To build a brand online, you will need customers and other stakeholders to trust it and identify with what your business does. The following are some of the steps in the process of building a strong brand online.

1. Analyze and Understand the Market

It is always important for you to have a deep understanding of the market where you want to operate. Understanding the market allows you to know what the customer needs that are not getting fulfilled. It helps you understand how you can do things differently from what is already being done and carve a niche for yourself.

When you find out what the customers are searching for online through research, you can then use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques. SEO helps you to ensure that your brand comes up as often as possible when potential customers search for information that is of interest to them.

Watch for particular phrases to use in your SEO and content marketing initiatives. It is this information that you can then use to advertise effectively. The looping Keyword Research Tool “Get Suggestions” can help you learn what variants of your keywords are being used by people in your local area.

2. Pinpoint and Analyze Your Competitors

The other way to build your brand is by analyzing your competitors. Study how they have effectively, and ineffectively built their brand. Ask the following questions:

• Are they consistent with their message and visual identity across channels?
• What is the quality of their products or services?
• Do they have customer reviews you can read, or social mentions about them?
• How active are they in social media?
• What is the engagement rate of their visitors?
• What is the quality and the tone of their content?
• What are their strengths and weaknesses?

Utilize the data and combine it with your business in such a way that it makes you unique from the market.

3. Build Trust in Your Brand

To ensure that there is trust between you and your online audience you should always think long and hard before publishing anything for them to see. Online audiences tend to lose trust in anyone who doesn’t respond to their inquiries quickly. It is advisable to maintain a regular schedule for posting your updates, blogs or other posts. Ensuring that the content of your website and other online platforms is simple and relatable is also key to building trust.

Posting regularly is how you keep your audience engaged. It is also important to, as much as possible, communicate with your audience in real time. This is usually made possible by the use of social media marketing. Many companies nowadays employ full time social media managers who respond to queries from customers in real time.

Long term relationships help you to stabilize your brand. If for example, if you keep changing your graphic designer, there is a chance that despite their best efforts, the graphics you get from these different relationships may be different. This would lead to a situation where your brand can not be properly identified. Stable, consistent design has always been important in web design, email marketing, postal mail, TV ads, magazine ads, text messaging, social media and video presentations.

To achieve that consistent design, you will need quality images. While you can hire photographers to take the pictures you need, or it is easier to acquire pictures for free through online sharing platforms.

Strong, long-term relationships with other suppliers also contribute in helping your customers understand you.

4. Be Creative and Use Humor

When seeking to get people to click on your advert in a Pay Per Click initiative, one way you can get it moving is by use of humor. Once you have been online for some time and you have acquired a considerable following, people on the net will start stereotyping you. Stereotyping happens especially when you have been engaging with your customers and prospects on social media. Once you get wind of the stereotype that is going around your brand, use that to entertain your audience with some self-deprecating humor.

In social media marketing, a dose of well researched humor for clients and prospects is a good way for you to start the day. Humor also makes your page appear more approachable. People want a face for your brand and a humorous face creates an air of friendship and camaraderie.

5. Track Your Online Brand Mentions

Another crucial part of building your brand’s reputation is monitoring its online mentions. Your campaign is meant to produce results, and the customers’ opinion of you reflects how well you are trying – not exactly something you can ignore safely. And why would you ignore your brand’s mentions when you can make them work for you?

Tracking brand mentions helps you to:

• Build new links from unlinked mentions
• Start fixing your brand’s reputation if it’s bad
• Communicate with your audience where discussion is possible
• Turn your haters into supporters (if your diplomatic skills are strong)
• Research the market by getting to know your customers and their wishes better

You can find mentions of your brand by using search engines and Online SEO tools, and it’s best to use both in tandem. There are plenty of things even Google can’t find. Did you know that not even 10% of posts made on Twitter are added into Google’s index? But with a social monitoring tool like WebCEO’s Web Buzz Monitoring, you can easily find them all.

In addition to SEO and social monitoring tools, use Google to expand your search range and cover both indexed and unindexed brand mentions. Forums and review platforms are the most obvious places to look – and depending on the reputation you’ve already made, those might be just the tip of the iceberg. Be sure to search far and wide!

6. Evaluate and Change for the Better

Always have your ear on the ground as far as public perception of your brand is concerned. This helps you to sift through these perceptions and identify which ones to keep and which ones to demolish. Demolition of some of the perceptions is meant to ensure that the only perception that comes through to your online audience is the one that properly represents your business. This means that you will want to brainstorm with your team on how things can be done to clarify your brand image.

Afterword

Don’t forget that, ultimately, your reputation is a reflection on how you treat your customers. Value them, and they’ll value you back, too!

The post Brand Building: How to Build a Good Reputation appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Our blog has seen a lot of SEO talk lately. SEO for legal firms, SEO for fashion sites, tips for local SEO… However, before you even start doing SEO for your site, the first and the most important steps are creating a brand, doing proper positioning and taking care of online brand tracking.

What is the sign of a good brand reputation?

Who creates a website without the intention to lure visitors in? I guess there are webmasters who want to dwell in the unexplored pages of Google’s search results; maybe even the deep web. Somehow I doubt you are one of them. You were born for greatness. You want to make your website known and famous; maybe it already is. Whatever the case, your success is deeply tied to your online reputation: one of your highest rewards and one of your main concerns at the same time.

A good brand reputation is like a tree. Not only does it feels nice to rest under its shadow, it can also grow and bear fruit to even riper rewards if you nurture it right. And obviously, it will wither if you don’t show it proper care. Growing the tree of your reputation is a complex task, and not the least important of its steps is tracking your brand mentions online. That’s what we’ll give special attention to today.

How to find online brand mentions

Many people are scared to search their own name online. Woe to you if you named your brand after yourself, for you’ll have to overcome this fear. If you were more creative, all is good in your world. Search away safely.

A simple Google search can reveal a lot about your reputation: reviews, for example. Yet there are a number of reasons I wouldn’t recommend relying on Google alone.

• It sorts search results by their rankings, regardless of how old or recent they are. This poses a problem if you want to know what’s new.
• It likes to put results you’ve clicked on before in the top positions. This can be circumvented by going incognito, but can you really be bothered to do that every time you want to Google yourself?
• Your own site will most likely occupy the top search results, making your search needlessly longer.

You could try and come up with sophisticated search requests that would solve those problems (there are plenty of secret Google Fu techniques), but there’s an easier way. It’s much more optimal to use an SEO tool which can quickly find the brand mentions that you need.

If you have a project in WebCEO set up and running, you can start tracking your mentions with the Web Buzz Monitoring tool.

Click on Settings. That’s where the beast awaits commands from you to obey. It’s all fairly simple. The first step is typing the keywords you want to track.

You can choose up to 20 different words and phrases. You can even use the minus sign to exclude all results with specific keywords; this is in order to filter out irrelevant matches. I can’t come up with a serious example from the top of my head, so let’s go with a silly one. Suppose you want to track mentions of pizza, but you don’t find pineapple pizza appetizing enough to want to see it in your results. You go to Settings -> Keywords and type in pizza -pineapple and pizza -Hawaiian in the list of keywords to be tracked. Done! No more recipes that offend your taste.

Below Keywords is the Languages menu where you select the preferred languages of results. Pretty straightforward.

Press Save when you are finished tweaking the tool, and in a few moments you’ll have your mentions. They’ll be displayed in two separate sections: News and Blogs and Twitter Buzz.

The former is for when your brand’s name, linked or unlinked, is dropped in news articles and blog posts. The results are marked as ‘read’ as soon as they appear on your screen (i.e. they’ll turn purple if you keep scrolling and will stay blue if you don’t), and you can filter out read posts by clicking on the menu in the top left corner above the list. Tremendous help when you need only fresh updates, isn’t it?

Twitter Buzz, as the name suggests, shows the most recent tweets with your mentions (in hashtags and otherwise), picked from Twitter. It shares the settings with News and Blogs, so you don’t have to configure the tool twice.

If you happen to get a particularly positive mention – an article full of accolades or a tweet that received lots of likes and retweets – you can mark it as a favorite so you could easily find it again whenever you want. As they say, confidence is built through success. Let those favorite mentions become a foundation for yours!

How does online brand monitoring help you?

Now that you’ve discovered a goldmine of your brand’s mentions, what are you to do with it? How does this information help you? You put it to good use, of course! Here are the advantages of brand monitoring:

• It provides opportunities for link building. Expect to get more than a few unlinked brand mentions. While they work fine for raising awareness, you can attempt to make them even more useful. Reach out to the person who talked about you in their article and ask them to attach your site’s URL to the mention. Chances are, they’ll do it: after all, they liked you enough to bring you up in the topic.
• You can interact with your target audience. If the mention sparked discussion in the comments, you can join in and participate. Do commenters have questions about you? Be helpful and answer them. Are you being scolded instead of praised? This could be your chance to present yourself in a more positive light. Conversation is the best way to build reputation.
• You can research the market. Just sit back and absorb information without actively doing anything (but don’t make it a habit). It’s important to know how the public perceives you, how their opinion of you can be improved and how you can improve yourself to bring in more customers.

Awareness is the key to winning any battle, and your online reputation is worth fighting for. Be constantly aware of what the Internet thinks of you, and that’s half of the battle already won. Knowledge, swift action and a good SEO tool are the nutrients you need for growing the tree of your success. Be sure to take good care of it!

Sign Up for a Free 14-Day Trial
and Combine Brand Tracking with Good SEO!

The post Why Online Brand Tracking Is No Less Important Than SEO appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

If you’re an entrepreneur, you know the story of your business. You followed it from an initial idea to execution, so you should have a deep understanding of what makes your brand tick.

But you can’t assume your audience will inevitably arrive at the same interpretation. If you want to get everyone on the same page, you have to become a storyteller.

What is Storytelling?

Think back to your childhood and recall the person who most enthralled you. Maybe it was your mother, father, a grandparent, or a teacher.

What was it that made you so interested in what that person had to say? Usually, we find ourselves captivated by people when they’re good at communicating and relaying a story.

They do an exceptional job of employing words and descriptive language to take us to a particular place in our minds. Whether you realize it or not, the same is true of brands.

We love our favorite brands because they enable us to feel strong, healthy, comfortable, sexy, wealthy, and other positive things. They take us to places that — in our minds — are ideal.

Though there are many different aspects to painting a product in a particular light, storytelling is one of most effective ways that a brand reaches its customers.

Three Tips for Telling a Better Brand Story

If you’re a marketer or business owner, the question is: Are you doing justice to your company’s story? Here are a few tips that should help:

Keep it Simple

When companies start to think about storytelling, they tend to draw up lists of words, concepts, ideas, and values that are important to them. As they pile up, the story of your brand risks becoming fairly complicated and lengthy.

That’s all right, but you have to find a way to synthesize all this information into a concise story to convey to your audience. Take Sixthreezero, a popular West Coast bike brand, as an example.

Being a lifestyle brand, the firm has so many different directions it could go. But Sixthreezero discovered a way to simplify the message to arrive at clean phrases such as “We chase our dreams,” “Spread the use of bikes,” “This is our lifestyle,” and “It’s a culture.”

See if you can do the same. To effectively distill your brand’s story into powerful, resonant messages, use WebCEO’s Keyword Research Tool. It is your assistance in identifying precise keywords that resonate with your core values and messaging, ensuring your simplified story not only captivates but also reaches the right audience.

Be Honest and Transparent

Honesty and transparency are the most important facets of a powerful brand story. If you try to fudge the facts or exaggerate certain points, you’ll find yourself in trouble. Your customers will see right through this.

Dove doesn’t kid around with their transparent storytelling. Just watch some of its videos and you’ll see this clearly.

Use the Right Mediums

Finally, make sure you’re telling your story in a way that will reach the audience. Every brand is unique, and you’ll have to discover where your target customers are and how they enjoy consuming content.

As a rule of thumb, don’t limit your storytelling to a single medium. You should seek a healthy balance of video, written content, and branding.

The more versatile and widespread your storytelling is, the more honest and real it will come across. TOMS Shoes is a great example of this. The firm has been able to tell its story in a variety of ways, without ever losing its focus on the core message. 

Putting It All Together

“Before you sell anything, you will need to connect, and not just with a handshake or sending out one email. You need to emotionally connect with the people you want to be your customers now, and for the rest of their lives,” marketer Felicia Spahr explains.

How do you establish an emotional connection? By now it should be clear: Tell a compelling story. Your business cannot thrive until you’ve identified and clearly conveyed the story of your brand. Don’t delay any longer.

Just so you know, WebCEO’s SEO Content Assistant can help you craft compelling storytelling that resonates deeply with your target audience, ensuring your content is not only engaging but also strategically optimized for search engines.

The post How to Tell Your Brand’s Story in a Powerful Way appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

When formal customer service comes to mind, most people think about call centers and service desks. And while these are certainly important components, modern brands also need to integrate social media into their customer satisfaction service strategies. This is the only way to meet the demands of tech-savvy consumers who are always connected to the internet.

The Need for Social Media Customer Service

The beauty of social media is that it can be leveraged in so many different ways. From a business perspective, it’s a great tool for pushing content, advertising your brand, establishing authority, engaging with customers, and, yes, investing in customer service.

Unfortunately, most businesses put their social media priorities in that order. As a result, the customer service aspect often gets lost amidst other goals and responsibilities. This is also why many marketers will tell you customer service is the most frequently missed opportunity for small businesses when it comes to social media.

A social customer service strategy is important for a number of reasons. Primarily, it matters because customers want it. Nearly half of all U.S. consumers already use social media to ask questions, complain, or report satisfaction. In other words, your customers are already using social outlets to discuss experiences with your brand – shouldn’t you meet them there?

3 Tips for an Effective Strategy

It will be harder than ever to ignore the importance of developing a social customer service strategy this year. And as you venture into this new area, you’ll want to remember these suggestions.

1. Provide Extensive Training

According to DMG Consulting Research, 80 percent of companies underinvest in formal social media customer service – and will continue to for years to come. This is a striking statistic that will need to be dealt with one business at a time.

“While it may appear that social media service does not require the same level of investment as demanded by other, traditional support channels, don’t underestimate the power of extra technology and agent training resources,” writes Global Response, “especially when diving into unexplored customer service territory.”

It’s important that you don’t just dive in head first with social customer service. If you want your strategy to be effective, adequate and extensive training must be supplied.

2. Proactively Monitor Feeds

The beauty of social media is that you can listen to what’s going on all over the world. In many cases – such as with Twitter – you can even listen to conversations you aren’t part of. From a business perspective, this is invaluable. It also points to the need to proactively monitor feeds, as opposed to waiting for users to contact you.

For example, it’s much better to use social listening tools and identify the moment when a customer first expresses frustration with a product they recently purchased than it is to wait until that anger reaches a boiling point, and they directly call out your brand in front of thousands of users. You can use Hootsuite for regular monitoring of your brand mentions and possible customers’ requests on Twitter. If you have not yet tried WebCEO for your online reputation management it’s a high time to embark on it. Once you’ve added you niche terms alongside your brand name or your site domain, the Web Buzz Monitoring tool will let you monitor the latest term-related articles, as well as reviews or posts with mentions (hyperlinlinks or implied links) of your brand over the web and Twitter. Using these or other tools, you will become more proactive in your business niche.

3. Use the Right Tone of Voice

The tricky part about social media is that it’s easy to take things out of context. This goes both ways. Sometimes customers will post something that’s nothing more than a quick sarcastic jab, but can be perceived as a serious complaint. Other times, your brief response to a complaint may seem inauthentic.

Because it’s so easy to misinterpret text-based comments, it’s important that you spend time perfecting your social customer service voice so that users know exactly what to expect from your brand.

Let Social Work for You

Ultimately social media is a powerful customer service tool that’s vastly underutilized in today’s marketplace. If you want to meet customers where they are and satisfy their demands for real-time support, now’s the time to make an investment.

The post 3 Tips For a Social Media Customer Satisfaction Strategy appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Social media is an effective tool for B2B marketers and has played useful roles in increasing brand awareness, establishing companies as thought leaders and growing lead conversion rates.

Broadcast media used to be the go-to place when it came to advertising. There are many benefits to be gained from broadcast media just as there are many benefits from social media. People are able to make really great strides in marketing using these platforms.

The likes of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+ and YouTube need no introduction. Marketing on any of these platforms can bring some amazing returns. You just need to ask companies like Air Asia, Taco Bell and Safaricom (the most profitable telecommunications company in East and Central Africa).

Air Asia’s story

A well-managed company loves to have a strong brand.

The problem – small budget for massive advertisement

Air Asia is now probably one of the best known airlines. However, previously, it was just another airline from Malaysia that few people had any idea existed. What the company wanted to do is launch a new flight from Australia.

As you probably know by now, the competition in the airline business is stiff, what with the likes of Virgin Atlantic and British Airways. Such a small airline would not normally stand a chance against these major corporations because they lacked the budget to run an effective traditional advertising campaign. Air Asia still needed to raise brand awareness and they needed to do it very fast. They wanted to get the brand out there to the millions of potential customers while squeezing into a very tight budget.

How they solved the issue –> Facebook

The marketing team chose to run a Facebook campaign. They launched the campaign giving away – wait for it – a free airplane. Well, it was almost a free plane. The company created a competition on Facebook where the winner had the chance to select 302 of their Facebook friends to fly for free. The flight would be from Australia to Malaysia, absolutely free.

What you would do on Facebook is choose the friends that you want to take along with you on a hypothetical flight and then tag them in the seating plan. Take a snapshot and then share it with all the tagged friends. It was as simple as that. Did the plan succeed? Massively!

Outcome – a brand that everyone knows

Perhaps the biggest benefit was the doubling of the number of flights. The company wanted attention; it got the attention in doubles. This is on top of generating PR that was worth an approximate $1.5 million. The company was able to reach out to over 2 million people on Facebook so effortlessly. The Facebook fan base grew by a staggering 30% during the period that the campaign was running.

Why it worked – viral potential

When creating a social media marketing campaign, the goal is to make sure that it goes viral. It does not matter whether you are creating awareness about something specific or you are building a brand. It just needs to go viral for you to get the results you want and even more. A campaign with massive viral potential like Air Asia’s was set to be a great success right from the beginning. The campaign was highly social which made people want to get involved. It also harnessed the principle of reciprocity.

Taco Bell’s Story

Admittedly, if you are so accustomed to using Facebook, Twitter might be a bit of a challenge to begin with. Taco Bell, however, did not have a problem getting their social media channels engaged using Twitter. The company was suffering low engagement and fewer followers than larger brands. This did not work so well for the brand image. So, Taco Bell had to re-engage and they did this by beginning conversations with Twitter users who ad more than 10,000 followers (Twitter influencers). This increases the potential for brand mentions. The whole campaign resulted into a reach of over 600,000 Twitter followers.

Safaricom’s  Story

Social media marketing does not work in America and Asia alone; Safaricom proved this. This company based in Kenya (East Africa) is one of the most profitable corporations in Africa.

The company is famous for having some awesome advertisements on TV and radio. The same is true online. A number of the Safaricom adverts have made it to YouTube and they have great viewership. The company is known for using YouTube, Twitter and Facebook a lot.

They offer customer support on Twitter and while in the business of solving customer problems, they advertise their products. Everyone who uses Safaricom knows that if they want fast customer care, they should go to Twitter. This popularizes their Twitter handle and their hashtags.

They once gave away free smartphones on Facebook. You have probably noticed by now that Facebook users have a thing for free giveaways. Back on YouTube, they place their ads on the channels of influencers. Before you can play the latest video from your favorite artist, you will probably be watching a Safaricom advert (depending on where you are).

How will you gain from social media yourself?

The answer to this question is pretty difficult to give because it all depends on how your campaign is set up. You will need to get someone who has a good understanding of the dynamics of using social media for marketing in order to make the most of it.

For optimizing your social media marketing campaigns and tracking their success, use WebCEO’s Social Media Analytics Tools. WebCEO provides a comprehensive suite of tools designed to enhance your digital marketing strategy, improve your SEO, and streamline your social media efforts, ensuring your campaigns are effective and impactful.

The post 3 Social Media Marketing Success Stories appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

The beauty of SEO campaigns is that they can be run from anywhere. You don’t need a huge office space to house all your employees.

You can outsource the bulk of the work to freelancers. If you’re in the market for an excellent SEO campaign, there are seven types of freelancers that can support your effort.

1. Writers

Content marketing is a major piece of an SEO campaign, and unless you have endless time on your hands and plenty of talent, it’s just not possible without freelance writers. They pose several advantages that an in-house writer cannot, such as reduced overhead, since freelance writers are generally paid on commission or by the hour rather than on salary with benefits.

Some companies choose to order all their content from content mills, which is certainly an affordable option. However, the material from content mills is often riddled with errors, duplicates information from elsewhere, and therefore appears on multiple websites throughout the Internet, which is not good for your overall strategy.

An excellent freelance writer ensures high quality content at an affordable price. It’s not that difficult to find good writers and other dependable freelancers on freelance marketplaces.

2. Web designers and programmers

If you want to drive conversions once you’ve drawn customers to your website, you’ll need to have a well-designed, easily navigable, and highly functional website. By hiring a freelance web designer and programmer, you can have the stylish, easy-to-use website that does the job without killing your budget.

These professionals can design your website from the ground up, and then you can keep them on retainer in case you run into any bugs. When it’s time to update the site, give them another call and they’ll take care of the necessary upgrades.

3. IT professionals

Having an IT professional at your disposal is the best way to ensure that your online operation will stay up and running no matter what. They can answer general tech questions as well as fix small and large technological glitches as they occur, which they inevitably will.

Small businesses and startups have an especially difficult time harnessing their own freelance department, so an IT freelancer will likely be your best option. When you’re looking for an IT freelancer, check to see if the person is collaboration certified, which means that he or she has the expertise to work with your collaborative software and specific technical needs.

4. Project managers

Chances are you have more projects in your current SEO campaign than you can handle. Delegate some of those responsibilities to an independently contracted project manager.

This type of freelancer has a unique skill set that encompasses organization, leadership, and communication. He or she can take the specifics of your project and work with your team of freelancers, and even in-house employees, to improve overall efficiencies and productivity. 

5. Web analysts

A major element of getting ahead of the competition in SEO is being able to monitor web traffic, for both you and your competitor. It’s a major task that could easily take up all your precious time if you let it.

So it’s a good idea to outsource this activity to a professional who specializes in monitoring web data and analytics. Such people can help you stay effectively ahead of the competition, and report back to you about what changes you need to make. It’s a far more efficient and accurate way of monitoring web traffic.

6. Social media specialists

Social media engagement is another SEO task that requires near-constant attention. In Internet time, if you don’t respond to activity on certain social media sites within two hours, you can be viewed as a negligent business.

Delegate this time-consuming responsibility to a professional who can handle the constant demand for social interaction. This person can also help you monitor your social strategies and improve them as you go.

7. Graphic designers

Content creation involves more forms than just prose. Graphic design contractors can make videos, infographics, memes, and more to boost your social campaign.

Consumers respond extremely well to visual content, so having a graphic designer on hand could make all the difference between content that’s shared hundreds of times and content that gets no attention and garners no feedback.

As supplementary to human resources there are free and paid digital marketing tools that can increase the effectiveness of your SEO and marketing campaigns and bring your brand on an industry level.

Don’t make your SEO campaign any harder than it needs to be. Call in the expertise you need to accomplish the necessary work while improving your bottom line.

The post 7 Freelancers Every SEO Campaign Should Use appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Google keeps on sharpening its guidelines by adding new signals to its ranking algorithms. For the past ten years links were used as the main element of the Google ranking system and this was like a gold mine for link hunters. Google was not as smart at link scheme detection as it is today. Those were the Dark Ages in the web world. The black hat SEOs flooded the web with spam links generated by link exchanges, link farms, direct link buys, blog commenting and low quality guest posting etc.

Today, Google has eagle eyes. With the release of the Google Penguin and Panda Updates, and the webmaster’s sacred book, links have partially lost the status of being the primary ranking signal. Deeper signals now count a lot more than they did before, i.e. social media sentiments, brand keyword mentions, citations.   In other words, a link-building strategy still matters, but the algorithms are changing.

In March, 2014, Google filed a patent in addition to the Google Panda Update which stated that “implied links” were an additional trusted way to measure the authority of a brand.

While actual hyperlinks (aka, express links) are under close surveillance by the Google Spam Team, implied links (keywords that obviously refer to a specific brand, especially in context with the words around them) are in great favor for being organic, relevant and unbiased. These links without links have become a new, more trusted way to gauge the authority of your website. Google scours social media for them as well as the rest of the web.

Implied links are now one of the hundred possible ranking factors. We highly recommend you to balance your backlink profile with non-linked references to the Title of relevant landing pages plus relevant keyword phrases + brand names. This will keep your website from Google Penalties and establish a strong connection between your brand mentions and your website. The places where it is vital to run your PR campaigns and build links are:

• Third party review sites
• Local business site listings

Note: in order to improve rankings, be sure to include proper citation information: Name, Address, Phone.

• Guest blogs

Note: most of the reputable blogs accept guest posts with non-linking references that are actually implied links within the copy with links to social media profiles in bio sections).

In order to be able to analyze all of your brand mentions over the web on a daily basis, use the WebCEO Web Buzz Monitoring tool. Also use Google Alerts for your branded terms and start to track what folks are saying about you and your competition. Take part in discussions on high authority expert blogs and niche-specific groups built on social media platforms.

The more you are mentioned on other sources, the more links are built to your site and the higher the risk that a low quality sites link to you.  Don’t forget to check your backlink profile quality on a monthly basis in order to keep it free of toxic and low-quality links. The WebCEO Backlink Checker tool provides a clear picture of your backlink profile with a detailed list of harmful links.

To summarize, the below graph will put all the pros and cons of using implied links:

The post Links That Aren’t Links appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Quora is all about building your authority on your industry topic and building relationships with people who share similar ideas and interests by answering questions. Quora can help you build your online reputation and guide prospects to discover you.

Your aim is to create an inbound marketing strategy that encourages people to discover your product or service online. Quora is the most important platform for this.

How to use Quora

1. Search for content ideas.

Writing high quality content that speaks to your prospects and answers their questions should be part of your marketing strategy. Have you ever wished to get inside your prospects heads to know what they are interested in? Quora lets you do this.

Search for topics related to your industry and you will get a better understanding of the questions your prospects have and the language they use. In a specific industry, as SEO is, we are using professional jargon that may be not be familiar to your prospects. Quora helps you to find out what terms they use to describe their needs.

When you see a question you can answer well, write a short post on Quora and go in deeper detail on your blog where you can link to. Remember to enrich your post with relevant keywords by utilizing WebCEO’s Keyword Research Tool. By carefully selecting keywords that your target audience is searching for, you can improve the visibility of your Quora answer and drive more traffic to your blog.

2. Do competitive and industry research.

Research how your competitors are using Quora. Check how prospects speak about your competitors’ products and services. What are their pros and cons, verses your pros and cons? You may find topics where you can refer to your product. But remember, your answer should add value, don’t just drop a link. As you experience the point of view of potential, you can come up with ideas on expanding your service and improving your products.

3. Manage your online reputation.

You can monitor what people are saying about your industry, product/service and competitors. The best way is to set a Google Alert for the query “Quora the Name of Your Brand.” With timely information, you will be able to step in and respond to a negative review, help your customers if they have questions and thank your loyal clients. Remember that you can private message most members of Quora – this can be a good way to communicate with a prospect privately whose email address you do not have.

4. Improve your website’s visibility.

People ask questions on Quora with the same words as they do on Google or Bing. Your topic-related, full, authoritative answers with good keywords have a good chance of showing up in search results.

5. Generate leads.

Quora allows you to see how many people viewed your answer and, what is more important, you can see the profiles of the people who are following the question. This information is important for you, because these are people who are interested in the question and the topic it is related to. You can now reach out to the followers personally and engage them with targeted offers. This will drive the prospects to your landing pages and convert them into your clients.

The post Why Your Business Needs Quora and How to Use It appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

First of all, do not panic. Bad reviews create significant credibility for your positive reviews; they help your customers make a purchase decision. And most important they give you a chance to respond and show how responsive and awesome your business really is.

Negative reviews happen all the time; your task is to make lemonade from them. You should not respond to every negative review you get. However, you must step in when you are able to “own the issue.”

You answer the reviews to show that: you are paying attention to the issue; the issue and the customer are important to you; you are sorry that the problem occured and you want to help. You should communicate your desire to help and solve the problem.

The aim of your answer is to tell your prospects that something has changed and this issue will not happen to them. Do not waste this great opportunity to market your business and show your prospects that your company cares about them.

Guidelines for Your Response

1. Calm down. We understand, a negative review most likely made you angry. That is the reason to take your time, calm down and write your comment when you are relaxed. Your response should not sound angry. Do not do what this business apparently did.
2. Do not be defensive. It happens that clients are not satisfied with the products. You are here to help and to resolve the issue; not to explain why the problem occurred, but to resolve it. The best advice is to show your answer to a person who doesn’t work at your company and remove everything that sounds defensive to them.
3. Make your answer short. You want your answer to be read; that is why you should keep it short and clear.
4. Write for your prospects. That is the most important part. Think about your audience. Your response is addressed to the reviewer, but your real audience is your prospects, who make decisions upon reviews. Your response should not try to change the reviewer’s mind or dispute the facts as set out in the review.
5. Encourage positive reviews. It’s much more likely for a customer with a bad experience to take the time to post a review than for one with a positive one to share their feedback. Be more proactive in encouraging customers happy with your products or services to say so publicly on online review sites. Good reviews will help to offset bad ones and make consumers less likely to consider the latter as being credible.

Writing a short, non-defensive reply to a review that owns the issue & describes how the issue has been resolved will earn you the trust of your future customers. Track your reputation online with our Web Buzz Monitoring feature from WebCEO’s Social Analytics Tools.

The post How to Deal with Negative Reviews appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.