How can YouTube help your SEO?

With more than a billion views a day, by 2013 YouTube became the second largest search engine on the web, after Google (and Google owns YouTube, which says a lot about the volume of search for the Google group). The website that started as a free streaming website in 2005 has turned into one of the most popular websites in the world (YouTube ranks #3 worldwide according to Alexa.com). A lot of companies are using YouTube as a way to get videos online and share them on social media. Studies show that YouTube would be a wonderful way to improve your ranking, your SEO, and your online presence. But how can a video help your business?

First of all, you need a video. It seems to be the easiest part of the process, but it's not. The video needs to be high quality content. We always talk about content as the way to promote your brand, improve your SEO, and get exposure on social media, this is your chance. Good video and sound quality are the first steps on the path that leads to good content. In addition to the quality, a topic must be chosen, something that gives the viewer the will to learn more. A good content in a video will be more likely to be shared on social media.

The second step will determine how much your video will help your ranking and your website. For a video to be efficient on Youtube, it needs to be optimized for SEO:

- The title of the video will be the first step. Make sure to include the keywords your business usually uses to consolidate your keyword strategy. Use your keywords wisely, to get a title short and appealing to the viewer.

- Then comes the time to enter a description for your video. This part will describe the content in the video, but will also be the opportunity to include the link to your website, linking at the same time the video to your brand.

-Text within video may seem annoying when used without control, but it can be a good way to display directly your URL, your business name, and phone number directly on the video. Google may analyse these links and keywords included in the video and help the ranking of your video in the main search engine. Tags should also be included in your video, as a word or a phrase depending of your strategy.

- Link your video to Google Places. As developed in our previous article, a good link on Google places will help your local business, and your video will improve it even more

Once your video is set up on YouTube, it needs to be promoted. Embed your video on your website and your blog, knowing that the number of embeds is a factor that determines the popularity of the video. YouTube gives you the code to display the video somewhere else, and you can include this support directly to your website and blog. But the promotion doesn't end with the video on the website. To be fully efficient, a video must be shared on social media. It is the only way for a video to get views, go viral and bring your business the attention and popularity you were looking for. Promoting and sharing the video will get your video views, which will make it more popular and rank better on the search engine.

To summarize we can say that the process to improve your SEO with a YouTube video is a 3-step program: create quality content, post it and tag it to optimize it, and finally promote it. And if the content is original, funny, and appealing, it may go viral and open you the gates for SEO heaven. Take it EZ. 

How can Google help your local business?

You are the owner of a small business and you need more exposure? The location of your shop is difficult to find?You have traffic on your website but few visits from customers? If it is the case, Google can help your business, not only for the ranking of your website, but also to help locating your website. We all know by now that the new algorithm of Google is changing the way SEO works, but it is giving a bigger place to locations applications of Google like Maps,Business, Places, and Google + . So what are the advantages of using these applications for your business?

Nowadays, even if the internet is opening the door for customers to shop anywhere in the world, a majority of them are still shopping locally. The human factor is still a very important component of any transaction. With the rise of social media, local businesses have been presented the opportunity to advertise in their local community, but on a media that covers a worldwide population. Moreover, with the increasing number of smartphones, a customer can just do an internet research wherever he or she is, and locate the product needed near him or her in a few seconds. Google is the main provider of localisation for businesses, thanks to its application Google Map. And let say the customer is literally next door and need your product, but you are not showing up on Google Map... The customer is going somewhere else.

Google is offering a full suite of application to help developing small businesses like Google Map, Google  + Business, and Google Places. On top of advertising your shop on the map, the combination of these applications will give you a complete solution for local business: location, map, reviews, access to social media etc. It is a matter of giving your customer the right information. If we step back and look at the bigger picture, the web scale, what is going to change with you using these applications?

It will help your SEO. Being local will help the ranking of your website. Hummingbird gave a lot of importance to Google local applications, and using them will be a good tactic for your SEO. Moreover, your online reputation will increase and, with the good community management behind, it will help grow your customer basis. On the local scale, your business will have a platform that is mobile friendly. Because the truth is, most of local research are done on mobile devices, through mobile applications and are linked to the GPS of the device. 

To conclude, it is clear that Google will help your business with all the local application that the search engine is offering. Some other company like Yelp, Foursquares,and Yellowpages also offer local business applications to locate businesses (for Yelp and Foursquares, it is mainly restaurants). Using these applications will help your SEO, increase your exposure and increase your brand reputation. So advertise online to be more local, and take it EZ.

How to create a King Content?

The motto is here, and since the launch of Hummingbird (the new algorithm of Google), content has been crowned king of the online marketing kingdom. It is true that Google, with the new update of the search algorithm (the program that gives the results when somebody does a Google search), gave a particular place to content creation. Any online marketer knows by now that organic and referral traffics will be driven by content creation. But there is a shortfall to this new trend: everybody is creating content, and if quantity may be good for some businesses, the quality of the content is not always there. So creating content for the sake of creating content, is it a good idea? The obvious answer is no. But how can you make your good, clever and original content stand in a sea of poor quality content? How to create content that will be crowned king?

1- Think outside the box.

In this mass of insipid and tasteless content, your creation needs to be different to be noticed. The box is where all your competitors and other company are advertising with a slightly identical content. You need to be outside of this box, stand by yourself with a revolutionary idea. Think big, think original and think clever. Lego is a very good example of outside the box creation with a full scale X-Wing (spaceship from Star Wars) made out of legos and exposed in Time Square :

   

The brand is known for having a lot of their products tied to the trilogy of Georges Lucas, and the announcement of new movies by Disney created the opportunity for Lego to surf on the Star Wars wave. But to be noticed in the middle of all the content related to the movies, the brand of the blocks needed to strike hard, with something big and original. Of course, this is an extreme example, but the idea is there. This creation gave the brand an incredible exposure and fresh content that talks to people, to followers, to customers...

2- Tell the world something that matters

Your content may be big and original, but if the core of it is empty, your business will not bring the ROI expected. On top of originality, the content needs a soul, a real background story that rise the interest and the curiosity of the reader. This emotional factor is often forgotten by marketers who only focus on the size and visibility.

An internet reader spends hours online, and will see hundreds of blogs, pictures and articles. The only way for this reader to become a lead or a customer is to give him something that plays with his or her emotions, and give him or her the will to stay and learn more. Intel, with its new blog Intel IQ, is a good example of emotional content. 

This blog, highlighted by Ecoconsultancy,  is the new blog launched by the micro chip company. In order to connect with a younger audience, Intel launched this blog , made by the employees of the brand. The idea is to create content by using engineers and employees curated content with the form of an online magazine, and it helps giving a human face to Intel. Intel IQ ranks 1078th in the USA according to Alexa.com, showing the success of the story telling strategy. 

3- Be sharable

It is crucial to have a good, original and emotional content. It is even more important to be able to share it. A good content is a content that will appeal to the reader and will be shared, the main objective being to go viral and to bring people to your website without paying for traffic. Your content needs to be shared on social media and linked to your social media to insure that it will be sharable and shared. The most platforms you use, the better it is. For example, WestJet with their Christmas operation , got more than 200 000 views in 16 hours only. The second day the story was on national television, and the video became the most shared video in 2013. Thanks to a good relay of their story on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube...), the content was a hit and increased the exposure of the company.

 

4- Target the right audience and make the customer part of the process.

Targeting an audience in a world where information travels at the speed of light is not an easy task, and an efficient content creation process depends on a good target audience. But how to target the right audience for your next campaign. The solution is to listen to your audience and see what they want. Thanks to social media, your business has the opportunity to be social, meaning that you can involve your customers and fans/followers in your content creation process. A Twitter or a Facebook contest involving the experience of the customer with the product is a good way to figure where is your audience and what your audience wants. You will be able to use this data to build a content more adapted to your audience. Use social media to be social and your content quality will increase.

As a conclusion, their is a difference between content king and king content. The difference is the quality of the production that will be the reflection of your company, the image of your brand to the world. Creating a content that will be king is not easy, and requires originality, soul, accessibility and a good audience. The combination of these 4 component should give you and your business the ability to create content that may become an heir to the throne of the content kingdom. Take it EZ.

Photo Sharing Wars : Snapchat vs Instagram

To start the new year on a good note, we will explore today the universe of social photo messaging, a booming niche market in the social media sphere, and we will discuss if these tools are relevant for your business. 2013 has seen the rise of new entrants in the social media sphere, such as Pinterest, Instagram and Snapchat. The common denominator between these networks is their focus on the graphic part of social sharing, using pictures as the main data shared. Two of them, Snapchat and Instagram, are fighting for the lead of the social niche of photo messaging, and we will be focusing on them.

Instagram is not a new player on the social media scene, but its latest evolution makes it a challenger in photo messaging. A little bit of history first: 

Instagram is the social media that allows the user to take pictures, add effects to them (and hashtags), and then share the pictures on other Social Media like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Flickr. They were the pioneer of photo messaging by being the first application to allow people to share pictures directly from camera to social media, without having to upload the picture. The success of Instagram was so important that Facebook purchased the company in April 2012, making it part of its strategy. But Instagram was not the only one contributing to the success of image sharing. A company created in September 2011 by two students of Stanford University will push the concept further. Snapchat was created as a social media with instant photo sharing. Instead of posting your pictures on your social media, Snapchat allows you to send a photo, a picture or a drawing directly to a selected list of users, creating the first direct photo sharing social network. At the end of 2013, Snapchat claimed more than $50M profit and Google made an unsuccessful offer in November to buy the company. This success of direct photo sharing pushed Instagram to launch Instagram Direct in December 2013, entering at the same time the arena of instant photo sharing.

But where does the success of these networks comes from? The first answer lays in our society's habits. The increasing amount of smartphones equipped with camera makes it easier to take a picture, and the constant access to internet opens the door to social sharing. The second component of this success is the trend of the "selfies". A "selfie" is a self portrait of somebody taken with a smartphone and shared on social media. The trend was so important that the neologism "selfie" was added to the Oxford dictionary in 2013. The picture sharing networks are perfect to share this kind of content, and you can even add some effects or drawings, and send it to a selected list of people. 2013 has been the year of the "selfie", and a lot of famous personalities have used the digital self portrait, such as Pope Francis and President Obama.

But can we use these photo messaging networks to promote a business? The answer is yes. These networks are a golden opportunity to create the buzz around your products. But some major details needs to stay in your mind while developing your Snapchat or Instagram campaign:

- The audience is young. Most Snapchat users are between 13 and 23 years old. Your campaign will be accurate if you target this kind of market. Other social media may be more relevant if your products target an older population.

- These social media are very graphic. A good Snapchat or Instagram campaign will rely on a new design or a new product that provides visuals that can be used and shared. The message needs to be short and striking. Acura gave us a good example of promotional message on Snapchat  by releasing a short video about the new NSX .

To summarize, photo sharing is the new trend on social media, and this trends takes roots in the evolution of our society, the evolution of our habits. A new generation has full access to Internet through a smartphone with camera and  is looking for something else than Facebook and Twitter. Photo sharing networks like Instagram and Snapchat are benefiting from it. There are a lot of possibilities for businesses on these networks that are not as big as Facebook or Twitter (yet?) but offer a new experience, and maybe a more personal experience than other social media. So be young, integrate photo sharing into your strategy, even take selfies, and take it EZ .

What to expect for SEO & Social Media in 2014 ?

As we just celebrated the new year, we thought it would be good to take a moment to think about what we can expect for 2014 as a matter of SEO and Social Media.

2013 has been a pretty intense year when we talk about SEO. Google launched the new algorithm Hummingbird that is supposed to be a major change in the SEO sphere. A lot of rumors and theories have been presented, and a lot of questions asked: Should we change our SEO strategy? Is link Building obsolete? How can we create the content that bring traffic? And with all these changes it seems legit to be a little worried about 2014. But a major change like Hummingbird is not likely to happen again in 2014. Google will certainly update this algorithm, making it even more efficient and content oriented, but it will just be an amplification of what we have seen in 2013.

SEO:

Optimizing your Search Engine is becoming more and more complex and the trend will stay this way in 2014. The content is now king and old strategies are becoming obsolete. But do not wipe out what you have built yet. Link building still has a power and the relationship that you built through it are still a mainstay for your SEO strategy. Guest blogging is still in the game and even if it is becoming trickier to avoid to be labeled as spam while using guest blogging, this tactic is still one of the most efficient way to build high quality inbound links.

But for 2014, you need to add to your SEO to do list the content creation . The idea is to build fresh and high quality content to bring organic traffic. You can create 4 types of content : company information, Industry content (educational), customer support and sales content. But even if sales content, company info and customer support are important and should not be neglected, the focus for 2014 should be about education. As said before, the content has to talk to the customer, give him an added value that make him share the content in his personal sphere. And of course this content has to be linked to social media to make it sharable, and if the quality is there, go viral.

Social Media:

If you have a business that sells online, Social Media are not an option anymore. The new algorithm gives to Social Media a bigger place int he SEO process , and they are the highway of information, perfect to share your content. Facebook and Twitter, as the giants of the industry are launching more paid advertisement solutions to attract businesses . Being present on only one network is not enough anymore and new actors are entering the game to allow you to target more precisely your audience. For 2014 we should all start digging on the side of new networks for new opportunities and more important flows of content. Pinterest and Instagram offer a good way to share graphic content, and pictures for promotion. Snapchat is competing with Twitter for the micro blogging and can be an opportunity for you to show another face of your business to your clients and prospects.

Google + is on the way up, because we all assumed that with Hummingbird, Google is trying to push its Social Network that had some trouble competing with the king Facebook. Is it true? According to the head of webspam team at Google Matt Cutts, there will be no short term effects on your traffic whether or not you choose to use Google +. But on the long term, there will be effects and "early" adopters of Google+ will probably be rewarded. 

To summarize and conclude, 2013 has been intense for SEO specialists and online marketers. The rules have changed but the game remains the same. New trends, new media, new ways to bring people to you. Because that is the main idea: how to bring people to you? Just paving their roads with signs is not enough anymore, you need to show yourself through your content, build an audience on social media by being social and innovative. Thinking outside the box and creating amazing content would be the recommendation for 2014. Be social, be fresh, be aware of changes and take it EZ.

How Coca-cola revolutionized Christmas...

When the new ad for Coca-cola is on TV, you know that Christmas is coming. The bears walking on an icy land and drinking the famous beverage have been really symbolic of the last decade of Christmas commercial for the Atlanta's firm, showing how important Christmas is for this company. Coca-cola has always been a pioneer in marketing and advertisement, and the end of the year has always been special for the company. The Christmas celebration as it is painted in media is a product of Coca-cola marketing company, and it is in my opinion the biggest and most successful marketing campaign of the history.

What was Christmas before Coca-cola? We will talk about the commercial aspect with Santa and the present and we will avoid the religious signification of the holiday in this article. So before the worldwide propagation of Christmas as we know it, Santa was not the Santa we know. He used to be called Saint Nicholas in the Germanic influenced part of Europe. The idea is that Saint Nicholas was a bishop that was supposed to come on December 6th to bring presents to children who have been nice during the year. This tradition has been adapted in all Europe, incorporated with variations in the folklore of many countries. But this character was depicted as pretty serious and sometimes very strict, the opposite of what Santa Claus represents. So how did the transformation happened?

The idea of Santa comes from the merge of all the images of Saint Nicholas in the diverse cultures, helped by the publication in the 19th century of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. The canon of Santa as we know him was established by a poem called "A Visit from St.Nicholas", that started to describe him being joyful, chubby and plum, and introducing his reindeer. So the folklore and popular culture have made the Santa we know today, and it has been a long process since the origin. So what did Coca-cola do?    

Coca-cola merchandised Santa, creating at the same time one of the most successful merchandising campaigns ever created. First of all they shaped Santa, they gave him a face. In 1931, the Santa created by Coca-cola and painted by  Haddon Sundblom was beginning his advertisement career in The Saturday Evening Post and has been advertised ever since. Coca-cola was looking for a new approach for their product, to make it family friendly and Christmas was the best opportunity, and Santa the best ambassador. The brand was really lucky that the colors of the character matched the colors of the brand, and that is why we often attach Santa to Coca-cola. The pop culture spread a different version of the history that benefit the brand... nowadays wen something went all over the world and spread  like that, we say it went viral... yes that's the strength of the Christmas campaign by Coca-cola: they went viral before internet, they advertised with Santa so much for the past  82 years that now, a character coming from the folklore of many cultures has been totally changed and processed to be a commercial spokesperson. 

Coca-cola just invited themselves in Christmas by changing the ambassador of the holiday to a brand ambassador, and Santa is now more known for Coca-cola than for a folklore of many centuries. And by doing so, Coca-cola stays on top of the biggest commercial event of the year. And by always improving and modernizing the image of Santa, the cola from Atlanta stays on top of Christmas as a matter of marketing. So if we summarize, it is not by creating Santa that Coca-cola revolutionized Christmas, but by using the image for a commercial use. They made the character more popular,  detached him from his religious origins and made him international, relevant everywhere, global. It worked so well and he has been around for so long that now popular culture took him and is now part and parcel of Christmas. Take it EZ, and Merry Christmas.

We wish you Happy Holidays

Happy Holidays to all our readers, thank you for your support and take it EZ for the Holiday Season.