It’s hard to believe that there are just a few weeks left in 2017. How effective were your SEO strategies and its initiatives will be? Were they better or worse or beyond than expectations? We can’t Predict!

Similar to other areas of the industries, SEO is constantly changing. The once fail-proof method of consistently landing a top SERPs(search engine results pages) became irrelevant within a few months. SEO practices that once dominated the industry quickly fell out of favor.

The Google algorithm itself changes constantly, sometimes with multiple changes happening within months. On top of that, the technology available to SEO professionals also constantly evolves, allowing us to stay informed the seemingly daily changes of what it takes to dominate search.

While 2017 has brought about the dominance of Google AMP (accelerated mobile pages), the rise of HTTPS, the importance of backlinks, the precaution of the overuse of 301 redirects and reformatting of rich snippets to accommodate the increasing popularity of voice search, some of these trends will continue into 2018 and some will fall away.

Increased SERPs Features

It is the goal of any SEO professional to achieve and maintain a high volume of traffic to a given website. Ideally, this would be the result of reaching the top spot on a search engine results page. Not only is it important to achieve this coveted position, but to also maintain it as long as possible.

However, with the latest developments in the search engines, achieving this #1 ranking may no longer be enough to get the traffic you desire. Gone are the days of the ten search results listings, highlighted in blue hypertext, and a couple of clearly marked ads.

Now, when you look at a SERP, it is cluttered with images, videos, links, social media mentions, in-depth article listings, various widgets, and ads. While keyword and key phrase optimization are still important, you now have other offsite elements to consider. Popular search engine results page features include AdWords, news block, featured snippets, local packs, reviews, tweets, video, image pack, shopping results and site links.

“Rich Snippet” Structuring needed

There are rich snippets and regular snippets. Both include a clickable title, a URL, and a meta description. Rich snippets have more condensed titles that include “|” instead of a dash (-), reviews and an image. How you structure the data, however, is important in how search engines will display the information.

Page Speed

In today’s fast-paced, on-demand society, people want things, including information, immediately. Nothing is more frustrating than clicking on a website that appears to answer your question exactly, only to have to wait for the page to load. If the page doesn’t load in 5 seconds, you’re off onto another website that can hopefully give you the answers you need. If your page is slow, your site traffic will suffer. Page speed is a user experience feature that is expected of all websites. To see how the speed of your website stacks up, you can take Google’s PageSpeed Insights. As speed has been a critical component for years, but moving into 2018, we’re going to see even more emphasis on it in the future.

Increased Page Relevance

This means that search engines will evaluate the relevancy of the content on your website. As Google assess the relevance of a website’s content is with Latent Semantic Indexing. Through Latent Semantic Indexing Google can gather content from billions of websites and parse through the content, scanning for related terms and words.

Voice Search is More Real

Just like in 2017, voice search will continue to pick up steam. Many consumers prefer the convenience of speaking over typing. Not only is it faster, but the queries can also be more detailed. More importantly, voice recognition software has reached the point where users are comfortable trusting it to understand their normal speech. The increased detail of search queries means you’ll need to go beyond the simple keyword and phrases to rank and focus more on terms and phrases people are naturally going to say out loud. People speak differently than they type, so your SEO strategy should try using conversational terms and sentences.

Mobile Will be More Important

Smartphones dominate the landscape and more & more web browsing is occurring on mobile devices. In fact, the number of people using their smartphones to browse the Internet is higher than the number who browse on a traditional desktop computer. It is no longer optional to have a mobile-friendly website. It is now required and expected by the search engines and the users. In fact, mobile friendliness is now a search ranking factor.

The Rise of “Linkless” Backlinks

Backlinks have been the tea and saucer of SEO for many years. In the past, this linking from another source to shore a webpage’s authority in the eyes of Google was abused, prompting Google to come up with the Penguin algorithm in 2012. A simple link just isn’t going to stand out from the crowd. Search engines now have the ability to associate mentions of brands, institutions, organizations, and people without the need of linking to their corresponding webpages. While links are going to still carry some weight, the other content around the hyperlinked text is going to also be very important.

SERPs Will Continue Getting Personal

Traditional search ranking factors, such as page speed, content relevancy and page authority, search engines are using information about the user, such as interests, browsing history and location, provide a personalized search results list. Pages that succeed in dominating search will not only get more initial traffic, but when a user clicks to their page, that business’s page will subsequently appear in future searches by that user.This will give you a greater opportunity to dominate that user’s SERPs in the future.

Optimize Your Strategies in 2018

SEO is an ever-changing industry. In 2018, Google will continue to enhance the web user’s experience by scanning the relevancy of a page’s content, using personalized search engine results and faster page speeds, and include additional results page features.

Websites are mobile-friendly and full of normal, conversational terms and words.It takes time and long-term care. If your company is small or new and it doesn’t have a designated Digital marketing professional, IMarks can help you out our trained and knowledgeable SEO professionals can set up and monitor a customized SEO campaign specialized just for your business’ website. Contact us now for more information.

Nowadays conversion is moving with so much forcefulness that staying part of the competition has now become a matter of life and death for the businesses.

If you are running a business, you have to learn all the rules and regulations of this competition. For this you need to have a war hawk’s eye view of what factors are driving the market and where the game is heading and also check the performance plus with maintained balanced on the way how to execute it with the business strategy.

Vary your business to the market trends through consistent, progressive and innovative alteration in the prevalent strategies and meanwhile checking out on gathering the right kind of leads and turning them into customers this is the only way to stay a part of the competition and thrive for excellence.

Expecting for more Conversions

While you might think that everything might be going ‘instant’, sales process definitely is not!  Expecting your prospects to readily turn into clients, graduating through the attention, interest, desire to final action within a blink of an eye can only be termed as one wishful thought. Sales, in reality, is a painstaking process and requires patience and consistency at all levels before you finally get the deal closed.

Wrong Assumptions about Leads

At the initial levels of the sales funnel, if a lead doesn’t show interest or attention, assuming that he would not make it to the next level of the funnel is an absolutely wrong idea. While some may make it gradually to the bottom and then back off, some others may just stick to level one and would eventually make it to the final action without much ado. All you need to focus on is nurturing your leads, for you never know what might just turn into your customer.

Not Evaluating Conversion Plane

You tend to find that businesses focus more on their ultimate closing proportions and overlook. The conversion level loses a number of prospects and leads only with a small ratio of the initial count that makes it successfully to the bottom of the funnel, the sale close. It is important that you evaluate how much loss in terms of leads you are bearing at each step of the funnel this is a requisite to analyze and improvise the efficiency and productivity at each level to maximise the conversion rate.

Unbefitting The Lead Management

Focusing on lead generation and mishandling on the successfully generated dig of leads as this is one mortal error that most of the organization are doing today. It is important to note that effective lead management is more important than generating leads. A smaller number of leads managed well would yield more returns than a large dig.

Effective sales funnel management is important to draw the maximum proportion from the top level to the bottom line. It may require an extra load of work to review and evaluate your sales funnel, but the result, this troubleshoot and improvisation will reap would be much more worth than the efforts put in. A strong, vital and up to date sales funnel is one essential tool that forms the basis of your business strategy and without it, all your efforts and resources may turn disastrous and doomed.

Remember, you don’t have to follow every point on this list. Always try to start with small or with per section. Make sure that over time which you build out should be more sophisticated, predictable, scalable, and repeatable lead generation process from your website.

Follow the tips we have mentioned here and you are sure to see your sales rise. To learn more about B2B sales, comment if you have any queries.

Blog posts are the first step on the conversion path as they drive prospects towards your landing pages and forms. They are also an excellent opportunity for an organisation to show thought leadership and provide unique industry insights. But, how do you attract people to your blog feed in the first place? Unless prospects have subscribed to your blog, you’ll be unable to directly notify them when your latest post is published.

So now what?

Well, don’t fret. Blogs are a fantastic demand generation tool and fit comfy at the top of the sales funnel. This means that they are most effective when targeting prospects in the research stage of their purchase. As the prospects in question may not be able to name their exact issue at this point, they are most likely using search engines to just research their pain points. And this is when blogs become highly valuable in your lead generation activity.

Firstly, get to know your prospects, leads, and customers. Find out what their concerns, issues and pain points are. Ideally, identify the business-related keywords and phrases what they are most likely to type into a search engine or did so during the early stages of their buying process. This information can be gathered by speaking to current customers, reviewing the popularity of certain phrases on Google Adwords, or analysing the source data on your marketing automation software.

Once you have this information you can begin to create engaging blog posts that focus on these keywords and phrases. Using SEO best practice it’ll be possible to ensure your blog post ranks highly on the search engine results pages for this keyword.

Now, when one of your prospects uses a search engine to research their business issues and pain points, they are likely to see one of your blog posts which directly references their query.

It’s important to remember that blog posts are not e-books. They are not meant to be 1000s of words long. They are about providing top-level insight on a particular subject and ultimately driving the reader to convert to a lead by downloading a larger piece of content.

Be sure to only focus on one keyword or phrase per blog post, as otherwise, search engines will become confused and not rank the post as highly relevant to the prospect’s search phrase. It’s also worth noting that if you are starting a new blog, each post should ideally be 1000-1500 words long. This gives the search engines a good amount of content to digest and understand, so they can rank future blog posts more accurately.

Once the blog is more established you can reduce this to between 600-1000 words, but never less than 300. If a blog post has less than 300 words, the likelihood is that the search engines won’t even bother ranking it for their results pages.

Although SEO is an excellent way to ensure your blog posts are found on the search engine results page, there are other ways to ensure the maximum number of people see your latest post. Start by sharing the title and a snippet of text on all of your social media channels.

Only write a short teaser post on social media and link the reader to your full blog post. Also, when sending a lead generation email to your database, add a link to the blog at the bottom. All of these methods will help to increase your subscription rate and build interest in your blog.

A blog is an excellent tool, but only as part of a multi-channel marketing campaign, so to ensure you generate the best results from your activity. To learn more aboutB2B sales, comment if you have any queries.

 Nurturing Techniques To Raise Your B2B Lead Conversion Rates

The most difficult thing to achieve is conversions in B2B, marketing professionals are of the view that their biggest challenge is to convert leads into customers without knowing their lead conversion rate.

Conversions are the money makers or the cash cows of B2B marketing, and it is from them, that the cash flows in. Running a lead generating campaign is easy, but if leads don’t convert into business opportunities and those opportunities are not turned into deals, it is not worth the effort.

Here are 7 Ways to increase your B2B lead conversion rates

1. Create landing pages that work

Landing pages are one of the most important elements of lead generation. First and foremost, you need to do is that remove the main navigation elements such as additional header and footer navigation from your landing page. The landing page is only for one single objective and intended to generate high-value B2B leads or score conversions. A meaningful and direct copy with a clear value proposition can improvise conversion rates. You need to build your marketing campaign accordingly to target niche segments of your potential customers.

2. Create content that is relevant and valuable

Create some unique thought to provoke your content which leaves the reader with something to think about. You need to ask the correct questions so that he learns something from your articles. Adding different visuals to the content make it more appealing to the different learning styles which your readers may have.

3. Make your calls-to-action persuasive

A good calls-to-action (CTA) drives people to your content offers. The offers can turn out to be useless if the CTAs aren’t effective at capturing people’s attention and persuading them to the click. There are chances of your CTAs going unnoticed if your CTA totally blends in too much with the website design. You need to use contrasting colors to make the CTA stand out, and moreover, use of design should be done in such a manner that it is clear that it is a clickable call-to-action.

4. Unleash lead flows to the maximum

Lead flows can help you deliver a pop-up if the reader stays on a page for a certain amount of time before the bounce. For example, if you come to know through analytics, that someone stays on a high converting page for 45 seconds before they bounce, consider using lead flows to deliver subscription pop-ups. This will give enough time to provide them with a re-engagement opportunity before they bounce off the site.

5. Go that extra mile to retarget your audience

Retargeting is the best bet for marketers as there’s a longer buyer cycle, with a reduced likelihood of low consideration impulse purchases. Buyer decisions are reached after a much focused detailed deliberation, a long and sustained period of thought and research. Here’s why there is a good chance of conversion as your prospect has already visited your website and traveled down the sales funnel a bit. Retargeting advertisements could help you in brand recalling and stay top of mind with your customers.

6. Concentrate on leads that are high quality

You need to implement the best inbound marketing method to attract quality traffic and turn them into paying customers. The conversion rate can increase just by funneling more high-quality leads in. In case you have not analyzed your target audience, you need to look at your top of the funnel.

7. Constitute credible always

Establish your credibility with success stories and testimonials, try to have loyal clients who use your services talk about it and consider offering a free demo or free consultation to generate trust on your brand to increase conversion and acquire more customers.

Lastly, try out these new ways to attract potential clients, by talking to them, and applied new ways to close the deal. Try some of the points which are mentioned above and become a witness if you can increase your B2B conversions. Small changes can make a big difference in your business.