SEO is one of those terms that people throw around without knowing much about. Sure, most business owners know that SEO helps drive traffic to their websites via search engines. But how does SEO work? How much does it cost? And does your business really need it? In this blog, we’ll boil SEO down to its basics to give you a rudimentary understanding of this complex, yet crucial practice.

First of all, what is SEO?
Short for “search engine optimization,” SEO is a methodology used to boost the ranking or frequency of a website on search engine result pages, with the end goal of directing more traffic toward the site. SEO is a natural, or organic, way of improving a website’s visibility on search engines, as opposed to “paid search,” which involves paying search engines directly for prime real estate.

How does it work?
Say you’re looking for a new pair of sunglasses, and you want to explore different brands and styles on the Internet. Conventional wisdom will likely lead you to a search engine like Google. To initiate your search, you’ll probably type “sunglasses” into the search bar. A quick glance at the results will reveal everything you need to know about a website’s SEO prowess. Websites with the best SEO will appear first, while websites with poorer SEO will appear on secondary pages My Update Studio.

Why should I care where my website is ranked?
No matter the purpose of your website, being on Page 1 of search engines for search terms most relevant to your business is essential. According to studies, Page 1 garners 92 percent of all traffic from the average search. The higher you’re listed on Page 1, the better. On average, the top ranked result for any given search scores 32.5 percent of traffic share, while the second ranked result gets 17.6 percent. The drop-off gets even steeper from there.

How do I get my website to rank higher?
There are a number of steps you can take to improve your SEO, which in turn will boost your ranking. Updating your website content to incorporate keywords is the first step. There is really no substitute for well-written and relevant content. Optimizing your metadata and alt tags is also very important. Getting other websites to link to yours is also valued by Google’s algorithms, as it helps to establish your website’s credibility.

Alt tags? Metadata? What are those things?

An alt tag is a text alternative for an image or object on your page. Metadata is data that provides information about other data.

It’s a no-brainer that getting funded is a great achievement. You can hire the best of talent, move into a proper workplace, and invest more in improving your product.
Also, now you can go all-out marketing yourself, and that is where the problem begins.
Once you get funded, there’s an irresistible desire to explore all marketing options which you were not able to afford previously. And that is perfectly understandable. We all want to grow and start marketing ourselves to our target audience, but a careful approach here will ensure that you reach them with maximum effectiveness while burning considerably less amount of money.
Digital-marketing-for-start
Let’s a dive deeper and find out how you can optimize your approach towards marketing so that you can get better results.
Hire a senior digital marketing resource
Instead of going for a digital marketing executive, I would strongly suggest that you go with a senior resource who has seven to ten years of experience in handling overall digital marketing for startups/brands.
You will be coming up with a marketing strategy at this time and his/her insights will help you a lot in charting a long-term plan. While hiring the marketing person, make sure that he/she is good with all the major digital channels like SEO, SEM, social media marketing, email marketing and digital PR; a good knowledge of analytics is also must.

From my personal experience, however, I have noticed that people who come from digital marketing agencies don’t live up to the expectation; possibly because agencies have different teams handling all the above digital channels. I would suggest that you hire people from other startups/brands that are in the same niche as yours or somewhat related.
PS: I am suggesting a marketing resource in digital because it has a low entry barrier. Traditional marketing channels are very expensive and you will blow up your money in no time.
Work on your branding
Once you have decided to kickstart your marketing activities, you need to start working on your communication.
Coming up with a brand personality will help you define an identity for your brand. This, in turn, will develop an emotional connect with your customers and also help you stand apart from your competitors.
Once you have this in place, you will find that coming up with a tweet, an ad-copy for SEM campaign, or even the copy of a landing page becomes the lot easier.
To read up more on this, please refer to my earlier column on why startups must have a brand personality.
Start creating remarkable content
Content marketing is the most reliable way to make an impact on your audience. Having good content writers on board will make sure that you are coming up with content that people like and share. More than that, it will ensure that people get to know you and adopt your product/service.
This is a very big playground and you can dabble with so many options here. From videos to infographics, to blog posts and downloadable content; there are N number of ways you can create and share content.
However, you should stay away from fluffy content if all it gets is page views but no leads/sales. There’s no point in having a blog that shares listicles on food and lifestyle while you are dealing in real estate.
So keep analyzing the impact of your content strategy on your KPIs (brand awareness, leads, sales, etc.) on a regular basis. You should always see content as a way to increase more sales, and not just a channel to get more likes or pageviews Graet Report.
Focus on product marketing
While the initial version of your product was about giving customers a good experience, you should now look at maximizing your returns from the customer’s usage of your product.
We all know that product marketing is a good way to spread the word organically and it saves a lot of money, but many startups wait till they hire a good growth hacker to get started with this. However, this shouldn’t be the case.
Numerous case studies have pointed out that simple tweaks can lead to good returns, and your senior marketing resource should be able to pull this off (with some training, if required).
Work on your landing pages
Since you will be beginning with your paid marketing campaigns, you must have a landing page that converts like a charm. Being the first point of interaction of the customer with your brand, it becomes imperative that you focus on delivering a great experience to them.
Instead of going with a template and letting it run on auto-pilot, you should run A/B tests on all the aspects that are crucial to conversion (headlines, text, CTA, button, color scheme, etc.). This should be an ongoing process and not a one-time affair.
Invest in great tools
Now that you have the funds, you should start looking at working with premium tools that do a better job than the free ones that you’ve been using all this time.
There are many good tools out there that can help you with SEO, lead generation, project management, and analytics. Give their free trials a spin and see which ones fit your requirements.
Suggested tools: Moz Pro, Crazy Egg, Webengage, SumoMe, Wishpond, Mixpanel or Kissmetrics.
Follow Pareto’s principle
In your eagerness to market yourself aggressively, it would be wise if you don’t spread yourself too thin here. You don’t need to do everything to build up your sales funnel. More often than not, you will see a handful of marketing activities giving you maximum returns.
Once you begin your marketing activities, you will start seeing the effectiveness of various channels. Invest in the ones that are more impactful than others. May be it is SEO, or SEM, or product marketing – it can be anything.
Running after every marketing channel is not going to help you. Stay focussed.
Work on your employer branding
Since you will only be growing more in the coming months, you should invest in branding yourself as a good place to work at.
Hiring is a lot of pain and trusts me, there are very few talented people out there. This makes employer branding all the more important for you. Having a nice team page and a company blog always helps, but nothing beats tapping into the contacts of your current team via social media.
When people see their friends having a great time at their workplace, they start aspiring of a workplace like yours. This positive perception of your brand comes into force when you ask your team members to share the current job openings in your brand within their network.
I hope the above pointers were of help to you and gave some direction to your marketing aspirations. In case if you have any queries please feel free to comment below, I will do my best to answer them at the earliest.

The fintech ecosystem in India has been blossoming since the last couple of years. While payment tech firms have existed for over a decade now, there has been a lot of development in other FinTech verticals as well. The subject of discussion here is the insurance tech space, where online companies are cutting short the lengthy process of negotiating with brokers and banks followed by endless documentation exchange, to allow consumers to buy insurance policies with just a few clicks.

Insurance 2015 to 2020, reaching Rs 15,000 crore. This indicates the opportunity being created by technology, which is organizing the scattered space of insurance retail. At present two of the leading firms in this space are Policybazaar and Cover fx, 1.5 million and 350,000 visits on a monthly basis, as per SimilarWeb. They are also the most funded firms in their segment with $69.6 million and $14 million raised till date.

In the midst of these established firms, there are startups which are gradually carving out a share of the total market opportunity by building their own USP. The larger objective is still to make insurance buying easier for all users through technology. Subir Mukherjee founded GIBL in 2014 with a similar aim, to eradicate the miss-selling of insurance policies through an easy informative web & mobile app based procurement platform.

An Introduction to GIBL

Subir’s own bad experience in dealing with health insurance brokers, and ‘nightmarish’ paperwork, led to him establish GreenLife Insurance Broking Pvt. Ltd. The company is building an intuitive web and mobile platform to enable customers to make their own decisions for policy buying, through a tech guided and personalized process. GIBL isn’t only an aggregator, it has a broking license from Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority as well.

“We are giving customers the option to see multiple quotes & the features at their finger tips. So within few minutes they can understand what is good or not so good for them and take decision accordingly. It removes the dependency on what the agents are saying and accepting the price they are quoting.” says Subir.

About the Product

The product curates quote from over 25 insurance providers across segments and allow users to review them as per their requirement. Additionally, understanding the need to present documents repeatedly to redeem or renew policies, the mobile app in particular acts as a policy vault to store all policies, claim history etc.
The company claims to have tied up with insurance firms to give a better price to its customers, with an option to buy policies instantly without uploading their documents.

When asked about why would a consumer download an app for policy buying, Subir responded “Our App lets our customers have the flexibility to purchase a policy or do the research on the go. It will store their required policy documents, claim details, motor RC copy and all related documents at their finger tips. Now e-Policy for motor is being accepted, so no need to carry the hardcopy.“

The platform is built on Microsoft MVC technology, and take pride on their integrated work-flow and customer relationship management system. “We integrated continuous machine learning, profiling and pattern matching algorithm in our integrated system which brings automated sales suggestions to our team and help them bring more sales,” says Subir.

Progress Till Date

The company claims to have approximately 500,000 registered users and is seeing around 20,000+ monthly transactions. Subir says that they are growing at a 50% rate month on month. It acquires most of its users through content marketing and SEO efforts. In FY15-16 GIBL claims to have seen a growth of 5000% over the last financial year.

Additionally, the company is seeing a 90-95% renewal rate for policies bought through its platform.

Challenges in Building an Insurance Tech Firm in India

“I think our biggest challenge is the people’s faith in God and karma. As a nation, we believe if we do good, nothing bad could happen to us as god is watching. So they feel they are already safe-guarded by God and he will protect them from any disaster. As the result, they think they don’t need any insurance protection from any company.” shares Subir. “Most people in India will prefer more to take the chance than being insured. It is kind of an extension of the Jugaad mentality. So educating the mass is still the pivotal challenge.” he adds.

Most of the people might not think of purchasing insurance unless they buy something new, or come in close contact with a health or accidental mishap. The traditional path of buying insurance is also tedious, there’s no straightforward way nor are the consumers aware of a go-to the person or a destination who would guide them right. The aforementioned research by BCG also predicts that in 2020, 25% of insurance buying decisions would be influenced by digital.

Related Read: The Two Biggest Mistakes I Made As a Founder-CEO
The startup is operating as a customer-first broker, educating them and guiding them wherever required. They are aiming at making policy buying, and claim settlement a piece of cake. Subir shares, ‘Recently we fought against two mighty insurers and settled more than Rs 15 lacs claim for our customers. They were delighted and their smile makes our job so easy.’

On Competition and Market

Considering that the investor funded companies have been able to build a name among consumers, we asked how will a new player like GIBL will sustain in the space, to which Subir responded “There are few companies out there, who have raised fund in this space. But current status of most of these companies is just like their other eCommerce peers. They are in big loss and if you dig deep, you will find out that, they are struggling for their existence. Spending money on advertisements can create the brand but this doesn’t guarantee revenue. Their current revenue is not justifying the big spending. The burn rate of these companies is really high.”

Also, quoting the above-mentioned prediction of the Rs 15000 crore market size by 2020, Subir opines “Online insurance is very fragmented and still there is not a single player with more than 10% of the existing market.” hence there is a lot of opportunities for more companies to start-up in this space. With that said, the online insurance industry indeed has a lot of players in the market such as Policybachat, EasyPolicy, NammaPolicy, InsuringIndia, PolicyX and more.

“Being an insurance broker it gives us the advantage to design our own policy and able to expand both offline & online. The industry will take its own time to go totally online, so we are moving at our own pace. We are building up our niche and our special customer-centric process, which will be keeping us ahead in the competition.” says Subir.

To many people, SEO is a minefield of misinformation and conflicting advice.
Trust me, I’ve been there. When I Googled “SEO” for the first time, I was quickly overwhelmed with a mountain of anecdotes, case studies and “best practices”. I picked up a few tips, but for the most part, I couldn’t make heads or tails of what I read.
After years of in-the-trenches online marketing and PR work, I eventually put the pieces of the puzzles together. But I’m no SEO guru. In fact, most of my best SEO successes have come from old-school PR. That’s because, when you do it right, PR equates to link building or the practice of building backlinks to your site to get higher rankings in search engines.

But over the last few months, I’ve read that “link building is dead” and that “Google doesn’t care about keywords anymore.” Instead, the search engine is supposedly more concerned with high-quality content, schema markup and social media shares. I’ve been busy with my startup, so I haven’t had time to keep up with the latest trends in the SEO world.
Fortunately, someone else recently took the time to make sense of the topsy-turvy SEO landscape. Brian Dean and a team of data partners at Backlinko recently analyzed 1 million Google results to see which ranking factors are important for SEO in 2016.
Here’s what they found:
Backlinks are still (very) important
Of the 20-ish ranking factors Dean looked at, he found that backlinks are still the no. 1 most important ranking signal that Google uses. But not just any backlinks. This study found that you need backlinks from a bunch of different domains.
In other words, if you get 100 backlinks from the same domain, it’s not going to blast you to the top of Google. But if you get 100 backlinks from 100 different domains, you’re in business.
The question is: how do you get these backlinks? Spam 10,000 site with blog comments. Just kidding 🙂
In my opinion, the best links you can get are contextual mentions from authoritative media outlets.
Not only are these links highly-valued by Google, but they can bring in a boatload of traffic to boot. Here’s a guide I wrote that will help you get links using PR.
More bounces equal lower rankings
This study also found that bounces aren’t just bad for your bottom line: they can throw a monkey wrench into your SEO efforts.
Using data from SimilarWeb, the study found that sites with a high bounce rate tended to rank lower in Google than sites with a low bounce rate.
This data suggests bounce rates may cause lower rankings.
After all, if people bounce off of your site like a trampoline, it sends a pretty clear message to Google that people don’t like reading your content. So it makes sense that Google may downrank sites with lots of bounces.
However, Dean mentions in the report that a low bounce rate might be a byproduct of excellent content in general. In other words, if you write a kick-butt article, people are going to stick around longer.

How do you decrease your bounce rate, you ask? It’s not rocket science. On my blog I just make sure that my content is above the fold — and that the first few sentences draw people in. If you can hook them quickly, they’re significantly more likely to view another page.
Another way you can improve bounce rate is to break your content up into small chunks. In my experience, walls of text make users run for their lives. But when you break your content into two to three sentence paragraphs it becomes much easier to digest.

Bottom line? Spend some time improving your bounce rate. It definitely won’t hurt your SEO (or conversions), so it makes sense to invest some time in improving it.
Long-form content ranks better (surprise, surprise).
“People online have short attention spans.”
How many times have you read that?
Yes, there are certain people who live and breathe to;do (i.e. too long, didn’t read). But you don’t want to architect your content marketing strategy around this group. Think about it: if you found a 3,000-word article on the topic of “why you’re so awesome,” would you skim it? Of course not! You’d read every word.

While that’s an extreme example, it goes to show that people ARE willing to read long-form content. Just look at the runaway success of waitbuywhy.com, which publishes posts that clock in at more than 10,000 words!.
And the study points out that not only do people like reading long-form content, but it tends to rank better in Google:
According to Dean’s data, the average first page results in Google boasts 1,890 words. That’s a helluva lot more than your average 400-word blog post.
Obviously, if you use long-form, you need to write well.
So when you can combine compelling writing with long-form content you have a one-two punch that’s very powerful.

In fact, other studies (like this one by BuzzSumo) found that longer content tended to get more shares on social media:
And I’ve found the same phenomenon on my blog. When I look at the content that brought in the most shares (and get the most Google traffic), they tend to be more than 2,000 words:
Does the increase in social shares explain the association between long-form content and rankings?
It’s impossible to say from this study because it only looked at correlations.
Like with bounce rate, publishing long-form content definitely won’t hurt you. And it will probably help. So give it a shot.
In-depth, focused content outperforms content about 10 different topics
Like I said, you can’t publish 1,890 words of fluff and expect to light the world on fire.
And this study found the same thing. They discovered that content rated by software as “topically relevant” ranked above content with a low content score:
So what does this mean, exactly?
It means that when you write about something, cover one topic in-depth.
For example, here’s a post about building an email list from the Buffer blog.
In this post, they write about one thing and one thing only: how to grow your email list. They don’t meander off and talk about social media. Or content. Or blogging. Or building relationships.
It’s 110 percent about getting more emails. That’s it.

That focus is one of the reasons that the post ranks #4 in Google for the keyword “list building”.
That’s what you want to do with every post that you write. In my experience, this approach produces flat out better content in general. And it may also boost your rankings.

That’s what you want to do with every post that you write. In my experience, this approach produces flat out better content in general. And it may also boost your rankings.
Site speed makes a difference
You’ve probably heard that Google prefers fast-loading websites. In fact, Google has emphasized that they use site speed as part of their algorithm.

According to this study, this appears to be the case:
How can you make your site load faster?
At Criminally Prolific I use a (free) plugin called WP Super Cache. I’ve to notice that it makes a huge difference in my loading speed. And it takes about 5.3 seconds to set up. Other programs people use include WP Rocket, WP Smush, and Max CDN.

Keyword research is an extensive and important part of the Houston SEO process. It’s the first and probably most vital step in obtaining accurate key phrases. If you want to redirect organic web traffic to your site then keyword research is the foundation. These magical words determine who visits your site and why. The more relevant you make the phrases, the brighter the prospects of getting web traffic from your target audience.

Four tips small businesses can use for fast and effective keyword research
1. Relevancy
Finding keywords that are relevant to your exact page or blog post is one of the most important things when conducting keyword research. As Houston SEO experts, we know that being relevant is much more important to your readers (and Google) than ranking. Yes, you want to rank high on search engines but, if your keywords aren’t relevant, visitors will click off your page. This could be a reason for changing website data-for example, high bounce rates.
2. Focus on Long-Tail Keywords
Long tail key phrases are longer and more specific keywords that a target audience will be searching when they are close to the buying stage. They are typically phrases with 3-5 or more words in length and are the key to finding a relevant topic on any subject. Google is becoming better at analyzing the intent and the relevance of both search queries and content, therefore it has become vital to shift to long tail keywords.
As an example, if you’re selling jewelry, instead of using the keyword “necklaces” a long-tail keyword like “sterling silver oval pendant necklace” is more specific. Someone searching for this key phrase knows exactly what they’re looking for and are, therefore, is most likely in the buying stage.
3.Check Out Your Competition
Look at your competitor’s blog-it’s the easiest and quickest way to find high traffic and bright keywords for your content. Identify the keywords and use them to create your own unique content. For this technique to work, you must produce content of higher quality than your competitors. Do not copy what they have already said. Instead, use your own voice and perspective to add a unique spin to the same topic. Effectively managing this technique can help you pick out the most relevant keywords during your research.
4. Monitor Trends
Trends will give a glimpse on which keywords might evolve in a few years or months. To be ahead of others, you should plan content based on these predictable keywords. Google trends will show you recent keywords that are rising on the traffic charts. If you target these keywords, your content will be ranked without much SEO practice since competition on these words is lower. If you are In a new market sector where there are new products, you can target upcoming keywords in advance using trends data.

Vijay Thomas, founder, and partner at Tangent, began by saying, “As a consultancy providing technology solutions to increase organizational effectiveness, we now talk to CMOs, not CEOs or CIOs of our corporate clients. This tells you how big and important marketing budgets are to an organization especially with the onset of digital marketing.”

Anand Natarajan, chief business officer at Excello, pivoted the discussion to the key role of data in digital marketing. “Marketing clouds now offer ample amounts of data unlike traditional mediums of TV, radio, etc. This also means customers expect you to know what they like and prefer.”

Julie-Lynn Tikekar, senior manager for risk management at PayPal added, “Big data is a buzz word nowadays. It describes the speed, access, and amount of data available and it is making marketing more focused and accurate therefore will create more profit.”

Rajesh Munjal, COO, Carzonrent India offered his insight saying technology is not enough content is important too. “For instance, we have provided vehicles for corporate rental. B2B is niche and should be customized. Tech and content are equally important, this is where sound marketing strategies will come into play. There is an abundance of data with everyone thanks the internet so you must use technology like analytics to make sense of all this.”
The panel also shared their views on what marketing tools and tips can be used to increase online marketing efficiency.

“Have a data feed to keep your front end relevant, use analytics to do this. Pay attention to the placement of products on your pages to optimize sales. You will see product preferences vary by geography”, suggests Vijay of Tangential.

Kunal Gupta, associate director for media, digital and e-commerce at Nielsen suggests experimenting with giving free data to consumers, “Keep track of what happens when you give internet data for free – how many people will experiment with shopping online etc. it’s another revolution.”

Julie-Lynn of PaPpal added, “Maximize your digital real estate, don’t just build a website and forget about it. Keep it dynamic. While you’re building your website test it out with your target audience to make sure you’re attracting the right audience.”

Keeping track of online marketing costs is very important. Mohit Gill of Global Sell said, “While it increases visibility, the cost of online marketing must be checked (sponsored ads, paid campaigns) to make sure your spending justifies what you sell, when you’re earning back around 30%, it’s not justified. Say u pay 100 rupees for five days but the product is sold in 5 hours. That’s not justified either.”

Gaurav Kachru, CEO of Today Retail (now part of Zee Media Corporation), says, “Do not underestimate the power of SEO, it brings traffic to your sites at a low cost. You should be careful about paid acquisitions and display ads; they don’t draw customers anymore. Using influencers like friend networks to like your product is better.”

Summing up this discussion, things come a full circle when Gaurav said, “No matter what marketing is still what it was. The fundamentals have not changed and you must get those right; only the tech and tools have changed.”

Julie-Lynn agrees, “There’s no substitute for studying an excel sheet for about 2 hours. Based on my findings from an excel sheet I am still able to find points with which to challenge guys who use.”

Being an solopreneur isn’t easy, is it?

It’s a lot of responsibility and sometimes even struggle. You’re dealing with all sorts of risks that you would be shielded from if you were working a “normal” job. You’re facing greater obstacles and dealing with many different types of stress.

One of the biggest challenges solopreneurs face is marketing their businesses effectively. This is especially true of online marketing. If you’re not familiar with how it works, it can be incredibly frustrating.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the areas that vexes many solopreneurs. As you already know, it’s important to make it easy for your prospective clients to discover you online.

Good SEO is what will get your business in front of the most eyeballs, so it must be done right. As you read through to the end of this post, you will get 7 proven tips that will help you improve your search rankings.
When you start putting these tips into action, you will watch your search rankings grow over time. One thing that is important to remember is that SEO isn’t a sprint. It’s a marathon. Don’t expect instant results. If they happen, you’re lucky. If not, it’s okay. Just keep trucking and you’ll see the reward.
If you’re a small enterprise — and you probably are if you’re running it solo — most of your business is probably going to come through word of mouth, human-to-human organic “marketing.” Because of this, you’re going to need high-quality content on your website. It’s a well known fact that content marketing and SEO go hand-in-hand.
Here are some points to remember when creating content:
Is it relevant to my prospects? Does it relate to what my business does?
How is this piece of content helpful to the reader? Does it inform, educate, or inspire?
Is the content easy to read? Or will my readers have to work hard to understand it?
Moe Kermani, the founder of Natural Area Rugs is well aware of the importance of high-quality content:

“We sell decorative area rugs, so the content on our blog focuses on giving practical tips on decorating and interior design. Not only does this help our readers design their rooms, it also positions us as an authority in our space.”

I agree. Creating this type of content also makes it more likely that a prospective customer will find their website. If they happen to search for tips on how to decorate with area rugs, it’s likely that they will find Kermani’s company.
That’s how it works.

High-quality content is important because search engine bots are getting better and better at being able to tell what is readable and what is not. Also, genuinely useful content is more likely to be shared on social media. Social signals will give you a huge boost in search engine optimization. It’s the “social proof” that spiders like the Googlebot are looking for.
Another thing to consider when it comes to content is to make sure that your material is fresh and that it’s published consistently. Not only will this entice visitors to come back more often, it will also induce search engine spiders to visit your site more often in order to update their search content in a timely manner. So update your content often to keep both the humans and the bots interested.

2. Do Keyword Research
Keyword research isn’t too hard if you use the right tools. Google has a keyword research tool, though you do have to sign up with their Adwords program to access it. There are also other free and premium tools that will help you hone in on related keywords that your audience may be searching for that you may have not thought of yourself. The sweet spot finding keywords with a decent amount of monthly searches and not too much competition.

3. Watch the Keyword Density
In the early days of the Internet, when the basics of SEO were first being discovered, it was basically the norm for people to keyword-stuff their web pages, making the text look oddly redundant to human eyes.
Don’t do this. It’s a bad idea.
Not only will that not help you rank on sophisticated search engines such as Google, it can actually get you penalized. This type of practice is known as “black hat SEO” and you want to avoid it at all costs. By all means, make sure to include keywords, but try to go for a natural flow. Keep the keyword density at less than 3 percent, or it will start to look unnatural to the bots and the humans.

4. Display Your Keywords Prominently
Now that we know that we shouldn’t go overboard, it’s important to note that keywords should be placed in certain key places in your page’s content. In particular, put your keywords in the title of your page, the header of your page, and in the body of your content, especially as close to the first and last sentences of content as possible.

5. Make Keywords Part of Your URL Make sure that relevant keywords are included in the web address of the page that you are optimizing. Google uses the text in your URL to help it determine the topic of your content, and it’s also more human-readable to edit your URL and add keywords than many of the random default URL’s that some content-management software can spit out.

6. Don’t Neglect Local Searches
Be sure to focus some of your SEO efforts on local search if you are a local business. Target keywords that are particular to your area, and you may be able to rank quite a bit higher than your competitors.
If your business is located in an area where your competitors are not taking advantage of local search, you will have a tremendous advantage over them because your company will rank higher. When your prospective customers use Google, they will see your listing first!

7. Take Social Media Seriously
As mentioned, social signals are important in modern SEO, and having your web page go viral on Facebook can do wonders for your ranking, not to mention all the free traffic that you may be able to snag from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media sources in the first place. Most people expect to be able to contact and interact with the companies that they buy from, so you should be on social media anyway.

20th October 2016, Sydney, Australia, Husband and wife entrepreneurs, Lel and Khai Ngo, are both event enthusiasts who enjoy celebrating life. The co-founders of The Kit Source want to take the hassle andstress out of celebration planning.

The duo source, curate and package bespoke, beautifully themed party supplies and deliver them directly to your door. Every theme is carefully styled and assembled. All the party organiser has to do is unpack and enjoy the party.

They share their unique start and start up tips:

It’s about embracing change…

In mid-2013. we both lost a little motivation with our jobs and decided we needed a challenge. Khai was keen to study again and I planned to start a career as a freelance event consultant, so moving overseas would be the perfect way to get a new perspective and start afresh. We considered a few locations (even the Netherlands – I have a Dutch passport), but as we’d both traveled to the States before, and fallen in love with San Francisco, an international program at Berkeley – just outside San Francisco – fit the bill.

One afternoon in February 2014, after being in Berkeley for a month, I was completing an assignment and had to find classy, themed party ware for a few hypothetical events. I realised that I loved putting together colour and pattern combinations (mood boards) for these different themes, and before I knew it, I was off Googling whether Party Kits existed – all I could find were ‘packs’ with the exact same tacky image on each item – a lazy and tacky approach in my eyes.

It’s about finding the gap….

That afternoon, when Khai walked in the door to our tiny, dingy college-town apartment, I told him about the apparent gap in the market and, without really thinking about it, joked that we should fill it by opening an online store that curates party supplies into kits. Khai, inspired by his Entrepreneurship subject, pulled out an article on writing a Lean Canvas and said they’d complete it the next day.
That next afternoon, they planned the entire business out in about four hours, and were so tired from all the idea generation that they couldn’t discuss it again for weeks!
Lel then began researching shopping cart platforms, suppliers and the market, and listened to hundreds of podcasts such as eCommerceFuel and My Wife Quit Her Job. Needless to say, the event consultant idea was forgotten about!

It’s About Inspiration…

At this point, the ‘Start-Up’ scene hadn’t quite hit Sydney to the level it has now – it was something that was born in the Bay Area (SF, Silicon Valley).
Not only this, but we were exposed to SO MANY new ways of doing things, especially online or via App – Uber was already deeply ingrained in society, food delivery services were huge, Meetup groups were everywhere… we experienced a lot of new services that were completely different (and more efficient) than the things back home.

I decided to follow creative pursuits while setting up my consultancy – studying event and wedding design (online) and floristry at the San Francisco School of Floral Design. During these courses I realised that I desperately needed creativity to be at the core of my career, no matter how successful I was as an event coordinator. When the idea of an online store struck, it was like I found my calling! There was a lot of logistical and organisational tasks, but I could design the website, take all of the photos, and most importantly curate the Party Kits!

It’s about excitement, suspense and passion…

Mostly beauty, fashion and food subscription boxes inspired us. It was the ‘unboxing’ of a curated collection of products that really inspired me. As a passionate online shopper, I find it so exciting and suspenseful opening up a box and pulling things out, item by item. I’ve grown up using Apple products, where packaging and unboxing is so well constructed and purposeful. One day I hope to recreate that sort of experience with our Kits.

It’s about like-minded, positive people

Khai’s Diploma was only for international students, so our friends were from Brazil, France, Spain, Japan, Germany, Argentina, India… they were all at a similar stage in their life – postgrad study to upskill and start something new. Almost every one of our friends had a business idea, or planned to stay in the US to work in a start up… we were surrounded by people who had such a passion for change; they were excited about business and life (sadly this wasn’t the case for a number of our friends back home). This meant that when we returned to Australia, our friendship circle changed; we’d realised that being around like-minded and passionate people would keep us motivated.

It’s about learning who your target audience is and adapting..

When we started, I actually wanted to focus on the ‘young corporates with disposable income’ market – I was basically creating the product for myself. After some time on the market and seeing who our customers and followers were, we realised that this wasn’t really the market that needed our help – it was the mums who were time poor, that felt the pressure to live up to their fellow mum’s expectations. I really enjoy catering for the Mum’s market, they’re really grateful for all the assistance and time saving!

It’s about being true to creativity and intuition…

I usually find one item that is the jumping off point for a kit – as much as I should research upcoming trends, I tend to come across things I love and ideas snowball from there. One of my favourite Kits, the Black and White Party Kit, was inspired by patterned carpet in a hotel we stayed at in 2009. My ideas truly come from anywhere, and I guess that makes it hard to imitate what we do. I’m more about creating timeless products than keeping up with whatever fleeting trend other stores might be pushing.

It’s about collaboration…

Khai and I have very complimentary skill sets. To put it simply, I’m about form, and he’s about function. I love the design side of things, whereas he’s very analytical. He’s a very successful business manager – handling all of the financial, operational and logistical aspects that I simply don’t have an interest in. This isn’t to say he isn’t creative though, some of our most random (and successful) products or marketing efforts have come from his creativity in problem solving.

It’s about quality and honesty..

My main benchmark for quality is “If I won’t use it myself, I won’t offer it to our customers”. Have you ever attended a party and tried to cut your food on a flimsy white plate with bendy cutlery? It’s awkward and frustrating – we even filmed a plate test to show how we focus on quality! https://vimeo.com/158722753
In addition to this, Khai and I have taken it upon ourselves to learn as much as we possibly can. Khai’s learnt the basics of html, css and SEO; I’ve upskilled in graphic design programs, photography. One day we’d like to outsource these sorts of things, but it’s best we learn what we can first so we don’t get ‘screwed over’ later (I’ve heard too many horror stories about entrepreneurs paying thousands in SEO a month, with no results!).

It’s about celebrating life…

I was always on the fringe of the event industry, but when we began The Kit Source I became really involved and interested in what other party stores, stylists, cake makers, etc. we’re doing. It was then I realised that throwing parties should be simple. I was no longer just interested in coordinating party items and selling them in kits, I wanted to simplify party planning and show people that less is more. I vividly remember parties from my childhood, with home-made cakes and silly games – it wasn’t about expensive decorators or how much my parents invested, it was about the memories – it’s cliché but it’s true! If we can get people who are hesitant about throwing a party because of time restraints (or perceived lack of creativity), to grab a kit and celebrate, then we’ll be pretty happy no matter the occasion.