For instance, the social media giants have created a way for us to communicate and interact with their servers using special software that allows us to talk to each other using their software.

Many small businesses are looking for an easy and effective way to connect with their customers. A chatbot can help solve this problem by providing an automated way for you to connect with your customers.

Using bots is ‘like having a secret agent on your side.’ With that in mind, let’s look at some reasons why you should use chatbots.

1. Chatbots Save Time

Chatbots can be applied to many different areas of our lives, but one of the most popular uses is customer service. Chatbots allow businesses to communicate with customers more efficiently while on the phone or online. 

For example, if you need to send someone a faster response than emailing them back and forth, you can use a chatbot instead. 

If you are looking for a new product, you can use a chatbot to search for it and get it delivered right to your door. The possibilities for using chatbots as part of your business are endless!

2. Chatbots Improve Productivity

Chatbots serve businesses of all sizes, from small start-ups to large corporations. The reason? They allow companies to scale up their business by automating repetitive tasks and allowing them to focus on more important things like sales growth or developing new products or services.

You can also use chatbot technology to increase customer satisfaction levels by offering better customer service or finding out about potential problems before they occur like not being able to get through on the phone. 

Some even offer live chat features so clients can get answers immediately. When you have a chatbot, you can communicate with your customers in real-time rather than having them wait on hold for hours or days. 

You can also provide personalized responses that match each customer’s needs — for example, if someone is looking for a product recommendation, you can send them specific recommendations based on your knowledge about their interests and preferences.

3. Chatbots Create New Business Opportunities

Chatbots can engage customers at any point during their purchase journey and help them understand the benefits of your products or services by showing how they will benefit from using them.

Chatbots are a great way to get more customers in your store and generate more revenue. Getting customers into stores is difficult because they might be hesitant about making purchases from an unknown brand or shop.

Chatbots can help you overcome this problem by creating an easy way for people to find products that match their needs and interests.

4. Chatbots Boost Customer Service 

Chatbots can help your customers resolve problems with their accounts or give them account information in a way that’s easy for them to understand.

Most importantly, they can help reduce the number of phone calls you have to make. Because chatbots are so effective at answering questions, they can help reduce the number of phone calls you have to make for certain inquiries. That can save both time and money for your business.

5. Chatbots Drive Leads and Sales

Chatbots allow marketers to create messages that drive people to their website, landing page, or another digital channel. 

A chatbot can help you get more out of your marketing efforts by interacting with customers in a way that is natural for them, resulting in higher conversion rates and increased revenue.

6. Chatbots are Incredibly Versatile

A lot of businesses use them for different purposes. Such means can be used for many different things by different people. 

For example, you could have a chatbot that generates leads for your business, one that helps with customer service issues, another that helps with product research, or even another that automates some of your backend tasks. The possibilities are endless!

7. Chatbots are Affordable

You might not know this, but most businesses do not have any budget for digital marketing because it doesn’t help drive revenue like traditional forms of marketing do i.e., email campaigns. 

For that reason, that’s why many small businesses embrace chatbots with their marketing strategy until they experience some success with their existing strategies.

In Conclusion

There are many great reasons to implement a chatbot for your website. They offer convenience for the user, increase sales, and convert them into customers. 

Chatbots can handle routine tasks, create a better customer experience and reduce overhead costs from hiring people to handle these menial tasks.

Implementing a chatbot on your website will give you a competitive edge over other websites in your niche.

Chatbots keep your business relevant in your customers’ everyday lives. This opportunity should not be overlooked and should be utilized as soon as possible.

The post Reasons Why You Should Use a Chatbot appeared first on SiteProNews.

Before you jump into ways to improve core web vitals, let us understand what core web vitals are. 

What are Core Web Vitals?

Google has developed page experience signals that evaluate the user experience on sites. Core Web Vitals are among many signals that guide website owners to optimize the quality of user experience to achieve long-term success on the web.

By quantifying the experience of your site, you will not only rank better on Google search engine search pages but will also provide your users the ease and the interest to explore your site. 

The Core Web Vitals comprises three metrics that measure your pages on their parameters and help you find if the page provides a better user experience:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): It measures the time it takes your page take to fully load. In simple words, it is the time taken from clicking on the link till the page fully appears on the screen. For a great user experience, every page element including images, videos, or animation including text should be loaded within 2.5 seconds.
• First Input Delay (FID): It determines the time it takes before users can interact with the page. Here interaction means the actions users can perform on the page like navigating to other pages and choosing options. The acceptable FDI is 100ms.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): It measures the stability of page elements after the page is loaded. If the elements move across the page while loading, it will disturb users from consuming the content. A higher CLS means your page has poor visual stability. The acceptable CLS is 0.1.

Ways to Improve Your Core Web Vitals Score

While optimizing your site for Core Web Vitals metrics, remember that the key is to improve the user experience. While there are different ways to do this, here are some of the best ways to improve your core web vitals score.

1. Implement Lazy Loading (Improve LCP and FID)

Sites containing multiple images are usually concerned about slow webpage loading. Such sites will be benefit highly from lazy loading. The basic concept here is to load images or iframes only if users wish to view them. This means the pages will display only those visual representations that are above the fold and the rest will appear when the user scrolls the page.

This way users won’t have to wait for all the elements in the page to load before using the web page. You can improve both LCP and FID with a single move. 

Lazy loading is strongly recommended if your site has lots of images and especially when compressing the picture size is not improving the site’s LCP score.

There are different ways of implementing lazy loading – for example late binding, using Lazy<T> Class, enabling it in entity framework, and eager loading. Choose whichever goes well with your site code. 

2. Remove Unnecessary JavaScript Execution (Improve FID Score)

You should consider minimizing and optimizing your JS execution if your FID score is poor. When your site’s code requests the browser, which uses a new memory space, it hinders the execution of JavaScript and slows down the page loading. One way to fix the issue is to free memory space, which you can do primarily in two ways:

Remove unnecessary third-party JavaScript or unused components of .js libraries. Manage components to be included in your library package and remove any snippets that are no longer in use.

Defer or Async tags and consider JavaScript snippets that are necessary and those which can be deferred to later in the loading process. The benefit of scripts with ‘defer’ is that they never block the page. In fact, tell the browser not to wait for the script. As a result, the browser will continue processing the HTML, to build DOM. 

Async scripts work the same as ‘defer’ but with minor differences. They load in the background and run when ready without blocking other scripts or being blocked by other scripts. 

There are also other ways to optimize your JavaScript to make your website load faster and offer your visitors a better experience.

3. Utilize CDN (Improve LCP Score)

CDN (Content Distribution Network) is a great way to handle latency problems that interrupt long-distance online transactions and cause slow loading. It is especially useful to boost the LCP score if your site has a global audience. 

CDN has a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and data centers which stores your site data and makes it faster to load on end-users systems. Choose the CDN service provider that has servers located in maximum locations so that content delivery to end-users becomes faster and seamless. Stackpath, NitroPack, KeyCDN, Cloudflare, etc., are some of the best CDNS you can have for your site.

Also, ensure that your CDN serves your static assets to make the page loading faster. Cache the assets reached on the client-side in your browser to improve the second time load. Further, you can also cache your dynamic pages in your CDN. You just have to set the correct TTL value by observing your application behavior.

4. Set the Size of Attributes (Improve CLS Score)

A site can have several attributes that enhance its appearance and impresses visitors, but they are also the reason for poor CLS scores. Here is what you can do:

• Choose fonts wisely: Different types of fonts on a single page cause a cumulative layout shift. This in turn hurts your CLS score. Stick to the minimum possible font types and sizes. Choose a maximum of two fonts, one bold type for headlines and a high readability font for the rest of the content. The more font types you choose, the longer they will take to load.
• Set media sizes: Include the size attributes in the HTML tag for images and videos. The user’s browser will then know the exact amount of space the file will reserve while loading the page. 

For example, if the original image is 640×960, you can resize it with a height of 500 pixels and a width of 400 pixels using the code below:

<img src=”https://ik.imagekit.io/ikmeia/girl-dress-2.jpg” width=”400” height=”500”/>

• Reserve space for ads:  If your website shows banner ads via third-party JavaScript through networks like Google AdSense, reserve a default block that loads first. For this, style the element before the ad tag library starts loading.

If you want to place ads in the content flow, reserve the slot size. The ads then won’t cause layout shifts when loaded off-screen.

5. Optimize Your Site for Mobile

As per statista, there are over 6 billion smartphone users worldwide today and that number is expected to increase every year. So, it is obvious why you should optimize your site for mobile phones. 

If you are still using a site geared to desktops , then you should quickly make the transition to a mobile first site. There are tools like the Zyro mobile site builder that can help you create a mobile site that works perfectly on every device. 

Your mobile site should be faster to load. Heavier site design causes code bloat that leads to slow page loading and a poor Core Web Vitals score. 

Next, work on minifying codes, reducing redirects, and using gzip compression. Re-check your site to see if these solutions improved your mobile website speed. 

6. Perform SSR Render for Your Page Components (Improve LCP and FID Score)

Doing Server Side Rendering or SSR is necessary to maximize loading performance in an era when every user uses a smartphone. By serving render-able HTML you will have the fastest way to get something on the screen. 

The reason is the browser can paint right away, before loading, parsing, or executing any of your JavaScript. So, SSR is highly effective on mobile websites which usually take longer to load than desktop sites, often due to network issues. 

SSR is primarily recommended for your page components that appear above the fold. For the components that appear below the fold, render them from the client-side. You will then speed up the loading process without hindering the user experience. SSR is performed using different libraries such as React, Vue, and Angular.

Performing SSR is also a good idea because Google promotes and encourages it for achieving better SEO values. 

7. Optimize API Requests and Responses (Improve LCP and FID Score)

API responses and requests are generated from the client-side. Often these responses are not required and packed with data that may or may not be needed. Such responses directly impact page loading and the core web vitals score. Simplifying these responses can lead to dramatic increases in site efficiency. 

While there is an array of third-party solutions, many of the methods are code-based. For example, pagination, filtering, and ranges are all code-based solutions that you can employ to fix the problem.  

Summary

Google is ready to implement page experience updates to offer an even better user experience. You must start incorporating Core Web Vitals into your SEO strategy as soon as possible to avoid a drop in Google search engine ranking due to poor user experience.

By using the solutions above, it is not difficult to achieve the required score. But, do not forget to compare your site’s results before and after fixing errors. The sooner you start, the sooner you gain an edge over other websites.

The post 7 Best Ways to Improve Your Core Web Vitals Score appeared first on SiteProNews.

If your business runs on WordPress, then following some basic SEO tips can play a significant role in boosting your site’s organic presence resulting in more leads, sales, and higher revenue.

Here are the top WordPress SEO tips to follow in 2021 and ahead:

1. Make Sure Search Engines Can Access Your Website

If search engines can’t access your site, they won’t rank your pages and you will lose all organic traffic.

Therefore, log in to the WordPress admin, and click on Settings > Reading.

Make sure, the box that says “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is unchecked.

2. Optimize URLs 

Permalinks play a huge role in making your site SEO friendly.

Visit Settings > Permalinks and select the post name option as the default URL structure.

If your site has been running for years, then take the help of an SEO professional to do this for you since there is a risk of losing all your SEO equity if proper redirects are not done. 

Also, when you add a new post in WordPress, it automatically creates a new URL having the same name as the post title. 

However, you should manually change the URL every time you create a post to make it SEO friendly. 

For example, if your blog topic is “99 tips to renovate your house and make it look beautiful”, then the automatic URL that WordPress will create would be:

yoursite.com/99-tips-to-renovate-your-house-and-make-it-look-beautiful

Obviously, this URL is too long and would not look good in the search results.

Search engines prefer shorter and clear URLs. Hence, your URL structure should contain your target keywords for maximum SEO weightage. 

Here, the perfect URL would have been yoursite.com/house-renovation-tips

See the difference, short, clear, simple, and SEO friendly.

Hence, next time, you create a blog post, make sure to change the default URL to keep it short and keyword-rich.

3. Optimize Your Site for Google Page Experience

Google launched the Page Experience Update in May 2021. It affects the rankings of all sites that do not pass the Core Web Vitals test. 

If you are already using the Google Search Console, you might have seen issues such as LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), FCP (First Contentful Paint), and FID (First Input Delay) already affecting your site.

You can use the Page Speed Insights tool or the Finteza Lighthouse Report to improve the performance of your website and optimize for the Core Web Vitals. Both the tools offer suggestions to fix the problems associated with site speed and UX optimization. Moreover, the Finteza Lighthouse report offers a performance score along with SEO score, Accessibility score, and Best Practices scores that lets you evaluate your site on several parameters.

4. Use Images in WebP Format

WebP is a new image format for the web that creates richer, yet smaller images that are 26% smaller in size compared to the traditional PNG images.

Images play a significant role in making your site faster. Faster websites will easily pass the Core Web Vitals test. One of the best ways to make your images load faster is to use the WebP format.

Use the WebP Converter for Media plugin to convert all the jpeg, gif, and PNG images on your site to WebP. You will see a drastic change in page load since the images will load faster without any loss in image quality. 

5. Move Your Site to HTTPS (If You Haven’t Yet)

Google takes security very seriously. The era of HTTP sites is over. If you are thinking HTTPS is only needed for ecommerce sites then you are wrong. 

Purchase an SSL certificate for your website and visit Settings -> General in your dashboard to change the WordPress address URL and site address URL to HTTPS.

HTTPS is good for your website and this is what Google recommends. It builds a secure encryption to keep all the user communication data safe and makes your site trustworthy. 

6. Optimize Site Speed

As stated earlier, the Page Experience Update is going to affect all the slow websites negatively. Interestingly, it will boost the rankings of sites that are fast to load. 

Identify the weak spots in your site that are causing performance issues. Take the help of the search console to fix the Core Web Vitals issues. Some of the metrics that require attention are:

• FCP
• FMP
• Speed Index
• First CPU Idle
• Time to Interactive
• Estimated Input Latency

You can also take the steps below to further improve your page loading speed:

• Use minimum plugins and delete the ones that are not required.
• Upgrade your WordPress hosting to increase bandwidth.
• Move to a faster theme. 
• Minimize the number of external scripts.
• Install a WordPress caching plugin like WPRocket. 
• Create AMP pages using a plugin like AMP for WP. AMP pages are designed to load faster on mobile devices.

Taking these steps will help to speed your website like never before.

7. Build High-Quality Links

Building quality links can boost your SEO efforts and help you rank your targeted keywords. 

There are many link building techniques you can use to acquire quality linkings. Some of them are:

• Guest posting.
• Blogger outreach.
• Broken link building.
• Unlinked brand mentions.
• Resource page link building.
• Guestographics.
• Roundup posts.
• Product reviews.

To save time, you can use tools like Pitchbox to find quality link building prospects and reach out to them.

With Pitchbox, you can find link building opportunities for various strategies. After finding good prospects, the next step is to check the quality of the links. Here, tools like Ahrefs and Moz can help you because these tools provide link data like traffic, rankings, DA, and PA.

For good link building, you need to register and use various tools so you might need to create an account on several websites. 

Saving passwords in your chrome browser is not that safe since your friends and family might see your passwords. Also, hackers always try to bypass your security to enter your system and see your personal credentials.

8. Leverage the Power of Video Marketing

You can use video marketing to boost SEO since research shows that 83% of marketers generate high traffic using video marketing.

To leverage the power of video marketing, you can insert or embed your YouTube videos.

You can use a plugin like the Easy Video Player to add videos in your blog. 

Using video marketing, you can boost traffic and social shares of your content because stats show that in a week, around 45% of Facebook and Twitter users watch at least one hour of video content. 

9. Improve the UX of Your Website

User experience is a must when we talk about website success. Webmasters often ignore providing good user support. 

Here are reasons why UX is important for any website and its role in SEO:

• Converts visitors into customers.
• Reduces the bounce rate and improves the time on page.
• Increases site trust and improves website authority.

To improve the UX of a website, you can take the actions below:

• Provide well-researched, intent-specific, high-quality, and engaging content to the audience.
• Create a well-structured responsive website design that is easy to navigate.
• Make your website load fast.
• Add responsive and user friendly calls to action.
• Provide good customer service.
• Use attractive media like images and videos.
• Fix any 404 issues, redirection errors, or core web vitals issues.
• Optimize all the images on your site.

There are several tools that can be used to improve UX. For instance, Smush lets you optimize images to increase website loading speed. It also allows you to add lazy loading to images on the website that lets users see the main content of your page without waiting. With Smush’s bulk optimization feature, you can optimize up to 50 images in one click.

With the help of the Apex Notification Bar you can display relevant notifications to guide users. It is an excellent notification bar plugin for WordPress users that allows you to display custom notifications, alerts, offers, and promos to website visitors. It offers five ready to use templates with customizations. You can add it on the top or bottom of your website.

There is also Zendesk which can be used to offer excellent customer support. It lets you offer customer services via channels such as live chat, phone, and email. Both small and large businesses use Zendesk to offer exceptional support to their customers and clients.

For a WordPress blog, the best practice is to install a free plugin named “Zendesk Chat”. This plugin allows customers to live chat directly with you on the website. The best part of Zendesk is that it supports over 40 languages and it is compatible with the majority of browsers like Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Opera.

10. Update .htaccess File

An .htaccess file is a high-level configuration file that is usually located in your WordPress root directory. With the use of the .htaccess file, you can make various changes like adding redirection to the HTTPS version of the site, prevent hotlinking, create a custom 404 page, and password protect directories on the server.

If you are using SEO plugins like Yoast SEO then simply go to the SEO > File Editor > .htaccess file.

To edit the .htaccess file, you can add lines of code directly in WordPress as shown in the image below. Simply click on the “save changes to .htaccess” button and it will automatically update in the backend.

For example, if you want to redirect any page to a new location then add the code below to your .htaccess file:

Redirect 301 /oldpage/ http://www.yourdomain.com/newpage

How to Force WWW and Non-WWW Versions of your Website

You can use the code below to force open your website with a www address:

Options +FollowSymLinks 

RewriteEngine on 

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com [NC] 

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

You can use the code below to force open your website without a www address:

Options +FollowSymLinks 

RewriteEngine on 

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} . 

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^yoursite\.com 

RewriteRule (.*) http://yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Note: Replace “yoursite” with your website address and if you have an extension other than .com then replace the .com with your TLD. 

11. Use the Yoast SEO Plugin

Yoast SEO is one of the best SEO plugins for WordPress. Yoast SEO helps optimize content for higher rankings. It provides various suggestions and recommendations for the content to make it more SEO friendly.

To install the Yoast SEO plugin, you need to go to Plugins > Add New in your WordPress dashboard and search for “Yoast SEO” and click on the install and active button as shown in the image below.

The Yoast SEO plugin also allows you to add meta title, description and focus keyword to your articles. You can even see the snippet preview which means you can check how your article will look in the search results after publishing.

Apart from this, the Yoast SEO plugin offers these features:

• SEO analysis.
• Keyword density check.
• Keyword check in prominent areas like headings, introduction, title, description, slug, and content body.
• Internal links and outbound links check.
• Meta description length check.
• Image alt tags check.
• Content word count check.

It also offers some advanced options like article indexing, link following, and canonical tag addition.

Yoast SEO automatically assigns a schema type for your article but if you want to change it then you can easily do that. 

Moreover, you can control open graph tags for Facebook and Twitter. Choose the information you want to display on social media like article image, title, and description.

12. Perform Content Optimization

Content optimization is very important for good rankings. WordPress website owners can optimize their content with the help of tools like Yoast SEO.

Writing long and informative content can help you in achieving better rankings as compared to thin content. To optimize your content for SEO, it’s recommended you add the primary keyword in the title, description, headings (H1, H2, H3), and main body. Apart from the main keyword, you can also include some LSI or similar keywords to improve the relevance score. 

The Yoast SEO plugin gives a “readability score” (good, average, and poor) to every post on your blog and provides various suggestions to improve the score.

In the above image, you can see there are suggestions to make your content better. You should always aim for a good readability score which is green.

13. Make Your Internal Linking Stronger

Interlinking is a best SEO practice you should follow on your website. Adding links to articles pointing to other articles on your website are called internal links.

There are many benefits of internal links:

• It increases session duration and pageviews on the website.
• It helps in organic rankings.
• It reduces the website bounce rate.
• It spreads the overall link juice to other linked articles.

You can use tools like LinkWhisper to make your internal linking strong.

14. Add Your Site to Google Search Console, Google Analytics and Bing Webmasters

Adding your site to Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and Bing Webmasters is important because of the reasons below:

• You can allow search engine crawlers to crawl your website by uploading an XML sitemap.
• You can fix indexing issues and can also request page indexing.
• You can check the traffic data of your website with filter and search queries.
• You can fix various technical issues like mobile usability, core web vitals, mobile responsiveness, 404 errors, and AMP.
• You can get alerts whenever Google encounters any technical issue with your website.

To set up Google Analytics on WordPress, you need to create an analytics account and add your website as a property. 

To install Google Search Console and Bing Webmasters on your website, you need to add a special verification code in your website’s header file (in between the opening and closing head tag). 

Adding Code Using a Plugin

If you are a non-techy person then again Yoast SEO plugin can help you. You just need to go to SEO > General > Webmasters Tools and enter the code. Save changes.

Apart from Google and Bing, you can also add the verification code for Baidu and Yandex search engines.

Adding Code Without Using a Plugin

If you don’t want to use any plugin, then go to Appearance >Theme Editor and find the Theme Header (header.php) file from the right navigation area.

Here, you need to add a verification code before closing the <head> tag as shown in the image below.

Conclusion

Most SEO guides available on the internet are hard to follow, but I have made it easier for you to understand the technical concepts of WordPress SEO and take the required steps to make your site search friendly and user friendly. 

Once you implement the above SEO tips, wait for a few weeks to see the benefits. In addition, prepare high-quality content, acquire high-authority links, and take steps to improve UX. Taking these steps will help you to continue generating noticeable results for your site. Happy WordPress SEO 2021!

The post 14 Best Tips to Boost WordPress SEO appeared first on SiteProNews.

Social Media started as a platform to connect people together, it was just a place where you communicated with friends and family, and met new people to share memories.

Advancing to this day, social media has become a major marketing arena for creatives and businesses. Businesses are busy creating paid social media ads because it is worth the money.

This advancement brought about several career opportunities like influencers, content strategists, social media managers, etc.

Almost every business is on social media, and to achieve success in social media marketing you need to keep up with a lot of things. It is not something that can be winged but has to be strategically done.

The social media marketing boom has birthed the high demand for social media managers because employing social media specialists leads to increases in ROI.

Who is a Social Media Manager?

A social media manager is the person who manages a company’s social media accounts and enhances the success rate of brands’ social media marketing campaigns.

They update business social media pages, engage with their audience, create relevant content, and promote their products and services across their social media channels.

Social media managers in some organizations are responsible for the social media marketing team of writers, graphic designers, content strategists, etc.

Being a social media manager requires different skills that need to be acquired.

Since the social media manager career is relatively new and quite unconventional, it is not a degree that is taught in traditional colleges. 

However, there are online degrees and courses that offer you the right training to become a social media manager.

For example, Udemy offers several online courses to get you started. This training will equip you with the essential skills required to become a social media manager.

So what are the top skills required to become a qualified and successful social media manager?

Skills Required to Become a Social Media Manager

Here are the top 8 essential skills you need to become a social media manager.

1. Analytical Skills

Social media marketing involves a lot of tracking and measuring analytics to gauge what is working and what isn’t.

Social media managers need to be very analytical in order to continuously optimize their strategies to increase ROI.

It is essential that they know how to use the various analytical tools available for measuring KPIs and content performances.

Knowing how to digest and interpret data and take appropriate actions in response to that data is a vital skill for social media managers.

2. Staying Updated with Latest Trends

What worked 3 months ago might no longer work currently, social media networks are constantly evolving and changing.

Therefore, because of the dynamic nature of the digital world, a social media manager has to stay updated with the latest trends on all platforms.

Social Media Managers have to familiarize themselves with trends that constantly roll out, for example, trends like: 

• How Instagram is removing likes
• How video content now rules
• The reign of Influencer marketing, 
• The popularity of user-generated content, etc.

3. Copywriting Skills

Visuals will grab people’s attention, but copy will convince them to take action.

One of the recurring tasks of a social media manager is writing captions or copy that accompanies the content.

Therefore it is important to know how to write words that will engage people and drive them to take action or motivate them to engage with posts.

Social Media Managers need to master copywriting and writing styles that retain the attention of audiences such as attention-grabbing intros and skimmable content – keeping it short and sweet.

Excellent copywriting skills are important because social media managers fill company bios, come up with the best hashtags for campaigns, and write profile and product descriptions.

Furthermore, they will have to craft tweets, write Facebook posts, and Instagram captions.

4. Research Skills

Achieving social media marketing success involves a lot of in-depth research on what works and what doesn’t.

Social media managers need to research what people find engaging and which marketing style or content works best for each of the various social media platforms.

Additionally, they need to be aware of the type of posts that attract the most engagement, the best and worst times to post, the length of texts, and how the social media networks algorithms work.

This is information that needs to be researched from time to time since the social media world is very dynamic.

5. Creativity Skills

In the world of social media marketing, those with the most creative ideas and strategies win.

Most past, successful campaigns were creative and unconventional in their marketing strategies.

This is usually the handiwork of social media managers. 

On social media platforms, audiences have to be constantly wowed. People easily tag things “cliche” and are looking for content that stands out or brands that do things that they are not accustomed to.

This is why it is very important that social media managers develop creativity skills to pop out ideas and marketing styles that are sure to blow the minds of consumers.

They need to be willing to experiment and tell creative stories that speak to their target audience.

6. Strategic Skills

As a social media manager, you have to develop a social media marketing strategy for businesses. You will continually have to come up with the right strategy for your social media marketing campaigns.

Therefore it is vital that you can be future-oriented and make confident decisions based on research and proven mechanisms that will make social media marketing successful.

Social Media Managers have to plan ahead, experiment to find what works and what doesn’t, and make their strategy flexible for adjustments and changes.

7. Design and Graphical Skills

Visual content rules the Social media marketing world because it attracts the highest level of engagement.

According to social media examiner, 80% of marketers use visual assets in their social media marketing. 

Therefore, the ability to create striking visually appealing content is an important skill every social media manager should possess.

8. Community Engagement Skills

A business’s biggest asset is its brand community on social media. A brand’s image is assessed by their community or audience response.

One of the major roles of a social media manager is regulating a brand’s audience, responding to their comments both positive and negative, answering their queries, sparking conversations, and spurring engagement in the community.

Therefore, developing the skill to effectively engage a brand community is essential to enhance customer experience through responses and conversations, demonstrating care and empathy whilst engaging with audiences.

Conclusion

And there you have it, the most essential skills required of social media managers to excel at their roles.

Becoming a social media manager requires a mix of different abilities and skills in order to excel in the role.

So investing time and money to acquire these skills will pay off in the long run.

A social media manager has to be analytical with results, stay current with the latest trends, and be strategic with plans.

They, also, have to write excellent copy, become avid researchers, be creative, exhibit graphical skills, and be able to manage an online community.

The post 8 Essential Skills You Need to Become a Social Media Manager appeared first on SiteProNews.

There are various good SEO tools like SEMrush, Moz, and Ahrefs that can help you improve your website’s ranking in search engines. However, most of them are paid tools, and to use them you need to pay a recurring fee, which is expensive. The charge varies from tool to tool, but even the lowest plan will cost you $99 for doing basic SEO like keyword research and a site audit. 

That’s where Ubersuggest can help. From keyword analysis to competitor research and site audit, Ubersuggest provides in-depth information about your target domain for free. This makes Ubersuggest the best alternative to expensive SEO tools. 

Let’s take a look at an in-depth review of Ubersuggest and understand why you should be using it. 

An Overview of Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a freemium SEO tool that provides a detailed analysis of keywords and websites. It also enables you to check your site’s traffic history, best-performing pages, and keywords. 

Talking about keywords, Ubersuggest provides insights into the monthly search volume, SEO difficulty, paid difficulty, and related keyword ideas. You can check if there are any technical SEO issues with your website and get recommendations for how to fix them. 

Unique Features of Ubersuggest

There’s more to Ubersuggest than just offering keyword research and site audit.  

Here are some features that make Ubersuggest the best SEO tool in the market:

• Generates tons of keyword ideas for free. 
• You can find the top ranking keywords and pages of any website. This is essential as it allows you to spy on your competitors. 
• It helps you generate unique content ideas revolving around your primary or secondary keyword. 
• You can check how many people click on the search results for any given keyword. 
• It displays the age range of people searching for your target keywords. This is helpful when you want to target a specific age group. 
• Ubersuggest shows the organic traffic of any website for the last twelve months. 
• You can analyze your or your competitor’s backlink profile. It includes the domain authority and page score of the site linking to you. 
• Has a Google Chrome extension that provides crucial details related to keywords like search volume, SEO difficulty, and related phrases right on your browser. 

How to Use Ubersuggest?

The reason I like Ubersuggest the most is because of its ease of use. All you need to do is enter your seed keyword or website URL and it will then provide you with all the details you need to optimize your website. 

Here’s how you can use Ubersuggest. 

Keyword Research

To do keyword research, enter a broad term in the tool. For Instance, I searched for a keyword “bags,” on Ubersuggest, this is what the tool returned. It includes the average monthly searches for the keyword, SEO difficulty (SD), paid difficulty (PD), and cost-per-click (CPC).

Ubersuggest also provides information related to the devices used to search for the keyword “bags.” 

Scroll down, and you will see details like, how many people on search results for your desired keyword and the searchers’ age range.

Scrolling further, you’ll find keyword ideas. You can check for question keywords, prepositions, and comparisons related to your key phrase. 

Content Idea Generation

To find topics that you should be creating content on, click on “Content Ideas.” The tool will show you the top-performing posts related to your seed keyword. 

Use the “Filters” feature to sort content based on the number of Facebook and Pinterest shares. You can also add and exclude multiple keywords to narrow down the results.  

Domain Analysis

To conduct a domain analysis, all you need to do is enter your or your competitor’s URL and click on the search button. Ubersuggest will return with the target website’s organic monthly traffic (and last 12 months history), domain score, number of keywords, and backlinks.

You can check how many keywords the website ranks for and at which position. For example, as you can see in the below image, the domain (hubspot.com) ranks in position 1-3 for 22,975 keywords and 4-10 for 36,578 keywords. Since Ubersuggest shows the keyword ranking over time, you can easily determine if your SEO strategies are working. 

As you scroll down, you can see the keywords the website is ranking for, its monthly search volume, the average position, estimated traffic, and SEO difficulty.

Site Audit

When it comes to site audit, Ubersuggest shows you how many technical SEO errors are on your website. It categorizes the issues based on their impact on your SEO, enabling you to focus on the most important ones first. 

To conduct a site audit, click on “Site Audit” at the bottom of the menu. You will then see something like this. Begin by fixing the critical errors as they have the maximum impact on your SEO. 

It also shows your site speed for different devices. Depending on the time taken to load your website, Ubersuggest indicates if it is excellent, good, fair, or poor. Anything except “excellent” means you need to improve your site speed. You can also check first contentful paint, first meaningful paint, time to interactive, input latency, and speed index.

Backlink Analysis

Ubersuggest also allows you to conduct a backlink analysis to determine how robust your link profile is. Click on “Backlinks” below “Site Audit.” It will show your domain score, total backlinks, number of referring domains, and traffic. You can also check whether the number of backlinks has increased or decreased over time.

You can see how many backlinks are gained and lost each day for any website. This is beneficial as it helps you determine if you are losing more links than you are acquiring.

You can then check the source page title and URL, the referring website’s domain score, page score, link type, and anchor text. This helps you keep spammy links out, and anchor texts are relevant to the page being linked to. 

If this seems too much for you, then you have not seen the Ubersuggest Chrome extension. Just add it to your browser, and you can check the keyword volume and suggestions right on Google. 

For example, I searched for “cloud computing” on Google. Ubersuggest showed the average monthly searches (33,100) and CPC ($29.45) right on the search box. On the right side of search results, Ubersuggest shows keyword suggestions.

What I liked the most about Ubersuggest Chrome extension is that it shows the domain score and the average number of backlinks required to rank on the first page for that specific keyword. 

For the top ten results, you can see their domain score, traffic, the number of backlinks that URL has, and social shares.

Scroll to the bottom of the search engine results page, you will see “searches related to [your keyword].” Ubersuggest displays average search volume, CPC, and SEO difficulty for those terms as well. This is essential as it helps find highly-relevant related keywords that you should be using in your SEO campaigns. 

As you can see in the below image Ubersuggest displays average search volume, CPC, and SEO difficulty for the searches related to cloud computing.

Why Choose Ubersuggest Over Other SEO Tools?

As mentioned above, Ubersuggest is a beginner-friendly tool. Unlike other SEO tools, it doesn’t require you to go through a learning curve to understand how it works. 

Here are some more reasons you should choose Ubersuggest over other SEO tools. 

• From keyword research and content idea generation to site audit and backlink analysis, everything is available for free with a daily search limit. 
• Provides ideas for new blog posts based on what has performed well in the past on social media. 
• It is not just a keyword research tool. Ubersuggest offers insights into the demographics of the searchers as well, including their age group and the device they use to search the keyword. 
• You don’t have to consider several sets of tools to perform different research and analysis. You will get all the basic information in a fraction of a second in one place. 
• The Ubersuggest Chrome extension offers all the necessary information as you use Google. This prevents the hassle of visiting the tool for little tasks like keyword research. 
• You can set up daily rank tracking for up to 20 keywords for free. 
• Enables you to stay on top of your competitors’ SEO practices. 

Ubersuggest Pricing

Ubersuggest offers the necessary SEO features for free with a daily search limit. This means you don’t have to spend even a single dollar to generate keyword and content ideas, conduct domain analysis, or do site audits. 

Nevertheless, if you wish to generate a hundred reports per day or analyze around 300 keywords per day, you have to pick up a premium plan.

The paid plans from Ubersuggest are divided into three categories :

• Individual Plan starts at $29 per month. 
• Business Plan starts at $49 per month. 
• Agency Plan starts at $99 per month.

If you are a growing business with limited resources, I recommend choosing a premium plan. Apart from generating additional reports, you get access to SEO training and support, where you will learn the latest techniques to increase traffic. 

There are biweekly coaching calls where Neil and the Ubersuggest team will answer your questions. You also get access to worksheets and templates to apply your learnings. 

Conclusion 

Whether you are just starting with SEO or want a quick analysis of keywords and your website, Ubersuggest is a perfect choice. If you are short of time, just add the Ubersuggest Chrome extension to your browser, and you will get all the relevant information. Have you used Ubersuggest? How was your experience with it? Let me know in the comments!

The post Ubersuggest Review: Best Alternative to Expensive SEO Tools appeared first on SiteProNews.

Marketing to a Gen Z audience is not the same as marketing to Millennials. They have different social media habits and they do not trust a brand as easily. Let’s learn more about Gen Z, their habits and how to market to them effectively. 

Who Are the Gen Z Audience?

Those who born in 1996 and after are referred to as the Gen Z audience. Approx 32% of the population in the United States will comprise the Gen Z audience within a year. They are set to outnumber millennials.

Gen Z are the people who were born in the era of internet. They have been using the internet right from their childhood so they are aware of every popular platform and how things work there. 

Differences Between Gen Z And Millennials

There are a number of differences between Gen Z and Millennials. Gen Z does not respond to marketing campaigns sent using text based mediums. They know what is real and work hard to achieve that. 

Gen Z is pragmatic and their focus is on saving money. They are always looking for brands that feel authentic. They are inspired by social values and their behavior is much more stable as compared to the Millennials. The table below summarizes the differences between Millennials and Gen Z.

What are the Social Media Habits of Gen Z Audiences?

A marketer must learn how to market to the Gen Z audience. Why am I saying that? Because the Gen Z audience is highly responsible in nature. Gen Z is already aware of the social media mishaps that can happen so they market themselves intelligently in front of their prospective employers. They do not indulge in bad behavior or share stuff that might hamper their reputation. They remain true to themselves and share thoughts that benefit the community as a whole. They strictly stay away from any form of direct advertising. 

Here are some points that will help you understand the social media habits of the Gen Z cohort:

• The top social networks that Gen Z uses are YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat. 

• They like to post and view ephemeral content (the content that lasts only a short time before disappearing) because they find them real and up to date. Needless to say, the quality of content needs to be good. 

• They post photos on Instagram that reflect their true personality and they follow people whom they admire the most.

• Gen Z are extremely health-conscious. They understand which influencers promote products having negative health effects and they stay away from them. Kim Kardashian was seen promoting appetite-suppressant lollipops which quickly received negative reviews from the audience.

• They prefer to spend their money on experience instead of purchasing something material. 

• They are price conscious shoppers and they don’t blindly believe what a brand promotes unless they identify it themselves. 

How to Market to Gen Z? 

Marketing to Gen Z is not that difficult if you know the right strategies. Here are some of the top ways to persuade Gen Z to take an action and follow your brand:

1. Get Their Attention and Remain Authentic

The first step is to get the attention of the Gen Z audience. Banner ads won’t do it but Influencer marketing will! The best way to capture the attention of Gen Z is to get help from micro influencers because they want to see real people doing real things. 

Another essential thing to keep in mind while marketing to Gen Z is that you need to remain authentic. The younger generation wants products that are of high quality and they trust brands that have integrity. There is no shortcut to success; you need to focus on your brand values and be true to your morals if you want to get the love of Gen Z.

2. Reach Them Where They are and Communicate With Them in Their Own Language

Keep in mind that the preferred platform of the Gen Z audience is Snapchat and Instagram. They are not active on Facebook like Millennials. Hence, if you are spending dollars on Facebook ads to reach them, then you’re wasting your money. 

Gen Z likes to read ephemeral content, like Snapchat stories, that is short lived. They browse such stories once or more a day. Hence, the best way to convert them is to reach them where they love spending their time. 

Besides, you must communicate to them in their own language. They like their individuality and follow their own style. You need to provide an experience that is personalized to them in every manner. Storytelling is a great way to reach Gen Z. Share your brand message in a language and using a medium they prefer the most.

3. Become a Business that They can Admire

Gen Z follows businesses that they admire. One of the easiest ways to attract their attention is to stand for a great cause. There are so many social issues that affect a community. Take a stand on any of the social causes and help. Almost all the top brands are seen engaging in doing social good for others. This is a strong way to showcase your brand message to people. 

Adidas, the world leader in sports goods, does this brilliantly. With the #mygirls campaign, it ignited women’s interest in sports and encouraged them to follow a passion for exercise.

4. Leverage the Power of Videos

Gen Z are video crazy people. They hate text and are more likely to watch videos. Longer videos are not able to receive traction when compared to shorter videos; meaning, Gen Z audiences love watching shorter videos that are between 10 – 30 seconds in duration. The easiest way to engage a Gen Z audience is to create humorous videos that are under 10 seconds long because they are 3 times more likely to enjoy a funny ad than a serious one. 

Amazon made more than a 100, ten second ads that aimed to convey the capabilities of Alexa to people. The e-commerce giant is way ahead in terms of reaching the Gen Z audience with ads.

Final Thoughts 

Gen Z audiences are still trying to adapt so brands can be 100% right regarding whatever they do. You need to test, understand and repeat. The above strategies are carefully synced with the minds of the Gen Z audience and can prove really helpful to engage them. Happy Gen Z marketing!

The post The Complete Guide to Gen Z Social Media Marketing appeared first on SiteProNews.

IoT will have a significant impact in our day to day lives, not only in the way we do business,  but also in that every device we interact with will be connected to IoT. 

A world of massive possibilities lies in the future and we should be ready to accept IoT in all spheres of our life.  

What is IoT?

IoT stands for the Internet of Things. It is a network of physical devices which are connected to the internet and to other connected devices in order to collect and share data. 

Some examples of IoT include a smart microwave that can automatically cook food without any human intervention to set the time for cooking or self driving cars that can make travel easier without the need for human assisted driving. Sounds like a fairy tale but it’s true.

Top IoT Trends that Will Lead to Digital Transformation 

A Connected Business Framework: IoT will help to build a connected business framework where logistics, devices, consumers and workforce will be connected together leading to an improved business ecosystem. This will make data sharing across all segments easier and the insights derived will be used to build strategies that will be more valuable than the existing ones. 

Device Security Will Be Crucial: As devices become interconnected with each other, the threat to security will not be limited to just public networks. More and more private networks are set to come under scrutiny, meaning threats can arise from your smartphone or your smarthome.

Systematic Enterprise Processes Will Be In Place: Automation will be adopted by most  companies. When such automation starts to happen at scale, it will lead to systematic enterprise processes that will greatly improve efficiency. 

Machine Learning and Blockchain Will Empower IoT: Both machine learning and blockchain are set to play a crucial role in the development of IoT. In fact, both of these will become established elements that will serve as the backbone of IoT. 

Smart Home Devices Will Rise in Popularity: IoT powered smart home devices are set to become a part of every household in the near future. People who are currently not feeling the need to have IoT enabled home devices will start buying smart home devices. This is set to become one of the hottest IoT trends. Amazon Alexa, Google Home, home automation range from Wemo, Philips Hue lighting are some of the examples of smart home devices that will soar in popularity in the near future. 

The Need for IoT Management 

IoT device management will be extremely crucial because the current IoT device landscape is still immature. For an IoT friendly world which is secure and makes life easier, device management capabilities need to evolve rapidly. 

In an interesting case study by Cloud Management Suite, it was discovered that Plan B, a UK based managed services provider which specializes in difficult program delivery found it frustrating to keep track of software across an array of devices spread over 20 countries and 1300 different users. A large number of the devices were purchased outside of the organization, hence the manual software maintenance was extremely slow and was adding to the cost burden. When the company adopted an IoT Device Management solution, it was able to drastically bring the costs down and the management of devices became easier. The solution used an agentless tool, providing effective management over systems based on a network or connected via Virtual Private Network (VPN). It was easily operated from the cloud, meaning, the tool required no server installation or configuration. Moreover, the solution incorporated a self-upgrading capability with a multi-tenancy feature, that enabled MSPs to proactively manage multiple customer environments from 30 – 30,000 endpoints. 

IoT device management is the process of maintaining the device firmware and software so that it functions smoothly and securely. Constant monitoring, device maintenance, configuration and authentication plays a crucial role in maintaining the entire IoT framework.

Here are some pointers that will lead to effective management of IoT devices:

• Centralized password management: One should be able to change the passwords of each of the connected devices from one central location. 

• Automatic software updates: All the connected devices should be automatically checked for vulnerability. You should be able to manage unpatched vulnerabilities at the click of a button. With predictive patch management, effective network security should be achieved on a scale leading to a secured IoT world. 

• Better Groupings: Different devices in the IoT network will be provided by different IoT providers but there should be a system to group all the functions together to achieve optimum performance. For example, if I need to switch on the TV, AC and Fridge of my house then I should be able to do that at the click of a button without the need to press 3 different switches to operate 3 different devices. AWS IoT 1-Click is an example of such software provided by Amazon. 
• Artificial Intelligence: Devices should be smart enough to sense the need of operation, meaning lights should switch off automatically when there is no one in the room. Artificial intelligence is what will drive the efficiency of IoT. 

Conclusion 

The entire world is slowly moving towards IoT. We all will be highly dependent on IoT connected devices in the next 5 years. IoT is rightfully regarded as the ‘next generation of internet’. However, security will become tougher and both consumers and manufacturers must take every step necessary to leave no vulnerabilities. 

The post A Look into the Future of IoT appeared first on SiteProNews.

Your logo should be flexible and unique. It should be able to properly define your brand personality. 

So, how do you create the perfect logo? 

Paul Rand, the famous logo designer who designed logo for top brands like IBM, ABC, Morningstar etc. once said:

“The principal role of a logo is to identify, and simplicity is its means… Its effectiveness depends on distinctiveness, visibility, adaptability, memorability, universality, and timelessness.”

To create a winning logo for your brand, here are 6 important things that need special consideration. 

1. Don’t Follow The Trends

It has been rightly said don’t follow the trends because trends are short-lived. Following trends is a sheer waste of time. 

A logo design should be timeless and must properly reflect your brand identity, hence it is better to keep away from graphic design trends.

A better approach would be to follow technological advancements and make sure your logo remains consistent with them. For example, your logo should work on mobile devices, should look good on different forms of print media etc. 

2. Create a Strong Identity and Mission

Your brand logo must properly reflect your brand mission. There is no need to spend a lot to create a logo that can clearly communicate your businesses goals, values and mission. 

Work with a clear focus in your mind and strive towards achieving a specific goal. This will help you to create a strong identity and mission in your logo. 

Your visual design strategy must connect the dots between your mission and your target audience. You must explore the competition, extract the information, translate it for your audience and execute it in your design to leave an everlasting impact.

Follow the below essentials when designing your logo in order to make sure that your design clearly reflects your brand mission:

• Take a look at your competitors logos and list the elements in your logo that you want to differentiate from those of your competition. 
• Define your target audience and keep their likings in your mind when designing your brand logo. If your target audience likes businesses using green in their logo and if you are using red, then you might go wrong.
• Get your USP in the logo. It should be in the form of a symbol or a text but it must be unique in relation to your competition. 
• Your logo should be scalable, neat, distinctive, functional and memorable.
• Define your brand mission and identify your brand personality.
• Do not use clip art. Instead, use your own unique art that sets you apart from competition.
• Identify your emotional appeal and use it in your logo so that it is able to leave a lasting memorable image in your customers mind.

3. Check the Logo in Black and White 

Always check your logo in black and white because if your logo does not look good in black and white, then you won’t be able to use it in advertisements where colorful ads are not permitted. 

It is recommended to start the design of your logo in black and white because it will help you to solely focus on the design. 

Black and White logos are monochrome versions of your colored logo. Have a look at the below set of logos to get an idea:

A Black and White logo is useful in many cases:

• When you are using the logo for 3D printing or textile printing.
• While scanning or faxing a monochrome version is preferred because it doesn’t fade out.
• When you are partnering with other companies, they might ask for a monochrome version of your logo instead of a colored one.

4. Follow a Minimalistic Approach

Minimalistic design refers to a design where the work is reduced to its necessary elements by maximizing simplicity and capitalizing on space.  Adopting a minimalistic design makes your brand stand apart from your competitors who might have clunky and gaudy designs in their logo. 

Here is an old logo for Ford Motors in the early 1990’s. At that time, logo design was nothing but the brand name in fancy fonts.

But, as time passed, Ford adopted a minimalistic style and revamped its logo. Here is Ford’s new logo which was designed in 2003.

Here are some tips to create a minimalistic logo:

• Stick to a geometric shape since these are the most recognizable. You can start your logo with a circle, square or a rectangle and then add more elements to it. 
• Try and design your logo with a pencil in one go without stopping. If you can do it, the design will be 100% minimal. 
• Keep the design simple and make sure your logo gets identified at a glance. 
• Embrace efficiency and don’t be afraid to break the rules.
• Explore the depth of symbolism with your design. You can opt for an object and the things associated with the subject. 
• I recommend using a minimum of 1-3 fonts to keep your design to minimum.

5. Harness the Power of Color Psychology 

Color plays a key role in logo design. Colors help to convey messages and evoke emotions. A brand gains visibility and recognition by the choice of colors it uses in its logo.

Here are some of the main colors and their meaning in logo design:

• Red – Raises the energy level and conveys excitement.
• Orange – Depicts confidence and youthfulness. 
• Yellow – Conveys optimism, clarity and warmth.
• Blue – Conveys trust and dependability. 
• Green – Depicts peace, growth and health.
• Purple – Depicts creativity and imagination. 

6. Keep an Eye on The Font

You definitely want your logo to be easily readable. A tough to read logo will be unable to reach the masses. This is where a good font comes into play. A font is one of the most crucial elements of your entire business identity. 

Here are some of the important font types:

Serif: These fonts are easier to read and are often used by male dominated products.

Sans-Serif: These fonts are extremely simple and are associated with practicality. 

Script: These are elegant, formal and stylish. These pair well with both Serif and Sans Serif. 

Slab Serif: These are bold and trendy and pair well with Sans Serif.

Here are some tips to choose the best font for your logo:

• Keep it simple, clean and elegant.
• Analyze your competitors and choose a font that reflects your brand identity.
• Always take into account your product and service and choose a font that perfectly fits your niche.
• Do not use too many fonts. One or two top fonts should be your preferred choice.

Conclusion

The startup culture is moving quickly and a professional logo is what your business needs. Always remember the top 6 things as discussed in this article and you won’t go wrong with your logo design.

The post Designing a Logo For Your Startup? Here Are 6 Important Things to Consider appeared first on SiteProNews.

For thousands of people out there, this essentially means starting over and preparing for another learning curve, which will directly impact their jobs and businesses. 

The key to making it out of this chaos for all of them, however, is to not panic, go about their business with zeal and passion, and be very quick and very smart with picking alternatives to Adobe Muse and Business Catalyst.

1. Duda

The PCMag’s 2017 Editors’ Choice in website building platforms, Duda was always a power packed alternative to Adobe’s web development suite. Particularly for web development agencies and professionals, Duda offers the perfect white label web development solution. 

Duda’s range of beautiful mobile responsive templates, for starters, are head turners. No wonder, the platform’s network spreads across 4,500+ web design and development professionals across the globe. 

For anybody looking to get over the shock of the loss of Business Catalyst and Muse, Duda emerges as a turnkey solution, as the account managers will help you complete the transition quickly and inexpensively. 

Here’s a snapshot of the powerful suite of Duda features for professionals and agencies:

• Transform Duda into a proprietary CMS system, and send periodic customized analytic reports to clients.
• Set up roles and authorizations to enable collaboration across teams and allow clients to access backend features.
• Manage bulk content uploads & use the APIs to build and promote your branded website builder, and build customized widgets for clients. 
• Use the import algorithm to effortlessly pull client content from legacy systems to a central space within the Duda account, enabling seamless migration. 

Duda wins over Adobe Muse and Business Catalyst because it offers highly nuanced and scalable functionalities, such as AWS based hosting (industry-best), extended controls over client website SEO, streamlined analytics, and a widget builder to create unique web assets and to enable easy 3^rd party integrations. 

2. WebFlow

Both developers and designers like WebFlow. The platform enables novices to create responsive websites without having to worry about coding. 

For expert coders, WebFlow emerges as power-up because of its ability to speed-track code creation, with major automation in backend code generation. The net result – a platform that supports your desire to get the design exactly as you want it, much like you’d have with Adobe’s Business Catalyst and Muse. 

WebFlow’s CMS is immensely flexible, allowing you to realize complex navigation structures via a visually powered interface. Plus, the interface lets you create realistic and nuanced animations using CSS and JavaScript. 

Your WebFlow website is hosted on the company’s servers, offering you secured hosting, with the power to scale up as traffic surges. Or, you could bring your developers on board, and host your complex web apps on your own servers. 

The interface, though peppered with lots of buttons and menu options, is adequately balanced and hence delivers a good user experience. 

Other noteworthy WebFlow capabilities include white label development, plans for agencies and startups, a free version, and everything you’d expect from a web development platform. 

WebFlow is, thus, a platform suited for individual businessmen who don’t have the time to code, expert developers who wish to go to the next level, and designers who need a tool powerful enough to support their vision.

Webflow’s Editor, it’s client facing CMS side, allows on page editing that’s unlike anything Adobe Muse and Business Catalyst could ever deliver. Plus the code is cleaner, there’s an easy billing functionality, and several knowledge resources.

3. Weebly

One of the most well-known names in the website builder market, Weebly also offers a robust solution for agencies and web development professionals. 

The range of customization, both in terms of template re-design as well as service terms makes Weebly a bright alternative to Adobe’s Business Catalyst and Muse. 

Weebly’s Reseller program is intuitive, customer focused, and scalable. As a reseller, you retain complete control over your end customer’s experience, and Weebly bills you on a fixed date every month. Here are some key aspects of the program:

• Weebly’s website builder is a drag and drop powered and WYSIWYG interface, making website creation a breezy affair. 
• Get stunning mobile responsive themes, robust APIs for integration with workflows, and full customization. 
• Deliver the complete Weebly experience to your agency clients, via your own branded platform. 

Moreover, you can leverage the admin layer to manage team and client accesses, add staff members, and enable collaboration.

Weebly’s blog creation interface is especially better than Adobe’s Business Catalyst and Muse. In general, Weebly offers a highly similar feature basket, and more, in its inexpensive paid subscription packages, as compared to Business Catalyst.

4. Simvoly

Free hosting, superb designs, and ample scope for customization – that’s basically what you’d get with every web builder platform. Simvoly takes things a few steps further, assisting your portfolio, blog, or e-store creation. 

The Website Wizard takes all the pains out of website development, and hands you a ready-to-go business website within minutes. Here’s how Simvoly proves its value as a worthy alternative to Adobe Business Catalyst and Muse. 

• Create client websites using all of Simvoly’s features, branded under your agency name. 
• Target your niche market with a self-branded and fully powered website builder. 
• Set your own pricing, business terms, and designs to offer a truly customized experience to your clients. 
• Manage all your clients and business transactions from a single platform. 
• Leverage free Amazon server-based hosting, SSL certificates, SEO optimization, and user management. 

Starting up is easy, with on-screen instructions. Also, the editor is intuitive enough.

Users are likely to find Simvoly’s blogging interface much more intuitive than that of Adobe’s Business Catalyst. The templates are also very modern and elegant. Simvoly focused on offering a neat web development platform that gets the job done, unlike Business Catalyst where the options can be a bit too much for users. 

5. WordPress CMS

WordPress.org, the CMS, hardly requires an introduction. Why is it an alternative to Business Catalyst? Well, considering how almost 30% of the world’s websites are based on this platform, the answer presents itself. 

For web development agencies and professionals. WordPress CMS offers hassle free, coherent, well supported, and highly inexpensive opportunities to deliver customized solutions to their clients. 

The key differentiator for WordPress CMS is the availability of thousands of very useful, light weight, and secure plugins that add every functionality you can possibly imagine for your WordPress installation. Building a website using the CMS is easy enough, as you can use your coding expertise, or fall back on the WYSIWYG builder to quickly create pages.

Consider WordPress as a worthy Muse and Business Catalyst alternative because the universe of responsive and niche-specific WordPress themes and plugins is expansive, and ever expanding. The platform is attuned to the idea of collaboration, and lets you add as many users as you need, with deep control over their access privileges. Also, the support community is strong, and always growing. 

Concluding Remarks

The world hasn’t ended; it’s only the era of Adobe Business Catalyst and Muse that’s ended. Pick yourself up, embrace the change, and look at this as an opportunity to move to a web development platform that offers you the best of tools and functionalities, and will continue to do so.

The post Adobe Muse and Business Catalyst Shutting Down! Top Alternatives to Consider appeared first on SiteProNews.

Ubersuggest – For Keyword Suggestions

Keyword suggestion is a time consuming process and extremely important part of the entire SEO process. Keyword research if done wrong can hamper the performance of the overall SEO campaign. 

Ubersuggest is one of my preferred tools when it comes to highly effective keyword research. Here are some of the important features offered by this tool:

• This tool fetches data from both Analytics and Search Console without the need to login.
• You get hundreds of keyword ideas from head terms to long tail phrases.
• You can easily filter out negative keywords.
• Ubersuggest also displays data related to your competitors like who else is ranking for your selected keywords?

Google Page Speed Insights – For Checking The Speed of Your Website

Speed is already a ranking factor and owing to the fact that mobile searches have surpassed that of desktop, you need to make your site as fast as possible.

I take the help of Google Page Speed Insights to check the speed of any site and also review suggestions offered by the tool for optimizing the current speed. 

The tool displays:

• The speed of the site on both mobile and desktop.
• Page speed metrics like FCP and DCL. 
• Page stats and optimization suggestions to further improve the performance of the webpage. 

Google Analytics and Webmaster Search Console – For Monitoring Your Website  

You won’t get any free SEO tools better than these. Both Google Analytics and Search Console offers free data and suggestions to improve the performance of a website. 

The first step is to add your website as a property in the Search Console. Once you have added and verified the property, you can do the following tasks with the help of the Search Console:

• Submit new content for crawling and remove content you don’t want shown in search results.
• Create and monitor content that delivers visually engaging search results.
• Maintain your site with minimal disruption to search performance.
• Monitor and resolve malware or spam issues so your site stays clean.

Similarly, you can add your website in Google Analytics. With the help of analytics, you can:

• Grant permissions to make configuration changes and to interact with data. 
• Link your AdWords and Analytics accounts to enable them to share data together. 
• Set up reporting views so you can align Analytics users and relevant data. 
• Set up goals to identify the actions you want users to take on your site or app.
• Create custom reports and dashboards in your Analytics account.
• Modify your tracking code to collect additional data 
• Monitor ecommerce activity like user engagement with product lists and internal promotions.

SEO Review Tools – For Checking Backlinks

Backlinks were and still remain one of the most important ranking factors. Although there are several paid tools available like OSE, Ahrefs and SEMrush that display link data, if you are looking for a free tool, then SEO review tools should be your preferred option.

This tool displays backlink URL, anchor text, type of link ie. No Follow or Do Follow and Ahrefs Domain Rating. Hence, you get all the important link metrics in one place. Moreover, you can check the percentage of follow links and the number of referring domains/IP’s. 

Duplichecker – For Checking Duplicacy of Content

Content forms an integral part of every SEO strategy. For effective content marketing, you need to ensure your content pieces are not copied from somewhere else on the web. 

Although Copyscape is the best tool to check duplicacy of content, it’s paid. Duplichecker is a completely free alternative to Copyscape. 

Simply register and start checking duplicacy of as many content pieces as you wish to.  

AMP Test – For Checking The Validity of Your AMP Pages

In an era where mobile is dominating desktop, speed plays a deciding factor in enhancing the user experience. 

AMP is a lightweight version of your normal HTML and loads much faster. In order to test your AMP pages before you actually upload and run them on a server, it is recommended you test them using the AMP test tool by Google. 

This tool will test and look for any issues in your AMP pages and offer suggestions to fix them. Moreover, you should follow the AMP guidelines for Google search. 

Robots.txt Generator – For Creating Error Free Robots.txt File 

Many SEO’s still ignore robots.txt and the result is that they face improper site indexation issues. Hence, it is extremely important to create error free robots.txt files in order to ensure your important pages can be easily accessed by Googlebot.

You can easily generate robots.txt using robots.txt generator. Simply enter the directories and files that you wish to exclude and this tool will generate the required commands to be added in your robots.txt.

XML-Sitemaps – For Generating Sitemaps For Search Engines

In order to enable Google and other search engines to regularly crawl updated and new pages on your website, it is important to update your sitemap regularly. Moreover, a sitemap is a way of organizing a website and identifying the URLs under each section. 

You can create an XML sitemap using this tool. 

Using XML-Sitemaps is extremely simple. You only need to enter the URL of your website and this tool will automatically generate the sitemap for you. 

Microdata Generator – For Creating Schema Snippets

Due to rising competition, it has become a necessity for website owners to use proper schema data in order to enable search engines to display as much information as possible in the search results. With the help of Schema data, you allow Google to gain valuable data about your business. Google can then automatically display that data in the search results depending on the user query. 

The Microdata Generator generates the required code automatically for you. Simply enter information related to your or your client’s business and you get the code hassle free.  

Conclusion

In order to save time and improve productivity, usage of proper SEO tools should be a priority. Make use of the above tools because they will help you to have a balanced SEO strategy, reducing mistakes and improving your chances of increasing conversions. 

The post Top SEO Tools That Are Easy to Use, Highly Effective and Completely FREE appeared first on SiteProNews.

Here are some top tools that you can use to easily promote your e-store and generate more sales: 

1- Unbounce

A landing page is one of the most important elements for an ecommerce site. Unbounce lets you create conversion friendly landing pages that help you to generate more sales with less effort.

Some of the important features offered by this tool are:

• You can easily build high converting landing pages and sticky bars using a drag and drop builder. 
• With just a few clicks, you can add or change any element of your web pages.
• Place targeted popups on any web page and drive more sales.
• All landing pages created by Unbounce are mobile friendly 
• With a feature like DTR (Dynamic Text Replacement) you can easily improve your Adwords quality score so that you spend less and sell more.
• All the pages use parallax scrolling to create a fluid, 3D experience.
• You can run unlimited A/B tests.
• You receive automatic notifications every time you generate a lead.

2- Hello Bar

Hello Bar helps to improve the effectiveness of your website by displaying the right message to people at the right time.

Here is what you can do with Hello Bar:

• Increase your list of email subscribers. Hello Bar automatically sends email subscriber data to MailChimp or any other email marketing tool. 
• Promote your content on social sites like Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Pinterest etc. This also helps to grow your social following. 
• It also allows you to test messages that work best for your brand. 

3- MailChimp

Marketers are now obsessed with marketing automation. MailChimp is an all inclusive platform that offers powerful automation for online sellers.

Here are the main features offered by MailChimp:

• You can easily connect your store with MailChimp’s ecommerce integrations and create targeted ad campaigns.
• You can target customers based on behavior, preferences and previous sales. 
• Automatic emails can be sent using a single API. 
• You can target your contacts with personalized ads in order to reach them personally and segment them across social media. 
• With the help of MailChimp’s mobile app, you can create ad campaigns, add or remove content blocks and insert product images on the go. The all in one dashboard allows you to have a quick view of sales. 

Moreover, you can access advanced analytics features from anywhere. MailChimp displays revenue reports and takes into account the purchase data using Google Analytics. This lets you refine and optimize your email and ad campaigns.

4- Shopify POS

You simply can’t run an ecommerce business effectively without a POS (Point of Sale) software. With the help of Shopify POS you have the power to accept credit cards anywhere at any time. This gives you the ability to sell from a place where your customers are already present.

Here is what you can do with Shopify POS:

• Track and manage inventory across channels.
• You can accept any form of payment and process transactions on Apple or Android devices. 
• You can apply bulk discounts and optimize your invoices for taxes. 
• With a centralized product inventory, your workload is balanced and all the operations are simplified. 
• You have unlimited bandwidth, product inventory and customer data.
• New platforms like Amazon and Pinterest are supported which means you can directly sell on these channels. 

5- ReferralCandy 

You cannot ignore the power of referral marketing if you are an ecommerce business owner. One of the most effective ways to improve sales both online and offline is through referral marketing and ReferralCandy is an awesome tool that lets you easily manage your customer referrals.

Here is what you can do with ReferralCandy:

• Your best brand advocates are your customers. ReferralCandy lets you reward your customers for sharing your store with their friends. 
• You have the option to reward people with cash, discount coupons, store credits or free products.
• Simply upload your logo and you have an awesome referral program ready.
• It offers specialized widgets and templates that you can use to promote your referral program to others. 
• You can share personal referral links with your customers to make it easy for  brand advocates to share the link with their friends.

6- Metrilo 

Almost every ecommerce business has lots of data but is it of of any use if it doesn’t work for you? Metrilo makes your data work for you.

• With Metrilo ecommerce analytics you see suggestions that actually help you sell.
• You can automate and send personalized email messages using this tool.
• You can access a specialized CRM that eases management of data in order to improve ROI.
• Sorting of customer data becomes easy and you can send personalized messages to your customers.

7- OptinMonster

As an ecommerce site owner, what you need is leads! Wouldn’t it be great if you could convert your website visitors into subscribers? OptinMonster is like a lead generation machine for you.

Some of the important features offered by this plugin are:

• You have multiple form design templates and the ability to add custom HTML and CSS to forms.
• You can integrate it with major email marketing services like MailChimp and Aweber.
• An easy to use canvas tool is there through which you can create custom popups.
• It allows you to add animation effects to your forms. This improves the user experience and allows you to generate more leads.
• You can test the forms before you display them. Moreover, faster loading time of forms allows the user to take faster action.

Make use of the above tools and constantly try to reach customers during their micro moments. Remember, time plays a crucial role in this regard. If you use the right tools at the time time, then it becomes easier to generate and convert leads for improved ROI.

The post Top Tools to Generate More Sales For Your Ecommerce Store (2018 Edition) appeared first on SiteProNews.

1. Tradify – Job Management Made ‘Smart’

Tradify provides an end-to-end service, including delivery tracking, managing, and invoicing, giving you complete control of your business via all kinds of devices. Real time job allocation and super smart scheduling functionalities make Tradify a must-have for any business with a workforce of technicians and knowledge workers.

Estimating and quoting for jobs and projects can be easily done via this cloud based tool. With tremendous applications in service markets such as plumbing, HVAC repairs, and construction, Tradify digitizes the most important components of the business – job allocation, scheduling, tracking, and billing.

With Tradify, you can track progress on every service and repair project by the minute, and can connect with on-field technicians in real time. The tool is well integrated with accounting software like XERO and MYOB, which makes bookkeeping much easier for your business.

2. Groove – Transforming Email Into A Virtual Customer Service Help Desk

Bad customer service could pull down your business before you can even react. Use Groove instead of running the risk of letting the odd customer complaint or request go unattended.

Groove transforms your mailbox into your ticketing tool. Create service desk tickets right from your customer emails, assign them to agents, track progress, use ticket statuses for tracking, merge repeat tickets, see full customer support history, and do everything you can with a dedicated help desk tool. The best part – your email responses are automatically updated in ticket work-logs, which makes Groove a totally hassle free and agile tool.

With Groove, you ensure that your knowledge base is accessible 24×7, even if you are not awake or available. Customers can quickly search for answers using Groove, and get their problems resolved without even getting an agent involved. Groove supports 12 languages and supports multimedia in its content creation interface. Groove also provides you a contact widget that can be leveraged to deliver quick support to customers.

3. Slack – The Next-Gen Way Of Team Communication and Collaboration

Slack is pretty much all you need to manage communications on any kind of project. It takes a novel approach to delivering advanced communication features, connecting people from different teams together with a very intuitive, classy, and easy to use interface.

Slack organizes communications across different channels, which makes it super organized for everyone to make sense of things, even with dozens of people involved, and dozens of projects running in parallel. In doing so, it creates a searchable archive where information can be found within seconds, letting people judiciously choose which meetings they want to attend, and which to skip (depending on Slack message search later on).

Slack puts your project collaboration efforts on super-charge mode by integrating with almost every office productivity app used these days. And, you can even use Slack’s API to set up complex workflows.

4. ClickMeeting

For anybody in the knowledge market, delivering content via webinars is a scalable and low-cost method of distribution. To monetize your business plan around it, however, you need a power-packed webinar software package, and that’s what ClickMeeting is.

This branded webinar delivery and management software is all you need to connect with audiences, and to train your employees on remote locations. You can quickly create branded invitations for your webinar sessions, host hassle free and interruption free webinars without investing in expensive equipment or software, and let audiences interact with you and share their questions and feedback.

ClickMeeting lets you record your webinars, which adds to your knowledge library. Webinar storage, attendee statistics and trends, branded thank you messages, performance rating, and social media sharing – ClickMeeting has it all. You can use the free version for a 30-day trial before purchasing it.

5. QuickBooks: Accounting and Billing Like The Big Boys Do

QuickBooks takes the hassle out of book keeping and billing for your business. Not only does it keep all your expenses organized at one place, but also delivers advanced analytics features to deliver complete financial management solutions. No wonders, 4.3 million plus customers use it already.

You can integrate your bank account with QuickBooks and let the software automatically import transactions and categorize them. Quickbooks Mobile is a great value-add; your employees (particularly the field personnel) can easily click snaps of receipts and store them using Quickbook Mobile.

Quickbook’s billing solution is impeccable; you can automate reminders to your customers (which can significantly improve your receivable collections). Then, you get access to all kinds of reports that help you get more insights into your billing practices to help you improve them.

6. HootSuite: Social Media Marketing Like A Pro

Social media marketing is a massive enabler for small businesses, provided you do it like the big boys of your market. HootSuite lets you do so. The best part – you can schedule social media posts (100s of them) across your social media accounts and can manage everything from a single dashboard within HootSuite.

Content creation can also be improved via HootSuite, as it lets your team upload content in your favorite cloud service, and lets you approve the content. Analytics make HootSuite a catalyst for your social media ROIs. It generates super quick, super accurate, and super easy-to-understand reports to help you understand social media conversions, separated across channels, and across paid and owned campaigns.

You can even use HootSuite as a basic social media monitoring tool, to find and filter social conversations with specific hashtags, brand mentions, and locations.

Take control of the essential business functions of your startup or small business with these tools, now!

The post 6 Top Tools to Grow Your Small Business in 2018 appeared first on SiteProNews.