanations, no exciting stories about how your products or services will make the world a better place, etc.  You can simply attract these dominants people’s attention by being short and direct.

✅ Influencing Personality

Influencing types of people usually get hyped by exciting visions of the future and always want their environment to be positive.

That means the use of scaremongering (negative messages to trigger fear) may not work well with these kinds of people.

You need to focus on things that they can accomplish using your products or services and help them to be a part of your bigger vision. If they feel excited about your brand only, these influencers will consider your product’s or service’s price. So, you should include visual marketing tactics in your strategy to help influencers visualize the future in their minds, on the other hand, it will help you to reinforce and clarify your messages to them.

✅ Steady Personality

The steady type people like a methodical course of action and often look for consistent, loyal and supportive individuals.

When approaching these kinds of people, you need to show empathy and friendliness. In your marketing strategy, you should avoid overwhelmingly-strong language. Through warm and meaningful conversations you can build your brand trust among these people. Trust me; this type of people could form a big part of your loyal customers.

✅ Calculating Personality

Skeptical people usually come under this personality type, who are mainly interested in facts and figures. These kinds of people enjoy long, thorough analysis and choose to avoid small talk.

That’s means, unlike dominants type of people, you need to provide the calculating type of people with as much information as you can, and give them enough space to analyze it.

These type of personalities usually like security, so, providing them with assurances and evidence on the claims that your brand is making would be extremely convincing. Like I said above, you should ensure that your messaging is reassuring and contains plenty of facts, figures and stats.

  1. ???? Adaptive Marketing Framework

As marketers, one of the biggest and most tough questions to answer is how to market to the masses without becoming so generalized.

This is where adaptive marketing comes into play. Adaptive marketing helps marketers predict how different personality types of people will interact with a brand and its products and services. This information then allows brands to create tailored micro messages to individual personalities.

The best part about adaptive marketing is that it can help you to create complete innovative and personalized marketing strategies while still abiding by your brand’s privacy regulations.

Adaptive marketing framework involves 4 key processes:

#1 Behavior Analysis

#2 Personalization

#3 Real-Time Experience

#4 Proactive Engagement

✅ Behavior Analysis

A customer behavior analysis is a qualitative and quantitative observation process of how customers interact with your brand, its products and services. This analysis provides insight into customers’ motives, priorities and decision-making methods during their buying journey. Through customer behavior analysis you can understand how customers feel about your brand and how that perception aligns with their core values.

✅  Personalization

Leveraging the data from your customer behavior analysis, you can personalize your content that’s unique to each customer. This method called as personalized marketing in which brands use customer behavior analysis data and digital technology to deliver personalized messages and product or service offerings to their current or prospective customers.

The below image will give you an idea about the adaptive marketing personalization process.

✅  Real-Time Experience

Providing a real-time experience for your customers is a two-steps process:

⚡ Delights your customers by providing what exactly they seek from your brand

⚡ Shows sophistication and responsiveness towards your customers

According to studies brands with the best customer real-time experience increase revenue at two times the rate of those with the worst. Many times we see examples of customer delight experience going viral on social media, which is the beauty of the customer real-time experience. Because when you provide real-time experience to your customers, the delight customers tend to spread word-of-mouth goodwill about your brand or business. That means, your brand will gain a positive identity in the marketplace.

✅  Proactive Engagement

Proactive engagement means identifying ways to enhance your customers’ customer experience without the customer asking for it or even knowing that it’s possible. For example, a text message letting a customer know that her order has been delayed, an email informing a customer that a new T-shirt design from their favourite Cloth line is available, or a phone call checking to ensure that the shipping address mentioned on file is correct. Proactive engagement can help you to build customer trust and long-term relationships with your brand.

The below diagrams will explain to you about adaptive marketing framework and its process.

  1. ???? Adaptive Marketing Examples

Let’s check out some examples of how adaptive marketing works and how it can help you to grow your business.

✅ Custom Copy

The custom copy is one of the best ways to use adaptive marketing technology. When people visit your business website, this custom copy technology will ask them to fill in a form with their name, contact details like email as well as their industry.

Each of these people comes from different industries and buys different things from your website. So once they have submitted form with specific information, the next time that they visit your website they’ll see web copy based on their industry and buying habits. Simply custom copy helps you to market differently depending on people, their industry and buying behavior.

✅ Reward Returning Customers

If you’re being honest, you’re probably going to accept that the majority of your business sales come from your returning customers. So, reward those returning customers to keep them coming back for more! Reward them with offers, coupons, special gifts, etc, then you’ve got a cult-following for life. A little appreciation for your customers goes a long way and you will get the extra engagement with your emails and social media channels that’ll help you to grow your overall customer base.

✅ Follow-Up Sales

Let’s say recently you’ve attended a trade show and got a huge list of emails. Flare an email thanking everyone and say how you enjoyed meeting them at the trade show, also attached the link to your homepage in the email. When they click the link to your homepage, let’s  greet them with a banner that specifies the trade show and offer a discount. These new prospective customers will be blown away that you redid your homepage banner and offered a discount just for them. So, more likely they’ll become your customers.

Hope these above examples gave you a clear idea about the adaptive marketing approach. Now, let’s take a look at some case studies of adaptive marketing.

  1. Adaptive Marketing Case Study.

Brands are already aware of this phenomenon marketing approach that is spreading like wildfire in the leading marketing companies. Let’s see two examples of internationally popular brands that used the adaptive marketing approach to provide best customer experience.

☑️ Coca Cola

People’s favourite brand viz. Coca Cola was one of the best examples that justifies and distinctively sets adaptive marketing method. The Coca Cola Company set up Coca Cola Freestyle — a data-driven vending machine that allowed customers to mix different flavors and creates their likeable mocktails with more than 200 Coca Cola products. The vending machine tracked and collected the data from the consumers to identify the most popular flavors. Coca Cola used this data to introduce new product variants and flavors that responded to consumer preferences.

☑️ Lay’s Potato Chips

Another good example of similar execution from another consumer brand was from Frito-Lay, their many successful attempts with their new flavors of Lay’s Potato Chips. The brand created a marketing campaign that engaged consumers by asking them to suggest new flavour combinations for their favourite potato chips. This marketing campaign garnered many consumer impressions and Frito-Lay leveraged the reach of TV advertising to direct the communication with their consumers. Later, many consumer-submitted flavors were picked up by the brand and were introduced in the market. This benefited the brand by widening its brand awareness with positive identity and satisfied consumers by transforming collected data into tailored products.

  1. ???? Benefits of Adaptive Marketing

Structuring your brand’s marketing mix around adaptive marketing concept can strengthen and develop a new strategy for enhancing customer experiences, without hefty expenditures. The benefits reaped from the adaptive marketing approach can impact the brand’s identity in the long term. These benefits include:

✅ Trust: If a brand aims to achieve anything more important than sales, it’s consumers’ trust. Adaptive marketing approach makes your Consumers feel comfortable about sharing their personal data with your brand as you sell the products or services they need.

✅ Transparency: Using your consumer information comes with great responsibilities. When you’re gathering consumer information to construct your marketing strategy, you should allow consumers to know how their preferences are going to be used by your brand. This practice encourages transparency between your brand and the consumer. And if your brand delivers what your consumers asked for, you have a fair chance to gain their loyalty.

⚡ Information: In the adaptive marketing approach, you collect vast information both about your actual and potential consumers to provide personalized product variants to them. This information can give major insights about consumer behavior and preferences that can later be used to craft new marketing strategies.

✅ Leadership: Adaptive marketing is all about adapting to consumer touchpoints and creating audacious brand experiences. It can bring a leadership quality to the brand’s image in the market and a brand can be deemed successful in the market’s view.

✅ Strong Identity: With adaptive marketing approach brands have a good opportunity to become the more likeable brand of people that they cater to. The capacity to constantly adapt whilst staying true to their brand personality throughout the marketing process brings more value and positive identity to the brand.

Apart from the above five benefits, adaptive marketing approach helps brands to save more advertising and branding resources.

???? Conclusion

We’re living in a world where everything is interconnected with each other. Not only people are becoming increasingly connected to the internet, even objects are becoming ‘smarter’ and more connected. Moreover, in this new digital age, customers mandate personalization, and to personalize on a massive level, marketers need to concentrate on adaptive marketing systems that can capture customers’ behaviors, enable marketers to familiarize to those behaviors and eventually help them to win in the marketing game.

Interpreting the nature and benefits of the adaptive marketing technique can help us to evolve a rigid understanding of this dynamic marketing approach that turns out to be a permanent game-changer in the age of digital marketing.

Ready to get some hands-on help? Get in touch with me today to learn how to take your brand and business to the next level with adaptive marketing. Let me help you!

EAT & YMYL – Actionable Tips to Boost Your SEO in 2020

With Google’s ever-evolving algorithms updates, many of the old SEO practices become outdated quickly. Also, it’s becoming harder to outsmart the artificial intelligence and the machine learning technology set up by Google.

If you’re really serious about SEO and want to build websites that are profitable in the future, you must keep yourself up-to-date about Google search algorithms and the changes taking place in them.

Post-BERT algorithm update, EAT (Expertise, Authority, and Trust) and YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) are the two crucial elements that have a significant impact on search rankings.

This post will explain to you about E-A-T, as well as YMYL, and provide actionable tips for how you can use these elements to boost your SEO.

Let’s have a look at how to boost your SEO with EAT & YMYL.

  1. All You Need To Know About E-A-T

EAT is an acronym that represents Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These three metrics are used by Google’s Search Quality Raters (the human raters employs by Google) to quantify whether a content creator, webpage, or website is a leader in its respective niche.

Makes perfect sense, right? Google wants to reward the sites that are producing high-quality content with better rankings and sites that create low-quality content get less visibility.

Now let’s look at each of these three metrics individually.

➡️  Expertise

Are subject matter experts creating your content?

Experts are people who possess the necessary understanding and knowledge related to the specific field that they can discuss the particular topic deeply. This knowledge can be very general or highly specialized.

Even Google is OK with something called “everyday expertise.”

What exactly does it mean?

Let’s see what Google said about this term:

“Some topics need less formal expertise. Many people write extremely detailed, comprehensive, and helpful reviews of products or restaurants. Various people share tips, guidelines, and life experiences on forums, blogs, etc. These normal people may be considered experts in topics where they have life experience. If it appears as if the individual creating the content that has the type and amount of life experience to make him or her an ‘expert’ on the topic, we will value this as ‘everyday expertise’ and not penalize the person/webpage/website for not having ‘formal’ education or training in the field.”

In nutshell, Google wants to offer links to websites that have published helpful content that is relevant, comprehensive, accurate, and useful.

People are coming to Google to find answers to important questions. Therefore, Google doesn’t want to send its users to incorrect content or websites that deliberately misinform users. So, offering inaccurate, outdated, or unhelpful content on your website is a formula for SEO disaster. Especially, it’s important to validate your expertise in certain niches like medical, legal, and financial.

So, you must ensure the people who create content for your website possess subject matter expertise.

Also, do the necessary research and fact-checking of any content before you hit publish.

➡️  Authoritativeness

As stated in Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines, Google has used PageRank to understand authoritativeness right from the start.

“Our ranking scheme is specifically designed to recognize sites with high indicia of expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.”

This “smoking gun” sentence from the guideline indicates that backlinks have been one of the top signals for authoritativeness; especially the quality of those backlinks is a top-ranking factor.

For many years now, we’ve heard people compared votes to links, where the more votes aka links your webpage or website get the more authoritative/popular it is.

Expertise means having the required knowledge and skills, whereas authority is what happens when others both within and outside of your industry recognize that expertise.

This recognition can come in the form of shares, mentions, links, reviews, or any other type of citation.

Authoritativeness sounds like your online reputation, right? Because in a way it is. So, creating useful content is the best way to build your authoritativeness online.

➡️ Trustworthiness

It requires tons of hard work to earn the trust of both the people and the search engines.

Your efforts must be able to make people trust your brand or business and be willing to buy from you or endorse you.

You can increase the level of your trustworthiness by highlighting your content creators’ credentials as well as your website. Awards, endorsements, and testimonials are some of the trust factors to improve trustworthiness.

  1. How to Check Your EAT Score❓ 

With checking your website’s domain authority, you can also check your EAT score by the ratio of your website’s bounce rate, the number of search queries related to your brand, your brand’s social media impressions, favorable to negative reviews that your brand has received and so on.

Unluckily, you must check your performance in every category to evaluate your EAT score, because there isn’t just one tool to check your EAT ranking.

Simply, people need to feel they can trust and rely on all the information they find on your website. In the same way, Google wants to give high-ranks to the websites and content that it can trust.

  1. YMYL: Your Money or Your Life.

As mentioned in the title YMYL acronym refers to Your Money or Your Life. That means YMYL pages consist of information that might have a significant impact on a user’s wallet or wellbeing. WebMD and eTrade are great examples of YMYL sites.

According to Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines’ section 2.3, YMYL pages have a potential impact on the happiness, health, financial stability, or safety of users.

As mentioned in the above image: Ecommerce, legal, financial services, and healthcare are some of the industries that fall under the YMYL category.

Google gives the highest standard for these kinds of YMYL sites because this type of content holds extremely high stakes. So, when it comes to YMYL, just make sure that any content on the website will help and not hurt the people who consume the content.

Simply, if you take great care of the users, Google will take great care of you.

  1. Why Are EAT and YMYL Important for SEO❓

For as long as I can remember, there is a clear relationship between what Google considers high-quality content and what appears in the Google SERP results. And EAT and YMYL playing a role in determining high-quality content. Hence, there is a correlation between EAT, YMYL, and SEO.

Google works with more than 10,000 human search quality raters worldwide who work with real search queries and evaluate how accurate and useful Google’s SERP results are. Also, they evaluate the impact of Google’s search algorithm updates and verify if the changes are functioning correctly.

In short, raters define EAT scores of web pages and help to ensure that pages that demonstrate high EAT, as well as meeting all the YMYL requirements, are ranked higher on SERPs. That’s the reason EAT and YMYL can have a direct effect on your SEO and rankings in the SERPs.

  1. How to Boost Your EAT & SEO❓

Here are some of the effective steps you can start doing right now to improve your Website EAT that boosts your SEO and SERP rankings.

➡️ Update your website content regularly

➡️ Have a well-designed website

➡️ Have a well-written and updated “about us” page on your website.

➡️ Make sure every webpage has authoritative content

➡️ Get backlinks from relevant and high-authority domains.

➡️ Offer valuable and trustworthy advice on your website

➡️ Have good credits for your website content by mentioning the author’s name, date, and more.

➡️ Provide clear and accessible contact information.

➡️ Provide all the significant legal pages on your website.

➡️ Maintain a good online reputation.

  1. Boost Your EAT & YMYL with Your Content

You always need to provide authoritative content on your website that is written by professionals who do the required research and write well. Here are a few key points to be considered if you’re really keen to boost your EAT and YMYL with your content.

✅  Audit your website content to demonstrate expertise, authority, and trust.

✅  Make sure that there is no duplicate content or plagiarism.

✅  Create good author pages in your website articles.

✅  Ensure your content is written or reviewed by credentialed experts.

✅  Add cite authoritative references for your scientific topics

✅  Make sure your scientific-related content represents the accurate scientific consensus.

Conclusion

EAT is really important for SEO, especially if you cover YMYL topics. Improving your website’s EAT and YMYL is a two-steps process:

  1. Have values, be legit, and hire experts. Take care of your customers and do real company stuff.
  2. Work to signify your expertise and values to Google.

It just takes some effort and time to do it.

If your EAT and YMYL scores improve, you can easily reap the rewards of professional SEO, and gain a much better ranking in Google’s SERPs. So, pay heed to the important EAT and YMYL factors and boost your SEO in 2020.

Finally, remember, based on users’ expectations of search, Google’s guidelines are constantly changing, and so do you.

How to Get A Google’s Knowledge Graph Panel for Your Brand?

Google allows entities to claim their own Knowledge Graph Panel and become the authoritative owners and editors of the results within the Knowledge Panel.

Making themselves stand out on Google search results is the topmost goal for many businesses. Especially for those businesses who solely run on digital marketplaces. You’ve likely to noticed Google’s Knowledge Graph Panel on the right-hand side of your search screen. But have you ever considered how to get that Knowledge Panel for yourself?

Here’s how you can claim your Knowledge Panel

In this guide, you’ll learn:

  1. What Google’s Knowledge Graph Panel is
  2. Structure of the Knowledge Graph Panel
  3. How it influences search results and SEO
  4. How to claim your Knowledge Graph Panel
  5. How to get into Google’s Knowledge Graph Panel?
  6. How to nourish the Knowledge Graph Panel for long-term success
  1. What is Google’s Knowledge Graph Panel?

Google’s Knowledge Graph Panels are information boxes that display on the Google SERP results when the user searches for an entity which can be tangible elements like people, places, and organizations, or intangible elements like colors, concepts, and feelings.

Google’s Knowledge Graph Panel Launched in May 2012, it’s a system designed to understand facts about entities and the relationships between entities. It’s used to power the traditional SERP results. The Knowledge Graph Panel gathers information from a variety of different sources and Wikipedia is the most commonly cited source in Knowledge Graph Panel. When the information in the sources changes, Knowledge Graph Panel gets updated automatically.

The type of information displayed within a Knowledge Graph Panel can vary. Below is an example of a Knowledge Panel on a desktop.

  1. Structure of the Knowledge Graph Panel

Google’s knowledge graph Panel is made up of several elements which are found on the right-hand side of the search engine. The size of the panel varies depending on the amount of information available. As standard, the panel will feature:

  • A collection of images related to the subject, person, or business
  • A sub-categorization of the information
  • A link to websites or apps on which the service/business/content is ‘available on
  • A short description of the subject
  • Information about the location and other relevant details, as well as a ‘did you know in some cases
  • Details of popular products or content
  • Social media profiles
  • A ‘people also search for’ section

This data may differ based on the purpose of the page. As well as the quantity of information available. However, this is the basic structure for Google knowledge graph panels.

  1. How Does Google’s Knowledge Graph Panel Influence Search Results and SEO?

On the whole, the Knowledge Graph Panel is a positive thing for both users and SEOs as users get more relevant search results for the queries, and SEOs get more traffic to the deserving content.

Let see how does Knowledge Graph Panel influences search results and SEO for better and worse.

✅ Google better understands search query

When users search their queries, Google can use links as quality signals to return the best content from its index. However, links are great for evaluating the quality of a page, but not its relevance to the search query. Because people don’t always search in the same way, they describe things in different ways.

This is where the Knowledge Graph Panel comes in, as Knowledge Panel allows Google to go beyond keywords and return relevant results for the users.

For example, take the search query “little weird guy in lord of the rings”:

In spite of the fact that we didn’t even mention the name “Gollum”, Google still understands what we’re looking for and gives us the exact answer.

Not only the relevant results, but Google also shows the connection in the Knowledge Graph Panel and delivers an entity carousel that satisfies our search query.

✅  Google can better accommodate with voice searches.

Understanding voice queries are more important than ever for Google, with Google Voice Assistant now built into more than one billion devices, nearly 70% of search requests being stated in natural language.

But, how does the Knowledge Graph Panel help with this?

We all know there’s a difference between the way we type search queries and how we actually talk. In this scenario, Knowledge Panel allows Google to recognize the entities and attributes that asked in natural language queries and provides better results.

✅   Increase brand visibility and authority.

In SERP results, Google shows Knowledge Graph data like Knowledge Panels and Knowledge Cards.

That means if you are able to get your brand in the Knowledge Graph Panel, you’ll get benefit from more SERP real estate, visibility, and probably it’ll increase more authority and trust for your brand amongst searchers.

✅  Fewer clicks on SERP results

According to Rand Fishkin’s study held in 2019, more than 50% of search results on Google SERP have no clicks.

 

Knowledge Graph Panel is part of the reason for it. Because Knowledge Graph helps Google answer more queries directly in the SERP.

Just look at the SERP results for the “What is SEO” query:

If people get all the information from the Knowledge Graph Panel, they aren’t clicking on other search results on SERP. So, you stand to get little or no organic traffic, even if you rank at the top. No worries, you can solve this issue by avoiding targeting keywords with low organic click-through rates (CTR).

  1. How to claim your Knowledge Graph Panel?

If already a Knowledge Graph Panel appears for your brand when users search for your brand keywords, you can claim the panel by clicking on the “Claim this Knowledge Panel” button placed at the bottom of the panel.

Here is a guide to claim your Knowledge Graph.

  • Click on the “Claim this knowledge panel” button at the base of your Knowledge Graph Panel. This will take you to a Google Verification page. The URL for the page has your custom MID number (machine-produced identifier number) which is particular to your brand as an entity.
  • Click on the “Get Verified” button. Then you will be taken to a page with a list of options to verify that you’re the entity. From the given options you should choose one and sign in to finish the verification. Typically, the options will be YouTube, Twitter, and Google Search Console.

When you complete the verification process the “Claim your knowledge panel” button will vanish from the bottom of your Google Knowledge Graph Panel. Now, you will have authoritative editing power on your Knowledge Panel where you can suggest changes. So, if you have wrong information appearing in your Knowledge Panel, now, you have the ability to correct and update it.

 

  1. How to get into Google’s Knowledge Graph Panel?

If there’s no Knowledge Graph Panel appears for your brand keywords, that means your business still lacks the reliable information essential for Google to display a Knowledge Graph Panel for your brand.

You can use Knowledge Graph Search API to see how Google views your brand as an entity.

To get a Knowledge Graph Panel to show up for your brand, you need to grow your brand presence within Google’s Knowledge Graph. One of the best ways to do that is to establish your brand presence on the platforms and websites like Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Reuters, Bloomberg, and Crunchbase that Google commonly cites within its Knowledge Panels. Having your brand page on these platforms and receiving mentions from these kinds of authoritative websites or publications can help you to “teach” Google about your brand and push your brand towards the critical frame necessary to trigger a Knowledge Panel from Google.

Let’s see what are the significant ways to get into the Knowledge Graph Panel.

 

  ☑️  Get a Wikipedia page for your brand

Here you have noticed that I used the word get rather than create. You can attempt to build your own Wikipedia page, yet you have to adhere to all rules and guidelines of Wikipedia.

The sources you use to specify notability must meet all five criteria presented below; otherwise, Wikipedia moderators may consider the sources are insufficient and make your brand ineligible for a Wikipedia page. If your brand is notable enough for its own Wikipedia page, you can avoid a conflict of interest by submitting sources and requesting an independent editor to create your brand page.

 

Some people have been able to create Wikipedia pages for their customers or their own brand by becoming autoconfirmed users. Autoconfirmed users can create wiki pages, but to get the autoconfirmed user authority you’ll have to pass through some hoops: accounts are considered “autoconfirmed” if they’re at least four days old and have made a minimum of 10 edits on the encyclopedia. if you are able to turn into an autoconfirmed user, you can improve the chances of your Wikipedia page gets affirmed by giving verifiable sources and sticking to the creation guidelines of Wikipedia’s page.

Plus, I would highly recommend you not trying to find loopholes and shady workarounds because once Wikipedia moderators hit your Wiki page with a penalty, it’s really hard to recover.

 

  ☑️  Create an entry on wikidata.org

Wikidata stores organized information for Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites. Thus, I highly recommend you start to create a Wikidata entry if you don’t yet have any Wikimedia presence.

A huge chunk of Google’s Knowledge Graph information depends on Wikidata, therefore having a profile on Wikidata is much more significant than Wikipedia. But, not like Wikipedia, creating a profile on Wikidata is a quite simple and straightforward process. However, you should always obey their rules, particularly the Notability policy.

Check out Wikidata’s Help Portal to get an idea of how the platform works.

  ☑️  Step up your PR and backlinks

 

It’s so much easier to be included as an entity in Google’s Knowledge Graph Panel if your brand gets discussed on the web.

Mentions from leading newspapers or sites like Forbes, TechCrunch, and etc, will reveal to Google that you may represent a prominent entity. So doing press releases for your brand and building links on the popular sites will speed up your way to get your brand into Knowledge Graph Panel. 

  ☑️   Add schema markup on your website

Schema.org is the officially suggested markup for structured data. it’s altogether a different topic, so I’ll simply point out a few key things that may help your brand to get into Google’s Knowledge Graph.

  1. Use organization markup
  2. Make sure to use at least the name, logo, URL, and sameAs properties
  3. Add all your social media profiles and probably Wikidata and Wikipedia pages as your sameAs reference
  4. Validate your schema markup

 

5) Create a Google My Business profile

If you run a physical business, having a GMB profile is essential. It helps you to increase your brand’s visibility and authority in both Google Maps and Google search because it provides you a branded local listing that looks like the Knowledge Panel.

 

But, pursuing a Google My Business doesn’t ensure consideration in the Knowledge Graph. I looked for the most famous restaurants around Sri Lanka in the Knowledge Graph API and not many of them were listed as entities.

However, offering Google with structured data in your GMB profile may build your opportunity of being added to the Knowledge Graph. Just make sure to add the same details (name, address, telephone number, and so on.) on your business website and social media profiles.

 

06) Nourish your Knowledge Panel for long-term success

When you’ve earned or claimed a Knowledge Graph Panel, Google will offer you more authority over the data that displays within the Knowledge Graph.

So, frequent updates and maintenance are required to guarantee your Knowledge Panel’s accuracy. Google has been known to change data in Knowledge Panels based on the sources that feed the Knowledge Graph.

You can suggest changes to the knowledge panel by offering feedback via the gray “Feedback” link at the bottom of a Knowledge Panel. When suggesting edits or information removals, just make sure to follow Google’s official documentation.

Conclusion

Knowledge Graph Panels and entities have been with us for quite some time and they will become more and more important in the future. And, Google is already on its process to “entity-first indexing.” So, you should make sure you’re doing everything you can to claim your knowledge panel and provide your customers with all the information they need today.

If you have any questions or remarks about this interesting topic, feel free to ping me in the comments!

GMB Update – Upgraded Google My Business Profile Program

Hope you heard the news right? Yes, Google starts offering new Upgraded Google My Business Profile Program

In April 2019, Google tested the idea of subscription-based services for Google My Business. Now it’s reported to be offering Upgraded Google My Business Profiles for a $50/month subscription. But, this new program is not officially announced yet. Apparently, this new service seems in the testing phase.

Local Search expert, Tom Waddington (@tomwaddington8), tweeted about this newly upgraded Google My Business program.

This is what he said in his tweet:

“Google starting to offer an upgraded Business Profile (Google My Business listing) for $50/month that will add the Google Guaranteed badge to the listing and back services the business provides with the Google Guarantee.”

This new service program offers businesses to upgrade their Google My Business account to a $50/month plan that would promote a refund guarantee and feature a green icon signifying that the business was Google Guaranteed. This green icon feature appears to be trust-related badging that can help businesses earn more clients.

As the offer stated like this:

“Make it easy for customers to choose you

Stand out with an upgraded business profile and the Google Guaranteed badge. Just $50/month for eligible businesses.”

There are some additional features related to the service that includes the following:

  1. Agreeing to the use of binding arbitration.
  2. Agreeing to surrender the right to jury trials.
  3. Class action lawsuits for resolving disputes.

Later Tom shared more details about this new Google My Business program via his Tweets, where he stated that the new program seems too limited to select local service providers.

He also proposed that businesses already in the Local Services program would be the ones from which Google might pick for an upgraded Google My Business profile.

In the continuous discussion, Tom suggested that most businesses would be keen to have an upgraded GMB profile once their competitors have one.

Obviously, he has a valid point! A business could begin losing its customers to its competitors if potential customers view their GMB profile as less trustworthy than another business that has the upgraded badging which signaling the particular business is guaranteed by Google. As we all know trust is an important factor in convincing a customer to approach a service provider, this upgraded badging help business to attract customers.

Insights on Google My Business.

The Upgraded Google My Business cost is $50 per month which subject to Google Guaranteed’s normal eligibility rules, that include background and licensing checks. The yearly cost of the upgraded program would be $600 when the eligibility requirements are met.

According to Archive.org, this Google Guaranteed was introduced in connection with Local Services Ads dates from April 30, 2020, to instill greater consumer trust and confidence in the advertised businesses. But, it has also advanced into a different program used to certify local businesses to ensure their presence in Google Home/Assistant search results.

Last year, Google announced a similar program for professional services called Google Screened. So, Screened will be next if Google decides to roll out upgraded Google My Business profiles to professional services categories.

Conclusion

In my assumption this new program has two paths forward: one, Google adds new features to the “upgraded Google My business profile” that give added incentives to participate, and Second, there will be an a la carte approach, similar to what Yelp has done with its licensing related trust badging.

As mentioned above an upgraded Google My business profile may become necessary for businesses to use against their competitors to attract leads.

What do you think; will it be effective than the old positive word of mouth approach?

 

60+ SureFire ECommerce Statistics That Will Guide Your Strategy in 2020

From the way we network with people to the way we gather our information, we’re steadily moving everything online. And there is no exception for shopping as well.

In recent decades, online shopping becomes a multibillion-dollar industry. Millions of people around the globe buying goods and services online and amid the COVID-19 pandemic it has increased more than ever before. One of the main reasons why online shopping has grown so much over the past years is the speed and convenience that eCommerce businesses are able to provide to their customers.

If you’ve got an eCommerce business, or are interested in starting an online store for your business then it’s important to know the data behind eCommerce. Data is incredible, with it, you can make informed strategic decisions for your eCommerce business that will pay dividends in the future.

So, in this article, I’ve rounded up the most amazing eCommerce statistics that will help you build a strategic plan for your eCommerce business. Let’s get started, shall we?

Here’s a quick menu of what you’re going to acquire from this article: 

  1. General eCommerce Statistics
  2. Shopping Cart eCommerce Statistics
  3. Email eCommerce Statistics
  4. Social Media eCommerce Statistics
  5. Mobile eCommerce Statistics

Essential Facts about Ecommerce Websites in 2020

Let’s begin with some interesting facts about eCommerce websites to give you an idea of how big the industry actually is.

Approximately there are 12 million to 24 million eCommerce sites across the world, with more and more new sites being created every single day. Even eCommerce seems like a competitive market, lots of eCommerce sites sell more than $1,000/year, so there are tons of opportunities for growth.

People all over the globe understand the benefits of eCommerce, hence eCommerce sites are continuously on the rise. Based on the Invesp research, the countries with the leading average eCommerce revenue per shopper are:

As per BELVG statistics by gender, the difference between the percentage of female and male shoppers are:

So, now you have an idea about the penetrating growth of the eCommerce industry, let’s take a look at the important eCommerce statistics in 2020. Buckle up!

Fast-Forwarding eCommerce Statistics for 2020

 

 1. General eCommerce Statistics

Ecommerce is thriving vigorously that by 2021, eCommerce is expected to generate $4.5 trillion revenue in sales per year. And according to the below eCommerce Statistics, the future of selling products online seems bright.

 

  1. Inviqa stats tell that 59% of Millennials will go to Amazon first for their online shopping, making online retail as Amazon Era.
  2. In Nasdaq stats, they mentioned that by 2040, nearly 95% of all purchases will be through eCommerce.
  3. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 61% of online consumers in the United States have made their purchases based on recommendations from blogs.
  4. According to CNBCstatement, in 2017 44% of all US eCommerce sales happened on Amazon.
  5. Based on OptinMonster stats 93.5% of the world’s internet users have purchased products online
  6. According to UPS, 55% of online shoppers tell their family and friends when they aren’t satisfied with a product or company.
  7. According to Drift, around 50% of people prefer to purchase something from a website’s chatbot using conversational marketing.
  8. GeoMarketing stats tell that 76% of people like to go to a physical store for their holiday shopping.
  9. According to Venture Harbour, Multi-step forms in WordPress can lead to 300% more conversions.
  10. Based on BigCommerce data, the eCommerce industry is growing by 23% each year, yet 46% of American small businesses still don’t have a website for their businesses.
  11. UPS data says that 32% of online shoppers own at least one connected home device.
  12. According to Invesp, only 2.86% of eCommerce website visits convert into a purchase.
  13. Walker Sands stats says that In the US, 2 in 5 consumers (41%) receive 1-2 packages from Amazon per week and that increases to 50% for consumers ages 18-25, and 57% for consumers ages 26-35.
  14. KPMG stated that the main reason for people to prefer online shopping is that they’re able to shop at all hours of the day.
  15. OptinMonster stats suggested that in the last year businesses have lost $756 billion because of poor eCommerce personalization.
  16. Amex research found that 6 out of 10 American shoppers use self-service tools for their concerns including websites (24%), mobile apps (14%), voice response systems, and VoIP (13%) or online live chat (12%).
  17. Nielsen stated that worldwide, 57% of online shoppers buy from retailers who are overseas.
  18. According to Kinsta around the globe, credit cards are the most preferred method of payment, being used in 53% of transactions, followed by digital payment systems at 43%, and debit cards at 38%.
  19. Based on the State of Conversion Optimization Report 68% of small businesses don’t have a structured or documented conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategy.
  20. According to Practical eCommerce, mobile shopping hit $2 billion for the first time on Cyber Monday in 2017.
  21. B2XPartners report suggested that 69% of B2B businesses say they expect to stop printing catalogs within 5 years.
  22. Absolunet stated that Amazon is making an AI-based, real-time product recommendation engine available to sellers who use the AWS console.

 

 2. Shopping Cart eCommerce Statistics

An online shopping cart is the last step before customers make their final purchase. And shopping cart is where a lot of actions happen for your customers since it’s an important stage of your eCommerce sales funnel. As an eCommerce, you’re well aware that shopping cart abandonment hurts your eCommerce business bottom line. So, have a look at the below eCommerce Statistics to improve your Shopping Cart.

  1. According to MCM, 5% of SMEs increase their profits by offering free shipping.
  2. Baymard Institute stats say that if you require account creation during the checkout process, 23% of people will abandon carts immediately.
  3. OptinMonster statistics tell that Exit-Intent popups have helped recover 53% of abandoning visitors.
  4. Based on Baymard Institute data the average cart abandonment rate across all industries is 69.89%.
  5. According to Baymard Institute stats the biggest reason for shopping cart abandonment is extra costs that are too high.
  6. Baymard Institute stated that Slow-loading eCommerce sites increase the abandonment rate by 75%.
  7. OptinMonster research data revealed that the product with the highest abandonment rate is clothing (40%), followed by tech (18%), and home products (16%).
  8. According to Disruptive Advertising stats an average abandonment rate of nearly 70%, eCommerce sites could be losing a total of $3 billion a year.
  9. Baymard Institute data stated that the eCommerce sites can gain a 35% increase in conversion rates with an optimized checkout design.
  10. OptinMonster data revealed that mobile has the worst cart abandonment rate of all devices at 78%, followed by tablets (70%), and desktops/laptops (67%).

 3. Email eCommerce Statistics

The email has the highest ROI compared to other digital marketing campaigns, so, using email marketing for your eCommerce business is essential. Email is a wonderful tool to generate leads and nurture a good relationship with your customers. If you aren’t already using email marketing for your online business, the following stats will make you to opt for email marketing for your eCommerce venture.

 

  1. B2B Marketing Community research found that the B2B eCommerce market sees success in their email marketing campaigns because emails provide compelling content for each stage of the customer journey.
  2. Based on Smart Insights, 58% of the top 1,000 US online retailers send welcome emails.
  3. Statista stats say that nearly 61% of consumers prefer to be contacted by brands via email.
  4. According to OptinMonster data email marketing yields $44 for each $1 spent for a 4400% ROI.
  5. Based on OptinMonster email marketing was responsible for 24% of holiday sales during the 2018 holiday eCommerce season.
  6. Campaign Monitor data revealed that segmented campaigns to email subscribers drive a 760% increase in revenue.
  7. According to Moosend data, abandoned cart emails have an average open rate of 45%.
  8. Based on com stats, nonprofits lose about $15k/year in donations due to spam filters blocking fundraising campaign emails.
  9. OptinMonster stats suggested that 60% of consumers made a purchase as the result of an email marketing message they received.
  10. According to Experian transactional emails, get 8x more opens and clicks than any other type of email campaign and make 6x more money.
  11. Based on Wolfgang Digital data email marketing contributes to 20% of the traffic which driving eCommerce sales.

 4.Social Media eCommerce Statistics

If you want to see a huge boost in your eCommerce profits, you need to include social media in your digital marketing strategy. You love it or not social media is one of the best ways to make more money online and grow your eCommerce site. The eCommerce statistics below will explain to you why social media deserves your attention.

 

  1. nChannel stats say that 25% of US shoppers consult social media before buying a gift for their family and friends.
  2. According to BigCommerce, on average eCommerce sites publish 4.55 posts a week on their Facebook page.
  3. Kinsta stats tell that 74% of consumers rely on their social networks to make purchasing decisions.
  4. BigCommerce data stated that online stores with a social media presence have an average of 32% more sales opportunities than those that don’t.
  5. According to DreamGrow stats, the number of marketers sharing video content on LinkedIn is set to rise to 65% in 2021.
  6. eMarketer data suggested that worldwide ad spending on Facebook and Instagram combined will reach nearly $95 billion annually in 2021.
  7. Based on Shopify data 85% of orders from social media sites come from Facebook.
  8. Neil Patel stated that social media posts with photos get 53% more Likes, 104% more comments, and 84% higher click-through rates.
  9. According to Locowise, 75% of Instagram users have taken an action, such as visiting a website, after looking at an Instagram advertising post.
  10. According to Neil Patel, Social media posts with 80 characters or less get 66% more engagement.
  11. Shopify statistics say that the average order value for customers referred from Instagram is $65.00, followed by Facebook ($55), Twitter ($46), and YouTube ($38).

 

 5. Mobile eCommerce Statistics

If you want to run a successful eCommerce business, you should do mobile optimization for your eCommerce website. If you think mCommerce is not a big deal, you’d be surprised you’d be interested to know that 67% of users like to do window shopping for fun on their smartphones. That’s why improving your site’s mobile usage can help you to catch those potential shoppers. And the following eCommerce statistics give you a better idea of the importance of mCommerce.

 

  1. According to OuterBox, 40% of all online purchases made during the holiday season are done on smartphones.
  2. Statista statistics revealed that 93% of Millennials have compared online deals using a mobile device.
  3. Based on Invesp data 32% of shoppers changed their minds about purchasing items after checking out the product information on their mobile devices within a physical store.
  4. KPMG stats suggested that 65% of consumers look up price comparisons on mobile while in a physical store.
  5. According to Marketing Land Data, Conversion rates from mobile apps are 3x higher than mobile websites.
  6. Based on Statista stats 82% of Internet users in the United States have used a mobile device to shop online.
  7. According to Google, 73% of consumers will switch from a poorly designed mobile site to one that makes purchasing easier.
  8. Invesp stats tell that 53% of smartphone and tablet owners will shop on company-specific apps.
  9. According to Flurry Analytics, 90% of the time spent on mobile devices is spent on apps.
  10. Google stated that people who have a negative experience in your mobile store are 62% less likely to purchase from you in the future.
  11. According to CopyBlogger Making CTA buttons can create a 45% boost in clicks.
  12. Based on Practical eCommerce stats, sales from mCommerce on both Black Friday and Cyber Monday in 2018 were more than $2 billion, breaking the previous records set the year before.
  13. Google stats revealed that if page loading times change from 1 second to 3 seconds, bounce rates on mobile sites increase 32%.
  14. According to Adobe, people’s friends have the most influence on mobile purchasing decisions over email marketing, online ads, or Facebook.

Major Takeaways from the ECommerce Statistics

  1. Overall revenue of eCommerce is growing rapidly
  2. Nearly half of all online shopping is done through mobile
  3. Most of online consumers love innovative technology
  4. Many shopping cart abandonment is preventable.
  5. Social media is a major digital strategy to boost eCommerce revenue

Conclusion

Here you have the whole bunch of stats! Hopefully, these eCommerce statistics offer you a snapshot of the current state of the eCommerce industry. Undoubtedly 2020 is an exciting time for eCommerce. And, now you have a better idea to approach your eCommerce and have the statistics to level up your game on the online market.

Is there anything else you’d like to know about eCommerce statistics and wish was added in this post? Let me know them in the comments below!

 

Top 15 LinkedIn Mistakes That Will Make You Look Unprofessional in 2021

When it comes to LinkedIn, lots of people tell you what you should be doing, but what about what you shouldn’t be doing?

LinkedIn is not just the place to find the right people but also to be found. Therefore, you need a LinkedIn profile that not only helps you get found but also will entice people to connect with you once they view your profile.

“Active participation on LinkedIn is the best way to say, ‘Look at me!’ without saying ‘Look at me!”

                                                                                                 – Bobby Darnell, Principal of Construction Market Consultants

I see many people making fundamental LinkedIn profile mistakes on their LinkedIn that hugely impact their professional networking on the platform. If you’re spending your precious time putting together a LinkedIn profile, I assume you really want to maximize your opportunities of being connected with the right people on LinkedIn, right?

Keeping that in mind, I’ve listed down some of the specific LinkedIn mistakes which can easily be avoided, so that you can get the most out of LinkedIn.

1. Having an Incomplete LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn offers a set of comprehensive sections that all provide you with the opportunity to showcase your expertise, skills, accomplishments, interests and current links to your business sites.

If you keep those sections incomplete or skimpy, it can send a negative message about your brand credibility. It can create a bad impression on your personality that you just don’t care, or you don’t follow through and finish things. That’s why I put this point at the top of my LinkedIn mistakes list.

Even though if you don’t need to fill out all the sections, makesure to complete the main sections to give a well-rounded profile view of your LinkedIn headline, summary, post activities, experience, skills, endorsements, education and other additional information.

2. Having an Inappropriate Headshot

The most primary thing people will first notice is your LinkedIn profile picture (Headshot). You know what? Within seven seconds a person will make several judgments about who you are which means you have only a few seconds to make a good first impression. And that is well-apt for your LinkedIn profile picture as well. So, now you understood why keeping an inappropriate headshot is one of the major LinkedIn mistakes, right?

Remember, an unprofessional or inappropriate profile picture is an immediate perception killer and a connection killer. As LinkedIn is a professional networking site with a bunch of professional and academic people, makesure your profile picture portrays the image that you want to be aligned with.

For example, consider the following two images as two LinkedIn profiles. One person, you might want to party with. But which person would you hire as an employee or consultant, and entrust with your most important business concerns? Hope, now you got your answer!

3. Failing to Personalize Your Profile URL

LinkedIn allows you to personalize your LinkedIn URL by including your name, instead of gibberish numbers.

If you want to promote your LinkedIn profile in your community, the best way to do that is with a customized profile URL that reflects your name or business name rather than the default string of numbers that are assigned to your LinkedIn account when you join LinkedIn. This is one of the main LinkedIn mistakes that may make People wonder about your seriousness as you don’t take the few minutes to set up a personalized profile URL.

To personalize your LinkedIn profile URL, just follow these below steps:

1) Hover your mouse over the Profile link in the top navigation bar and then click the Edit Profile option.

2) Below your profile picture, you can see a URL that starts with linkedin.com/in/ Click the Edit link option next to the URL.

3) Scroll down until you see Your Public Profile URL header along the right side of the screen.

4) Click the Customize Your Public Profile URL link. Then enter your own custom URL (start from 5 to 30 characters) in the text box. Mostly, people use a combination of their first and last names or their business name. You can enter letters and numbers only, cannot use spaces, symbols, or any other special characters.

5) Click the blue Set Custom URL button to save your entry and change your LinkedIn profile URL. After this point, your old URL is no longer functional, so make sure you update any references that include your LinkedIn URL.

4. Providing Inaccurate Career Information

This point shouldn’t need to be said but, unfortunately, it does. Never lie or fabricate your career information in your LinkedIn profile experience section. Jenifer DeLoach, who supervises background checks for corporate clients at Kroll Inc stated that “about 20% of job seekers and employees undergoing background checks by their companies are found to have exaggerated their educational credentials. Those seeking jobs usually get turned down when discrepancies appear.”

Never pad your resume. If you didn’t do something then don’t post about it. If you kind of did something don’t inflate to make it sound better. Trust me guys, it’s one of the huge LinkedIn mistakes that will make you regret it forever. Because somebody will eventually find out the truth and when they do, your career in that industry will essentially be over.

Therefore, it’s always best, to tell the truth about whatever you have done and accomplished. Also, learn to celebrate what you have achieved, not what you wish you’d achieved.

5. Not Including Brief Job Descriptions 

Even if you’ve listed positions at companies that you previously worked, it means nothing if you don’t have any job descriptions. Because when you leave out dates and descriptions of your prior jobs it makes them seem like they didn’t really exist or it may seem like you are trying to hide something.  So, don’t commit this mistake from the LinkedIn mistakes list.

Always, provide accurate dates and a simple description of your real jobs and your contributions that unfold your career story and the skill sets you’ve delivered. These job descriptions also provide you with the perfect opportunity to pepper your profile with keywords that will help you get found. Why aren’t you taking advantage of this?

6. Not Frequent Status Updates

Consistently showing up is the way to make people get to know us, in all our activities, whether at office or gym, in the social and community activities or even enjoying our favourite hobbies like singing and dancing with others, it’s important to maintain the consistency.

The same way, the more regular and consistent we are on LinkedIn, the more people will expect to see our activity. In nutshell, once in a blue moon appearance won’t work on LinkedIn because too much time in-between your LinkedIn activity updates will interrupt your networking and relationship building.

Also, it seems like you are not serious about being on LinkedIn. So, be consistent even if it’s three to four times a week, it will help you to establish a strong connection on LinkedIn and you can contribute to other’s activities on LinkedIn as well.

7. Doing Over Posting on LinkedIn

The flip side of not frequent status updates is “Doing Over Posting”. And these two LinkedIn mistakes should be avoided. Fast Company shared a guide on how often to post on LinkedIn and other social channels.

According to it, if you look at the top influencer like Richard Branson’s LinkedIn profile, you can see he publishes his articles on a weekly basis and does short updates 2 to 3 times a day. In my opinion, that’s a good formula to follow. But, you can find and follow your own formula which is convenient for you.

8. Not Personalizing Your LinkedIn Connection Requests

Each time you press “connect” on someone’s LinkedIn profile, an automatic message is sent to them that says something like: “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.” This cold and generic message isn’t likely to improve your opportunities of actually connecting with people.

Therefore, it’s really good to take the time to research your potential connections and personalize your message to them, so they know you took the time to get to know them. Include something specific that you know about them. It will be highly appreciated. Here’s an example of how to do that:

“I enjoyed reading your latest blog “Top 10 Powerful LinkedIn Automation Tools for Maximize Your Lead Generation Efforts in 2020” and I would like to connect with you on LinkedIn.”

Here’s another example, this time a little more in-depth:

“Thanks so much for sharing your knowledge about LinkedIn through your blogs & webinars. I’m looking forward to meeting you sooner. Congratulations on your new Startup, that’s truly exciting. I’ll be on the lookout for its official launch.”

9. Connect to People and Sell Immediately

Don’t connect with people and then immediately send them your sales pitch. It’s one of the terrible LinkedIn mistakes. Remember, a relationship first. People don’t want to know your latest offers in your business or on your website as soon as they connect with you. Be patient and engage to build your commonalities by getting involved in their LinkedIn activities and comment on their posts.

Otherwise, you’ll make your new connections to regret their decision to accept your connection request. It’s always good to build your way up to sales activity after you have earned some trust and developed a good professional relationship with your connections.

10. Asking for Recommendations/Endorsements from People You Barely Know

If you need an introduction with a person, look at the common connections that you have on LinkedIn and reach out to somebody you actually know and are connected to, then ask that person to give you an intro with the person that you want to connect. I sometimes reach out to people this way to invite them to be a guest speaker on my webinars.

This is completely different from sending a request to someone you met once at a conference or networking event, then asking that person to endorse your skills or recommend your services. How would that person know enough about your skills and services to give an endorsement or recommendation? It’s totally unreasonable, never do it. Get the endorsements and recommendations from the people who are well aware of your skills and services.

11. Sending Spammy Direct Messages

Never send uninvited, promotional direct messages through LinkedIn to people, whether you’ve just connected or have been connected for years, it’s a relationship faux pas to send irrelevant messages to your connections. By irrelevant messages, I mean those messages that people send out which are not personalized in any way or totally irrelevant to that specific connection.

For example, if your connection is not in an eCommerce industry, it makes absolutely no sense to send them a message telling them that you’ll provide budget-friendly dropshipping services for their eCommerce. We usually get irritated when we get spam messages, so, don’t send it to others.

12. Posting Negative Comments on LinkedIn

Remember, LinkedIn is a professional networking platform, so, never post negative, emotionally-controversial or shocking comments on others posts or in groups. It’s one of the must-avoid LinkedIn mistakes.

Also, it’s always best to stay away from politics, religion and sexuality topics. And talking about these topics never going to give you any business benefits, therefore it’s safe to stay away from them.

If you have a different opinion or a contrarian view, state it professionally, it will be highly welcomed.

13. Being Self Serving in LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn groups should be where like-minded people get together to exchange their, knowledge, ideas and information. If you’re joining groups on LinkedIn, it’s an opportunity to become a part of the insightful conversations and share valuable knowledge, not to pitch and sell your business.

Follow the conversations in the groups; add value by sharing your knowledge and ideas. But, don’t use LinkedIn groups to promote your self-serving interests. You can still, use LinkedIn groups for your advantage by demonstrating your expertise knowledge and add value to the group conversations.

14. Not Including Your Websites Links on Your Profile.

Contrary to the above point, you can be a little self-serving in your LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn is a great hub to organize and post all your links and information. Sure, people could search all around the Web to find information about your websites, your blog, your social media channels and so on. But, why make them search? When you can provide them with all the details in one platform. And it’s okay to talk about yourself on your profile.

15. Using LinkedIn Like Other Social Media Channels

We need to understand LinkedIn is NOT Facebook or any other social media channels. It’s a professional networking platform that features professional business content to educate and inform people to facilitate their professional networking and career.

When you’re posting on LinkedIn, makesure the content is repute as a source of reliable and credible business information. Also, you can enhance the text message by adding images and videos that best demonstrate your text message. Even I added this one as my last point, this is one of the must-avoid LinkedIn mistakes. So, consider this point as much serious as other 14 points.

 

Conclusion

LinkedIn is indeed the perfect platform to build your personal brand and reputation, along with creating your key professional connections. It all depends on how you use it. If you use LinkedIn in the best way possible by telling your professional story and showcasing your expertise, you can able to build true and authentic professional relationships that you will find valuable. On the other hand, if you use LinkedIn as a free marketing space, you’ll likely be disappointed with the results that you receive at the end. The below quote from the Co-Founder of LinkedIn also demonstrate the same:

“If you can get better at your job, you should be an active member of LinkedIn, because LinkedIn should be connecting you to the information, insights and people to be more effective.”

                                                                                                         –Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder of LinkedIn

I hope the above list of what not to do on LinkedIn helps you to learn about what you should do on LinkedIn. Like I said before, if you present yourself professionally on LinkedIn in an authentic way, LinkedIn can be a great experience for you!

Top 10 Powerful LinkedIn Automation Tools for Maximize Your Lead Generation Efforts in 2020

Having more than 675 million members from 200 countries, LinkedIn has cemented its authority as the number one professional social media network for corporates and job hunters to spread the word about their brand and products. With that being the case, LinkedIn is the go-to resource for anybody to get connected with different prospects from allies to clients, among other peers.

In my previous posts, I’ve discussed LinkedIn social selling and important LinkedIn groups for marketers. While, today, in this post I’m going to examine 10 of the best LinkedIn automation tools that can help you become an acumen LinkedIn marketing expert.

I’ll give you the finer details of each LinkedIn automation tool based on my research in the criteria like the tool’s features, reliability, reputation among the users, customers’ feedback, customer care support, frequent updates of the software, trending technologies used in their features, the end-results customers get by using the tool, etc. So, while going through the post, you’ll realize that you can use any of the 10 LinkedIn automation tools for your present and future LinkedIn marketing plan.

It’s my hope that by the end of this article, you’ll have a better understanding of how to use LinkedIn to improve your lead generation and social selling while building trust among your prospects.

Let’s dive into the 10 LinkedIn automation tools to help you nail as a LinkedIn marketing pro.

1. Salesintel.io

Salesintel.io is one of the super easy and intuitive LinkedIn automation tools. Using salesintel.io sales and marketing professionals can find new LinkedIn contact data for prospects to start and close more deals and updating current contacts with accurate data. Salesintel.io users can filter data by tech stack, metro area, industry, position, and more. The salesintel.io service also includes a free Chrome extension to find contact data while visiting a prospect’s website or LinkedIn profile.

Here are some key features of salesintel.io:

  1. Salesintel.io provides research-on-demand for your niche market with its well-experienced research team.
  2. Use multiple filters to easily identify your target contacts and build lists for email marketing, events, and more.
  3. With the SalesIntel and Bombora integration, you can identify and reach out to the companies already looking for a solution.
  4. With accurate, updated data, you can reach out to the right people and close more deals.
  5. Research on demand with fast human verification.
  6. Search by intent topics let you actively monitored; learn what your prospects are interested in before you reach out to them.

Nothing is worse than spending time pounding away on the phone with bad contact information. Salesintel.io solves that problem with their research on demand and salesintel.io reverify the data every 90 days to maintain high accuracy and avoid data decay.

2. We-connect.io 

We-connect.io is one of the safest and affordable LinkedIn automation tools. Through we-connect.io you can able to reach very targeted people to link in with them and it will automatically set up a follow-up email once they accepted your LinkedIn request. Also, you can easily reach out to more than 100X people on LinkedIn using this automation tool. We-connect.io offers Powerful analytics and a dashboard to monitor your new connections on LinkedIn, focus on new opportunities, and drive meaningful conversations with email and chat-style interface.

With multiple We-connect.io features, here are the highlighted ones:

  1. Cloud-based automation tool, so no need to download any extension or software.
  2. Sync We-Connect with your CRM and other third-party apps.
  3. You can invite new LinkedIn connections, message, endorse, auto-follow, and visit profiles.
  4. Mark the replies from contacts as leads, follow-up, archive, and unread.
  5. Works well with free LinkedIn Account and Sales Navigator
  6. Run segmented campaigns based on job titles, industry, geography, company size, or any other filters available in LinkedIn or Sales Navigator.
  7. Create multiple campaigns. The next campaign automatically starts after the existing campaign completes.
  8. Get instant alerts when a prospect replies, the campaign starts or completes, and a captcha is detected, etc.
  9. Campaign level stats and charts allow you to compare different campaign stats in numeric and percentages.

We-connect.io helps you to automate professional networking on LinkedIn by assisting you to discover knowledge, insights, and opportunities 10 X faster. We-connect.io is best designed for busy sales & marketing professionals, entrepreneurs, business owners, recruiters, and professionals.

3. Leadleaper.com

LeadLeaper is one of the perfect LinkedIn automation tools as it provides useful features that LinkedIn doesn’t have, such as lets you build a list of dozens of contacts from your LinkedIn searches, gives you verified business email address for each of your LinkedIn contacts, and enables you to capture hundreds of prospects with a single click. LeadLeaper comes at affordable prices for organizations of any size and you can easily integrate it with Salesforce, and other CRMs.

Below are some of the highlighted features on LeadLeaper:

  1. LeadLeaper LinkedIn email finder empowers you to find and capture 100’s of new LinkedIn leads.
  2. LeadLeaper automatically adds the new lead to your selected list including the lead’s name, title, employer, and verified business email address.
  3. LeadLeaper’s open tracking and email history options let you notify whenever a lead opens your email.
  4. You can integrate LeadLeaper with LinkedIn free / Premium accounts, Sales Navigator, LinkedIn Recruiters, G Suite Email, Office 365 Email, and more.

LeadLeaper continuously upgrades its service so you can easily source your leads and LeadLeaper setup is simple hence it really makes finding leads on LinkedIn more efficient. Altogether, LeadLeaper is definitely a helpful tool for anyone looking to get in contact with someone they don’t know directly on LinkedIn.

4. Snov.io 

 

Snov.io is your perfect outreach automation platform for efficient contact management and CRM. This automation platform offers many useful tools, from email finders to well-designed email campaigns. It also provides a great variety of tools for lead generation, email verification, email sending, and email tracking. Especially snovio allows you to launch your own automated drip email campaigns to nurture your leads and gain their trust.

There are many features of Snov.io, here are the most important ones:

  1. Email Finder helps you to find the email addresses by domain, company name or via Boolean Search.
  2. Verify emails to get a clean list of email addresses that you need the most
  3. Snovio.io Email Drip Campaigns lets you create your personalized drip email sequence that gives you more control in your workflow.
  4. You can set email tracking for your Gmail accounts.
  5. Through the Email Finder chrome extension, you can collect high-quality contacts from any website you visit.
  6. You can Integrate Snov.io with your social media apps, CRMs, customer support platforms and other tools.
  7. You can manage your prospects by sync your leads with Snov.io API
  8. You can find out what technology your prospective clients use in their websites which help you to understand their pain points and needs.

Using these features you can find more convertible leads, verify your contacts, track your lead’s progress, and automate your outreach on LinkedIn which saves your time and improve your revenue and personalized automated outreach with over 2000 integration options. Snovio.io is best for sales reps, recruiters, event organizers, freelancers, startup CEOs, and marketing specialists like link builders, PR specialists, and outreach specialists.

5. Linkedhelper.com

Linkedhelper is one of the amazing LinkedIn automation tools that can help you to organize and simplify all the processes needed to boost your LinkedIn profile. Actually, this automation software is a Chrome extension and desktop application that can automate LinkedIn functions like messaging first connections, inviting new people to connect, inviting first connections to join a group, creating autoresponder messaging for new LinkedIn connections, etc. in a larger scale.

Let’s have a look at the key features of Linkedhelper:

  1. You can get thousands of targeted contacts by sending personalized invitations
  2. Auto-mailing system, Auto-Responder, Sequential Messaging to 1st connections or LinkedIn Group Members
  3. You can add a personalized message for your connection requests
  4. Automatic Profiles Visiting & Export to CSV file and build targeted mailing list
  5. Boost your LinkedIn profile and help you to get hundreds of endorsements from fellow LinkedIn users
  6. Endorse your contacts automatically to get endorsements in return
  7. Powerful Lists manager – allows building your own lead generation funnel

Using Linkedhelper can benefit you generate leads using LinkedIn. People in the SEO field also use this automation tool for outreach, so the Linkedhelper tool can be used for a wide range of interactions with people if you think outside of the box.

6. Dux-Soup

Best Linkedin Lead Gen Tool Duxsoup

 

With Dux-Soup LinkedIn lead generation tool it’s easy to find, attract and engage with your prospects on LinkedIn. Dux-Soup automatically views your prospects’ LinkedIn profiles, endorses their skills, follows their LinkedIn activity, and sends personalized messages on your behalf. You can also set up an automated LinkedIn drip campaign for your prospects that stops automatically when you get a response from your prospects.

Here are the main features you can enjoy by using Dux-Soup automation tool:

  1. Turn LinkedIn into a lead management system.
  2. You can easily find previously tagged LinkedIn profiles for follow-up actions
  3. You can upload your own list of profiles for micro-targeted sales campaigns
  4. You can follow up your LinkedIn connections with automated messages or set up a longer-term drip campaign.
  5. You can download the LinkedIn profiles details and upload them to your CRM for easy lead management

With all these above features Dux-Soup lead generation tool allows you to select your LinkedIn prospects, automate your LinkedIn functions, organize the results of your campaigns and let you share your leads. Therefore, it’s a comprehensive tool to automate your lead generation on LinkedIn.

7. Drift.com

Drift is one of the best conversational marketing tools. You can use drift to provide a modern buying experience for your potential customers, generate more qualified leads through LinkedIn, and dramatically accelerate your sales cycle. Usually, traditional marketing and sales rely on forms, calls, and countless follow-up emails, but, drift connects you with visitors in real-time using bots and artificial intelligence.

Drift offers some of these key features to you:

  1. Automate your sales and marketing experience with AI-powered solutions.
  2. Connect with your best buyers through live chat
  3. You can engage more leads with conversational email
  4. You can open and close more deals with sales video

Drift helps you to streamline your lead creation process with your potential customers and save both yours and your customers’ time by automating the calendaring and support request process with web chat functionality, email automation, and it connects very well with the other sales tools you use.

8. elinkPro.com

eLink Pro marketing software is one of the best LinkedIn automation tools for sales. eLink attracts and connects sales prospects to your LinkedIn, and help you to streamline your LinkedIn sales funnels. If you want to make your LinkedIn profile into a sales magnet by professionally increase your network on LinkedIn and successfully drive your online influence, the eLink Pro is the right choice for you. Also, eLink Pro is a perfect companion for users of LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Linkedin Recruiter, LinkedIn SalesForce, Sales Navigator for Gmail, LinkedIn CRM Social Selling, and LinkedIn Hubspot.

eLink Pro features to automate your LinkedIn functions:

  1. You can target your clients on LinkedIn, access their data, and export details to Excel to streamline your CRM management.
  2. eLink Pro helps you to get your target audience to engage with you back
  3. eLink Pro grows your connections at the scale of social media.
  4. You can streamline your LinkedIn functions by using search filters together with the Campaign Scheduler.

eLink Pro is a fully-featured LinkedIn automation tool that is designed to serve Enterprises, Startups by offering Keyword Filtering, Post Scheduling, Analytics, Automated Publishing, Customer Targeting at one place for automating your LinkedIn lead generation.

9. LeadConnect.io

LeadConnect is one of the most traditional LinkedIn automation tools for Lead Generation. This automation tool helps you to find your targeted Prospects and nurture them for your business and grow your sales funnel in a short time by assisting you to generate Quality Leads from LinkedIn. Simple searches with LeadConnect in your field will reveal thousands of peer experts, service providers, and potential clients on LinkedIn. LeadConnect supports CSV Imports, and Sales Navigator Search as well.

LeadConnect features to automate your lead generation process on LinkedIn:

  1. LeadConnect helps you to create, implement and manage your outreach approach with actionable insights.
  2. Offers you LinkedIn automation functionalities and sales prospecting with campaigns/sequences.
  3. You can contact an unlimited number of prospects daily with personalized auto sequences and build predictable revenue.
  4. You can automate follow-up message and response tracking

LeadConnect automates your lead generation efforts on LinkedIn with personalized multiple Follow-ups. also, sync prospect details to Hubspot automatically with a click. Hence, if you are a salesperson or marketing agency who wants to get Leads from LinkedIn outreach then LeadConnect will offer you the best automation service to improve your lead generation.

10. Growth-hacking.io

Growth-hacking.io is one of the effective cloud-based LinkedIn automation tools to automate your LinkedIn Lead Generation that put your LinkedIn outreach on autopilot. Growth-hacking.io Scrapers targeted Websites for Phone Numbers, Emails, Social Media and check which Website Plugins they use to segment your leads. Simply Growth-hacking.io helps you to step up your marketing game with High-Quality APIs, Scrapers, Automation Tools, and Workflows.

Growth-hacking features to grow your LinkedIn leads:

  1. You can send automated LinkedIn connection requests
  2. You can set up LinkedIn Messages on autopilot.
  3. You can extract Job titles, emails, companies, employees, phone numbers, and more
  4. You can track whether users reply to your outreach
  5. You can extract your LinkedIn contacts and sync your CRM.

Growth-hacking.io helps you to outgrow your competitors by automating your marketing outreach with High-Quality APIs, Scrapers, Automation Tools, and Workflows. Choosing this LinkedIn automation tool will help you to keep track of your LinkedIn lead generation with simple yet flexible documentation.

Conclusion

Comparing to other social networking channels like Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn offers you the top-level B2B networking opportunities. There are many LinkedIn automation tools from software programs, bots to browser plugins/extensions. So, it’s important to get the right tool with solid testimonials that showing real ROI.

While choosing your LinkedIn automation tool, look for a consistent track record of customer support from the team behind the tool. Check:

  1. Are you able to get access to customer support?
  2. Can you able to speak to the relevant people behind the tool?
  3. How is customer support offered?

Just choosing the right automation tool is not enough; you need to follow the right LinkedIn automation practices to get the result. Here is the list of best LinkedIn automation practices:

  1. Treat your LinkedIn automation tools like any other automation tool and use it sensibly.
  2. While selecting your automation tool, think about your core objectives: whom you want to reach on LinkedIn and what will encourage your prospects to respond to your connection request?
  3. Always stick with the LinkedIn usage limits unless If you are ready to take risk of penalties.
  4. Be as targeted as you can in your prospect outreach on LinkedIn. It will help you to receive dividends.
  5. Personalize your interactions on LinkedIn to increase your chances to get responses from your prospects.
  6. Practice good housekeeping rules on LinkedIn.
  7. Create a plan for the extra time you’ll get in your hands by automating your LinkedIn functions – Find out, how can you use that time most productively in your business?

Growing your network massively on LinkedIn is not enough. You need to use your network in the right way to make your LinkedIn network result in your business. With the help of these top 10 LinkedIn automation tools, you can take the highest advantage of your LinkedIn network. From better organizing, your LinkedIn contacts to streamlining your sales funnel, these automation tools help you to become a better player in the world of LinkedIn marketing which nurtures your business in real-time.

Do you use any of the above tools for your LinkedIn automation process? Feel free to share your opinions about them in the comment section below.

Top 10 Outstanding Social Media Management Tools for 2020

Unless, if you’ve been living in a forest cave for the recent decade. You already know the importance of social media to increase your brand awareness, generate more leads, and especially get more conversions.

However, managing your presence on social media can be extremely time-consuming with so many diverse tasks like designing graphics, scheduling posts in different social media profiles, monitoring performance, tracking analytics, etc. And it can be difficult to find the skills and manpower to execute all these tasks effectively. Therefore, you need the right strategy and the right social media management tools for your social media Campaigns.

Thankfully, there are thousands of social media tools in the market, but, not all of them can be classified as social media management tools. So, today I’ve picked up the 10 best social media management tools that could be essential for you in 2020.

We’re going to have a bit longer ride. So, put your seatbelt on and get ready!

What Makes a Good Social Media Management Tool?

Before we get into the tools, let’s talk about what a good social media management tool actually is. A good social media tool is an all-in-one tool that helps you to manage your social media presence effectively in multiple social media channels. And here are some key features social media management tools should have.

1) Help You to Save Time

The purpose of using a social media tool is to do similar tasks in less time with better results than you could without it. So, choose the social media management tools that not just automate a process but also give you quality results.

2) Easy to Use

You can save time only if social media management tools are easy and simple to learn how to use. Many social media tools offer tutorials about how to use their tools and some have excellent customer service where you can get immediate expert advice if you need help in choosing the best user-friendly tool that your team could find easy to use.

3) Affordable

Social media management tools should be affordable for your budget. Even you can get many high-quality social media tools for free, so all you need to do is sign up. Whether it’s free or for a cost, find the social media tools that are budget-friendly, then you don’t need to go back and forth with the accounting department to get approval for your budget.

4) Increase Your Brand Awareness

The biggest benefit we gain from our social media presence is brand awareness. So, when you’re choosing your social media management tools, you should make sure their services help you to increase your brand awareness.

5) Keep You Organized

One of the key benefits of social media tools is to keep you organized. So, make sure the social media management tools you’ve selected are efficient in keeping your social media tasks well-organized and tidy. This will help you to monitor your tasks effectively, give easy access to your tasks so you can go back and edit them later and most importantly save much of your precious time.

Top 10 Social media management Tool in 2020

I spend quality time checking these TOP 10 social media management tools quality, price, features, customer feedback, support and trustworthiness. Here is the list of social media management tools that help you with all aspects of handling your social media kingdom.

 
  1. Sprout Social
  2. AgoraPulse
  3. Sendible
  4. Falcon.io
  5. ContentCal
  6. Kontentino
  7. ContentStudio
  8. Hootsuite
  9. Buffer
  10. Planable.io

This post focuses on the following key elements of social media management tools:

  • Publishing – Posting and scheduling your social media posts.
  • Social Engagement – A single dashboard to monitor and manage all your social networks posts, messages and interact with your audience.
  • Audience Management Support – Let you view the insights into your audience to discover the influencers and the most engaged. Like simple social CRM.
  • Supported Networks – Social Media channels that you can manage with the particular social media management tool.
  • Standout Features – The unique features you can get from the specific social media management tool.

Let’s get started! I’ve ranked social media management tools from top to bottom. (Where the tools ranked at the top are highly recommended.)

  1. Sprout Social

 
Build and grow stronger relationships on social

Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media management platform built for connection that helps brands and agencies of all sizes to understand, reach and engage with their audience. This tool is a leader in usability, customer support, ROI, and user adoption which is used by over 20,000+ brands around the world, in businesses like education, hospitality, tech, digital marketing agencies, fashion, and many other businesses. With sprout social, you can easily do social media publishing, in-depth analytics, and engagement across all of your social profiles.

 
  • Publishing: Sprout Social has some cool publishing features that include all the basics and a few more customized features. For example, individual statistics on every post posts review & approval, and schedule multiple social media posts across different profiles.
  • Social Engagement: Sprout Social has the social inbox, social monitoring and keyword searching features that help you monitor your brand on social media. It also allows you to create automated Chatbots to quickly respond to incoming messages.
  • Audience Management Support: Sprout Social has Social CRM that access conversation histories and relevant contact details to provide personalized responses to incoming messages from customers / potential customers. You can also enable Help Desk Integration to create, track and manage support issues of your audience.
  • Supported Networks: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest
 

Pricing:

 
  1. Standard – $99/Month
  2. Professional – $149/Month
  3. Advanced – $249/Month
  4. Each pricing has a free trial offer
 

Standout Features:

  • Offers a single platform to manage all your social media profiles.
  • Give comprehensive audience management support to provide a good customer care service.
  • In-depth analytics and engagement across all of your social profiles.
 

  1. AgoraPulse

 
Powerful features built for easier social media management.

Agorapulse is a simple cloud-based social media management and CRM solutions platform to schedule your social media content, get reports, and engage with your followers. Agorapulse offers social influencer management, social media profile management, and social media analytics is a powerful suite. This social media tool is suitable for different business categories like Small business, Medium business, and Large business.

  • Publishing: AgoraPulse has the automated post feature, where you can queue your evergreen posts, put labels on your content that allow you to save and analyze your every social media post and you can also control who drafts and approves your social media post content.
  • Social Engagement: AgoraPulse combines all your social media profiles conversations in one place, so, you can easily reply, review, or label them. The social inbox feature captures organic/paid post comments, direct/private messages, and reviews in order.
  • Audience Management Support:  AgoraPulse allows you to view public profile information and private notes about each user in your “Fans & Followers” tab that helps you to identify your most passionate fans and followers. With a click on a user, you can review a history of their conversations with your brand.
  • Supported Networks: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn
 

Pricing:

 
  1. Medium (Best for small businesses) – US$79/Month
  2. Large (Best for agencies) – US$159/Month
  3. X-Large (Best for larger organizations) – US$239/Month
  4. Enterprise (Best for large teams with many profiles) – US$399Month
  5. Each pricing has a free trial offer
 

Standout Features:

  • Offers all the publishing options you need for your social media posts publishing management.
  • AgoraPulse combines all your social media profiles conversations in one place.
  • Comprehensive analytics reports to identify which metrics have gone up or down in any given period.
 

  1. Sendible

 
Build stronger brands on social media.

Sendible is a sophisticated social media management tool that helps you to streamline your social media management from planning and collaboration to engagement and analytics. The social media tool provides social media monitoring, analytics, and audience engagement services which can be useful to small, medium, and large businesses from all industries. These features will help you to demonstrate your value to clients with advanced reporting and deeper insights. The more interesting thing about Sendible is that you can also measure your social media ROI from the very same dashboard on Sendible you’re using to manage your social networks and schedule messages.

 
  • Publishing: Sendible has a Smart Queue feature and Auto Post feature that helps you to put your favorite posts on a repeat posting schedule. Its smart recommendation system also recommends the top-performing posts on your social media channels.
  • Social Engagement: Sendible has the Social Inbox feature, team member features, and social listening features that allow you to monitor different keywords and see what is being said about your brand.
  • Audience Management Support: Sendible has a separate dashboard for each user and even offers a white label solution that allows you to monitor your audience, your brand reputation, and your success.
  • Supported Networks: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google Analytics

Pricing:

 
  1. Starter (For Solopreneurs) – $29/Month or $24/Month Billed Yearly
  2. Traction (For Startup Agencies) – $99/Month or $84/Month Billed Yearly
  3. Growth (for Growing Agencies) – $199/Month or $169/Month Billed Yearly
  4. Large (For Large Teams) – $299/Month or $254/Month Billed Yearly
  5. Each pricing has a 14-days free trial offer.
 

Standout Features:

  • Separate dashboard for each user with the facility to measure social media ROI.
  • Sendible has a mobile app for getting notifications when you’re away from your computer screen.
  • You can easily manage multiple social media marketing campaigns on a single platform.
   

  1. Falcon.io

 
The Platform for Every Kind of Social Media Marketer.

Falcon.io is a cloud-based social media management platform where you can create powerful content, do effective team collaboration, insightful analytics, efficient strategy to deliver the best-personalized brand experiences across all social media channels according to your customer profiles. The tool offers social media marketing, social media management, and customer management solutions with the tools to handle social media posts publishing, scheduling, engagement, monitoring, and customer data management. Falcon.io also offers a content calendar that allows users to plan, create and schedule their social media post content in collaboration with their marketing teams.

 

  • Publishing: Falcon.io allows you to schedule, edit, preview, and publish all your social media posts and campaigns and the Approval Flows ensure your post quality while the Campaign Planner aligns people on your team. You can also track your social media success by posts and channels.
  • Social Engagement: Falcon.io has an Engage inbox where all your social media channels’ messages and comments come. It also has a variety of time-saving features that ensure your team can moderate and rapidly respond to all the messages and comments.
  • Audience Management Support: Falcon.io offers a personal profile card for each person who interacts with your brand on social media, where their future interactions with your brand will be automatically added. By enabling CRM integration and labels you can enhance it even further.
  • Supported Networks: Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and WhatsApp
 

Pricing:

 
  1. Essentials (For Single Users and Small Teams) – Start from $129/Month
  2. One user, 5 channels
  3. Full Suite – Customizable packages for larger companies with multiple teams and markets.
  4. Three or more users, unlimited channels
  5. Each pricing has a 14-days free trial offer.
 

Standout Features:

  • Support multiple social media profiles and marketing campaigns.
  • Offers a personal profile card for each person who interacts with your brand on social media.
  • Full Suite package offers customizable packages for larger companies with multiple teams and markets.
 

  1. ContentCal

 
Collaborate with your team and post great content.

ContentCal is one of the simple and spontaneous social media management tools that helps you to save time, collaborates with your team members or clients, and allows you to create better social media content. ContentCal is best for businesses, agencies, and freelancers to plan their social media content and management. The approval workflow allows multiple people to schedule social media post content to a calendar and it makes collaboration across a virtual team indeed easy.

 
  • Publishing:  ContentCal allows you to collaborate on upcoming social media posts, share ideas with your team, and the approval workflows let you perfect your content quality.
  • Social Engagement:  ContentCal has a Respond feature that makes it super simple for your support team to respond to social media conversations and Facebook Messenger messages, Facebook Comments, Tweets, and Twitter Direct Messages.
  • Audience Management Support: ContentCal has a Team Inbox feature that keeps new social media conversations in one central location which is easily accessible from within your ContentCal account. ContentCal features allow you to quickly respond to inquiries and close resolved conversations. It also allows you to see exactly who you’re talking to from location to follower counts.
  • Supported Networks: Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest
 

Pricing:

 
  1. Pro (For Individuals Managing Social) – $17/Month
  2. Free trial offer
  3. Company (Key Features for Small Teams) – $47/Month
  4. Free trial offer
  5. Premium (A Custom Package for Your Team) – Start from $79/Month
  6. Custom quote offer
  7. Agency Custom (One Home for All Your Clients) – Custom Package
 

Standout Features:

  • ContentCal features keep new social media conversations in one central location.
  • Easy collaboration across a virtual team.
  • Offers multiple pricing packages based on your needs.
 

  1. Kontentino

 
Streamline your marketing team’s workflow.

Kontentino is a simple social media content management tool for agencies, social media managers, and clients that allow them to Plan, assign, comment, and approve social media posts in the easiest way. With Kontentino, you and your team members can save time that would be consumed on managing operational tasks manually and the analytics section puts data in the context which helps social media managers to evaluate the performance of the social media posts/ads when they’re reporting to their clients.

   
  • Publishing: Kontentino features allow you to easily reschedule, clone, or move social media posts or ads across your channels. You can also assign multiple tasks at once, send all planned social media posts for client approval or schedule an unlimited number of social media posts with one click which saves time on your operational works.
  • Social Engagement: Kontentino offers custom metrics such as engagement rate or percentage of the reached audience that provides insights into your social media performance and based on the metrics you can order your posts from the best performing to the worst-performing ones. It also provides KPIs like organic reach, link clicks, engagement, and other social media metrics.
  • Audience Management Support: Kontentino offers an intuitive mobile app that allows clients to provide feedback under each social media post and clients have the option of approving or rejecting social media posts and ads from the mobile app. Also, through the mobile app, you have all your content under control.
  • Supported Networks: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
 

Pricing:

 
  1. XS – 49€/Month Billed Yearly
  2. Small – 99€/Month Billed Yearly
  3. Medium – 189€/Month Billed Yearly
  4. Large – 279€/Month Billed Yearly
  5. All the above packages have a 30-days free trial offer
  6. Enterprise – Custom quote offer
 

Standout Features:

  • Kontentino offers an intuitive mobile app to manage your social media content.
  • Easy features to reschedule clones or move social media posts or ads across your channels.
  • Comprehensive pricing packages based on your needs.
 

  1. ContentStudio

 
Streamline Your Social Media And Content Marketing.

ContentStudio is a cloud-based social media management and content marketing tool that is suitable for solo entrepreneurs, small businesses, and midsize businesses who want to share the best content consistently and increase their reach.ContentStudio contains features like automated publishing, post scheduling, social media monitoring, performance tracking, content management, multi-account management, and multi-user collaboration. ContentStudio allows you to manage multiple social media accounts from a single location and offers a built-in composer that enables you to create custom content for your social media profiles.

 
  • Publishing: ContentStudio allows you to plan, schedule, and publish months-long social media post content just in one sitting. By streamlining your workflow, ContentStudio helps you to maximize your productivity.
  • Social Engagement: ContentStudio allows you to publish approval workflows. The social inbox feature allows you to Tag, comment, and review social media posts in real-time to elevate team efficiency, collaboration, and engagement.
  • Audience Management Support: ContentStudio provides actionable insights from trend analysis and this automates report gives access to your social media data on the audience behavior with your brand which helps you to fine-tune your social media marketing strategy.
  • Supported Networks: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube
 

Pricing:

 
  1. Pro (Solo Marketer) – $49/Month
  2. Small (Business & Agency) – $99/Month
  3. Medium (Business & Agency) – $199/Month
  4. Large (Business & Agency) – $299/Month
  5. Each pricing has 14-days free trial
 

Standout Features:

  • Offers a built-in composer that enables you to create custom content for your social media profiles.
  • Enables multi-account management and multi-user collaboration.
  • ContentStudio provides actionable insights from trend analysis.
 

  1. Hootsuite

 
Social is your superpower.

Hootsuite is considered a good social media management tool for managing multiple social media profiles by logging into a single dashboard that helps to schedule and publish content to the right channels at the right time, track performance in real-time, and crank the volume on your top-performing content. It’s the world’s most used social media management tool. Hootsuite offers a secure environment for teams to collaborate across all devices and departments to manage social media profiles, engage with customers, and generate revenue.

 
  • Publishing: Hootsuite allows you to upload, edit, and schedule hundreds of social media posts at once, in CSV format. Hootsuite Chrome extension lets you schedule your posts automatically.
  • Social Engagement: Hootsuite allows you to assign social media tasks to a suitable team and department that helps you to boost efficiency, accuracy, and save time, and allows you to streamline your approval process. You can streamline all your social media profiles comments and conversations in one place and assign tasks for relevant team members.
  • Audience Management Support: You can create custom streams of your social content and organized them by tabs. Also, you can find and filter your social media conversations by keyword, hashtag, and location that allows you to reply to posts and comments faster. Even Hootsuite offers instant analysis to find out what your customers are doing, feeling, and thinking about your brand.
  • Supported Networks: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest
 

Pricing:

 
  1. Professional (Essential tools for effective social media marketing) – $19/Month
  2. Free 30-days trial
  3. Team (An expanded suite of tools for social media marketing teams) – $99/Month
  4. Free 30-days trial
  5. Business (Advanced, scalable tools for large social marketing teams) – $599/Month
  6. You can request a Demo
  7. Enterprise (Take your sales, service, and marketing to new levels with a custom social media solution) – Custom Solutions
  8. You can request a Demo
 

Standout Features:

  • You can manage multiple social media profiles in a single dashboard
  • The instant analysis helps you to monitor the performance of your brand and your competitors as well.
  • Hootsuite mobile apps make it easy to manage your social media profiles.
 

  1. Buffer

 
Simpler social media tools for authentic engagement.

Buffer is an authentic simple, yet powerful social media management tool to tell your brand’s story and grow your audience with social media publishing, analytics, and engagement. It’s suitable for small to midsize businesses that allow users to publish social media content, engage with customers, and helps them to analyze their social media performance. Buffer also provides advanced analytics to track social media performance on a weekly or monthly basis. Buffer has a browser extension and mobile apps so users can create and share their social media posts from anywhere.

 
  • Publishing: Buffer’s features allow you to Plan, collaborate, and publish social media content that drives meaningful engagement and growth for your brand. From one simple dashboard, you can draft your posts, coordinate with your team, and orchestrate your social media marketing campaigns
  • Social Engagement: Buffer has features to share and manage access to each social media profile, so you can create drafts, review posts, get feedback, and improve content as a team. This helps you to be sync with your team.
  • Audience Management Support: Buffer tracks your social media performance, audience engagement, and creates reports that help you to grow your social media reach, engagement & sales.
  • Supported Networks: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
 

Pricing:

 
  1. Pro (Ideal for getting started) – $15/Month
  2. Premium (Ideal for growing brands) – $65/Month
  3. Business (Ideal for large teams) – $99/Month
  4. Each pricing has a 14-days trial
 

Standout Features:

  • Buffer allows you to post photos, videos, and articles on your social media profiles easily.
  • You can schedule your post content across multiple social media profiles through one dashboard.
  • Buffer app makes it simple to schedule posts and track performance.
 

  1. Planable.io

 
The modern workflow for social media teams.

Planable.io is another intuitive cloud-based social media management, collaboration, and approval solution tool for social media marketers, freelancers, media agencies, and marketing teams that allows users to automate and simplify their social media management processes like social media images and content creating, social media posts publishing, post scheduling, content management, multi-account management, and multi-user collaboration. Planable allows you to create social media content for multiple social media profiles separately. Also, it enables users to drag and drop media files in their social media posts, also users can add emojis, hashtags, page tags, and Giphy integrations to their social media content.

  • Publishing: Planable.io allows you to create, schedule, view, and collaborate on your social media posts. You can drag and drop media files in your social media posts, also, add emojis, hashtags, and page tags.
  • Social Engagement: Planable.io allows you to gather feedback right next to the post and you can tag members to send notifications that help you to avoid miscommunications. Also, you can add attachments to comments and reply to specific comments.
  • Audience Management Support: If you’re an agency or have several clients, then Planable.io is perfect for you as Planable.io offers a dedicated workspace for each client with a separate calendar, inbox, analytics, and assigned team members. So, you will be able to keep everything organized and clean.
  • Supported Networks: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram
 

Pricing:

 
  1. Starter – $32.5/Month
  2. Premium – $82.5/Month
  3. Enterprise – Custom quote
 

Standout Features: 

  • Planable offers a centralized hub for all your social media profiles.
  • You can add multimedia content to your social media posts.
  • Offers separate workspace for each client.
 

Conclusion

You have so many choices out there for high-quality social media management tools that have all the features to boost your social media engagement, get you more leads, and grow your brand awareness with a powerful social media presence. So, ultimately, it’s your job to find the exact tool that is best suitable for your needs, budget, and marketing goals.

Are you still using any of these social media management tools for your social media scheduling process? If yes, don’t forget to share your thoughts on this post 🙂

 

Google’s May 2020 Core Update Is Live Now – All That You Need to Know

Google decided to give us a shocking surprise in May, like an unexpected knock out from behind….. Yes, I can hear you saying – Ouch, it hurts Unfortunately, this is the present scenario of Webmasters and SEO guys.

On May 4th, Google’s Danny Sullivan confirmed in his tweet that Google started to roll out its second Core Algorithm Update of 2020 which is officially called as the ‘May 2020 Core Update.’ – just a name to signify the facts, No fancy names like Mordy Oberstein’s one who called the Google May 2020 Core Update as “an absolute monster“, but, I love his naming!

Have a look at what experts like Danny Sullivan and John Mueller saying about the new Google May 2020 Core Update release. Really, this May 2020 Update is being successful in grabbing the attention towards it from the COVID-19.

 

https://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/1258091260570554368

https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1257615952461651968

Although, this May 2020 core update is causing major SERP volatility that’s not certainly a bad thing, and through this post, I will explain to you why. So, stay tuned with me till the end!

 1) Google’s Core Updates Purpose

Google regularly releases broad core updates to advance its search results as these broad core updates are created to provide significantly observable changes in Google’s SERP results across all countries in all languages. When a broad core update rolls out, websites will notice drops or gains in their search rankings.

Changes in Websites’ search rankings are basically a reflection of the website’s content relevancy that means if the website content has become more relevant since the previous core update it will get a rise in search rankings. And if the content loses its relevancy then it will get a drop in search rankings.

Google releases these core updates with the aim to provide the best search experience possible for the Searchers as we all know how much Google loves its searchers!

 2) Google May 2020 Core Update Amid COVID-19

On May 4th, Google started to roll out its second Core Algorithm Update of 2020, which strongly answers our queries about whether Google will hold back its broad core updates during the COVID-19 Pandemic. It’s a clear No. The first core update was launched in January 2020, at that time, we barely bothered about COVID-19. But, now, it’s a different story. Hence, the timing of Google to release this May 2020 update has shocked many webmasters, because of the fact that the COVID-19 crisis has been causing many businesses to shutdown; moreover, there have been drops in sales and traffic across various industries.

Also, COVID-19 pandemic has changed what people are searching on Google. Whether it’s looking for information about the COVID-19 situation, searching remote services options, or online stores to purchase necessary goods.

In nutshell, there are many things that gaining relevancy among the searchers during the COVID-19 that weren’t as relevant before. Equally, things that were once highly relevant are now lost their importance and having fewer searches. For instance, searches related to travel, tourism and entertainment are not being searched much nowadays.

It’s clearly evident that with the Google May 2020 Core Update, now, Google is facing a unique challenge of syncing up with the current searching trends of users. We will need to wait and see whether people are finding it easier to get the information they are searching on Google.

 3) Disruption of Google May 2020 Core Update

For a few minutes, you guys need to be nerdy, because I’m going to bore you all with some stats and graphs. Hey, I heard you saying “let’s exit from here.” Before you decide to leave, give it a try buddy, you won’t be disappointed!

“Everyone seems normal until you get to know them.” The same way Google May 2020 Core Update seems normal until you know it’s impact. So, here are some stats to enlighten your knowledge.

The Google May 2020 Core Update is now done rolling out. It’s a big and broad update that caused major volatility, means SERP rankings have been moved around quite a bit.

To get an idea of how big the Google May 2020 Core Update is, just have a look at the below image from SEMrush Sensor, which monitors the movement of SERP results on Google. The graph tracks Google’s SERP results on a daily basis, the green and blue colour indicate that there aren’t much changes on Google’s SERP. But, when the colour turns to red, it’s a clear indication that the SERP rankings are volatile.

Image Credit By SEMrush Sensor

RankRanger site also published the following graph based on RankRanger’s data set that demonstrates the impact of May 2020 core update in terms of Google’s SERP rankings volatility. The graph shows the Google SERP rankings volatility in the last 30 days where you can see significant changes in the SERP rankings.

Image Credit By RankRanger

Hope the above graphs give you an idea about the volatility happening on Google’s SERPs. Now, let’s have a look at the industries that are most affected by this Google May 2020 Core Update. According to the SEMRush data, real estate, health, travel, people & society, and pets & animals are the industries that most impacted by the update. Here is a graph from SEMRush that shows the breakdown volatility by industry.

Image Credit By SEMrush

Moz also released a top 20 winners list with the before-and-after percentage changes within the 7 days’ periods from the date of the update release. The winners list is based on the insights from the MozCast’s temperature report on Google May 2020 Core Update. Don’t scratch your head thinking about MozCast’s temperature report, it’s a weather report showing turbulence in the Google algorithm update, the hotter the temperature the more Google’s SERP rankings changed.

Now I’m feeling like a school mathematics teacher who is talking about graphs and stats. Hope I’m not that bored. Okay, let’s jump into the next topic!

 4) What’s the Status of Your Website Traffic?

Hope you already checked your website traffic, if you haven’t, you should go and check your website traffic & rankings to see if they have gone up or down, you can use Google Analytics to check your traffic and there are many free tools available to track your keywords rankings.

If you noticed a traffic drop, don’t panic. I will give some of my practical tips to help you out.

Let’s first start with clearing some misconception about traffic. People new to SEO have this big misconception that if your website has a high domain authority, your website won’t be affected by these core updates and you’ll constantly gets more traffic for your website. That’s absolutely false.

In fact, this Google May 2020 Core Update focus more on content, and based on the analysis it seems like the sites that have thin content, means pages with low-words counts are most affected by the update. Even Spotify also hit by the update. For your clear understanding, here I’ve mentioned the charts from Search Metrics that shows how the May 2020 Core Update affected the popular domains. Have a look at them below.

 5) What to do if you are hit by Google May 2020 Core Update?

So, finally, we arrived at the main topic! Let’s find the answer to your question – What to do if my site is hit by the core update? When it comes to core updates, it’s often harder to find out what you need to do to reverse any hit your site may have seen. Google’s Core Updates are intended to improve its overall quality of search results and to provide the best possible results to the searchers. Google’s guidelines on this Google May 2020 Core Update seems exactly the same as the guidelines for all other core updates in the past. Google’s all-time mantra is that there’s nothing to “fix” if websites rankings drop after a broad core update. But, it recommends webmasters and SEOs to make their website content the best it can be.

So, keeping Google’s advice in mind, today, I’m going to provide you with three effective ways to improve your website overall, they are:

  1. Improve your website content
  2. Improve your website SEO
  3. Improve your website’s Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T)

Let’s checklist the things that we need to do in each of the above three sections. You guys will find it easy!

    1. Guidance on Improve Your Website Content

We always need to provide authoritative content in our websites that the users find helpful to them. So, here is some guidance to make your content more authoritative.

  • If your old content is no longer relevant to readers, either you can update the content and do 301 redirect to the most relevant content page in your website or you can delete the old content page.
  • Make your content more attractive and useful by adding images, videos, infographics and step-by-step instructions.
  • Fix the dead links in your content if there are any.
  • If your website has translated articles, makesure the images and videos in the article make sense to the readers who are reading the content in that language.

  • Avoid using complex words in your content that only a few people can understand, this will help to increase the readability of your content.
  • If your content discusses topics that come in a specific time frame or year, see the possibilities to make the content evergreen by removing the dates and time frames.
  • If your article trying to solve a specific problem of people, makesure to research and provide the best answers possible that make sense of what people are actually looking for.
  • If your article covering the exact same topic as another article on your website, consider to merging them, you can 301 redirect one article to the other.
  • Provide new content based on current trends to attract readers’ attention.
     2. Guidance on Improve Your Website SEO

If you’re mainly relying on people to find you through a Google search, SEO should be at your top priority checklist. Below I’ve listed down some effective ways to improve your website SEO. Have a look at them.

  • Increase your website’s page loading speed.
  • Increase your website’s readability.
  • Post relevant content on your website – Start blogging.
  • Add images, video on your website to give a multimedia experience in your site.
  • Use infographics to generate more traffic and backlinks to your website
  • Use keywords to improve your website’s SEO ranking.
  • Makesure to write engaging page titles and meta descriptions in your website
  • Find and fix the SEO errors in your website
  • Provide accurate contact details on your website
  • Create a Google Business Page for your website.
    3. Guidance on Improve Your Website’s Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T)

Improving your website’s expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-A-T) increase your chances of ranking at a good position in Google’s search results. So, here are some ways you can start doing right now to improve your Website E-A-T.

  • Have good bylines for your website content by putting author name, date and more.
  • Create good author pages in your website articles.
  • Have a strong and well-written about page on your website.
  • Provide clear and accessible contact information.
  • Add all the important legal pages on your website.
  • Get backlinks from relevant and high-authority domains.
  • Make your website content written or reviewed by credentialed experts.
  • If you are writing about scientific topics, then you should add cite authoritative references.
  • Makesure your scientific-related content represents the scientific consensus.
  • Maintain a good online reputation.

Conclusion

Now, you guys know what you need to do to tackle this Google May 2020 Core Update. But, before you guys get into a false impression and started to make any larger changes on your website, I’d like to let you know that even if you do everything I discussed above, there is no guarantee that your website won’t be affected by the May 2020 Core Update or your rankings get drastically improve. Each website is different, and the main goal of these Core Updates is to provide the best experience for searchers.

If you look at the above guidelines carefully, you’ll realize that improving those factors on your website will create a better user experience on your website for the visitors and that should be your ultimate goal.

If you provide the best user experience on your website, you’ll do better than your competitors, when it comes to Google’s broad core algorithm updates.

So, have you spotted any changes in your rankings during the Google May 2020 Core Update? Let’s share your experience with the core update in the comments below!

 

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