I recently read an article by NewYork Magazine titled, How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually. You should read it too if you are trying to crack into the digital world to market your products or services using paid ads. We all know that paying for an ad in conventional print medias is old story. You don’t know who took action after seeing the ad or even people are seeing it or not. The flyer you designed well and printed probably might have ended up as another piece of waste.
Online Ad or Print Ad, which is better?
But social media platform ads are not like print ads, they give you metrics. What a great option to have, the metrics which will tells you who did see the ad, how many men/women, location wise insights, what did they do after seeing the ad etc. It is like you were with them when they were seeing the ad.
In theory all of these are amazing, but sorry to break it to you, the metrics are fake. Well may be not 100% of it is fake, but if you are wondering why your ads are not really giving you any return on investment then definitely the chances are the metrics are lying to you, or your ad is poorly designed.
Use Metrics that Matter to give your user the best user experience.
If you don’t believe me, please have a look at this video – beauty of click farms. After reading the article which I mentioned in the beginning I don’t know what is real and what is fake now. Many advertising dollars are dying in those fake rooms. Hundreds of millions of dollars of VC money are turning into ashes, flashing on these screens.
But all those fake views and comments, do they actually help? I think yes, to an extent if you are ready to put real work along with it. We people love “likes”, so for the same reason when I am on a profile with lots of like I tend of trust them automatically. It is not so easy to find out whether the likes are for real or not. So that trust they build using the fake likes can act like an anchor which can attract real engagement if you are good in terms of creating content.
Why you should be creating high quality content for your potential customers?
I am sure social media have helped millions of people to build small and big businesses. I am sure so many people got great exposure through paid ads and build empires. But the point is, don’t just rely on metrics. If you genuinely want to connect with potential customers, do it real. Create high quality content for your real users, for humans. These fake, bought likes and comments may add some gas into the fire, use the snowball effect gets created there to do real things. I am sure there must be ways to manipulate SEO as well, even when google is trying really hard to keep the quality high. However SEO has long lasting effect if you are not faking it.
SEO is really simple and complicated at the same time. Why SEO is simple? Google simply wants to give the best experience for people who are searching something in their search engine. If you help google to achieve this, you win. If you try to fool people by giving irrelevant content, Google will definitely penalise you. Then those paid ads are the only option left for you. So don’t try to fool Google, you will get caught sooner than you think.
Content Marketing is really about building trust by educating potential customers about things they should be knowing
What is really SEO?
In a real world scenario lets say you want to find a website designer for your new business. What is it you will do? You will go to a certain friend whom you think can help you with that. You will not go to any friend, but you will go to someone who knows about quality website designers.
Before going to that friend you already have an idea that he will be able to help you because of certain reasons. He might already built one website, or in the past you have had conversations regarding website development or that friend have a lot of connections.
Now this friend cannot disappoint you, or lead you to some random website designer/developer. He will point you towards a great website developer as he have a reputation to keep. If your friend mess up, next time you will not go to him.
How he will make sure that he is pointing you towards the right guy? Past work, or recommendation from someone who your friend trust, or their image in the market, or the way he might have explained something in the past etc makes your friend to recommend a certain website designer. That website designer have already convinced your friend that he is your guy way before you asked him help.
It is more or less the same happening in SEO as well. Google is your friend. He have a reputation to keep. The website designer already did certain things to convince Google that he can be trusted, so recommend him to you. Those certain thing is called SEO. The website designer need builds the trust with Google, so that when you ask Google to find one, Google will recommend the one who can be trusted.
Google Search Engine is all about helping people to find things when they are searching something. It does that by connecting you to the answers which are written by other people. Google don’t want to go wrong when its connecting you to the answer as it has a reputation to keep. So by using lots of parameters it checks the quality and arrange the answers to your questions in the order of quality.
Your questions are the keywords. “Find me the best website designer in Bangalore for X amount”
The website designer needs to tell and convince Google that he is the guy so that Google will recommend him. But how?
The website designer writes an article saying “I am the best website designer in Bangalore because
- I do design really well considering your business and target audience
- My coding is very clean and so the website will load real quick
- I have already build so many similar websites and these are my references and testimonials
- Many of the websites I developed are ranking well in google search result
- The websites I build have great user experience
Now Google will ‘read‘ all these and verify it using various parameters. Google use Algorithms to rank the quality. If Google is convinced, when you search using those keywords google will recommend the website designer who wrote that article. This is how google search works.
When a user types a query, Google tries to find the most relevant answer from its index based on many factors. Google tries to determine the highest quality answers, and factor in other considerations that will provide the best user experience and most appropriate answer, by considering things such as the user’s location, language, and device (desktop or phone).
How Google Search Works
Google Search Console is a platform for anyone with a website to monitor how Google views their site and optimize its organic presence.
It might all sound simple, but Google use like 200+ Ranking Factors to verify you. So it is complicated. However Google will never tell you everything in black and white, but one thing is sure. You need to gain Google’s trust and you need to be genuine if you want to keep that trust. 11 Things You Must Know About Google’s 200 Ranking Factors.
The TakeAway
If you provide awesome value to your community by creating great content the results will take care of themselves. Stop chasing irrelevant metrics.
- Stop spinning your wheels and fixating on things that do not matter
- You will never make payroll based on social media followers
- Bounce rate does not matter
- Focus on conversion. Conversion pays the bills
Podcast : The New Marketing Show: Stop Chasing Vanity Metrics
