6 Reasons Why you Should Get a Blog for Your Website
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6 Reasons Why you Should Get a Blog for Your Website

When you opt for website development services the first thing that should be on your mind is the fact that your website should be an active one, not a static platform that is lost in the Internet’s timeless limbo. The best way to make your website stay alive is to power it with inbound marketing techniques like business blogging, the benefits of which are manifold. Here is a look at 6 reasons why you must opt for a blog when getting a website developed.

  • Blogs generate traffic

Blogs are a cost-effective way of driving traffic to your website. All major search engines show a strong affinity to fresh, relevant and original content and they throw up search results based on this affinity. So your website has a greater chance of being indexed owing to its blogs. Moreover, insertion of industry- relevant keywords in blogs helps drive relevant traffic to your website.

  • Engage with customers

Engagement with customers online is a very crucial part of online marketing and branding. Blogs are one of the most interactive and engaging mediums of information dissemination and connecting with old and new customers. People on the Internet are hungry for relevant information written conversationally and your blogs can be a free gift of information to them. Moreover, if customers respond in the comments section, you can reply to their concerns and queries.

  • Build your brand

Every product or service has to have brand value in the market for it to sell. Building your brand and having a brand story is as important as selling your product or service because customers tend to prefer brands they can trust. Blogs help you spell out your core business values, what you essentially stand for, the nature of your products and services and how you value your customers and clientele. They serve as the book ends to your business.

  • Demonstrate expertise

Blogs are an excellent medium to flaunt your domain knowledge and expertise in your field of operation. You can write blogs on the production process or touch on topics related to your product’s market and trends – anything that catches the reader’s eye. And the more original and relevant the content, the more will your customers, clients and even competitors trust you.

  • Market Digitally

Blogs, if they are interesting, information-rich and unique, can find wide traction on the Internet and even beyond with people sharing the blog through phones and social media. This in turn helps market your brand widely and inexpensively. It can also lead to conversion to leads if people choose to click on your call-to-action buttons in the blogs they have particularly taken a liking to.

  • Pen down your thoughts

Blogs are a great way to express yourself and communicate to the world what you really believe in and stand for. It is a great medium to help you assert your individuality and stand apart from the crowd that is the Internet.

Now that you have a fair idea about the importance of blogs to your website, you should try to generate blog ideas and content regularly for visitors and search engines to know you are alive and kicking. Sprout Road, a premier website builder in Kolkata, recommends you enlist the services of a professional content writer for your blog section so you can put out quality content regularly.

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4 Essential Decisions You Must Take To Set Up Your Ecommerce Store
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4 Essential Decisions You Must Take To Set Up Your Ecommerce Store

Opening an ecommerce store and setting it up involves immense hard work and endurance. You must be brimming with ideas, open to change and equipped with quality research before taking the plunge. That said, there are a few more essential decisions you need to take to set up your online store like acquiring a custom domain name or selecting a payment gateway provider. Here are some pointers to help you set up and launch your ecommerce store.

Choose an appropriate Domain Name

Choosing a domain name, besides choosing which product you want to sell, is a task unto itself. An attractive, short and crisp name, both meaningful and symbolic, is what you want should represent your business.

If you are having difficulty finding a domain name, there are name generators like Namelix, Domainhole and Shopify’s name generator to assist you.

Know what products are suitable for e-commerce

Your product details are what customers will be reading primarily. So ensure they are perfect. Product photographs should ideally be taken by a professional photographer so you have quality images with the best lighting and backdrop on display.

Your prices should be competitive and attractive and graded according to product quality and features. And ensure you have a detailed product description with dimensions, colour, number of items and even a returns policy stated clearly.

Select a suitable Payment Gateway Provider

Payment is the holy grail in the relationship between a customer and a seller. Therefore, you must ensure customers have a seamless, secure and hassle-free payment experience. Choose a payment gateway that is secure.

Choose a gateway that accepts Master Cards, credit cards and e-wallet payments. Equally important is choosing whether you will offer cash on delivery payment option.

Select a cost-effective and reliable Logistics Provider

Firstly, you have to decide whether you want to ship locally or internationally.

Secondly, you must decide if you are going to pay for shipping and packaging out of your profit margins or the customer will pay or you both will share the cost. Based on these decisions, you go ahead and set up your ecommerce store.

Remember, an equally important aspect of the success of your store is a great ecommerce website, the door to your store. Sprout Road is a premier ecommerce company in Kolkata. We suggest you sign up for our ecommerce website development services for the best results.

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Top5 Content Management Systems to choose from in 2020
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Top 5 Content Management Systems to choose from in 2020

Making a website of your own has become more exciting and easier than ever before because of the sheer number of Content Management Systems or CMSs available. A CMS is a web application that enables you to publish and manage content on the Internet.

While most think CMSs are meant for blogging, the truth is that CMSs today are highly customisable and can be used for absolutely any kind of project including ecommerce sites and private membership sites. Here is a list of top CMS platforms you can use to develop your website.

WordPress

This open source software is unarguably the most popular one today and it boasts the largest market share among competitors. It is ultra easy to use and navigate and it is highly customisable with a large database of themes to chose from.

Joomla!

This open source platform, like WordPress, has a large library of templates and extensions to choose from. But it is not advisable for beginners because of its complicated interface. It is a good option to build your ecommerce site on for it has extensions for this.

Drupal

This open source software powers some of the most prestigious websites out there including The Economist’s. Many universities use it too. It is suitable for developers to handle especially for websites that are very complicated and designed to manage a large amount of content.

Magento

This powerful open source ecommerce platform from the software giant Adobe is one of the most competent and customisable CMSs available. It is, however, on the expensive side of things and you need specialised developers to build your website for you.

Shopify

This is an all-in-one hosted CMS platform. You do not need to purchase hosting or manage updates and backups. It is a brilliant platform for setting up an ecommerce store with an easy drag-and-drop interface. You can accept both debit card and credit card payments through Shopify Payments.

There are many more CMSs out there in the market. We have covered only five. What we suggest you do is first identify the purpose of your website – will it be a blog or an ecommerce platform or a private membership website? And then proceed to research on the type of CMS you want to go for. Sprout Road, a premiere website development company in Kolkata, recommends WordPress for websites and Magento for ecommerce platforms.

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Why The COVID-19 Lockdown is The Best Time to Take Your Business Online
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Why The COVID-19 Lockdown Is The Best Time To Take Your Business Online

The deadly COVID-19 pandemic has forced economies across the world to a grinding halt. Countries have issued lockdown decrees and travel bans to abate the spread of the coronavirus that has, as of April 21, 2020, infected over 24 lakh people and caused 1,67,000 deaths.

Small businesses have shut shop, factory production has slowed down and consumption has dipped across the world. In such a situation, while we wait with bated breath for the pandemic to pass over, it will be wise to think of ways to overhaul your business strategy – in other words, take your business online.

Here are a few reasons why you should take your business online.

Online Shopping

In a post-COVID-19 world, more customers will be shopping online than they ever did for fear of contracting infection. In fact, a study by the NRF (National Retail Federation) says

  • 9 in 10 consumers have changed their traditional shopping habits.
  • More than 50% of consumers have ordered products online that they would normally purchase at a store
  • Nearly 6 in 10 consumers say they are worried about going to the store due to fear of being infected

Low Demand, High Supply

For some companies selling luxury or non-essential items, demand has virtually disappeared. Customers are refraining from buying expensive watches or handbags simply because they do not really “need” them though they might “want” to possess them.

In this new need-based economic atmosphere, it would be best to take your store online so that you might be able to make yourself virtually present, 24/7, before your customer even if she is not driving down to your brick and mortar store. Having an online store or a website might as well convert “want” to “need” in these days of a nation-wide lockdown.

Improving Company image

Taking your business online is like presenting your customers and clients with a well-designed and thoughtful calling card. It improves brand visibility on the Internet and it lends your company credibility. You simply lose to competitors who have a professional website to go with their businesses.

Even if your business is not designed to be an online one, you can still have a website and generate leads through chatbots or customer care portals online. You can follow these up the next day from any-where you operate from. Taking your business online is the surest way to convert leads to sales.

So, if you have not already taken your business online, please start planning to do so today. The lockdown has given us ample time to rethink business strategies, so we might as well make the most of it. Best, Sprout Road

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Watch what you Search with the All-New Google Bert Update!
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Watch what you Search with the All-New Google Bert Update!

Every time Google releases a new update, it is almost like a storm running across the world of digital marketers and SEO enthusiasts. The Search engine giant released many such core updates with the likes of Panda, Penguin, Pigeon, and Humming Bird, to get the better of its rivals. Now, when we least expected it, BOOM, came the update, Bert, to watch over your content!

What should you know about Bert?

Google launched the Bert update recently, rolling out what they referred to as the most important update in five years.

Bert (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) is the fruit of the rapid progress of Deep Learning infused with the dynamic Natural language processing technology. This update is mainly aimed at making the complicated search queries easier for our favorite search engine, based on which, you will be getting more accurate results.

The esteemed search engine has been grasping our queries quite accurately for a while now but what it lacked is the knowledge of the context and of the nuances of the English language itself. Due to this, the popular search engine may have got you some disastrously wrong results. However, it will no longer affect us, with this latest update.

This is what Google has to say about its brand new update:

“These improvements are oriented around improving language understanding, particularly for more natural language/conversational queries, as BERT is able to help Search better understand the nuance and context of words in Searches and better match those queries with helpful results.

Particularly for longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions like “for” and “to” matter a lot to the meaning, Search will be able to understand the context of the words in your query. You can search in a way that feels natural for you.”

Particularly for longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions like “for” and “to” matter a lot to the meaning, Search will be able to understand the context of the words in your query. You can search in a way that feels natural for you.”

Understanding Bert with Examples

Bert may seem confusing to you but it will help Google ease out. It is an algorithm update that will make things simpler for the technological juggernaut.

For example: if I searched “how to go fish?” before October, Google would have offered me articles, pictures/video links bearing “fish” and “fishing”. The query is a crucial one because “go fish” is also the name of a card game besides portraying the idea of “fishing”.

However, if you type the same query and search now after the update, you will only get relevant pictures and links of the game “Go Fish”.

Now, if you modify the query by changing “fish” to “fishing”, it would return you relevant details about fishing and how you can go about it.

Bert and its Effects!

Ever since the update was rolled out, Bert seems to benefit the websites with lucid, compact content, which are written interactively and punish poorly written/unclear content and subsequently, the websites bearing them.

So, if the thoughts of working on your On Page SEO strategy once again from the scratch are giving you nightmares, then you are in luck. This is because you won’t have to change anything from your end, but rather tweak your content and improve the overall quality of writing them.

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SEO for Business: 6 Mantras to Achieve Success
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SEO for Business: 6 Mantras to Achieve Success

Want to increase your brand’s visibility?
Want to drive more user traffic?
Want to enjoy high conversion rate?
Want to flourish in a slow economy?

A powerful WEBSITE is the answer. A strong digital presence is the key to success.

However, every day, thousands of people search for products and services online. So, how to make sure your business (website) secures a dominant position amongst a vast number of competitors?

An effective SEO strategy is what you need.

SEO for Business: Your Guide to Success

From Visually.

Finally, after all these updates, you get an SEO-optimized website that works better, attracts lead and trigger profit.

To partner with us, click here: https://sproutroad.com/contact-us

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The Biggest SEO Trends of 2019
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The Biggest SEO Trends of 2019

2019 has been a crucial year for SEO due to numerous reasons.

With AI, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality driving the digital marketing landscape, it’s time we take charge before things get a bit overwhelming. As SEO professionals, we need to dominate the SERPs, generate more revenue and stay ahead of the curve.

Here are the top 10 SEO trends to watch out in 2019:

Understand User Intent and Audience

What does your targeted audience like? Texts, images or videos?

Answering this is all the more important this year, according to the experts. You need to understand what your audience is expecting from you and deliver them the solution in the easiest way possible.

Look Beyond Google Search Engine

 In 2019, we expect a steady rise of Amazon and Apple search engines. No more would it be enough to optimize Google; you have to take into account other search engines as well. You need to look beyond the websites, optimize for devices and drive engagement to your products, said Cindy Krum, CEO of MobileMoxie.

Use Structured Data As Much As Possible

Use Structured Data As Much As Possible

As AI is becoming the power tool for Google, the use of structured data is rapidly increasing simultaneously. JP Sherman, enterprise search expert at Red Hat shared that you should start comprehending structured data, active and passive search behaviors, and understanding how they adhere to behaviors that depict intent. Establishing contextual relationships between behaviors and topics is the key.

Content Is Still King

2018’s Google algorithm updates revealed that the search engine giant is acutely focusing on churning out high-quality content and rewarding sites that guarantee best in-depth content experiences. Last year, websites that offered incredible depth in quality content soared in page rankings while those that were weaker in content depth suffered.

E-A-T

Establish and enhance your expertise, authority and trustworthiness – collectively known as EAT- according to Google’s search quality rating guidelines.

“Although the E-A-T guidelines are written for Google’s algorithm raters, rather than Google’s algorithm itself, it helps us to understand where Google is heading in the short term,” said Dixon Jones, founder of DHJ Ventures. “I think this will help SEOs start to understand that ‘quality’ comes with context. You cannot rank so easily writing authoritative content unless you are already an authority on a given subject.”

Technical SEO

Day by day, websites are becoming more complex. Investment in technical SEO is now an absolute necessity. Corporate houses, who want to reap maximum benefit has to consider the glorious aspects of technical SEO. Speed, JavaScript and Progressive Web Apps are few technical areas in focus.

Focus on On-page Optimization

On-page SEO tactics continue fetching desirable results. Companies, big and small, are still witnessing incredible results from on-page optimization. It is great for driving traffic and increasing your online search presence.

2019: Year for Voice Search

2019: Year for Voice Search

Voice optimization is the strategy of the year. Last year, we saw the advent of voice search and how it gained immense attention. It is expected to become more popular and important in 2019. Michael Bonfils, MD of SEM International added that voice search is deemed to be a game-changer for multilingual and MNC websites shortly.

Impact of Machine Learning is Likely to Double

Machine learning is being adopted to curate unique content for SEO. AI coupled with data analysis and reporting is now the new imperative to decode failures and successes. Expect layout changes and a swooshing drive to address intents instead of questions.

Optimize for Feature Snippets and Google SERP Features

“Answer boxes, recipes, the knowledge graph, carousels, and who-knows-what-else will take an even bigger bite out of organic traffic,” pointed out Ian Lurie, CEO and founder of Portent. “That makes SEO even more important because exposure is as much about visibility in the SERPs as it is about clicks.”

As end notes, we’ve just scratched the surface till now. For more interesting updates on SEO trends and insights, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

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