5 Key Strategies to Boost Visibility of Android Apps on Google Play

With a galore of highly intuitive mobile apps available on Google Play, it becomes difficult to optimise your app and fetch a steady number of downloads. To make your app successful, it is essential to research well and come up with a unique strategy for presenting your app as more performing and better than the rest.

Adhering this fact, here are some of the most productive optimisation tips for boosting visibility of your app on Google Play.

Research and Place Targeted Keywords in the Description and Name

Keyword research has always been an important part of a process which, includes any optimisation strategy meant for a search algorithm. Try to use the set of keywords which, are relevant to the app. Moreover, try to pick a set of keywords which, enjoy the highest Traffic Scores and support the changes to gain a high rank as well.

Boost the Visual Appeal of app

While considering the concept of App Store Marketing, using imagery that serves the interest of browsers is a key strategy to work on. You will have to choose the screenshots which, accurately convey the main features of your app. This, in turn, will offer a good reason to users for downloading your app.

Track Your Progress

It is important to check the ranking of your app for the targeted keywords by using different performance measurement metrics. The different types of measurement metrics help in offering clear insight about effectiveness of the optimisation strategies thereby, allowing users to know their market standing.

Build an Attractive App and Get Good ratings

Build an app which, provides great value to your investment and your app will get optimistic reviews. Getting favourable feedback from users will help in improving the ranking of your app at search result pages of Google Play thereby, helping to drive consumers for making the final decision.

Release Promo Videos

Before buying an app, consumers mostly prefer to see how an app functions. Marketing at Google Play over the Apple Store comes with a huge benefit of including a YouTube clip of the app in action. This serves as a brilliant opportunity for showing customers what the product is, how it works and how it serves as a unique choice and most importantly the reason which, drives people to download it.

A well-built app directs impacts the various performance metrics related to the product. This certainly includes the download growth, number of downloads, installs, number of ratings and usage frequency as well. These facts and figures help in understanding how well the mobile app is performing and whether it requires any type of improvement or not while, optimising it on Google Play.

Improve Your Business With Google Maps Optimization

When going over the different duties and responsibilities that come with owning your own business today, one of the most difficult tasks is problem solving issues that arise with the company’s operations and performances. This can become easier over time, but for beginning business owners, it can be helpful to go over some of the most beneficial outside sources to solve common business problems. For instance, any financial questions should be directed at a professional financial analyst.

Questions about tax deductions and employee payroll taxes should go to a licensed accountant. If the business is suffering from low sales revenue and a low amount of consumer awareness, the business owner should seek the help of an experienced marketing firm that specializes in Google Maps optimization, search engine optimization, and even social media marketing. These forms of internet marketing can be extremely helpful to small business owners that need to increase their earnings while avoiding a sharp increase in overhead costs. The nature of outsourced marketing methods, such as Google Maps optimization, is a perfect fit for small business owners today who are unable to provide the upfront funds for their company to hire their own in-house marketing team. These small business owners will no longer need to go further into debt to perform these services on their own. Rather, they can hire an outside marketing firm to market their company on the internet, thus driving a great amount of consumer traffic to their online website for a low monthly fee.

Although many small business owners are familiar with social media marketing, which utilizes popular social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace to drive traffic to a website, many are still unfamiliar with Google Maps optimization and search engine optimization. Both of these internet marketing platforms utilize the incredible consumer reach of search engine websites and other technologies based on this software. Search engines, namely Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, are used around the world by hundreds of millions of consumers to answer common questions, research information, and find products and services to purchase. When the search engine browses through their large cache of websites to pull up the most relevant results for a consumer’s query, they will sort through the information based on relevancy, freshness, and authority.

This complex algorithm is used by internet marketing companies to increase a website’s ranking in Google search results. Thus, when a consumer performs a search query for a term that relates to the small business owner’s industry, their website will be displayed in a prominent place in the search results. This increase the website’s overall traffic ratings, as it is now more exposed to consumer searches! This basic explanation of search engine optimization, or SEO, also applies to other search engine technologies, such as Google Maps. With Google Maps optimization, rather than having the website’s general listing promoted in search engine results, the business owner will promote their physical location with Google Places.

Google Places is the network of local businesses, restaurants, and retail locations that allows consumers to perform location based searches from their computers or mobile phones. This network will pull up a list of locations that match the user’s search, complete with a small map that pinpoints each business location. Next to this map will be a detailed listing of each business, including the business name, location, hours of operation, phone number, and a link to their website. Most mobile search technologies that allow users to pull up restaurants or movie theaters based on their exact location will rely on Google Maps search technology to do so. In order to take advantage of these searches, business owners will need to hire a professional internet marketing firm to perform these complex advertising initiatives.

Website and Search Engine Marketing Simplified

The advent of the Internet has resulted in the level of competition for businesses now being global expanding throughout countries and continents. The Internet moves at a rapid pace mainly because it is a dynamic process forcing businesses to adapt several types of marketing procedures to conventional offline marketing and advertising.

The overall objective of online marketing is always to attract additional people to your website improving buyers for your business and enhancing your company brand. Working with the most cost-effective channels, web site marketing targets specific traffic / potential buyers to your web site depending on your market place and needs.

The leading advantage of Internet and search engine marketing as to traditional marketing will be the capability to measure your results in real-time.

A successful Online marketing campaign needs conversion tracking programs to measure results. Conversion metrics involve, Cost Per Click (CPC), average cost per thousand impressions (CPM), Cost Per Action (CPA) and Return On Investment (ROI). Tracking and putting an importance on the conversion metrics is vital to measuring and optimizing your campaigns so you can get to your closing conversion metric, Return On Investment (ROI). Google Analytics is a no cost conversion monitoring tool used to track the overall performance of your Online marketing campaigns from click to conversion.

Website marketing Channels:

1. Display advertising

Display advertising is graphical marketing and advertising on the web that appears next to content articles on a third-party site including web banners or banner adverts. Display advertising appears on internet pages in numerous forms and contains text, images, logos and maps and is an affordable way to grow your advertising reach. Search marketing and display advertising jointly can increase online revenue.

Google Display and Bing / Yahoo! Search Marketing offer substantial display advertising solutions. YouTube offers a video display advert alongside relevant YouTube videos, and/or on web-sites on the Google Display Network that fit your target market.

· Google Display Network – The Google Display Ad Builder software within AdWords lets you easily construct compelling image and video ads to make your organization stand out.

· Yahoo! My Display Ads – My Display Ads displays campaigns throughout Yahoo! Network Plus. With My Display Ads, it is possible to set up your own ads, target the campaign, and monitor your campaign overall performance.

2. Video marketing

Video marketing is presenting information to a possible buyer in video form and guiding them to a product. Online video is progressively becoming a lot more popular and companies are seeing it as being a viable method for attracting customers.

Marketers are realizing the importance of creating outstanding video substance as digital marketing and advertising continues to evolve. Video is one of the more exciting means companies can develop curiosity and inbound clients.

3. Search engine marketing (SEM)

Search engine marketing is the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) using Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, contextual / content advertising, paid inclusion and search engine optimization (SEO) procedures.

4. Pay Per Click (PPC)

Your advert will appear next to or on top in the organic search results for the search phrase you entered in Google or Bing. Pay Per Click PPC Advertising is known as “sponsored ads” along with your Google results page and “ads” with the Bing results page. Advertisers place bids for specific search phrases and when a searcher clicks on an advert, the advertiser is charged dependent on the amount the advertiser bid for that search phrase.

5. Contextual / Content advertising

Advertisers place adverts on other sites that carry information relevant to their products and the ads are displayed to people who are searching for information from those web-sites. The search portal analyzes the content of the web page to find out its meaning and matches related key phrase targeted Content Ads to display on a page.

Google AdSense was the first important contextual advertising network.

The Yahoo! Bing network comprises 30% in the search advertising market.

6. Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization is the process of increasing the visibility of your web site in search engine’s organic search results by considering how individual search engines function, what individuals search for as well as the keywords and phrases customers search.

Your internet site development and popularity building efforts must be engineered for search engines together with optimized code, content flow design, SEO copywriting and link building.

7. Social media marketing (SMM)

Social media marketing is the process of gaining targeted visitors through social media internet sites which include blogs, social networking web sites, social bookmarking sites, and forums. Social media marketing promotes your site by sending direct visitors, producing links for your website and creating awareness.

· Social networking sites include Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter where you could possibly place a link to your web site on your own profile. The largest gain comes when other people mention, link to or bookmark your site.

· Social bookmarking is a network in which users share with each other details about internet sites, articles, or news items that they like. These Social bookmarking sites include Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Google Bookmarks.

8. Email marketing

Email marketing is delivery of a commercial message to a group of people working with electronic mail. Creating a month-to-month E-Mail publication is one of the important web site promotion strategies. It may very well be a newsletter, list of suggestions, industry updates, or new product information.

How To Cage Google Animals?

As everyone may be aware by now, Google released an algorithm change in March 2011 called Panda (a.k.a. Farmer) that changed rankings in many sites, maybe even yours. Then Google pushed out another change called “Penguin”. These changes pushed many sites down in rankings, some up and a few that were not affected at all. Several affiliate marketers have been concerned about this “new” approach ever since and rightfully so. There are some great articles and blog posts out there that you can find but this has certainly changed the way SEO will be done in the future but here are some key things to remember.

1.) It’s always been about delivering original, valuable content. Having overly optimized web pages could cause some issues.

2.) Titles need to be authentic. They need to sound real. They need to sound like a human being wrote them and was not intending to necessarily simply rank for phrase after phrase.

3.) Use your footer wisely. Use your footer to link to the things that people expect to find in the footer. If you really need to get anchor text on pages, find natural ways to put it in the real menu at the top, in the content itself.

4.) Multiple pages that are targeting very similar, kind of modified versions of keywords and keyword intents, with only slight variations. Contrary to popular opinion this does not help with Google search.

5.) Watch for your backlinks. The ‘Penguin’ release especially is now paying close attention to this. If you’re spending the time and effort to build a strategy around this be sure it’s nothing that can be considered ‘black hat’ or even grey. Go for quality, not quantity.

Just like in life, there are no guarantees. You should not rely on any one method to drive traffic to your site. You need a combination of things including email list building, using social media appropriately and building sticky sites that people want to come back to or giving more “value” to your site. In short Google is a very valuable asset, but you should set up your business as if Google was going away tomorrow. Obviously, Google plays a major role in the lives of affiliates, but diversifying is always important in everything we do. There is no doubt that Google plays a huge role in affiliate marketing but for those looking for short cuts will surely be cut short. Go to Google’s webmaster tools to find out more on “quality guidelines”.

The main takeaway should be to be informed but also stick to the fundamentals. There’s no guarantee that you won’t be affected by changes Google makes now or in the future but at least you won’t be ‘caged’ by them.

AdWords Affiliate Marketer Blues – When AdWords Marketing Becomes Too Expensive

There comes a time in every AdWords marketer’s online life when things fail to work out as projected. If such an affiliate marketer is not careful, everything that has been achieved can go down the drain just like that.

When an AdWords marketer faces a lot of set backs, there is only one thing that can be done – retreat and re-plan again.

There are a number of AdWords affiliate marketer blues that are capable of collapsing your whole AdWords affiliate business within a twinkle of an eye. One of them is high cost per click.

High cost per click can ruin any AdWords affiliate business no matter how respected such an affiliate marketer is. It has no courtesy of thinking twice about how experienced such an affiliate marketer is.

High cost per click makes you pay unimaginable AdWords advertising bill at the end of the month for advertising that hasn’t performed really well. The good news is that you can reduce your AdWords cost per click significantly without headaches. It is a much easier task to accomplish than most people imagine. All you need to do is ensure you have a high click through rate on your ads, a good account history, and ad groups with no more than 25 keywords. You will also need to make sure than there is a high degree of relevancy between your ads, landing pages and keywords.

When you make sure that there is a high degree of relevancy between your ads, keywords, and landing pages, then you will enjoy AdWords marketing like you would enjoy a nice vacation at a very nice hotel in the Bahamas.

Personal Branding – Improve Your Google-Ability

Have you ever typed your name into Google? When you do, is it really you that comes up?

It’s quickly becoming a well-known fact that HR personnel and hiring managers at many companies will type job applicants’ names into Google before deciding who to interview. What comes up when your name is fed to Google could determine whether or not you get a job.

But even if you have your own company or are currently employed, branding yourself online is a free way of making yourself more marketable. For an entrepreneur it makes it easier for people looking for your good or service to find you. For someone currently employed it can help you establish yourself as an expert on what you do, which can help you get a raise or, perhaps even find another, better paying job.

You can improve your Google-ability in three easy steps. Here’s How:

1. Join social networking sites. If you’re already on them great; if not, join. And not just sites like Facebook and twitter, which, while they will come up on Google, are not really designed to present the user in a professional light. You should also join LinkedIn and post your resume. Sites like Meetup.com can show your interests, even smaller, niche social media sites like brazencareerist.com will help. Find sites with message boards where you can create a user profile and post content. The key is, when you do that, use your real name as your user name. That way, those posts or at least that site will come up when someone types your name into Google.

2. Comment on major blogs. Find a blog on the New York Times’ website, and comment on the issues that seem relevant to your career – media, if your interested in publishing; small business if you’re an entrepreneur; finance if you want to be a broker. Include your name in your posts (sign them, or, if you can create a “user name,” use your real name).

3. Google yourself – and when you do, go through the results. Click on the results you want to come up higher in the results list (that is, the results that are actually you). One way that Google determines search result rankings (the order that results are in) is by what links have been clicked on in the past when someone has searched that term. So, on a regular basis (monthly, or even weekly) type your name into Google and click on the results that are actually you and that you want to come up first.

Congratulations, you now know how to improve your Google-ability.

Google Places – The Benefits for Your Business

Did you know that one out of every five searches on Google pertains to a specific location? It’s true. And from this bit of information, Google Places was born.

Introduced to the online scene late last year, Google Places is a Google feature that produces search results for local businesses. Some consider it a highly beneficial marketing tool for their business; others are unsure of any benefits their business could receive from this localized search tool.

Recently, Google Places has added some new and exciting elements to their features list that could bode well for some businesses, but maybe not all. You make the call on these features:

*Streamline analytics feature: Discover who is searching for you on Google, how they’re finding you, and where they’re coming from right before they enter your store.

Benefit: You can customize your marketing strategies based on what search terms customers are using to locate you. For example, if you own a high-end spa in upper Manhattan and you list services on your Google Places page that customers are using to search for a nearby salon, you might consider keeping those service descriptions on your Google Places page. You might also consider using those keywords in other online marketing platforms such as copy on your website, blog, and social media profiles.

In addition to tailoring your marketing copy, you can also hone in on where your customers are coming from, based on their Google map search for directions to your location. This allows you to consider options such as opening another store across town-somewhere closer to your clients who live farther away.

*Business Information Feature: In addition to posting your business location, you can also post a plethora of business information, including your hours of operation, contact information, photos, payment options, products / services features and benefits, printable coupons, and more.

Benefit: Customers can receive rewards for visiting your business by printing out your customized company coupons on Google Places. This encourages support for your company and helps to build long-lasting relationships with clients.

In addition to building relationships with customers, posting detailed business information also provides your customers with necessary information in one easy-to-read location. This streamline navigation feature reduces frustration on your clients and allows you to reduce the number of unproductive phone calls and inquiries that revolve around your hours of operation, directions to your business, and more.

*Photo Feature: Businesses can offer Internet users a behind-the-scenes (transparent) look into business practices and the faces behind the business. Companies can post photos of the office, the team members, where products are made, where services are offered, and more.

Benefit: Showcasing photos of your business is a highly effective way to open your business to your clients and allow them to build trust in your company. When you illustrate your transparent business practices, you are making it much easier for customers to view your company as trustworthy.

*Customized Code Feature: As more and more businesses begin to promote their Facebook pages and Twitter usernames on their business cards, websites, and in stores, online shoppers are no longer limited to searching main company websites as their source for business information.

Playing off this trend, Google has created a new feature for Google Places that generates a customized code for each business. This code can be placed on business cards, in-store receipts, and business websites. Customers can scan this code into their smartphones and be automatically directed to the company’s Google Places page.

Benefit: According to a study performed by compete.com, smartphone users are interested in receiving some form of rewards on their mobile phone. 36% of participants said they would like to receive grocery coupons, and 29% said they were interested in scannable barcodes.

Taking into account these statistics, Google Places’ customized codes enable your company to cater to the smartphone segment of your market. This illustrates that your business respects your target audience’s time and takes every measure possible to ensure their preferences are met and their lifestyle is catered to.

Does Google Places benefit online businesses?

Although all of these benefits sound fantastic, there is one question that comes to mind. What if you’re an online business with a virtual storefront? Can you still utilize Google Places’ wonderful features?

Based on Google Places’ guidelines, there doesn’t appear to be any benefits for online businesses. Here’s a glimpse into some of their guidelines to help you better understand this conclusion:

  • Every listing must have a mailing address.
  • No one business can have more than one listing per physical location.
  • Businesses that cover a wide range of cities and states must choose one business location (it’s recommended by Google that you choose the address of the company headquarters if you have more than one address). You can specify the area you cover, but you must have one address associated with your business.
  • You cannot use a location where the business does not actually exist.
  • P.O. boxes don’t count as viable locations.
  • You cannot have more than one listing for your business, even if there are multiple locations.
  • If you are renting your property, it is not considered a place of business. Therefore, you must create one listing for the location that processes these rental properties.

Search Engine Minimization – Improving Google Rank is more about SEM than SEO

MINIMIZATION (NOT OPTIMIZATION)

Allow me to minimize the importance of search engine optimization, or SEO. The real work to be done is search engine marketing, or SEM. You’ll want to find a savvy partner for this journey. It takes a ton of patience, intuition and insight to read into the abundance of Google traffic statistics and arrive at prioritized, strategic focus areas. How you market against this knowledge decides whether you will rise or fall.

Before we look at a list of activities that constitutes “the real work” of improving Google rankings, please consider the following:

1) Everyone wants more online visitors, which makes the marketplace very competitive. This is not silver bullet marketing!

2) The best in SEO simply gets you “on the grid” – which means people will find you somewhere along the results returned by Google but not in the top 5 positions where over 75% of traffic gravitates.

3) SEO can only succeed where real research in engaged – meaning that it takes a smart marketer to navigate Google data and separate the real opportunities from millions of searches. Once these decisions have been both artfully and scientifically made, then leveraging that knowledge for results at your website is very easy.

4) Search engine optimization is misleading. It should be “search engine minimization” since it’s the least you can do for your website to get into the game (too many think it’s ALL they need to do).

5) The real difference is made with search engine marketing where you commit a budget to an ongoing campaign of measures that raise your optimized website in the rankings. A pro can help you to prioritize which measures bring the greatest return in the near-term.

So, what are the various service areas included in search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) services? There are two major components – increasing visibility and improving conversion. The latter is the process by which prospects are turned first to leads and then to customers. While SEO falls entirely in the first category, SEM straddles both categories. One thing should be clear. It’s not enough to turn consumers on to your product. You need to motivate them to buy!

INCREASING VISIBILITY

Online Niche Discovery

Keyword Research

Google Local Listings

Google Organic Rankings

Google Sponsored Ads (pay-per-click, PPC, Adwords)

Blogging

Local Forums

Customer Reviews

Article Marketing

Press Releases

Link building

Business Directories

Industry Memberships

IMPROVING CONVERSION

Branding Consultation

Website Design

Website Copy writing

eCommerce

Contact Form Management

Email List Building

eNewsletter (quarterly)

RSS Feed Management

Multimedia Development

WordPress Blog Software

Content Management System (CMS)

Audio/Video Content Development

Google Analytics

Progress Reports

How Local Search Engine Marketing Benefits Your Business

Due to the tough competition among online businesses, online business owners are constantly finding the best ways to keep them ahead of the competition. One of the best SEO strategies that are now being used by online business owners to promote products or services is local search engine marketing.

Local search engine marketing involves processes aimed at improving a site’s visibility in Google,Yahoo and Bing. These processes focus on Internet business marketing, AdWords campaign management, Google page rank, keyword ranking, and link popularity.

Like any Internet marketing strategy, local search engine marketing considers what people are looking for and how Google,Yahoo and Bing work. But the best thing about this SEO strategy is that it targets targeted audience. Because it aims at getting targeted audience, more and more people use this marketing method when promoting services or products online. Another reason why it is now one of the most popular SEO strategies is that it is also a more organic method of acquiring quality rankings in search engines.

Why Use SEO Strategies?

Since the Internet has become a major source of information, clients and customers search for whatever they need through Google,Yahoo and Bing. Search engines use these keywords or key phrases to locate a website. Every day, there are millions of new pages that talk about a specific keyword. That is why SEO as a form of online marketing is needed to keep up with the competition.

Internet marketing services are now offered to help online businesses rank in Google. The service begins by providing their clients the best keywords. This keyword is made for a specific niche. They will then optimize this keyword into HTML codes. This is when a keyword is known to be optimized. To make the campaign more effective, different techniques, methods, tricks, and shortcuts are employed. Aside from the keywords, the entire article is also optimized for link building purposes. This makes an article or a site that will rank high in Google.

The entire local search engine marketing process may be a bit complicated for now. The good news is search engine optimizers or SEO specialists provide overall SEO services. This way a business owner does not have to worry about promoting their services or products online. What business owners should do, however, is search for quality SEO providers. This means providers who do not use overly aggressive methods of promotion. Methods such as spamdexing, keyword stuffing, or black hat may get a business website banned.

Google Boost The New Local Business Way for Google PPC

Whether you spend your time and marketing budget on SEO, on PPC, or a combination of the two (smart thinking!), it’s important to stay abreast of Google changes to rankings on their results pages.

If you are a small to medium-sized local business, for instance, you might be aware that changes have impacted local SEO. If you’ve not familiarized yourself with Google Places and geo targeting, you could be missing out on getting a surge of traffic from very qualified local visitors.

Google Places & Google Boost

What is Google Boost and how will it affect your business? While it won’t affect your organic Google listings, it can enhance them by giving you more coverage on the search engine results pages.

If you claim your Google Places Listing, you’ll have the option to create sponsored / pay per click advertising from your account so that local listings will include your highlighted paid advertisement. Google will demonstrate a blue pin to help your ad stand out.

Google continually listens to the market place and finds digital ways to get them what they want. It’s not easy to keep up with all that Google is doing so you might want to enlist some professional help so that you can consistently optimize your site for search engines and for user experience.

Get Help with PPC

As they said above, a combo of SEO and Pay per click could be smart thinking. They also recommend a generous helping of social marketing thrown into the mix of an integrated online marketing strategy as well. Don’t go it alone or you’ll have to suffer through trial and error instead of hitting the ground running on the road to traffic and profit. They can help you with Facebook PPC, Google Boost PPC, and other aspects of your marketing strategy.

Yes, Google makes it easy to manage a Google Boost account on your own but if you get some help from a search engine marketing expert, you have a greater chance of targeting the right key phrases, of writing eye-catching advertisements, of maximising every marketing dollar you spend, and of boosting traffic and sales on your website.

Freelance Web Designer | WordPress Developer | Hong Kong