In view of the upcoming Q4, which is the shopping season, social media marketing costs like CPM, CPC, CPA, are expected to rise.
Here's what the Heroes of Digital marketing team have come up with - a series of recommendations that should help optimize your social media marketing campaigns.
It's broken down into 3 categories: high priorities, mid priorities, and low priorities.
Given the marketing trend during this time, it’s important to have a resilient structure and setup.
Many advertisers adopt a very segmented structure, where learning is not strong for each asset due to low conversion volume. Consolidate budgets or delete duplicates where there’s no differentiation in setups or no strong business reasons to segment so that the Learning can be completed, and therefore your Objective for the campaign can be achieved.
With the supply-demand framework, we want to increase impressions (supply). Do this by adopting more placements or using automatic placements; don’t limit the audience pool that the platform can explore. Try broader audiences, less restrictive custom or lookalike audiences, and try exploring new markets.
Use CBO with multi adset campaigns to ensure the budget is not stuck with underperforming ads and can be spent on well-performing ads freely. Decrease use of single ad set campaigns as there’s no liquidity between campaigns.
Learn more about CBO here.
Be mindful when using mid-funnel/top-funnel optimizations. The data shows mid-funnel/top-funnel optimizations are not as good as bottom-funnel optimizations (eg Purchase, Conversions) will result in higher CPA and lower ROAS.
Moving up the funnel is not a solution to combat declining ROAS, unless the purchase signal is lost significantly and the social media platform is no longer efficient at optimizing for purchase.
You can also consider mixing some Value Optimisations with your conversion optimizations. Some advertisers have expressed issues with VO’s scalability, as it relies more heavily on the volume of data, so VO wouldn’t work the best when ads can’t get out of the learning phase due to low conversion volume.
It also works better if the conversion value spread is more diverse.
Read more about VO here.
Think creatively about product-market fit during this time - what kind of sales to run to boost scale when people are more price-sensitive while maintaining ROAS?
Holiday gifting is a great time to boost sales but should be done more strategically with your overall brand message.
Cost constraints and scale are trade-offs. Most advertisers use the auto-bidding strategy. Autobid and highest value have no cost constraints, while bid-cap, cost-cap, and minimum ROAS have cost constraints.
If you're not happy with the campaign performance, try using a cost constraint strategy as a way to improve performance.
Please note, this will likely limit scale. Pair with consolidation and liquidity recommendations above to expand the scale. Autobid is supposedly good for spending the budget in full, but could hurt performance metrics like CPA and ROAS when budget scales.
When you don’t optimize directly for ROAS, ROAS will fluctuate depending on its relationship with your optimization. Optimizing for the purchase behavior doesn’t ensure high basket size. This is a low-priority task due to the complexity of the strategy.
Digital marketing has been my passion for the last 10+ years. Not SEO. Not social media marketing. Not inbound marketing. Not even analytics.
I'm passionate about marketing, and how the different parts fit together to help companies grow.
This article is my attempt at explaining that.
You'll also learn what is wrong with some companies' approaches to digital marketing, what digital marketing really is, and the frameworks we use in our digital marketing campaigns to achieve success for our clients.
Over the past decade or so, there has been an increasing number of digital marketing agencies (as reported here) and digital marketing jobs created.
This means that digital marketing is no longer new, or the "next big thing" as some claim.
It has been around for more than a decade. But the problem is many digital marketers enter the field of digital marketing without knowing the basic principles of marketing.
When I interview digital marketers, I often ask the interviewees what do they understand about digital marketing. One of my favorite questions to ask is this: I have a new website that just went live, and it has 0 visitors. How can I get to 500 visitors?
Many times, interviewees would be too eager to throw around buzzwords like inbound marketing, content marketing, search engine marketing, social media marketing, email marketing etc.
That's a junior marketer's response.
An experienced marketer would respond something like: Who is your target audience? Where do they spend most of their time online? What are you selling? What's your customers' buying journey like? etc.
The creation and use of these buzzwords have caused a generation of digital marketers to enter the industry without knowing the basic principles and frameworks that underpin our field.
This is a big problem.
What is inbound marketing?
According to HubSpot, this is the definition of inbound marketing:
Inbound marketing is a business methodology that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them. While outbound marketing interrupts your audience with content they don’t always want, inbound marketing forms connections they are looking for and solves problems they already have.
To put it simply, inbound marketing is the practice of drawing consumers to your brand through channels and strategies that are not traditional advertising.
Alternatively, you can say it's simply a combination of content development and Public Relations (PR).
Channels that are included in the current inbound marketing strategy have been working under different names and definitions for many years.
At the core of it, PR is telling your story through third-party mediums. A brand pitches its story to the media, and if the media thinks it's a good story, they write about it and publish it on mediums where your target audience is.
If the brand did its PR well, the message will reach its core audience, and they would have controlled the message so closely that they have convinced their customers of their product/service's value - and since PR is done on third-party mediums, it would imply a non-biased endorsement from the media.
So what happens next?
Customers are influenced and lured to buy something from the brand.
They bought it from an inbound channel.
Today, inbound marketing is just operating under different mediums - social media, blog, email and etc.
Inbound marketing was not invented by HubSpot. It's not new.
Content marketing was termed around the mid-2000s as well, by Joe Pulizzi, the founder of Content Marketing Institute, which sells, of course, content marketing courses.
And what is content marketing?
According to CMI, content marketing is:
The strategic marketing approach of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.
In the years since content marketing was termed, marketers began to say: Content is king!
As if content has not been the most important part of marketing:
Content has always been the most important part of marketing.
Digital marketers shouldn't fall into an echo chamber of meaningless buzzwords. They should start understanding and practicing real marketing.
Marketing has always been the creation of a message that resonates with a target audience, and transmitting this message into a piece of content on a channel where the audience is, in an effort to build the brand and increase demand so that prospects become customers, customers become repeat customers, and repeat customers become evangelists of the brand.
The tools and channels change, but the principles of marketing remain the same.
Digital marketers are doing nothing significantly different from what traditional marketers have always done.
To understand what digital marketing really is, we have to first understand what marketing is.
Here's a simple 4P framework that we learn in our Marketing 101 textbook:
Understand the product/service that you're really selling.
How much should your product be priced?
Your product's price is linked to the value (or perceived value) that you create for your customers. A few questions to ask yourself when deciding the price:
Where is the place you're going to sell your products?
Pick the place where your customers are. Don't expect them to come to you, you have to go to them.
For eg, if we put all our resources on Tiktok, would we get enquiries for our digital marketing services? Most probably not, unless our clients are 16 to 24-year-old people.
Here are some questions you can consider asking:
Once you've done the previous 3 Ps of marketing, it's time to think about your promotion strategy.
How are you going to promote your products to reach your target audience with your message? Think Google advertising, social media marketing, SEO, PR, etc.
Now that we understand digital marketing is, at the end of the day, marketing, on digital platforms, let's talk about the problem with digital marketing.
Because digital marketing has many different platforms and channels, many companies have become one-trick ponies.
If we think SEO works, we try to rank for more keywords and publish more 'content': second-rate paraphrased content from another website.
When new social media channels start to trend, and we see our competitors doing it, we start to adopt the social media marketing tactic.
I get it. It's easy to give the management/clients what they want. They want rankings, we improve SEO rankings. They want followers, we deliver followers. They want 5 blog posts, we write 5 blog posts. They want a new and sexy marketing tactic, we do it.
Focusing on tactics is a lot easier than explaining the importance of a proper marketing strategy and indirect attribution.
But tactics only get you so far. A digital marketing strategy is what all companies need.
In the end, every digital marketing tactic will reach its limit.
SEO will. So will Google ads, social media ads, churning out content, etc.
Companies that have worked with various digital marketing agencies might have encountered the Law of Perceived Diminishing Returns:
After engaging an agency for a while, you might feel that the agency does not add value (rightfully or wrongfully so).
Therefore, you might think that what your agency does is very easy, and your nephew can do the same. Or you might think that another agency can easily do better just because they promised 'guaranteed results' and there's no risk to you.
You flock from one agency to the next, because these agencies promise to give you what you want. The problem is, you don't know what you need to do to achieve success through digital marketing.
Your expectations of the agency are wrong. You start out on the wrong foot. You limit the agency's work or influence by engaging them for a single digital marketing tactic.
Of course, sometimes if the digital marketing campaigns don't work out, it might simply be because the agency is not good enough.
But, engaging digital marketing agencies for a single tactic is not the right way, because there are diminishing returns to tactics:
I'm not saying tactics are useless. Tactics are needed to get things done. Without tactics, we'll have consultants talking fluff and delivering nothing.
But we need to integrate the different marketing tactics into one coherent strategy and combine it with data, to produce a sustainable way to grow your company.
According to Google, strategy is defined as: a plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim.
Similarly, a digital marketing strategy can be defined as: a plan of action that integrates all tactics and data, to achieve repeatable, long-term and sustainable growth.
The last factor is what separates digital marketing agencies from traditional ad agencies. Traditional ad agencies don't have access to accurate data. Good digital marketing agencies do, and data is essential for success.
We talked about the basic principles of marketing. We talked about what's the difference between digital marketing tactics and strategies.
Let's explore the 2nd framework that Heroes of Digital uses for its digital marketing campaigns, we call it: Heroes of Digital's Digital Marketing Framework.
It's our framework for thinking about digital marketing strategy.
It's not the framework.
It's just ours, created and refined based on our years of experience working with hundreds of clients in different industries.
You'll need a framework to visualize how different tactics come together to play a part in your big strategic plan.
Here's how this framework works:
Our philosophy and approach to how the bits and pieces of digital marketing fit together. Click around to learn more. Read the blog post here.
What: Pay-to-play media where you spend dollars to gain visibility.
How: Buy impressions, clicks, or views through advertising platforms.
Examples: Pay-per-click, Display, social promotion.
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What: Exposure and attention that you can't buy, but that can be gained over time.
How: Providing useful content to answer the needs of online users.
Examples: Blog posts, infographics, videos, training guides.
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What: The stuff you fully control and own.
How: Claim it, build it, create it.
Examples: Your website, your Facebook page, videos.
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Content is not 'lots of words to help me rank higher.' It's every form of communication that passes information: Product descriptions, photography, blog posts, articles, white papers, video... Everything.
Content drives your entire business:
Content affects every channel: Paid (think of Google Adwords), earned (think of 'organic' search and social media) and owned (your own web site).
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Analytics tracks impact on key performance indicators (KPIs). Revenue. Profit. Leads. Whatever metric you care about the most, it should drive your entire analytics strategy.
Analytics provides the data to build and adjust your plans:
Analytics is not reporting. It's not a static thing. It's an activity. It should illuminate the next actions for your marketing strategy.
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Infrastructure delivers your website enabling the rest of the elements and channels to come to life. Without it, you have no website, and you have no online brand.
Analytics provides the data to build and adjust your plans:
Infrastructure impacts every other marketing activity and channel. It's the foundation for all digital marketing
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The base layer of this framework is the Infrastructure. It's the foundation on which everything else is built. Without this in place, the strategy won't work.
Infrastructure refers to the whole technology - hardware and software - that powers your digital presence. It impacts your customer experience online:
Analytics refers to meaningful data that you should track to improve your digital marketing campaigns. Without analytics, you won't know what's working and what's not.
Audience data refers to what kind of people are visiting your website.
How does the visitor performance vary with respect to the above factors? How then can you prioritize your website optimization according to these data?
Acquisition data refers to how customers are landing on your website.
How can you optimize your organic marketing (i.e SEO) based on visitor performance? What kind of paid ads campaigns should you be investing more in? Should you be striking a partnership, or doing some media buys on referral sites that send you high-quality traffic?
How do visitors interact with your site?
Understanding how visitors behave on your site enables you to refine and improve your content to improve performance.
What conversion metrics are you measuring on your site? These should be the most important metrics that play a part in the success of your digital marketing campaigns:
There are many metrics and data to track. If it overwhelms you, keep things simple. Identify the main metrics that matter the most to your business, and start from there.
Use the data to help you make better decisions going forward.
As I mentioned above, content is the most important aspect of marketing. It has always been, and will always be. No content, no marketing.
Infrastructure helps you to host your content.
Analytics tells you why your content works, or why it doesn't.
Channels help you distribute your content.
Without good content, your marketing won't work as well as it should.
Content is what you say.
Any engagement your customers have with your brand has some sort of content:
Are the different types of content you publish aligned to your main brand message and values?
If your content doesn't serve any of the purposes above, reconsider if you should publish that piece of content. Content is only useful if it helps. You shouldn't be churning out content for content's sake.
Treat your prospects' time and attention with respect, provide value through your content, and you'll see success through content marketing eventually.
Channels can be categorized into 3:
Paid Channels refer to channels where you spend money to advertise so that you can get your prospects' attention. Google ads, Facebook ads, Tiktok ads, Youtube ads, Amazon ads, etc.
Earned Channels refer to channels where you get your prospects' attention without paying for it. For example, doing SEO to get your website ranked on Google for certain keywords that are relevant to your business. Or PR, where media outlets write about your brand.
Some companies may not believe in this channel. Well, wait until they have strangers writing negative reviews about them, or competitors having a strong PR game.
Owned Channels refer to channels you control. Channels like your social media pages, your blog, your Youtube channel, and things like that.
Usually, companies will drive traffic from Paid and Earned channels, to Owned channels. Because you have the most control of what you say, and you can collect data of your customers to do various things like creating Lookalike Audience and/or retargeting them.
What's important for companies to know is a good digital marketing strategy involves more than one channel. Why?
Because you have different customers on different platforms, at different stages of their buying process.
If you're just relying on one channel, and that one channel changes its algorithm (think Facebook or Google for eg), you're left in the dust.
In marketing, diversity = sustainability.
You know what a digital marketing strategy is, and what it's not. You've got a framework for organizing your digital marketing strategy.
Now, let me present to you our digital marketing system and solution for SMBs.
You've read how important having a good infrastructure is for digital marketing. How important analytics is so that you can use the data to make better decisions.
We've created a comprehensive all-in-one marketing technology for SMBs that is both affordable and essential:
If you're interested, contact us to find out more!
In this article, we're going to compare the digital advertising rates of 2 online publishers in the Education niche, Google, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, and Outbrain.
If you're comparing between advertising on Sassy Mama or Kiasu Parents, your business should be in the Education industry, one of the few industries that we focus on as a digital marketing agency.
These 2 online publishers have audiences that are relevant for your Education business. Their audiences mainly comprise of young parents with kids of ages between 3-16.
Making a decision on where to spend your advertising budget is not easy. You have to consider the quality of the audience, their buying intentions, price, and so on.
We did a table to compare the various channels, based on recent data. For Kiasuparents and Sassymamma, the CPM is estimated. See below for our explanation/assumptions.
| Google Display | Youtube | Google Search | FB/IG | Outbrain | Kiasuparents | Sassymamma | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CPM | $0.33 | $0.95 | $239.00 | $10.69 | $1.19 | $9.99 | $26.70 |
| CPC | $0.12 | $0.04 | $2.55 | $2.14 | $0.97 | ? | ? |
| Buyer Intent | Mild | Mild | Very High | Moderate | Mild-Moderate | Mild-Moderate | Milder than Kiasuparents' |
The purpose of this comparison is just to show you what you can expect from a top-level/brand-awareness perspective.
If our estimates are correct, Kiasuparents seem to be a decent channel to run some ads on, compared to SassyMama; not just from a CPM perspective but also because their traffic seems to be more engaged - 5min average time spent on site as compared to Sassymamma's 2min.
Also, another thing to consider:
Kiasuparents' top-visited pages are related to primary school rankings, education, tuition. Sassymamma's top-visited pages are more lifestyle-related content.
So if your business has a focus on targeting parents with kids in primary school, Kiasuparents appears to be more suitable for advertising your business.
If your business is more focused on activities for kids, then Sassymama might be a better advertising platform.
So based on a very rough estimate, impressions per month for the whole website is estimated to be around 1 million.
1 million impressions for 3 months will be equals to about 3 million impressions, at a cost of $30,000 (their advertising rates), gives us a CPM of $9.99.
This CPM figure is most likely to be the minimum CPM you can expect, because we’re taking into account the whole website’s impressions per month, and the ad formats they propose do not appear on all pages of the website, only on some of the main pages.
Estimated total website impressions per month for Sassymamma is calculated as roughly 500,000, based on the same calculation format above, and this graph:
Concluding thoughts:
Each channel serves a different purpose in the consumer's journey. There are benefits to running editorial ads (not banner ads) on sites like Kiasuparents and Sassymama.
Consumers normally perceive content on these sites to be more trustworthy than normal ads. And having touchpoints on these sites can help your conversion rates, especially if someone is on the fence, comparing different schools.
Having touchpoints on channels like Google ads, and Social media ads, are important. As you can see in the table above, even though the CPM and CPC are generally more expensive, the buyers' intent is also stronger.
Businesses should not rely on one channel to do their digital marketing.
This is what we call a one-trick pony. It's not a sustainable marketing strategy. If for whatever reasons the channel becomes saturated, or algorithm changes, or something else, your marketing won't work anymore.
If your business is in the Education industry, one of the few industries that we have a core focus on doing digital marketing for (our clients include notable Education companies such as NUS, NTU, James Cook University, NTUC First Campus, Aureus Academy, Montessori, Mindchamps, Dancepointe and so on), and are looking for a digital marketing agency to help you grow your business, feel free to contact us for a free consultation.
Let's face it, creating social media content can be tedious!
Companies doing well on social media marketing usually post a few times a week on various platforms. Some of these companies have a team of full-time social media marketers to do it.
But some companies don’t have the luxury of having a team of social media marketers.
So how can we create useful and relevant social media content a week without spending too much time?
The secret lies in this concept called: repurposing long-form content.
Long-form content are content that are lengthy that you are already producing on a frequent basis. Some examples of long-form content:
The blog articles you spent time creating don't have to stop on your blog! You can repurpose that content and maximize its potential.
Not sure how to do that?
This article will cover different ways you can repurpose content so that you can save time yet maintain high quality content and consistently post on your social media platforms.
When you repurpose content, you save time. You don't have to create new content from scratch, which can take a lot of time. Creating new content involves researching, brainstorming, creating new content outlines and captions, designing, etc.
With repurposed content, you might also get an SEO boost on your website. Creating multiple posts around the same topic allows you to send Relevancy signals to Google. Relevancy is an important criteria for your website to rank on Google.
In most cases, your long-form content may reach a limited audience. However, with repurposed content, you can get more audiences through the various platforms that you’re posting on.
Publishing quality content around a topic on several platforms can help raise your authority in your niche. You can establish yourself as an authority when people see you as the go-to for a certain topic, on several social media platforms.
Talking about the same thing, again and again, is vital to getting your message across. In fact, the Marketing Rule of Seven says that a prospective buyer should hear/see your marketing message at least 7 times before they buy.
If you're looking at video marketing, then you must be on YouTube. YouTube is the largest search engine after Google. But you can't just read your content out over some slide with crappy audio. That won't work if you want to rank on YouTube.
So, how do you convert your blog content into a converting YouTube video? These steps will help you with that.
Not all your blog articles are suitable as scripts for YouTube videos. While a blog article may generate tons of traffic as blog posts, they might not do well on YouTube.
People on YouTube are sometimes at a different stage of the buyer’s journey. They might be researching a certain topic, or considering certain things. So your content has to be relevant and speak to the audience on YouTube.
What are the top videos on that topic? What are some titles that appeal to your audience? What is a unique title and/or angle you can consider for your video?
YouTube is not only about the script/content; the quality of your videos also matter.Some YouTube channels produce videos that require heavy post-production work.
But if you’re a small team, and don’t have much resources to produce a highly post-produced video, consider at least having a good camera that can produce high-definition videos.
Studies have shown that longer videos generally perform better than shorter videos on YouTube. That's because longer videos are more detailed. Check out how Brain Dean uses this method. All his videos are always at least 10 minutes long. Note that his views are quite impressive.
However, don't just create a longer video without valuable information. That may affect how long viewers view your videos, which will affect your YouTube SEO.
If your long-form content covers several sub-topics, you should break the content into different sections. Avoid long videos, build out each sub-topic, and create a detailed video for each of them.
You can then create a themed playlist that covers all the sections of blog content. That will establish you as an authority on that topic and help your video optimization.
Here is an example of a Themed Playlist by Lex Deville on freelancing. He is considered an established authority on freelancing on YouTube.
For several reasons, Facebook/Instagram is a great social media platform to repurpose your content. First, with over 2 billion users, it is the largest social media site around. So, it is more likely that most of your target audiences are active on either Facebook or Instagram.
Apart from that, social media platforms nowadays have several content format - graphics, videos, posts, links, stories etc
Divide your content into smaller pieces of information and cover them over a certain period.
Create social media content that covers different sections. You can also create posts to cover the significant talking points to drive engagement.
An excellent way to keep your audience engaged is to create a post series. This is a great way to break a long blog post and cover all the sections. You can also use that to connect all your posts with a central theme.
You can also summarize long-form content into a Carousel post format.
Infographics are a great way to summarize long-form content into a visual and easy-to-understand format. An example is like what Buffer did with infographics repurposed from their blog article.
Keep in mind that your infographic must not be too clustered. It must be simple and easy to understand. It should outline each point clearly.
If you don't know much about creating graphics, you should get a professional to design your infographics. Tools like Piktochart and Visually can also help create well-designed infographics.
According to this Wyzowl research, 72% of buyers would rather watch a video to learn about something. So take advantage of that by creating engaging and short videos from your content.
Revive your blog content as short, contemporary videos to re-communicate the message back to your audience.
If converting your blog posts into videos will be a lot of work; several tools can help that process. First, tools like Lumen5 can automate the process for you. Then, leverage the AI features to create your videos.
All you have to do is pick the blog posts; the tool will pull out meaningful sentences and create a storyboard for you. You can format, add photos, music, video to create a short video on the automated storyboard.
If your blog posts contain meaningful quotes, stats, and key takeaways, turn them into images. Then, create eye-catching photos with your quotes and critical takeaways for your social media posts.
Make sure your target audience can relate to your quote images. Pick out catchy phrases and valuable stats that your audiences will like to read.
Your IGTV is another great place to repurpose your content.
With IGTV, you can get more viewership, give your audience more value, and connect deeper with them. Furthermore, your IGTV videos are shown in the Discover section, notification on Instagram, and recommended videos on related videos.
Also, people prefer to stay and watch IGTV videos longer than Facebook videos. That is because it is easier to view and the seamless integration with Instagram makes for a better experience.
How can you efficiently repurpose your videos on IGTV?
Keep in mind that IGTV's full 16:9 ratio takes up the entire length of the screen. That way, it limits distractions and fully immerses your viewers. But it also means that your videos must be high-quality and engaging enough to keep their attention.
Check out how Jasmine Star does that on her IGTV videos.
Make sure you film in a way that can be easily cropped into a vertical format. You must also go farther than just talking. Create something fun and visually appealing that will keep your audiences engaged. Remember, it is a space they're constantly distracted.
IGTV is a public platform that anyone (or your followers, depending on your privacy settings) can view. If you want to create a marketing funnel, consider having exclusive content for your newsletter subscribers. You can use IGTV as a teaser for the exclusive content.
You can use your IGTV to broadcast Question and Answer sessions regularly. Through these live Q&A sessions, you can create long-form content for free, and be able to repurpose it into other forms of content.
You’ll also be able to identify what your audience are looking for.
Another great way to repurpose your content is to create interviews sessions. Organize interviews with industry experts and broadcast them on your IGTV. The beauty of this strategy is that the time needed to prepare for such interviews is minimal, compared to the quality of content produced (by experts!).
The other thing is interviewing experts is a form of social proof. You’re associating your brand with the experts.
According to this industry report by Edison Research, an estimated 112 million people have ever listened to podcasts in the United States only. And around 67 million people listen to podcasts monthly in the US.
That is a whole new demographic you're missing out on by not creating podcasts. By repurposing your content into podcasts, you can start connecting with new audiences.
Repurposing your blog content into a podcast can be as simple as just reading it out and recording. Or you can try several tactics to improve your engagement.
Here are some ways you can repurpose your blog content into podcasts.
Copyblogger, a freelancing website, does this well with their podcast series, The Lede Podcast. What they discuss on the podcast is based on their old blog content.
You don't have to write another script for your Podcast sessions. Just convert your YouTube videos into audio versions. You can either record your script as just the audio or literally convert your YouTube videos into audio.
Tools like Youtubemp3 and Y2mate can convert your video directly into an audio version for you.
Repurposing your blog articles into podcasts shouldn't be only about reading it out. Go a step further by creating a featured podcast series where you'll interview experts.
Use your article's outlines to create your interview questions. So, your blog content will help build your interview questions. Then, your expert can take it from there.
With featured podcasts, you and your listeners get fresh perspectives on the blog content.
If the blog article is longer or contains several subtopics, it is better to break it into several episodes. Then, let each podcast episode cover different areas of your blog content.
You can talk about the subtopics in further detail during the podcast.
Medium has an established viewership of 60 million monthly readers. As a result, it is a popular place to share or guest post content.
The best part is you can repurpose your blog article directly without altering it. With your repurposed content, you can start building your email list. Here is an example of Benjamin Hardy, who used his repurposed blog content on Medium to build his subscribers from 0 to 20,000 in 6 months.
If you want to repurpose your blog post directly on Medium without any changes, wait a few days after publishing on your blog.
That's because publishing your article directly on Medium immediately may not give Google enough time to index your blog article. Google may index your Medium article as the original post; that will definitely hurt your rankings.
Also, make sure you link back to the original article on your blog to drive traffic.
Quora is a social answer site, and answers to questions frequently rank top during search queries. You can either repurpose your content as replies to questions or as posts to Quora's user blogs.
Look for relevant questions that your blog content answers. Then repurpose your blog content to provide in-depth solutions. You can also link back to your original blog posts.
Here is an example of the Co-founder & COO at Buffer doing that on Quora. He replied to the question, "How do you get an interview at Buffer?" which is also a blog post on the Buffer Blog.
By repurposing content, you don't have to create new social media content consistently. Instead, by making a few changes in the format, you can push your content on the various social media platforms with minimal effort.
However, it should not be about repurposing blog content on different platforms alone. Turning those repurposed content into marketing tools matters. Ensuring that your social media content sells your products/services effectively, is key.
Not sure how to do that?
Get a marketing expert/agency to help you. If you're looking for the best social media marketing agency in Singapore to help you handle your marketing, contact us for help.
What does it take to rank a website? If you listen to many of the SEO gurus, you’re told to build more backlinks, forum postings, get social mentions, and so on. Before you start doing any of those, you need to understand that on-page SEO has an edge over other optimization.
In other words, if you’re not doing on-page SEO right, it wouldn’t matter how many backlinks you’ve built nor how fast your webpage loads. Your website simply won’t rank despite the effort you’ve poured into off-page SEO.
So, what is on-page SEO?
As the term implies, on-page SEO refers to SEO optimization that you can perform on the website without the involvement of a 3rd party. For example, you can perform keyword optimization, set up the title tags, and ensure that web page URLs follow the best practice.
These optimizations that happen within the website will gradually improve the search ranking if done right.
On-page SEO is starkly different from off-page SEO. The latter refers to optimization done externally but serves the same purpose of improving a website’s ranking on search engines. For example, guest blogging, link building, and blog commenting are off-page SEO techniques that are performed on other websites or platforms.
In this guide, we’ll show you what are the most important on-page SEO factors and how to optimize them on your website.
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Google uses over 200 ranking factors in its SEO algorithm and that includes on-page ranking signals. Almost everything you do or didn’t do on your website may influence its position on the search result.
However, there are certain ranking factors that have more weightage than others. If you’re to start optimizing your webpage’s on-page ranking factors, you’ll want to start with these.
It’s been decades since Google launched its search engine, but the fact is, content is still king in today’s SEO. Your content strategy, which should start with keyword research and follow with crafting a great piece of content, is the foundation for SEO success.
Building great content is harder than it seems. It’s not just about writing tens of thousands of words or impressing readers with nuances and vocabulary. When it comes to on-page SEO, you need to write content that appeals to both readers and the search engine.
For Google to rank your content, it needs to be able to crawl onto it. By crawling, we’re talking about Google sending its bot to index or discover your content and update the search ranking. Besides Google’s crawler, a good piece of content is also commonly shared on social media or linked to from another website.
If your content is blocking Google’s crawler, or is password-protected, then it has a negative implication in terms of SEO. No amount of on-page optimization will work because the content is technically barred from the public.
The title tag is a HTML tag that describes the topic of the content. It is also one of the most important on-page ranking factors. On the search result, the title tag is displayed along with the URL and description of the webpage.
The URL is more than a sting of text that brings up a particular webpage. It tells Google what the content is all about and its relevance to users' queries. If the URL contains meaningless characters, it can negatively influence the search ranking.
For example, the URL https://imdb.com/title/tt0648569/ points to an IMDB page containing information on The Dark Knight. While it does indicate that the page belongs to the Title category, the movie’s title is not reflected in the URL. Instead, it contains a series of alphanumeric characters that doesn’t help in SEO.
Here’s a better example of an SEO-optimized URL - https://www.heroesofdigital.com/my/seo/how-to-improve-seo/
Our blog URL indicates which category does it belong to and the keyword that reflects the webpage’s content.
Now that you’re aware of which ranking factors to focus on, you’ll want to ensure they are optimized accordingly on your website. This extensive on-page SEO checklist is created to make the process less overwhelming.
You’ll want to give readers and the search idea a good idea of what the content is all about right from the beginning. Therefore, it’s important to use the target keyword at least once within the first 100 words.
For example, our guide on Facebook targeting option has the primary keyword in the first paragraph.
While it’s important to include the keyword at the beginning of the content, it’s equally important to be natural when doing so.
It’s never a good idea to start with an unrelated introduction and only mention the target keyword further down in the article. Placing the keyword at the top relates to its importance to Google.
Once you’re included the keyword at the beginning of the content, you’ll want to do so a few more times in the content. That’s because an article that revolves around a subject tend to have a few occurrences of the specific keyword.
The question is how many times does the keyword need to be repeated.
Rather than sticking to a fixed number, you’ll want to do so naturally so that it doesn’t feel out of place. In this 4,500+ words article, we repeated the keyword ‘Technical SEO’ 13 times at appropriate places.
Avoid falling into the trap of keyword stuffing when you’re using keywords in the content.
Header tags are HTML tags that help to present the content in a structured manner. Not only it helps users to read the content with ease, it also helps search engines to understand the context of the article.
Ideally, you’ll want the title of your blog article to be wrapped with an H1 tag. If you’re writing the article on WordPress, it is automatically wrapped with the H1 tag. Else, you’ll need to ensure the title has an H1 tag on the HTML code as follows.
H2 tags are usually used for subheadings, which helps to break the article into a few smaller parts. Imagine if this checklist is written without any subheadings. You’ll have a tough time keeping up with thousands of words on a single page.
Besides, subheaders also help users to skim through the article and zoom into the parts that caught their interest. It improvises page experience and does have an indirect influence on SEO.
Alt-text is an HTML attribute that gives context to an image. Search engines couldn’t understand visuals as a human does. Therefore, it depends on the alt text to figure out what an image is and index it accordingly.
When you add an image into the content, there’s a field to fill in the alt-text. Never leave it empty as it’s a missed opportunity to improve the on-page SEO.
Ideally, you’ll want to describe the image briefly with the target keyword. For example, here’s an alt-text with the keyword ‘natural home remedy for dust mites’ for an image of a vacuum cleaner.
Avoid keyword stuffing and have unique alt-text for every one of the images in an article.
As you keep publishing blog posts, there’s a chance that a few articles could be targeting the same keyword, or in SEO terms, keyword cannibalization.
When keyword cannibalization happens, none of the articles will rank well on the search engine. Each of the pages suffers from diminished authority as Google struggle to figure out which is more relevant to the search term.
Most of the time, keyword cannibalization occurs unintentionally. For example, you’ve created an article on ‘baby feeding tips’ months ago. Then, you published another blog post titled ‘useful baby feeding tips’.
There are bound to be overlapped keywords and content in both articles, which ends up confusing Google and readers alike.
To prevent keyword cannibalization, you need to have a list of all the published articles. Check through the articles and ensure no two or more articles are targeting the same keyword.
If there are instances of keyword cannibalization, you’ll need to merge the article into one and delete the others. Then, use a 301 redirect to point the redundant URLs to the updated article.
Don’t be afraid of linking out to authority sites because you’re afraid of losing traffic. Contrarily, doing so can improve on-page SEO.
Outbound links are impactful when you’re citing statistics, research or quotes from external sources.
When you link to relevant authority sites, you’re enhancing user experience by directing them to useful resources. It also adds credibility to your own content.
We’ve stressed that it’s important to optimize each URL of your web pages if you want to do well on Google search.
As far as the URL is concerned, you’ll want to keep it short and keyword-optimized. For example, ‘seo-content-marketing’ is sufficient for a blog article titled ‘How To Do SEO Content Marketing The Right Way’.
The target keyword of the article is ‘seo content marketing’ and that’s all that needs to be included in the URL.
When you’re writing the title tag, ensure that you’re including the target keyword in it. Not only that, it’s best to place the target keyword as close as possible to the beginning of the title.
Here’s how we create the title tag for our blog post with the target keyword ‘off page seo’.
Unlike the title tag, Google does not depend on the meta description to understand a webpage’s content. It also may not display what’s written on the meta description on the search results. However, the meta description is used when Google couldn’t find relevant text within the article.
Google specifically recommends that you fill up the meta description on your own because you know the content best.
Similar to how you’re optimizing title tags, you’ll want to include the target keyword in the meta description. The meta description should appeal to the readers and gives a brief idea of what to expect in the arctic.
Also, avoid duplicating snippets of the article for the meta description. Be unique and write original meta descriptions.
Google rewards unique content and frowns upon publishers that plagiarize from others. In 2011, it released the Panda update, which punishes websites that commit SEO bad practices, including duplicate content.
Therefore, it’s not advisable to copy a competitor's website and publish it with just a handful of changes. It is still considered non-unique.
To be safe, you’ll want to check your content with tools like Copyscape, to ensure that it is unique. This is particularly true if you’re having someone writing the articles.
If you’re creating mediocre content, you’ll find it extremely hard to rank on Google. Google prioritizes high-quality content that properly addresses users queries.
For example, a guide on ‘how to fix leaking pipes’ isn’t particularly helpful if it doesn’t contain accompanying illustrations. By using images, you help the readers understand what you’re trying to convey in the content.
A piece of article littered with bad grammar and subpar writing isn’t going to fare well in SEO. You’ll need to produce content that shows professionalism, flair and be helpful to the audience. Hiring an experienced copywriter or brushing up your writing skills help.
If you’re assuming that what you’ve written and rank today will continue to do well in years to come, you’re wrong. Google is always on the lookout for fresh, updated content, particularly in fast-changing niches. You need to revisit existing content and update them with new strategies or examples to stay relevant on the search engine.
Readers would prefer reading content by an expert within the niche rather than an article produced by rehashing existing content. If you’re unable to write for your website, you need to hire a copywriter who understands the industry and offers original insights into the content.
It’s pointless to produce lengthy content if it doesn’t answer the user’s query properly. You need to put yourself into the users’ shoes and figure out the information they are after when they’re searching for a particular keyword.
For example, if a user searches for ‘air purifier for home’, Google is likely to return articles that list the best air purifiers or webpages selling the product. If you’re writing an article on ‘how air purifiers work’ and attempt to rank for the keyword, your effort will be in vain.
The reason is simple. The user intent for the keyword ‘air purifier for home’ is to compare and purchase. When they’re searching for the keyword, they are not interested in learning the mechanism of how an air purifier functions.
Schema markup or structured data is a form of HTML tags that help search engines better understand the content of a webpage. It is particularly useful to describe products, services or an e-commerce store.
When you use Schema markup on your web pages, Google could provide more details to users and hence, boost CTR.
Here’s an event website that uses structured data for its upcoming event. Google then displays some of the events on the search result, which attracts users to click on the links.
Using schema markup may also boost the chances of landing a spot at the Rich Snippet section, which enjoys a large portion of the search traffic.
If you’re using WordPress, you can download plugins to populate the structured data. Else, it takes some technical knowledge to manually insert them onto the webpage’s HTML code.
If you’ve built a website without SEO in mind, there’s a possibility that you’ve left many of the meta descriptions blank.
Revisit the existing pages and find out if any of those are without any meta description. Write an engaging meta description based on the target keyword.
Humans are drawn to topics that stir their emotions. Therefore, you’ll want to be creative with the title tags by adding some emotionally charged words.
For example, the title ‘How To Build A Website’ may target the right keyword, but does little to appeal to the reader. Instead, a title like ‘Everything You Need To Know To Build A Website’ relates more to the users.
Use words like ‘today’, ‘proven’, ‘free’ and ‘easy’ to convey emotion. Address the users by using ‘you’ to make the title sounds more personal. Be mindful of not going overboard with the power words as it could backfire.
If you’re publishing content that changes with time, you’ll want to include the current year in the title and meta description. It gives an impression that your content is updated with the latest information.
This on-page SEO strategy is effective for listicles, reviews, and how-to guides. Users who are searching for information are more likely to click on pages that have the current year.
Here’s an example of how the current year is used in a title tag.
We’ve mentioned that you need to include alt-text in the content images, but there’s much more to image optimization.
If you’re using high-resolution images, the webpage may load slowly and negatively impact SEO. In such cases, you’ll need to compress the images to speed up page loading time.
It’s also important to ensure that you’re sticking with commonly supported formats, which are PNG, JPEG and WebP.
This is perhaps one of the lesser-known on-page SEO factors, but using custom images has a positive effect on search ranking.
There’s a study designed to observe the impact of using stock images and unique images on websites. The result clearly shows that content using unique images fare better than those with stock images.
Internal links are links that connect from one page to another on your website. It’s one of the most impactful on-page SEO techniques that can be easily executed.
By having a well-established network of internal links, you help Google understand the structure of your website and how each page is interconnected to each other.
Generally, you’ll want to link from pillar articles to shorter, supporting articles. Doing so enables users to access more detailed information when they visit your website. You can also link to web pages that are related to what you’re currently writing for a new blog post.
According to Google, you lose 32% of potential visitors if your webpage takes more than 3 seconds to load, particularly on mobile.
Therefore, page speed optimization is crucial as it provides an edge amongst competitors with equally good content. There are, however, many factors that could slow down a webpage, including:
You’ll need to run an audit and find out how your web pages fare in terms of loading time. Then, zoom in on the problematic areas that are slowing the webpage and apply a fix.
Google does not specifically state the requirements for a web page to appear on the featured snippets section. However, there’s a great chance of landing on the coveted spot if some of these conditions are met.
First, you’ll need to rank your content on the first page of Google because that’s where they are selected. Then, you need to ensure that Google has a rich snippets spot for the target keyword and find out how the current rich snippet is formatted.
For example, the search term ‘how to learn violin’ returns a snippet with a list of steps and an image.
If you intend to rank in the featured snippets, you need to create a blog article with a similar format but better than the existing one. Make sure that you’re fulfilling the search intent when you create the content.
E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It is the principle that drives Google’s search algorithm and how it ranks web pages.
Expertise is shown by the experience and depth of knowledge when you’re producing articles. Google can differentiate unique, noteworthy content that’s written from a position of expertise rather than one that’s regurgitated from existing ones.
Note that expertise doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to be a professional in a certain field. It could also indicate your personal experience in a particular topic.
Authoritativeness has more to do with backlinks. Your website is deemed to have a certain degree of authority there are relevant and established sites linking to it. This calls for a proper link building strategy.
Trustworthiness gives confidence to the readers that they are consuming content from a reliable source. As such, it’s important to have proper author bios that indicate the author’s experience, credentials, and qualifications.
With so many ranking factors to work on, it is hard to optimize your pages manually. SEO professionals turn to software and tools that simplify the process.
Here are some that help.
Ahrefs boasts one of the most powerful keyword research tools for on-page SEO. Known as Ahref Keyword Explorer, it allows you to discover keyword statistics like search volume, competitiveness and potential traffic. Not only that, you can also spy on what your competitors are ranking for by running a keyword analysis on their domains.
SEMrush is a professional SEO tool that offers a comprehensive on-page SEO checker. It analyses your website and produces an extensive report on keyword usage, semantic analysis, content length and other ranking factors. Semantic analysis helps you to identify what other keywords your competitor is ranking and finetune your content strategy.
If you’re tight on budget, Seranking is one of the more affordable premium SEO tools. Despite that, it boasts a powerful on-page SEO analysis tool that covers practically every ranking factor we’ve mentioned in this guide. Each of the factors is given a score that reflects whether it is well-optimized or requires attention.
Screaming Frog is no stranger amongst the SEO community. It is a powerful desktop crawler that scans through a website and returns useful metrics. For example, you can detect issues in title/description tags, headers and duplicate pages with the software.
To prevent duplicate content or plagiarism, you’ll want to subscribe to Copyscape. It’s a plagiarism checker that scans your content against millions of others on the internet. It can determine which part of your content that are an exact match with others.
GTMetrix helps you to find out how your web pages fare in terms of loading speed and performance. It’s similar to Google Pagespeed Insight, but with a more intuitive and well-presented reporting interface. You can use the performance indicators as a guide to tackle issues that are slowing down your webpage.
Moz On-Page Grader joins the list with its own version of the on-page checker, or rather the On-Page Grader. It analyzes your webpage against a specific keyword. The results include the performance breakdown of the page, including keyword optimization in title, description, header and alt-text.
With this on-page SEO checklist in hand, it’s tempting to start auditing and optimizing your website on your own. If you’re a business owner or involved in managing one, doing so is often not the best option.
It takes time and effort to implement the improvements and monitor if you’re getting the desired results. You’re unlikely to have the luxury of tinkering around with on-page SEO while juggling your business.
Therefore, it’s wiser to outsource to an agency like Heroes Of Digital, which specializes in SEO Singapore. Our team has been helping local businesses with their SEO implementations for more than 10 years.
We’re equipped with the latest, in-depth SEO knowledge and leave no stone unturned when conducting on-page SEO audits.
We’ll thoroughly analyze a website’s keyword strategies, optimization and ranking factors like title tag, meta description, headers, alt-text and more.
Our expertise and effort have resulted in our clients achieving better rankings, conversions and revenue. This is how we’ve maintained our credibility as one of the leading SEO firms in Singapore.
Furthermore, we’re known to offer competitive pricing for on-page services and packages. Talk to our team and learn how we can help you with on-page SEO optimization.
It’s hard to keep up with the numerous search engine algorithm updates that Google releases each year. As such, SEO tactics that work a couple of years ago may be rendered obsolete today.
Yes, that’s how volatile and fast-changing the SEO industry is.
You’ll find it frustrating to keep up with every little part of each algorithm update. And there’s no point in second-guessing what Google may do next.
However, there are certain guiding principles that remain unchanged and they serve as the direction of where Google search is heading.
Seasoned SEO experts are aware of the underlying principles of how Google search works and here are some helpful SEO quotes that will help you for the next decade.
Dave Davies, Co-founder of Beanstalk Internet Marketing.
You can get a tremendous number of backlinks, but if you don’t get your content right, you’ll have difficulty ranking.
Remember that Google is first and foremost a search tool that returns relevant results to users. When a user searches ‘how to bake apple pie’, Google will return content that shows an apple pie recipe and the preparation steps involved.
Therefore, it’s important to step into the audience’s shoes, and think about which type of content serves the purpose of the search phrases best.
Jes Scholz, International Digital Director at Ringier AG
SEO optimization is more than publishing content and building backlinks. There are 200+ ranking signals used by Google. Some of them require technical understanding of how websites operate.
Even SEO professionals may find it tough to run a SEO campaign on their own. Often, you’ll need to work in a team, leverage SEO tools or outsource certain parts of the work involved.
Also, SEO practices evolve quickly and it’s hard for a single individual to stay on top of the changes.
An effective SEO strategy involves various stakeholders: product development, marketing, website development, PR, SEO, content, and branding teams.
Ruth Everett, Technical SEO Analyst at DeepCrawl
Landing on the first page for a particular search phrase scores you bragging points. However, if your website has poor usability, it’s only a matter of time before it slides off the ranking.
User experience or UX, needs to be given ample consideration if you want to remain competitive on Google search.
Factors like loading speed, mobile responsiveness and layout are some UX factors that affect search performance.
If users find your site too difficult to navigate, they’ll just hit the back button and click onto your competitors. Google takes that as a sign that perhaps, your site does have a UX issue.
Kristopher Jones, Founder of LSEO
You’ll find that many SEO quotes are centered on content. That’s because content is the foundation of any SEO campaign.
Whether you’re running a local business or an international e-commerce site, publishing SEO-optimized content helps you to attract search traffic.
Without high-quality, targeted content, you can’t go far with SEO.
Whether it’s industrial articles or blogs for a local e-commerce website, they help in attracting search traffic.
Carolyn Lyden, Lead SEO at Search Hermit
While keywords are important, you should never over-optimize them to the extent that it makes the content sound unnatural.
Remember that you’re writing for users and not search bots. Therefore, your content needs to be engaging and as if you’re conversing with the audience.
Never churn out content just to meet a certain keyword density. Google has a knack for detecting poorly-written, unnatural content and that’s bad news if you’re not producing high-quality content.
If readers love your content, Google naturally does.
Mindy Weinstein. Founder of Market MindShift
Images can make or break your SEO strategy. They are good at visually convey certain types of content.
Yet, if you’re not using the right format or compress them to an acceptable size, images can increase webpage loading time.
You can’t afford to have users waiting for a webpage to load, just because it has uncompressed, high-resolution images.
Also, it’s important to optimize the alt-tag of the images with descriptive and keyword-targeted text.
Jason Barnard, Founder of Kalicube
You can be a terrific writer, but sometimes words alone are not sufficient to rank a webpage. The reason is simple, certain subjects are better explained in other formats.
For example, a comparison table is more effective than lengthy explanations with text for a product X vs product Y article. A combination of a step-by-step guide and a video tutorial works best on a Yoga blog.
Rather than sticking with one format, you’ll want to think about which type of content is the most effective in fulfilling the user’s purpose.
Brian Harnish, Lead SEO at iLoveSEO
Back then, popping up on the first page of Google was the lofty goal of SEOs. Now, you ought to aim for the coveted Google featured snippet spot.
The snippet is featured above the top organic result and potentially draws more traffic. While Google doesn’t reveal what are the requirements to be featured on snippets, you’ll have a good idea by examining existing featured results.
For example, ‘how to’ guides with step-by-step instruction are more likely to rank on Google snippets.
If you’re not optimizing for Google snippets, you need to rethink your SEO strategy.
Ryan Jones, SEO Group Director at Razorfish
While it’s important to learn what your audience it’s searching for, it’s equally important to check out your competitors.
Sometimes, it doesn’t pay to rank for highly competitive keywords when your website is relatively new.
You’ll need to play smart and make the best use of your resources or you’ll end up with frustrating results.
Try to find keyword opportunities that are not dominated by more established sites. Targeting multiple low-traffic, low competition keywords is better than focusing all your efforts on ranking for a high volume, generic keyword.
Helen Pollitt, Lead SEO at Arrows Up
Here’s one SEO quote that will clear up many confusions on link building. It puts an end to the question of which type of backlink carries the most SEO juice.
Ideally, you’ll want to get a link from an authoritative site that is also relevant to your niche. It’s harder said than done and it requires patience, time and effort to link build from such sites.
Do relevant websites but with lesser authorities work? Yes, they are preferable to authoritative websites that have nothing to do with your industry.
Chuck Price, Founder of Measurable SEO
Just because you’ve managed to rank a webpage in 3 months, it doesn’t mean you’ll repeat the feat with others.
There are many factors in play that could affect the duration before you start seeing results. Some pages just take longer to rank for their respective keywords.
If a keyword is dominated by higher-authority sites, it may take more than 12 months before a new webpage squeezes into the search results.
You’ll need to evaluate factors like keyword competitiveness, backlinks, content quality, and user experience to determine if you’re on the right track.
Eric Enge, General Manager at Perficient Digital
A single Google algorithm update could wipe off most of your organic traffic overnight. A bad link building strategy may incur a manual penalty.
When you’re working on SEO, part of the job is to expect the unexpected. This holds true regardless of how evolved Google is in the coming years.
What’s important is to not panic and analyze what went wrong when the dust settles and make changes accordingly.
Perhaps you need a smarter link building strategy or improve existing content. Or remove unnecessary Javascripts that are slowing down the page.
Sometimes, the fault lies with Google and you’ll need to wait for a reversal.
David Harry, Lead SEO Consultant at Verve Developments
As powerful as Google search bot is, it is still a piece of software with limited comprehensive skills. It couldn’t interpret and understand a piece of an article just like a human could.
Therefore, your content should also contain semantic terms or related phrases besides the primary keyword. They give context to your article and help search engines to understand what the content is all about.
With that said, you’ll want to ensure the article is naturally written, and not forcibly squeezing in the semantic phrases.
Eli Schwartz, Growth Advisor at Eli Schwartz
Not all SEO optimization has to revolve around Google. If you’re targeting an audience in countries where Google is a lesser force, you’ll need a different strategy.
For example, Google is banned in China and you’ll want to rank on Baidu, which serves the Chinese audience.
Similarly, Yandex is the go-to search engine in Russia and you’ll want to optimize for it if you’re targeting Russians.
Even if most of your audience is on Google, don’t forget search engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo, which do have their respective user base.
Aleh Barysevich, Founder of SEO PowerSuite
We couldn’t agree more with this SEO quote.
Sure, ranking for short-tail keywords opens the gate to a large volume of traffic. But if you want better conversion and an easier path to Google page 1, long-tail keywords are the best.
People who are searching for long-tail keywords are driven by a more specific purpose. Their search intent is clearer and it’s easier to produce content that fits their goals.
Viola Eva, Founder of Flow SEO
If you’re looking for a shortcut to SEO ranking, you’ll be deeply disappointed. Such shortcuts are often loopholes that are eventually shut down by Google.
It happened in the past and it will happen again in the future. Instead of wasting time on BlackHat tactics, work on a sustainable SEO strategy with legitimate practices.
Honing up your SEO skills require considerable effort. There’s also the process of trial-and-error that you need to go through.
Eventually, you’ll get the desired results after giving everything you’ve got.
Julie Joyce, Owner of Link Fish Media
SEO effort doesn’t end after successfully placing web pages on Google’s first page. The hard part is to keep them in top positions and fence off challenges from competitors.
To do that, you’ll need to keep improvising on the web pages. For a start, look back at older content and update them. Google loves fresh content.
Get better backlinks, improve page loading speed, redirect broken links, work on internal linking and the list goes on.
You’ll need to be consistently improvising if you want sustainable results.
Tony Wright, CEO at WrightIMC
Taking the top spot for competitive keywords is indeed satisfying. However, you’ll need to evaluate if it fits into your budget and strategy.
In most niches, high-traffic keywords are dominated by websites with high authority. It is not easy to break into the search result.
Often, going heads on with authoritative competitors is not the best idea. Instead, focus on what you could do to outshine your competitors.
For example, closing the opportunities gap with long-tail keywords and improving the on-page experience.
Rachel Costello, Technical SEO Consultant at Builtvisible
If you’ve been paying attention, Google is prioritising content that delivers a great user experience.
In simpler terms, Google rewards web pages that give their users what they want in the most efficient manner.
To SEO-proof your webpages, you need to start looking into factors like what devices are your users using and how good is their internet connectivity.
It’s important to anticipate how users are going to interact with the content and ensure that the process is seamless.
Xavier Tan, Co-founder of Heroes of Digital
Nobody likes to do difficult things. It takes time, energy, resources, money and expertise. This is true in life, and it's no different when it comes to SEO.
Most SEOs would do the easy SEO optimisations - edit meta descriptions, optimize images, do local citations, get PBN links etc. Most SEOs would do these.
What are some difficult things that most SEOs would not do? Write long-form quality content. Build a memorable brand. Create linkable assets on their website that serve their target market well. Do digital PR.
By doing things that others don't want to do, you're creating value. And from there, success will follow.
Hashtags are a great way to increase organic reach for your social media campaigns, while also making them easy to track and share amongst your target audience. Every social media platform has its own unique set of hashtags that you can use.
Of course you need to make sure you don’t go overboard with your hashtag use, but it never hurts to be one of the brands consumers start referring to as an ‘expert’ on a certain topic.
With the ever-changing nature of social media, it’s sometimes hard to determine which hashtags are best for each platform. Sometimes that’s because there are so many options, but sometimes it’s because of the type of content you want to share.
Which is why we have created this blog post, which outlines what certain hashtags can be used for and which will lead to more engagement with your posts. You can use these tips on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and more to help generate more leads, build trust, and get more!
Let’s get started.
A hashtag is simply a word that comes after the pound (#) symbol. It is a way of referring to a specific piece of content.
When you add a # to the beginning of a word in a tweet, Twitter automatically adds that content to identify a content on social media platforms. You can use hashtags to get a stronger connection with your audience and save them time searching for relevant content.
When someone tags their tweet with a #, it automatically grabs the attention of other people on Twitter who might also be interested in the topic being discussed.
Chris Messina is an American blogger, product consultant and speaker. He is best known for his early work on the hashtag as it is currently used on social media platforms.
When Twitter was first launched, it did not have a hashtag feature. Not surprisingly, users were initially disappointed that they saw irrelevant content.
Chris Messina, was looking for a better way to organize information on the twitter platform. Messina's ideas on how to fix the problem were straightforward. He took inspiration from IRC, and unleashed the first Twitter hashtag on August 23, 2007. Although, the hashtag wasn’t utilised till the 2007 California wildfires in October 2007.
how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?
— Chris Messina (@chrismessina) August 23, 2007
Trying to get people to notice the content you create, is like talking to a brick wall. No one sees your genius post or quotes when you don't use hashtags.
Hashtags help people find you. A hashtag is added to a word or phrase and it is then visible to others looking for that tag. So why aren’t you using them? They allow you to build up your social circle and get more eyes on your name.
Learn how and which hashtags you can use for your own social media content to expose it to a ready-made audience of millions.
A recent study showed that hashtags are 80% effective at increasing engagement on social media platforms. This is particularly true for users in the 18-34 age bracket, who are rapidly growing engaged with their favorite brands.
If you take a look at some of the most popular hashtags recently used by sports teams, entertainment personalities or product retailers you'll see what we are referring to. These users are not only engaging with the content they're seeing but have a better perspective on what the brands truly values.
Adding hashtags to your posts can get you more engagement on your social media accounts, it can help get the word out about the content you're providing. Try writing the first paragraph of your post in a way that will highlight the importance of the topic and ask people to share it with their friends or followers using the relevant hashtags.
Use hashtags to build your brand. When you start a business you should think about how you are going to market it. That means using hashtags to help connect with other business owners. A quick search for #marketing will bring up plenty of ideas.
It’s easy to forget that every time you post a photo on Instagram or Linkedin there are people waiting to see what you have to say.
Yet as important as it is for your business “to be seen”, it is even more important for your personal “to be heard”. Information travels fast on the Internet and if you don’t take advantage of it soon enough your business could be missing out on potential opportunities.
Social issues are ones that affect a wide audience, such as social injustice or discrimination. When these issues come up, people rally around and speak out for their rights.
This happens all the time on Twitter and Facebook, where people show their support for a variety of causes. You can use these media platforms to spread awareness about social issues by using hashtags and posting messages that include them; this will allow people who aren't as involved to see what issues matter to you and get involved.
Using a hashtag that’s connected to an issue beyond your brand is a way for any brand to lend its voice and resources to support an important cause or issue.
For example, #BlackLivesMatter and #BLM was used across social media platforms, including Instagram, to build awareness and show support for the value of black people.
Using hashtags to attract new users is a great way to get in front of them and help them find you. It also helps you build relationships with your target audience, which is extremely important when building an organic business.
If someone searches for you, but doesn’t know what you do, they just wasted time looking at a page that wasn’t even related to their search. Some business owners are even using hashtags to attract new visitors straight to their profile.
On platforms like Linkedin and Instagram, social media users can follow specific hashtags including that of other users. Using some popular hashtags can be another way to help new users find your brand.
For example, if you follow #jobseekers hashtag on LinkedIn posts, you will see recent posts relating to this topic on your feed. This is a good way to find relevant information regarding that topic.
You know hashtags are helpful for your social media marketing, but where do you start?
How do you know which hashtags to use? How do you find the “best” ones? Which ones will give you the response you’re hoping for from your followers, clients and customers?
Hashtags used well can be a powerful tool to extend your reach, engage an audience with your brand and get results. There are many different social media platforms and each has its own set of rules though.
Here you will find easy tips for using hashtags on different social media platforms.
To make your Tweets more visible, try using hashtags. Hashtags are a powerful way to appeal to a global audience and attract the attention of people who are interested in your content.
There are 3 ways to use hashtags in your Tweets: at the top of the post where your followers can see them, at the end of a conversation ro wrap up your ideas, or within the content itself. In all cases, the more relevant and prominent a tag, the better.
Hashtags can also be added in your comment section, your replies and even your Twitter bio.
If you are using Facebook to promote a business, blog or other content be sure to use hashtags that will help connect your posts to people who are interested in the topics you are sharing.
Hashtags can be used to promote your posts on Facebook by including them in any part of your posts. When people view your posts, they may click on one of the hashtags listed under the post and view content related to that hashtag.
Hashtags can also help keep your posts visible in news feeds for longer periods of time if they contain certain keywords.
Brands should also use hashtags to create groupings of content on the private Facebook groups they belong to. This is especially important as Facebook users shift away from public channels.
When you create a great caption, incorporating hashtags can help you grow your Instagram community. Including hashtags in the comments section is a splendid way to engage with your followers.
Instagram allows you to incorporate up to 10 hashtags in your stories. You can also add hashtags to your brand’s Instagram profile bio.
Hashtags are now a part of YouTube’s search algorithm. This means that if you add a hashtag that is related to your video, it has the potential of showing up in your viewers’ search results.
YouTube hashtags are one of the surefire ways to help users discover your video. You can do this by adding a few hashtags in your brand’s YouTube video description or in your video title.
Hashtags here are usually hyperlinked and you can click them to find other videos with the same content category and hashtag.
Click on the hyperlinked hashtag to see a feed with other videos that also use that same hashtag.
Using more than 15 hashtags on your YouTube content will make YouTube flag your content as spam content.
Using hashtags in LinkedIn can help you stand out from other LinkedIn users and attract new users.
It can also help you get more engagement on your LinkedIn posts and save time as you don't have to scroll through hundreds of posts to find what you're interested in.
LinkedIn also allows you to follow any hashtag of your choice, this will enable you to see content related to that specific hashtag. You can add hashtags anywhere in your LinkedIn posts and in the LinkedIn article you write.
Pinterest is a visual social media platform. Just like every other platform, keywords are essential for content discovery on Pinterest.
This is why it’s vital to utilise them in your company, board, pin names and descriptions. Hashtags are also useful, especially since Pinners can follow hashtags that they’re interested in making them super useful for your brand.
When creating a new pin, start by adding a title and description. Ensure you include keywords and related hashtags. Pinterest also suggests hashtags when you are creating a new Pin although this feature is only available in the mobile version.
The best way to think about hashtags is that they're like a currency.
It's easy to use a lot of them, but if you don't have anything worth saying, or if you say something that's already been said by someone else, it might not look as fresh or effective to other people. Rather create content that is unique to you and boost its reach using relevant hashtags.
In 2007, the use of hashtags became popular in social media. Today, they are even more useful for brands than they once were.
Heroes of Digital is a social media marketing company. We take your brand and build a following by creating engaging content, generating organic traffic from our audience, and building a buzz that drives new customers to you.
Digital marketing tools are becoming quite popular across verticals. They help streamline and automate marketing activities, but there is more to it. They enable businesses to create and execute comprehensive marketing strategies.
Besides introducing an integrated marketing approach, marketing tools also provide real-time insights into analytics.
When choosing the best digital marketing tool for your business, you will discover that there are hundreds of them on the market.
How do you pick the best one?
As one of the best digital marketing agencies in Singapore, we regularly use these 8 tools and hope they will benefit your business as well.
Pay-per-click is one of the most popular digital marketing methods. It enables businesses to get instant results instead of relying on long-term SEO strategies. Some eg of pay-per-click channels are Google ads, Facebook ads, Instagram ads.
However, with the challenges of keyword research, competition analysis, and budget planning, we can’t do PPC marketing adequately without using some extra tools.
Over the years, SEMrush grew into one of the most powerful tools for digital marketers interested in PPC marketing. It comes with a variety of tools to help you with all things PPC marketing. The features SEMrush offers for PPC marketing are grouped into two categories - Paid Advertising and PPC Keyword Research.
PPC Keyword Research is a bundle of several tools created to help you build a perfect paid research campaign. You will be able to use cutting-edge keyword research tools to discover the most viable keywords for your campaigns.
With Paid Advertising tools, you will be able to monitor your competition. It can give us insight into the exact ad copy and paid keywords your competition is using. You can also see during what months they are most active. In addition, SEMrush allows you to analyze your competitors’ banners and ad texts and identify what audiences they are targeting.
SEMrush offers three pricing plans:
Your PPC campaigns are only as effective as your weakest ad copy. The platform has been created to help marketers discover content ideas and get actionable insights. If you don’t know how to create engaging headlines, give BuzzSumo a try.
One of the best features you can find on BuzzSumo is the Topic Analyzer. You can use it to assess your PPC ad headlines and get directions on how to improve them to boost engagement and click-through (CTR) rates.
The platform also offers a Keyword Tool that you can use alongside Topic Analyzer. It will help you assess how your new PPC ad headline will perform to ensure it gets displayed to the right audience.
BuzzSumo can provide you with thorough reports on your competition. You can use it to put your competitors’ online footprint under a microscope. You will be able to discover their primary sources of traffic and learn how and where they obtain them.
BuzzSumo offers a 30-days free trial along with three pricing plans:
Every marketing initiative is an investment. So if you want to keep your finances in check, you should consider tracking the ROI of your PPC campaigns.
Heroes of Digital PPC ROI calculator is a tool that comes from one of the best digital agencies in Singapore.
As you probably already know, every time a prospect or a lead clicks on your ad, the PPC platform will charge you differently. It’s because the bidding is dynamic, and it depends on keyword competitiveness and potential traffic.
This PPC ROI calculator is built to make calculating PPC ROI as straightforward as possible. You don’t even have to know the metrics that affect the PPC ROI to calculate it. It allows you to plan your budget ahead by only knowing the top-of-page bid range for your target keywords.
Pricing? Free.
Proving effective SEO services for our clients is not easy.
We rely on some SEO software to do a better job.
SERanking is a complete SEO software suite with marketing and SEO analysis features. Over the years, it has become a go-to SEO tool for many SEO agencies because it offers a complete solution to all significant SEO challenges.
Despite its numerous features, the tool remains easy to use and requires minimal technical knowledge.
SERanking keyword rank tracker stands at the core of this tool. It enables you to track your website’s ranking positions for targeted keywords on all major search engines, including Google and Bing. You can also dive deeper into ranking reports to assess how your website ranks in different countries and cities.
Additionally, SERanking offers a website audit tool. You can use it to analyze your website against the best SEO practices. The tool will identify all on- and off-page SEO issues and offer you actionable tips on fixing them.
SERanking also comes with a competitive research tool. You can use it to discover what keywords your competition is targeting. You can do so for both their PPC and organic search campaigns. The tool keeps track of historical data as well, which you can leverage to discover patterns.
Finally, SERanking also delivers a convenient way to monitor and check all your backlinks. You can do it in real-time and get insight into all relevant metrics for every backlink in your portfolio.
SERanking offers one of the most customizable pricing plans you can find out there. There are three pricing plans, but the final price depends on three factors: rankings check frequency, subscription period, and the number of keywords tracked:
AHREFs is a solution that offers access to the comprehensive SEO toolset. The tool is intuitive and easy to use. Among the various tools in the AHREFs offer, the key ones are keyword generator, explorer, backlink & rank checker, and site audit and explorer.
Site audit lets you analyze your website for on- and off-page SEO issues and guides you to fix them. Site Explorer is quite convenient if you want to see what the competition is doing. Keyword generator helps you find the relevant keywords and run them in the explorer to see how hard it would be to rank for them.
The rank tracker provides an efficient way to check how your website is tracking targeted keywords. You can use it to assess your SEO strategy and track your ranking as it goes up or down.
Heroes of Digital SERP Preview Tool helps you optimize your page title and meta description length. In addition,
it can help you make your snippet in the search engine result pages look more professional. The tool creates a search engine result snippet just as it would appear on Google. But there is more to it.
Optimizing the meta tags for all your web pages and content can help you boost your ranking and CTR. Meta tags help search engine crawlers understand what the page is about.
Your snippet in search results is the first contact a customer may have with your brand. Making a good first impression can make a difference between clicking on your link or scrolling past it.
Heroes of Digital SERP Preview Tool is entirely free to use.
With proper conversion optimization tools, you will be able to reap the benefits of your inbound marketing strategy. As one of the leading digital marketing agencies in Singapore, Heroes of Digital developed two conversion optimization tools for businesses to use.
Heroes of Digital Google Review Link Generator is a simple tool built to help any business easily capture customer reviews. With over 40,000 search queries per second, Google is the number one search engine. Customers use it to research brands and products.
This tool allows you to create a simple link and send it to your customers. It makes leaving a review convenient for them. It works on any device and generates short and professional-looking links.
Customers want to find everything that interests them in one place.
In order to drive engagement, businesses can use a QR Code Generator
You can use QR codes to boost conversion rates and facilitate your business growth. QR codes have found various use cases ranging from using them to direct customers to your website or enabling them to leave a feedback quickly.
When you direct users to a particular page on your website, you're able to collect first party data of your customers, and with more data, your marketing becomes more effective. You can re-engage your customers through SMS marketing, or do a Lookalike audience on Facebook and target similar audience through your ads.
Choosing the right digital marketing tool for your business depends on your specific goals and needs. The eight tools we’ve covered are very powerful and quite often seen in a successful marketer's toolbox. This article is the newest addition to the series we’ve been working on.
You can find additional tools in our guides for best social media scheduling tools, PPC spy tools, and best SEO tools.
