Ravi Kumar Rana

Virtual Visiting cards on Google Search

Virtual Visiting Card

Google always come up with out of the box solutions for users. Today we would like to share an interesting feature of Virtual Visiting Cards. Yes, you heard it right. Google launches Virtual Visiting Cards on Google Search. On August 11 2020, Google shared an update on it’s official Google Blog and told users about People Cards.

People cards are basically the virtual visiting cards which any users can create of themselves. Earlier we have seen such cards for famous personalities i.e. Film Actors, Actresses, Athletes, Politicians and Businessmen. We could say that this feature was only limited for well known personalities. We all have seen such information in knowledge panels (Google Business Box) which appears on right hand side of Google SERP page. For example

introducing people cards virtual visiting card on serp launched by google on august 11 2020

This information is collected from different trusted sources. But have you ever wondered what happens when you search for your own name? What search result would appear for people know are not famous or have you ever tried searching for your name on google? If yes, then you could understand it’s very hard for search engines to collect the right information and show quality results. It’s because there are so many people with similar names and it’s hard to select which one is the right answer for search query.

If you are a famous personality over internet and looking build or boost your online presence, you might already have social media profile, website and reference articles or websites from where users could get information about you and your work and achievements. But if you are willing to start fresh, you might not have these options available with you.

With the new Virtual visiting cards, google is going to solve this problem for users. These People Cards would help an individual to start fresh and create an identity over internet. It is going to be your virtual visiting card in which you could add your skills, education, work, website and social media profiles.

How to create virtual visiting card

Creating a virtual visiting card is simple. All you need to do is follow given below basic steps.

Open Browser
Login to your Gmail account
Now open Google
Type “Add me to search” You may also type https://www.google.com/search/contributions/profile make sure you are logged in while visiting the link. It will land you on your profile page. But it mostly work for people who have contributed in Google Q&A.
And tap on the prompt
Fill your details i.e. Workplace, social media profiles, website (if you have one), education details
Click on Save and you are done.

Google Analytics Search Terms – Set up site search

Ravi Kumar Rana

Google Analytics Search Terms

Google analytics is one of the most powerful tools for digital marketers. It is an essential part of marketing which can help you in many ways. It gives you data and insights which could help you to develop marketing strategies accordingly. You could get the reports, user data, define goals, track search terms, understand audience, real time users, age of users, time of sessions, session duration and much more.

Frankly, I spent a lot of time in analytics reports to understand what goes wrong and what is right for my website when it comes to create performance matrix. I develop marketing strategies and campaigns after studying the data and reports available in Google Analytics. Today we are going to talk about Google Analytics Search Terms. It is a practice to set up site search and collect the data of search terms used by website visitors to find a product or service while exploring the website.

Yes you got it right, here we are talking about the search option on website. Most of you have seen the search box on different portals. It is for users who are looking for any particular product or service. Let’s take an example of my blog TheSEOGuy.

On my Blog the search bar is available on right hand side menu of every blog post.

You can simply write anything in search box and get the results. But there are some benefits of tracking all these searches. Let’s quickly move on to the interesting part and understand the site search before learning google analytics site search setup process.

Site Search

Site search is a practice to understand your user behaviour. It is a great way of identifying what your site visitors are looking in a website. It helps to collect the data of searched keywords on a website which helps to identify the scope of improvement. It is one of the important factors for ecommerce platforms such as Amazon, Alibaba, Snapdeal, Flipkart, Myntra and Limeroad. These are few most commonly used ecommerce platforms where site search played an important role in understand user need by collecting the user search data on website. Let’s take an example of Alibaba here.

As you can see in above image, the website has a search bar for users who are looking for product or services. I have written “Digital marketing” and it gave me suggestions such as :

It’s important for website owners to understand what users are typing in search bar and what kind of product or services they are looking for. By enabling Site Search on web, we can do it easily. We can track the user queries which they have written in search bar. On the basis of collected data, you can easily identify which is the favorite product or service of your website users.

It seems that site search is important only for ecommerce where people deliberately type and search products or services. But it is equally important for every website which has search bar on available. Everyone deserves to know what users are looking for.

Now time to move on to the interesting stuff. Let’s learn how to enable site search in Analytics. This practice is called Google Analytics Search Terms.

Set up Google Analytics Search Term

Setting up site search using Google Analytics is easy. All you need to do is follow the basic instructions below.

Open Google Analytics
Go to Admin
Click on View Settings

Img set up site search steps - view settings

Scroll Down and look for “Site Search Tracking”
Enable the option and enter the search parameter
Site search tracking jpg
Click on Save

Now important thing to keep in mind while setting up site search. As you can see in the image that you could use up to five parameters so always test the parameters before entering them.

Search Parameters

Every website has different query strings and search parameters which you can test manually. Search parameters are the URL parameters which you might have seen on different websites. For example, whenever users search anything on my website, their queries are usually included in the URL.

If you use search box at my blog TheSEOGuy and search Latest SEO Tips, you see S (my blog’s query parameter) followed by your query:

https://theseoguy.in/?s=latest+seo+tips

You can refer the given below screenshot for the same.

search query for keyword latest seo tips

Strip Queries

While setting up the site search, you would see an option of “Strip query parameters out of URL”. This option is to strip the query parameters out and show the search only. For example, while checking up the search data in Behaviour > Site Search> it will show up like this /?s=latest+seo+tips but if we have enabled the option of strip query parameters out of URL then it will remove the query parameters and show the keyword only “Latest SEO Tips”. You can Learn more about Strip Queries here.

Where to find Site searches in Analytics

Once you are done with setup, you could check all the searched terms which people have used while searching for your products or services. For this you can follow given below steps.

Open Google Analytics
Go to Behavior from left hand side menu
Click on Site Search
Select “Search Terms”

Set the date range according to your need and you will get all the search terms data in front of you.

Hope this information on setting up site search would help you to enable site search for your website. You may share your feedback on this information by commenting below. If you have any questions from us then do let us know. You could use our Contact Page to reach out to us.

Stay tunes for more amazing information on Digital Marketing. You will learn about SEO Tricks and much more. Keep Exploring TheSEOGuy for Latest SEO Tips and Tricks.

YouTube SEO tips 2020: Rank Videos on Top

Ravi Kumar Rana

In order to rank videos on top, you must know YouTube SEO. It is a method which can boost your performance within the platform and help you to gain better ranks and can bring more views and engagements on your YouTube Channel. Today we are going to learn about YouTube SEO. I will share few steps and tools to perform SEO for YouTube Videos.

Before getting into tips and tricks, first we need to know about the ranking factors so that we could work according to them.

Social Engagement

Social engagement is form of any type of engagement such as Video comments, Subscribers, Social Shares, Likes/Dislikes, CTR (Click through Rate) and recommendations.

Video Comments

Being a content marketer, it’s not easy for you to make everyone happy. You will see both positive and negative comments on your videos. But you need to understand the importance of it and use it for your betterment. But what if there are no user comments or lesser user comments on your videos? In this situation you need to work hard and encourage people to comment on your videos. Later in this article we will learn about the techniques by which we can make users to comment on videos.

Subscribers

All YouTube channel owners want subscribers on their channel. Apart from asking people to subscribe to your channel there are few methods which could follow to gain subscribers and improve engagement on your channel.

Social Shares

If your videos are being shared by people, it drives great engagement on your videos and channel. It is one of the major factors in YouTube rankings.

Likes and Dislikes

Likes and dislikes are core engagement factors and also helps videos to rank within the platform. These are considered as best engagement metrics for any YouTube video and can help in improving rankings.

CTR (Click through Rate)

Click through rate in YouTube is based on number of times people got the videos on search results divided by number times people click on it to watch. You could improve your CTR by having compelling titles and thumbnails. Choose something that makes your result stand out from the rest.

Recommendations

It is similar to shares by instead of social media platforms; it is done on specific platform or personality. For example, if your video is recommended by celebrity or authorized authority, then engagement break records for your videos.

All these are Social Engagement ranking factors. Let’s move on to next factor which is:

Length of Video

Length of video is important according to your targeted audience and channel category. It is also a good ranking factor. A good length of video would give you better response. According to a study conducted by Backlinko, “The average length of a first page YouTube video is 14 minutes, 50 seconds.”

This is the average time of most ranked videos. As I said earlier, you could adjust your video length according to targeted audience. For example, if you are planning to create tutorial videos, then it should be of good length with easy steps to learn. However if you want to attract audience who are looking for quick tips then the length of video should not be long.

Keyword Research for YouTube Videos

Keywords play an important role in any form of SEO. While working for YouTube SEO, you need to put maximum efforts to collect best keywords for your videos. In order to conduct keyword research, first you need to set an AIM and find keywords according to it. There are few common things which you need to keep in your mind while doing keyword research for your YouTube videos.

Relevancy

Target the relevant keywords which can describe your videos. Do not choose the keywords on the basis of search volume. Always keep quality in your mind and pick the best keywords which are relatable to your YouTube videos. Let’s take an example of TheSEOGuy. At my platform I provide digital marketing services and I am based out in Delhi. If I would ever create a video, then my focus keywords would be “Digital marketing Services”. In order to find more relevant keywords based on this, I will use YouTube search feature i.e.

These are the actual search terms used by people while looking for content on YouTube.

Competition

It’s nearly impossible to find zero competition on YouTube because whatever you do, you have to deal with competition. Apart from analysing competition in keyword planner tool, I try to collect data from direct competitors by analysing their content and keywords used by them in their video titles and description.

Research on multiple Search Engines

You need to collect data from as much as platforms to filter out best keywords for you YouTube Video. It will help you to perform better YouTube SEO. For example, we could use multiple search engines such as bing, duckduckgo, ecosia and many more.

Pro Tips:

While doing keyword research I always keep in mind that I am going to upload fresh content and it is not at all easy to rank on high competition keywords. So I target the low competition keywords first and try to achieve ranks. Let’s take another example here.

In above image I tried to check out keyword worth on YouTube. As you can see there are more than 2,000,000 results for the keyword “Content Marketing”. It is not easy for me to outrank existing videos. So in this case I need to create a plan and target keywords on which I could get ranks and can relate my content with targeted keyword. So I tried “Marketing Tactic”

content marketing competition example-YouTube SEO

As you can see that “Marketing Tactics” has just 41,000 results and if I would work smartly, I could achieve my goal. After following these steps it’s time to take all the keywords on your list and roll them through search and see which ones have a decent competition.

Use of Tags and Filename

Use of quality tags and filename are part of SEO factors for YouTube videos. If you are concerned about YouTube SEO, then you can’t ignore these.

YouTube Tag

YouTube tags are used to highlight video content. It helps viewers to understand video content. However, you have to keep quality in your mind while creating tags for your videos. Tags should be relevant to the content of your videos. Tags can identify the category your video belongs to and help people discover your videos in the sidebar suggestions of “related videos” section.

Filename

The video file name should include your main keywords. It would be great if you are have used the similar keyword in video tile and description and tags. Filename should be relevant and descriptive enough to related with video content.

Adding Transcript

Search engines are bots and we all know that they can’t listen to audio, see image and watch videos but they do index texts. So having a transcript on your videos would help you to boost YouTube SEO. A transcript enables search engines to ingest your multimedia content and index it accordingly.

Every video has a title and description but content is blank for search engine bots/crawlers. Transcripts are body text of your video content and helps search engines to read it.

These are few factors of YouTube SEO. If you work smartly, according to above listed ranking factors, you could rank your videos on top.

However, when it comes to YouTube SEO, everyone look for easy options. So let’s talk about few YouTube SEO tools. Tools are always important for better performance if you are using correct tools and using tools wisely. Given below are few good “YouTube SEO Tools”.

TubeBuddy: This tool provides some amazing options to creators such as bulk video editing, Adding quick links, direct upload on social media channels i.e. Facebook, helps in social monitoring and so much more.
DrumUp: DrumUp is basically a content discovery tool. It helps you to manage promotions for your YouTube channel or videos.
Cyfe: It helps you to analyse and track your video’s performances and stats. You could monitor reports within an easy dashboard. Cyfe lets you easily monitor your overall channel’s performance, as well as performance metrics for each individual level. It lets you check out metrics like views, traffic sources, audience retention, and engagement.
Canva: It is a great platform to create useful and effective thumbnails for your YouTube Videos. The best part about this tools is, it has drag-and-drop format and provides access to photographs, vector images, graphics, and fonts. Even if you are not professional in editing photos, you could create great images with the help of this tool.

Hope these steps would help you to get into competition and rank your videos on top. These basic steps could help you to stand out in the crowd and rank your videos on top.

Keep exploring TheSEOGuy for more Latest SEO Tips.

Importance of SEO during covid-19

Ravi Kumar Rana

Importance of SEO

Today we are going to talk about importance of SEO during COVID-19 in 2020. We will try to understand how it became so much popular and gained new heights during pandemic. Search Engine Optimization also known as SEO became an important aspect in 2020. Every business in the world is understanding the importance of SEO. Everything was normal and every business was focussed on implementing new things. Everyone was looking for new technologies, trying automation, developing industry events and busy in creating innovative ideas to analysing market competition before 2020.

And then 2020 came, everything was normal until one fine day there was a bad new of Coronavirus (COVID19). World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11 2020 as more than 118,000 cases of COVID-19 were reported in more than 110 countries across the world. (Sources: Time).

Nearly every business was shut down overnight. Everyone was asked to stay at home and worldwide lockdown was suggested. Most of the countries declared complete lockdown with immediate effect and some declared within next few days.

Everything was changed overnight on March-11-2020. People were asked to stay at home and every business stopped functioning except e-commerce. While everyone was home, only e-commerce and online industry was available for people.

Importance of SEO for small businesses

During this hard time of pandemic, big businesses were able to manage the losses, but small business can’t take the burden of continuous loss. They need to run their business, but they can’t do so because of country wide lock down.

In this situation, they only left with the option to market their product and gain better visibility over internet to boost online sales. It can be possible by doing right SEO for the brand. While physical stores were closed and people were relying on online solutions, Digital Marketing became need of small business. Majorly because of low investment and positive results. Every other marketing method requires funds and monthly investment budget but in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) very less amount of money is required. It is purely skills-based marketing method. Investments are very low, but results are always high.

Importance of local SEO

In my earlier article, I have explained what is local SEO. If you would go through the article, you will get to know the importance of Local SEO. The aim of doing Local SEO is to attract local audience and gain visibility in local market. During the COVID-19 times, it became important and every business want to attract it’s local audience to keep the business running.

Use of SEO by Big Brands

When the online was only platform available for every kind of business in the world, every big brand started using SEO methods to build the brand value and generate leads. Every big brand across the world started aimed the organic search results and started building SEO strategies for their business. While sales was on hold, it was the right time to grow the brand value and gain positive organic results on SERP (Search Engine Result Page).

If you are looking for better SEO results, then you can refer given below proven methods to grow organic traffic for your website.

Advance SEO Marketing Strategies 2020

Difference between FAQ and Q&A schema

Negative Publicity-Remove Negative Search Results from Google

Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies and Best Practices

Location Based Marketing LBM

Here is how to cancel upload on instagram

Competition Analysis: How to spy on your competitors

Instagram SEO Tips 2020 you should know

Social Media Marketing Strategy- Tips for Small Business

How to write SEO friendly content

I Hope these Latest SEO tips would help you to design better SEO strategies for your business during this Pandemic.

If you could contribute more information in the list of importance of SEO during COVID-19 in 2020, then do mention your suggestions below.

Instagram SEO Tips 2020 you should know

Ravi Kumar Rana

Having good Instagram fanbase is always good for a brand name. Good number of followers are also useful for personal profiles and people who do influence work over the platform. Today, we are going to learn few methods and techniques to market Instagram page or profiles. Being an SEO expert , I would like to share few methods and proven techniques to do SEO for your Instagram profiles and pages. These are tested techniques on different client and methods are based on real time case studies. It is going to be an interesting information for people who are looking to increase Instagram followers for free and want to make their Instagram viral.

Importance of Instagram for Companies

Instagram is an app which is widely common between users. It has huge user base on Android and iOS platform. Since it is available for mobile device only, it is very easy to use and creates an alternative audience for marketers to market their products. It is so huge that, there were more than one billion active users were available on Instagram. (Sources: Instagram Users Official)

Instagram is an easy to use app and it does not require any desktop or laptop to run your campaigns or post an update on platform. A user just requires a mobile device to handle everything on Instagram. You can simply click pictures, add description and use your hashtags.

Let’s move on to the Instagram SEO Tips which I have collected while working for different clients.

Profile Matters

Your profile matters a lot if you are willing to do SEO for your Instagram Page or Profile. Only the Instagram profile name and description are searchable. So you can understand the importance of profile name and profile description. You should consider your profile description as your resume to show everything you have. Use most of the keywords in bio and make your profile description relevant to your organization or your aim.

After the description, username would be the next important thing which can help you in Instagram SEO. We know that it’s more than one billion users on Instagram and it’s not easy to get the username which you want. It is a big challenge though, but I would suggest you to come up with a profile name which can represent your business or yourself.

Pro Tip: It is suggested to keep a keyword in profile username to represent your brand name or services at the same time. For example @TheSEOGuyIndia is my username for this blog. Although I have never applied any Instagram SEO tips on this profile. But you can see I have used my primary Keyword SEO in username and Location for location.

Use ALT Text on Images

As I have written earlier in Image SEO tips Alt Text is one of the most important SEO practice for Image SEO. Instagram also has this feature. This feature allows users to write captions for their photos. However, this feature was introduced to help users who are visually impaired. As soon as you ad ALT text on images, Instagram automatically pop up the added ALT text on images.

Understand the Instagram Analytics

Instagram analytics is one of the important tools to improve Instagram SEO. You should know about your page or profile audience in details so that you could design marketing strategies accordingly. You can grow your Instagram fanbase if you can build the right Instagram marketing strategies.

In recent times, social media platforms are turning into marketing platforms which can help you grow your business and generate leads as well. The number of smart phones is growing exponentially and use of social media is increasing. Average time spent on social media is way more than average time spent on searching product or services over search engines.

Since you can understand the importance of this platform, You should know all the Instagram SEO tips to perform better on Instagram as it is becoming a big social media platform with more than one billion users and millions of active users.

Instagram Hashtags

Hashtags are important for Instagram platform also for Instagram SEO. When a hashtag is added, your post is added to the directory of that hashtags. The “#” symbol is added to a word or the combination of words to attract the audiences to your post. When the audiences search hashtags in the search box of Instagram or click on the same hashtag at the post of anyone else, he/she finds your post on the list.

You could choose between multiple relevant hashtags for your Instagram posts. Either choose between auto suggested hashtags or create new according to trending stories and your product/service category.

Pro Tips: Use your services and product to create hashtags in first place. After that focus on relative trending or viral hashtags which could represent your post to a larger audience. Capitalization in words i.e. using first letter capital or defining combination of words with capitalization while converting it into a hashtag would be good.

For example #SearchEngineOptimization in this hashtag, you could see SEO every first letter of word in capital which makes it easy to understand.

Account Linking

Instagram has a feature to link your other social media accounts such as Facebook and Twitter. You should always take this advantage and promote your account thorough other social media channels.

While sharing your account on other platforms, you could receive direct visitors to your profile. It does not have a huge impact on SEO until you have massive number of clicks. But it is always good to generate profile views and gain new followers.

Add Call-To-Action Buttons

Adding a call to action button is a good practice to connect with users directly. Including call-to-action is also a great way to engage audiences in your posts. You can simply ask profile visitors to:

Like your photos
Tag their Friends
Comment on pictures

There are a lot of users who like to see pictures only. You can use this feature as an additional tool to drive engagement as well.

Use Instagram Stories

Just like WhatsApp and facebook, Instagram allows it’s users to add stories for 24 hours. But Instagram stories has few advance features such as:

Adding Stickers
Creating Polls
Tag Locations
Use emojis
Send to Button
Questions and Answers

Every feature has its own value. If you use them wisely, you could drive better engagement on your Instagram profile. For example, you could use Q&A option to collect user feedback and suggestions. However, you can tag your location to attract local audience.

You could upload images and videos to create Instagram stories and use additional features in it.

Additional Instagram SEO Tips

So far, we have learnt about few good Instagram SEO Tips. Most of them are good enough to generate positive outcome. You can also consider following additional suggestions to focus on other aspects too, like:

Create a posting calendar and to manage post schedule posts
Maintain the post frequency to offer your followers more content.
Play with hashtags and do your experiments with it.
Learn to ask question on Instagram so that you could create direct engagement with users.
Work hard on stories and come up with stunning stories.
Learn to use fonts, emojis, and characters
Online contests and prizes for product or services promotion

Hope these Instagram SEO Tips would help you to grow your Instagram page or profiles. Keep exploring TheSEOGuy for more Latest SEO Tips.

FAQ – Frequently asked questions for Instagram SEO

Is there any impact of posting timings?

Depending on your country, you could choose the posting time. There is no such guidelines for posting on Instagram but you could consider the timings when most users are online using the data available in Instagram analytics. Go to insights > Audience > See Followers (Choose hours). It is the timings when most of the followers have followed your account. Not an exact metrics but it can give you a broad Idea about posting timings.

How do you rank on Instagram?

Instagram is a social media platform not a search engine. Ranking concept is for search engines only. In Instagram you could get featured under different categories. For this you should use multiple set of keywords and convert them into hashtags. People who are following those hashtags could see your posts and might follow your profile.

What is a good reach rate on Instagram?

Instagram reach rate is the number of people who have seen your post divided by the total number of your page or profile followers. As an industry-standard, an engagement rate on Instagram between 1% and 3% is generally good, and it is the average we see on an influencer’s profile. You could grow your page or profile if you are monitoring the reach rate regularly and working to increase it.

How do you do SEO for Instagram?

You can follow given basic practices of Instagram SEO

Profile Optimization
Use of Alt Text
Learn to use Instagram Analytics
Create and Use Hashtags
Add Call to Action Button
Instagram Stories
Account Linking

These are few common Instagram SEO tips which are suggested for better outcome.

If you have additional suggestions for above written information, then do comment below. You can also share any sort of feedback or suggestion with me.