How People Read Content Online - Statistics and Trends

/ Zach Heller

The following post was written by Asad Ali. Asad Asad Ali is a digital marketing expert having more than 8 years of experience. Currently he is working at GO-Gulf – a website development company based in Dubai, where he has worked on numerous eCommerce SEO projects & successfully run digital marketing campaigns.

Now people don’t read the online content in the way they do years before. Knowing about the behaviors and interests of your online readers is significant in order to optimize the digital content accordingly. Eventually you have put so much effort in generating top quality content but still, you are complaining about low user's engagement, the main reason is the changes that occur in the reading habits. Now, most of the people only emphasize scanning the content rather than reading through the whole web page.

After creating the content it is significant to share it on social media platforms, as without much exposure no one will get aware with the presence of the content.

Users communicate with the content in the form of skimming, scanning, and reading. People also get attracted to the content of their interest. A relevant and context-based content that resonates with the user's area of expertise appeals more, as people tend to read about the things they love the most.

From the year 2000 to 2018, it is estimated that the rate of reader’s attention towards the content has gradually decreased from 12 seconds to 8 seconds.

In the presence of huge information in the form of web pages, only 55% of the web pages get noticed for 15 seconds.

It is also observed that the left half of the web page gets more concentration by the users than the right half, as 69% of them get prompted towards left half and only 30% towards the right.

80% of the reader’s attention is towards the information present above the fold and only 20% get interested in the information present below the fold.

The readers who keep on reading the content from a web page for three minutes are likely to return back as compared to those who only bother to read it for just a minute.

For an individual post, a reader only conceive 20% of the whole information present on the web page, however, only 10% to 20% make it to the bottom of the page.

When it comes to the brand identity, 25% of the users who get engaged with a web page that is related to any brand for more than 15 seconds, the chances are they can remember its name for long, as compared to those who only spend 10 or less number of seconds.

The stories on the web pages that are more elaborate, having more than 1000 of word count; get more users’ retention than those with less number of words.

You can find more facts and statistics in the infographic below that is composed by Go-Gulf.

How Effective Customer Service Can Boost Customer Loyalty - Guest Post

/ Zach Heller

The following is a guest post from Garret Norris. Garret is the founder and CEO of Healthy Business Builder and through his company, remains dedicated as ever to use his training and real-life business experience to meet his passion for seeing business succeed through disciplined management, creative marketing and committed client service.

Building a strong customer relationship and satisfaction that leads up to customer loyalty is possible through improved quality of customer service.

Having excellent customer service can lead to an increase in customer retention.  When you tend to your customer’s needs, over time, you’ll be able to build a relationship with them which results in repeat sales.

On the other hand, once you missed their expectations, they are more likely to switch to another competitor who can provide a better experience while dragging down your reputation along with them.

A single bad encounter with a customer service representative could cause a ripple effect on your business. While there are 72% of customers who would share good experiences with others, 62% would likely share the bad as well.

If your business provides a less than satisfying experience, chances are your reputation would take a hit from the bad reviews and complaints you’ll get. New customers rely less on advertisements and sales reps than recommendations from people they know such as family and friends.

Excellent Customer Service Means Making Returns Policy Easier

Before making a purchasing decision, some customers look at a company’s return policy for basis. Offering hassle-free returns is essential to your overall approach to customer service as it is not only great for persuading new customers but also boosts existing customers’ loyalty.

While a lenient policy resulted in more returns, it also led in an increase in purchases.

A study showed that free returns could boost spending by up to 457% of pre-return spending.

Items that are easy to return gives customers enough confidence to make and repeat purchase.

Compared to an organization with a generous return policy, firms with a stricter policy decreases consumers’ willingness to buy a product. Creating rules that discourage customers from returning products, such as fees, reduces spending and a business decreases to 75%- 100% by the end of two years.

Another factor that lessens a customer’s motivation to make a purchase is a deadline. A short time frame also creates pressure around the decision to return an item. Meanwhile, a longer return period would take away that urgency. The product would eventually grow on the consumer.

Researchers at the University of Texas-Dallas find it may be a result of the endowment effect. It means that the longer the customers hold on to a product, the more reluctant they’ll be to part with it.

Of course, returns come with a cost that your company has to cover but making a returns policy easier can increase customer satisfaction.

Excellent Customer Service Fosters Efficient Delivery

One of the root causes of customer service issues revolves around delivery. Poor delivery services discourage customers from doing business with your company again. 

A study shows that late deliveries makes 17% of consumers abandon business with a company after one delivery and 55% of customers left after two to three times.

Delivery can be a real challenge, especially for smaller business. Not only do you need to provide high quality and reliability for customers, but you also need to keep costs down which means relying on couriers. While you can control the quality of your product and customer service, you have to trust your courier not to undo your hard work.

You might not be able to control when deliveries arrived, but you can set customer expectations around the delivery. Your customers would be kept happy by under promising and over-delivering.

If you promise delivery within a few days, then ship everything overnight or priority, customers would be left with a significantly more favorable impression on your company. On the other hand, if you promise overnight delivery, and then there are delays, your customers may think negatively.

Excellent Customer Service Means Giving a Quick Response

One of the essential factors with effective customer service is speed. Responding quickly to your customers with their inquiries or complaints keeps them from moving their business to the competition since they expect and demand fast services.

A fast response is especially necessary for a customer sharing their bad experience. This would leave them with a good feeling and memory that overtakes any unpleasant incident. It would make them feel important.

The longer your representatives take to respond, the greater the chance you’ll lose your customer, but there will be times when a slow response couldn’t be helped. Sometimes, slow response is due to not having anything to tell, the lack of updates or changes to communicate.

Immediate request is not the only way to keep your customers happy but giving a timely response. Customers understand that orders could take time and some things cause delay. Sometimes a response to their inquiry is enough.

/ Zach Heller/ Comment
, Customer Service
customer service, customer service tips

Zach Heller

Creative Ways to Increase Your Company’s Visibility - Guest Post

/ Zach Heller

The following is a guest post from Ivan Serrano. Ivan is a journalist living comfortably in San Francisco, California. Ivan's niche is in social media, business and marketing. When he's not typing up another masterpiece, he'll likely be off practicing his photography or losing his voice yelling at the television whilst watching his favorite sports.

It’s not enough for your business to offer high-quality products or excellent services — people also have to know that your company exists. If you want to nab customers who might otherwise fall into the hands of your competitors, it’s essential that you find ways to stand out from the pack.

You’ll also have to make sure you’re making clever use of current technology such as social media and mobile apps. More than 40% of the total population rely on multiple devices to stay connected with individuals and brands that are important to them, so your marketing efforts will have to reflect the technology of the moment.

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Striking the right balance between consumer psychology and technical savvy can be difficult for even the most experienced marketers, so here are some strategies you can use to start off on the right foot. Use your own blend of the following tactics to ensure that your marketing efforts will be unique and allow you to establish a distinctive voice for your brand:

Blogging 101: How to Create Content that Doesn’t Suck

Everyone in the ecommerce space understands that blogging is important, but too many business owners treat it like a chore instead of an exciting opportunity to engage with potential customers. Remember: when you blog, you’re always communicating something about what your brand is — and who it’s for. That being the case, you need to avoid boring or pedantic content like the plague. After all, nobody wants to associate themselves with a voice that seems drony and dispassionate.

You should already have a pretty good idea of who your ideal customer is, so take that concept to the next level: imagine how they talk, what they’re interested in, and how their sense of humor works. Then use that information to inform the content you write for your blog. Should your posts be stylish and quietly sophisticated, or quirky, sassy and outrageous? Are they for customers who are serious about solving important problems in their industries, or for fun-loving individuals who count on your products to spice up their lives?

It’s also essential to make sure that you’re blogging for different stages of the buyer funnel. 47% of buyers report viewing between three and five separate pieces of content from a given brand prior to engaging with a sales representative. What does that mean? Simple: in addition to posts that raise awareness of your products and the problems they solve, make sure you’re publishing content that deepens a potential customer’s awareness of how you can solve their needs and eventually convinces them to make a purchase. Then go one better: make posts that offer troubleshooting advice for customers who have already bought your products, so they’ll be more likely to remain satisfied with them and recommend them to friends, family, or colleagues.

Create an Influencer Army

We’ve just covered the importance of word of mouth, so don’t rely on your blogging to drive the hype machine alone. 70% of all millennial consumers report being influenced by their peers when they decide whether or not to purchase a product, so look for bloggers who fit into your target audience and reach out to them. Offer them free samples, exposure on your blog (if it’s large enough), and other incentives to get them writing about what you offer. A single kind word from an ostensibly unaffiliated influencer can be worth boatloads of simple self-promotion.

Incentives Aren’t Just for Influencers

Influencers love receiving deals and freebies, but you know who loves those perks even more? Potential customers — especially those who might struggle to afford your products and services otherwise. Offering scholarship opportunities to students can be an excellent way to raise brand awareness amongst potential buyers in their late teens and twenties, but it can also earn you the respect and admiration of their families and help you secure loyal customers for life.

Crack the Viral Code

Human interest stories tend to be much more shareable than advertisements, so don’t just write stories about how wonderful your products and services are. Try to write at least a few pieces in the style of news items each time you’re about to release a new product or offer a new service, and include real-life details of how your work has helped customers in the past.

Here are a few tips you can use to lend more credibility to your voice when creating news-style content:

  • Avoid a first-person voice (i.e. “my company” or “our products”). Use third-person so that it sounds like someone from outside your company has taken an active interest in your work.

  • Keep your tone neutral — don’t explicitly hype up the work you do, just explain how it helped someone solve a problem they were having. Trust that your audience will be smart enough to make the connection.

  • Publish in sources that aren’t directly connected to your blog. Medium’s content guidelines make it a fairly easy place to publish, as long as your writing appears credible and neutral. Buzzfeed is also a viable option for content creators who have mastered the “listicle” format.

Once you’ve made high-value content, make sure it includes backlinks to your landing page so that the people who read it will have an easy, natural way to engage with your brand. Then make sure you share the piece on social media through targeted ads so that it reaches as many of its intended readers as possible.

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Final Thoughts: Do What the Other Company Can’t — or Won’t Do

Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind when trying to distinguish your business from the pack is to embrace what makes you different. Don’t try to mimic the tone of successful competitors in your writing; they’re already nailing that approach. Don’t design your packaging to look like the boxes used by the leading brand in your field; make something that doesn’t already exist. Creativity is all about knowing when to take risks, and there’s nothing riskier than being yourself. Crucially though, there’s also nothing more rewarding.

Why Brand Building Should Be the Foundation of Your SEO Strategy

/ Zach Heller

The following is a guest post by Meaghan Yorke. Meaghan is a web designer who is quite passionate about writing. These days she is all about researching various IT related topics. When she is not working she enjoys dancing classical ballet.

Branding is more than a logo or an established slogan. It goes much deeper than that. 

A brand is a perception of your business through the eyes of the customer, the experience provided behind your product or service. It’s what makes your business reside in the hearts and minds of the consumers.

Branding and SEO work great in sync as they both paint the natural representation of your brand - no gimmicks. Users trust and rely on search engines to provide best, relevant and personalized results. Consumers trust and rely on brands to provide the best recommendations, personalized experiences, and trustworthy relationships.

Although SEO performance can be quantified, branding KPIs are a bit vaguer. But there’s an underlying connection between these two that drives organic growth. Not to argue which one is better. Let’s elaborate.

NAME RECOGNITION AND BRAND AWARENESS

What drives your click in Google SERPs for specific queries? How often have you clicked the first result? Organic link CTR isn’t as concentrated as previously stated by the people in the industry. Since 2011, the organic CTR in Google SERPs has been dropping for the first ranked result down the line for the rest. A more recent study suggests that top organic results drive up to 20% CTR while positions #2 to #5 range 9%-12% CTR. This isn’t a whole lot lower and it suggests that people who just started shopping around or are researching a topic they’re not familiar with, are going to click on a result they are more familiar with.

And this is the link between SEO and branding, your mantra and starting point - a familiar brand name will give you a greater chance of click-through even if you aren’t positioned as #1 in the SERPs. Well established brand presence is vital for your SEO strategy success - the greater the CTR on your result in SERPs, the better link, and rank positioning.

AUTHORITY BUILDING

Two words - Featured snippets.

The appearance of rich snippets has been increasing in SERPs over the past few years. Knowledge boxes, direct answer boxes, question and answer panels just to name a few.

GoogleMyBusiness should be your first business listing - it’s your doorway to branding in Google SERPs. For any branded keyword search query, GoogleMyBusiness listing will appear in the right side panel of the SERP along with additional data such are your social media profiles and shared posts on your Google+ page.

In order to compete for featured snippets in SERPs, your websites posts and pages need to have a valid HTML5 markup and structured data implemented in form of microdata or JSON-LD. This helps add context and structure to the content fields of your website and makes it easier for the web crawlers to understand the semantics and meaning behind it. This is something that top digital agencies with a technical SEO background should be able to implement seamlessly in your websites page and post templates.

Web crawlers ARE getting smarter in content interpretation though. Providing great user experience should always have priority over technical on-page search engine optimization. Content beats code, so focus on becoming an authoritative figure in your industry, market, and niche by creating topic-relevant content that brings value to the end user. It’s essential not only for better SEO performance but for building brand awareness as well.

LINK BUILDING

Link building is a cornerstone of any SEO strategy. Signals from backlinks make up to 23% of total confirmed Google ranking signals today. Your positioning in SERPs is directly proportional to the number and quality of backlinks acquired from websites across the web. In layman terms, link building can be seen as a sort of endorsement.

From the branding perspective, it’s way harder to build quality links and in volume without having a well-established brand. High-quality publications with established and knowledgeable communities are most likely to have a strong editorial team behind it. A good editorial practice is to always check the brand and the representative that reached out in its name for social profiles and their recent backlink portfolio. If a brand or its representative is shady or new, they will most likely be denied of any publication or simply ignored. So it becomes way harder for them to acquire a quality backlink on a topic relevant website.

And there’s the other side of a coin. If your brand is well established with a strong online presence, it will be much easier for you to acquire natural, organic backlinks across the web, without a direct outreach. Authoritative industry representatives that blog and publish across the web usually research their topics and back them up with sources from blogs, publications, research and whitepapers published on well-established websites. If you were to publish a piece on a blog that has a strong branded image and a community behind it, it will most likely be used as a reference in future publications. And if this was your website, you may certainly hope for it to be naturally referenced and linked back to from other topic relevant websites.

Let’s set up an experiment, here’s an example - we’re using non-personalized Google search to look for “microdata markup for web agency”. You can use this link. The official library any experienced technical SEO specialists would definitely visit is Schema.org, but it doesn’t contain any information about this markup, it’s non-existing.

So which of the results would you click on if you aren’t familiar with the topic? Which result would you refer to if someone asks you the question? Which one of them would you use as a reference in your publication? Let me guess, it isn’t the same result that answers all of the above.

BRANDED SEARCH QUERIES ARE EASY WIINS

This somewhat goes without saying but people are more likely to find what they’re after if they know what they’re looking for. If a user googles your brand name, they are most likely looking for you and what you have to offer. These users are already familiar with your brand and what it has to offer so the probability of click-through and conversion is greater. Branded keywords prune the competition.

By syncing your branding strategy with SEO engagement, you are getting on a right path to growing brand recognition. In time, you will be able to drive brand searches with more conversion value than of those search queries made by users who are just starting to shop around.

THE KEY TAKEAWAY

When starting out, without any previous online presence, you can focus your marketing efforts on SEO performance. Techniques like link building will get your website noticed by search engines, and if done properly, will start ranking in SERPs.

However, focusing on branding from the early stages is a much smarter move. Branding strategies help you build name, reputation, and authority. It opens a path to establishing a strong online presence. And it definitely improves your chances of acquiring natural links and brand mentions.

Either way, the crawlers will crawl. The user experience is what will always prevail.

4 Actionable Tips to Boost Your Organic Search Traffic – Guest Post

/ Zach Heller

The following is a guest post written by Raul Harman. Raul is editor in chief at Technivorz blog. I have a lot to say about innovations in all aspects of digital technology and online marketing. You can reach him on Twitter.

Nowadays, modern businesses compete for both market position and customers. With so many various companies competing for the same thing, it's very difficult to ensure your business can stand out from the others properly. The online world provides many opportunities for companies to make a name for themselves, but not every company is able to do so. The main reason is that businesses oftentimes choose the approach that's not best suited for them.

In that case, you're only wasting valuable time and resources on marketing and promotions without yielding any viable results. If you're uncertain on which approach to take, in order to outrun your competitors, remember that everyone uses a search engine, such as Google to find something online. Therefore, if you want your business to stand out, you need to focus on building your organic search traffic. In other words, you must become more visible and more accessible online. Here are a few easy tips to boost your organic search traffic.

Leverage SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a cost-effective marketing strategy that will boost your online visibility and organic web traffic. The purpose of SEO is to help your website appear on the first page of search results on search engines, such as Google. To achieve that you must rank for the right keywords that your audience most commonly uses in their online search. In addition, those keywords must be relevant to the products or services your business offers.

Appearing first on search results is perceived by consumers as a recommendation from search engines. If Google placed you on the first page it must mean your business is worthy enough to check out. SEO doesn't only make you more visible, but also improves the trustworthiness and credibility of your website. That means that you'll get much more organic traffic by having good ranking, than by investing in paid advertisement.

Optimize your website

SEO requires that you properly optimize your website, in order to rank well on search engines. However, that's not the only reason you should focus on website optimization. Consequently, you're optimizing your website for the customers and the organic search traffic as well. Customer experience on your website plays a major role in determining not only your ranking, but your reputation as well. If your website is fast, secure, easy to navigate, user friendly and responsive enough to meet customer expectations, you'll more likely to favor referrals and recommendations from your website visitors.

That means that if you give consumers what they need, they'll boost your organic traffic by recommending you to others. As an example, an easy way to achieve this is to make your website super fast. You can opt for a hosting solution, such as cPanel hosting. That way, you can make immediate improvements to your website speed on your own and without having to procure services from web developers or designers.

Guest post on reputable sources

Guest posting is an activity of sharing your content across various reputable sources, such as websites or blogs. The purpose of this activity is to build your authority and presence online, in order to position yourself as an industry expert. Not only that, but with guest posting you're also improving your exposure, allowing you to reach a broader audience. The more relevant and high-quality your content is, the more engagement you'll drive from different audiences.

What's more, you must target only the reputable sources to share your content with, because that way, you'll gain more relevant and more organic traffic for your website. Building your reputation and domain authority through guest posting allows you to stand out on the market. That way, more people will be willing to visit your website by reading the interesting content you've provided across various media channels.

Build your presence on social media

Social media platforms are the main hub for businesses these days. The main reason is that social media networks put you in direct contact with your target audience. That being said, there's no better way to gain organic search traffic than it is to generate leads on social media. This allows you to lead consumers to your website with little to no cost at all. The main reason is that you can build presence on social media organically, which means you don't really have to leverage paid ads if you don't wish to do so.

Engaging in conversations with your customers and sharing content with them allows you to build more personal relationships with your audience. Not only that, but you can launch social media marketing campaigns to build more awareness about your business. What's more, you can leverage social media influencers to ensure that your content and your promotions are more welcomed by the audience present on social media channels. The better your presence is, the more likelihood of people visiting your website or researching your business online.

When it comes to online exposure for businesses, organic traffic is the best way to get the recognition and attention you need. Organic traffic means that consumers are checking out your business because they want to and because you've managed to pique their interest. The more organic search traffic you have, the more chances your business has for outrunning competitors and ultimately more chances of reaching success.