The first step: Competitive Analysis

"A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step"

Brick and mortar businesses routinely track competitor's activities is terms of the P's of marketing (Price, Place, Promotion, Product). Any changes in these made by the competitor are immediately reacted to so that equilibrium prevails.

What does one do on the Internet?

Websites generally cater to the AIDA model of marketing - they create Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action in the visitor. In order to do so. they clearly demarcate their profile of visitor and cater to her interests.

By studying competitors websites, one can get a clear idea as to the strategy and by getting a clear idea of the strategy, one can formulate one's own plans for our website.

In order to study competitor's website, one looks at their meta tags, the quality of content etc. One also looks at their keywords used and how these keywords rank on the search engines. Based on this a decision may be taken to fix / tweak the keywords on our own website with an aim of increasing the ranking of the particular keywords so as to get more visitors to our website.

Spark Consultants is a leading Digital Marketing and Strategy company  (SEO / SMO) in Bangalore, India and can help you with competitive analysis. Please call Prakash at (91) 9019 548 565 or email him.

SMO: The Third Horseman.........

Gaddafi, who died recently, is the "The Fifth Horseman" in the book by Dominique Lapierre, an apparent reference to his being (at that time) the fifth formal nuclear power in the world. He tries to plant (and explode) a nuclear bomb in New York but is eventually defeated by the "good guys".

In SEO, if the first horseman is On-Page optimization, and the second is Off-page Optimization, then the third horseman must be Social Media optimization (SMO).

I use the horse example because horses are swift, elegant, take us to specific destinations.

Did you know that it was an Indian who first made use of the phrase "Social Media Optimization"? It was Rohit Bhargava who, in his Influential Marketing Blog, spelled out five rules of SMO. He defined SMO as:

"The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs."

What exactly is SMO? Wikipedia defines it as:

Social media optimization (also known as SMO or social SEO) is the methodization of social media activity with the intent of attracting unique visitors to website content. 

Driving traffic to one's website using SMO is an art and requires (a) a specialist agency and (b) a long term plan of action. 

SMO strategy differs between B2B and B2C segments. SMO is also a fast changing world where innovation rules.

Spark Consultants can drive your SEO and SMO strategy and has a huge database of successful B2B as well as B2C campaigns.

If you would like to successfully go the SMO route, give Prakash a call at (91) 9019 548 565 or email him.

Search Engines: Memories of another day

Before Google was launched in 1998, there were many search engines trying to guide people on the Internet. The most popular of these was Altavista. Other search engines were Lycos, HotBot, Excite, Infoseek etc.

Yahoo! wasn't a search engine, in those days. It was a directory. Believe it or not, Yahoo! charged $300 for an immediate listing and the listing process was that a human employee of Yahoo! would visit the website, double check that it was what it claimed to be , and then approve it for listing. A Yahoo! listing guaranteed a surge in visitors.

Each search engine delivered its own output and no two engines delivered the same results. This created a "search-engine-that-searched-search-engines" concept and such a search engine called Dogpile was born. It's still alive!

In spite of all this, surfers were not happy with the results and a search engine that tried to anticipate your needs and give you broader information was born. It was based on the mythical butler Jeeves, in P.G. Wodehouse books. The website was named AskJeeves.com (which went on to become Ask.com).

In those days there was no search engine optimization as we know it. Each website was supposed to have meta keywords inserted into the source code and search engines would look at these keywords and direct traffic based on them. It was very easy to spam the search engines and the quality of output further dropped.

It was into this environment that Sergei Brin and Larry Page launched Google, in 1998. From Day 1, the quality of their search output was vastly superior to what existed and Google started grabbing market share almost immediately, a journey that has made it the dominant search engine of today.

Spark Consultants, founded in 1988, is a Bangalore based specialist Digital Marketing company that has tracked search engines from the day the Internet was launched in India. If you would like to know more about search engine optimization and how it can improve your business, call  Prakash on 9019 548 565 or email him.

How SEO can help turn night into day

Imagine that you are entering a room full of goodies but there is no power and you have no torch. It becomes difficult to find, let alone see anything.

Most Indian websites are like that dark room.

What typically happens is that the business owner, typically a SME, hires a designer to design the website. The designer delivers a very beautiful looking site and the owner is very pleased. Six months later, the owner knows that he has a problem - he is not getting any inquiries from the website but does not know what to do. The site is like the dark room without lighting. No one can find it or see it. (The strange thing in India is that it is not just SME websites that suffer from a lack of search engine optimization (SEO) but also that of many large organizations.)

Now imagine that you have two special and powerful torches in your hand. You go back to that dark room and switch on one of the torches. You immediately start seeing the goodies in the room. This torch is symbolic with On page optimization. It lays the basic foundation of search engine optimization and allows Google (and other search engines such as Yahoo, Bing and Ask) to also enter the room and "see" things. Very soon, the business owner notices that he is get ranked for many of his keywords and that traffic to his website has substantially improved. He is getting business requests by email and he is a happy man.

But what about the other torch in your hand? When you switch it on, the room literally glows. This powerful torch is symbolically Off Page optimization. It is the powerful tool that helps your web pages get a ranking boost from search engines such as Google. Properly used, it is a strategic tool that helps you get higher rankings than your competitors and thereby get more visitors to your website (and more business).

If you feel that your website is not working for you, all you need to do is to email Prakash, our CEO, at Spark Consultants or call him at Bangalore on 0 9019 548 565. You will  get a free feedback regarding the status of your website and what needs to be done to rectify matters. Prakash is a digital marketing specialist with extensive senior marketing and management experience in India as well as in the Middle East.