Google Upgrades Rewards System to Earn Points Boosting User Reviews

Many years in the past, Google created a program from the mould on the Yelp Professional Group referred to as City Experts. The idea behind it was to accelerate the acquisition of “high quality” reviews for local businesses.

The first plan made available benefits based on the amount of testimonials/reviews being submitted. After a certain number of reviews, say 50 reviews, for instance, members reached to be a part of a new Google+ local community and were being made eligible to be invited to exclusive local events and more. Reviews have been needed to fulfil good quality rules. With all the adjustments away from Google+, it has additionally refurbished its incentives. Furthermore, the company is trying to extend the involvement along with the kinds of written content gathered.

Listed here are the particular levels as well as new point system:

As showcased in the picture above, the reward system now calculates the earned points in various ways, not just by contributing reviews. Now, Google affirms that one can earn points and the next level up by so many ways like by writing reviews, adding new places, uploading photos, fixing any out dated information, and responding simple requests/demands. And moreover, each sort of contribution would be worth one point, so now you have an option to earn up to five points per place.

Putting up the matter in simpler terms, Google has broadened the features of Local Guides to not only giving reviews, photos and tips but also to aid a flag and correct unfinished or imprecise facts.

No one can Guarantee a #1 Ranking on Google

When any online marketing company is being hired, it’s very important to set certain goals. But, the foremost question remains, “Can you guarantee that you’ll make my website #1 on Google?” This becomes a problem for several reasons as one cannot promise for a specific position or certain spot in search results.

No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.

Still if any online marketing company claims this, it simply means that company is dishonest in real and should be a big red flag. This is similar to giving a guarantee in which that company will be making use of shady SEO practices.

Such shady practices could be the use of employing “black hat” SEO techniques.

1. Ranking you higher on keyword phrases that are not very competitive.

2. Buying or trading links with low quality websites that aren’t at all relevant to your niche/business. This is referred to as “link exchange.”

3. Keyword stuffing goes beyond a certain limit on any webpage i.e. over using targeted keyword on your website, which instead of looking natural, makes your content unnatural and spammy too.

4. Producing low quality articles or using article spinning to distribute over number of directories massively.

Such techniques help to rank you higher but such an achievement will be short-lived. Recent rolled out update of Google Panda algorithm have been especially tough on low quality content. And such Black hat SEO techniques helps the website from getting banned by Google.

The fact is that search ranking results are unpredictable and the positions in search results keep fluctuating naturally. If today you are placed at #1, you could be at #3 tomorrow, and come back to #1 the day after that. It goes like that.

Initially it sounds good “being #1 on Google” but there isn’t really such a thing called “being #1,” and in fact there is no such way to guarantee a particular result. You must give significance to make sure that you have relevancy in your content/information, make use of ethical techniques (which do not violate Google guidelines) and place a strategy to make use of all avenues of online marketing (paid search, local listings, blogs, and so forth).

Few pro tips to consider are as mentioned below:

1. Use Google AdWords (or search engine ads) and bid on the terms that you want to optimize your website for. You just need to optimize only the ones that get the best click through rates or the ones via which you actually get customers to give promotion to your business.

2. Set up accounts at social media channels and use blogs so that when you or your company name is searched for on search engines, your company occupies all of the listings on the page.

3. Define your marketing goals and remain focussed on your target audiences. Documentation and planning helps a lot and simply showcases responsible marketing.

4. Analyse outcomes on regular basis and make modifications in your marketing tactics as per the requirement. Website analytics tools can be of great help to measure the success.

5. Careful research is needed to ensure that you have crystal-clear picture of your customer needs.

6. Include call-to-action on each of the webpage of your website to give right directions to your customers.

I hope this piece of content is helpful to all my readers.

Importance of Marketing Analytics

The current status of the B2B marketing metrics and analytics provides marketers actionable insights. They need to design programs that can be measured so that they have room to improve their marketing activities. The benefits of marketing analytics, and its impact on sales revenue, the being tools used, the budget allocations, main obstacles, and much more matters a lot. Here is the data that will be pretty helpful in order to optimize the user experience and drive higher ROI.

To measure the performance, role of analytics is a significant insight for the marketing success. According to the data collected for marketers, 86% of all the respondents consider it as the most important for the success of their marketing program.

Majority of the organizations (nearly 84%) invest in Marketing Analytics and rest of them are hardly paying any attention to it. Most of the organizations consider the increase in revenue as the top most priority and give high degree of importance to understand the sales funnel by the use of analytics.

KEY OBJECTIVES of Marketing Analytics

• Enhance customer lifecycle
• Improve competitive analysis
• Improve the marketing performance
• Reduce time taken to analyse data and interpret the results
• Gather data from multiple resources to draw correlations and make predictions

There are various parameters depending upon which the marketers select the marketing channels. The marketing goals, target customers, the budget, the Return on Investment, products or services being offered and the competitors, all of these metrics are used to evaluate their marketing programs. The organizations generally track the visits, page views, conversion rate, bounce rate and exit rate. Conversion rate is the most significantly used to track alongside visits and page views.

If SEO metrics are talked about then organizations are tracking the CTR, keyword clicks & rankings, top sources of organic traffic, and the unique terms that are driving the traffic. In Social Media, social reach, traffic referrals, engagement per post, leads, conversion rate, brand sentiment and top influencers are taken track of. In PPC marketing, CTR, sales conversion rate, and visit-to-lead rate are regularly tracked. For Content Marketing, leads, downloads views, likes, and comments per post, conversion rate and time spent on a page are the metrics that are tracked by organizations.

Looking at the current stats there are many obstacles like lack of resources, time & budget constraint lack of system integration, lack of vision that comes in between and hold back the organizations from investing in Marketing Analytics. 

The emerging trends in digital technology and marketing should be given utmost importance by the organizations today.

Warnings Issued by Google Search Console

Mass notifications sent by Google for Blocking JavaScript and CSS files.

Google Search Console had sent mass notification warnings to the webmasters that Googlebot is not able to access the CSS or Javascript files on their websites. The webmasters were in dilemma that this roll out might result in the drop in their website rankings.
On 28th of this month, Google sent out the notifications at such a rapid pace such that tons of webmasters received this warning instantly through the Google Search Console. Due to this, the websites were being blocked that appear to be blocking their CSS and JS assets.

The warning message looks like this:

 

This message reads, “Googlebot Cannot Access CSS & JS on…” shuddered webmasters as their anxiety level shoots up as and when their rankings come under alarming circumstances. Google keeps rolling out such notifications to keep the webmasters informed about its existence. Most of the WordPress sites are getting this notification because their /wp/includes/ folder is blocked by robots.txt.

Last year Google has updated their webmaster and had clearly stated that blocking CSS and JS can result in “suboptimal rankings.” Now the webmasters clearly see the implementation in the midst of the coming year i.e. 2015.

But again, Big Thanks to Google. As usual, they send you the instructions that can be followed to diagnose the issue. You need to use the “Fetch and Render" tool within the Search Console.

Hope this helps, friends.