Last week we tried Facebook Ads on PPC basis for one of our clients and we were simply overwhelmed with the returns.

For a small budget of $50 we got to show our ad (with a thumbnail and text) to more than 600,000 target audience as well as received more than 600 clicks. The effective CPC we paid was even lower than what we paid on Adwords yet we got significant amount of branding as value add too, something that Adwords doesn’t offer.

Oh by the way, Facebook has recently crossed Google as the most visited website in US as well. So you wouldn’t need to worry about the budget you can spend on Facebook.

I would start with defining the two concepts here:

Vertical SEO:
The standard way – identify main target keywords with maximum search volumes and go all guns to get ranked on their SERPs. Your SEO efforts are concentrated mainly on home page and other important pages. Beating your competition often takes long time depending upon the strengths of competing websites.

Horizontal SEO:
The smarter way – identify all possible target keywords (exact, broad and long tail keywords) and try to get ranked on all of them. Your focus on getting as many pages in search engines as possible. You may often find a range of keywords where your competition hasn’t reached yet and get top rankings much faster.

So who is using horizontal SEO?
LinkedIn – gets traffic from people search as every user has a public profile indexed by search engines
YouTube – gets traffic from brand search as every channel has a public profile index by search engines
Ecommerce websites – get customers searching for individual products with product name, model no. etc.

There are several more examples so time for you to think how could you use horizontal SEO strategy to benefit your business or simply ask us for a Free SEO Analysis and we will be happy to plan it for your business.

Have you been busy reducing CPC (cost per click) for your search marketing campaigns? Well how about moving to FOC (free of cost)?

Yeah you heard it right, getting clicks free of cost from search engines for the same target keywords where you pay cost per click is possible with the help of SEO. I bet your high profile digital agency is never going to even talk about this transition from CPC to FOC as they may lose out on that handsome agency commission they make out of your SEM campaigns by doing almost nothing.

Also because SEO requires real expertise and plenty of hard work on a regular basis to rank for those same very keywords.

Curious? Concerned? Stunned? Freel free to post your questions and I will be happy to answer them.

Indeed its a very obvious but well kept or may be well unknown or even well ignored secret. So here is how it works:

- Usability helps visitors on your website access information easily and quickly
- As a result visitors spend more time and access more information on your website
- Also, visitors are more likely to convert if your website is usable

So who is smiling? Well visitors who have just become your customers and  you because your sales/leads has just gone up.

Well smiles do not stop here, they reach all the way to search engines as well because those visitors have found what they were searching for. And now its time for you to smile again because search engines are going to reward you for helping the ecosystem get better.

Caution: Having said all this you must find the right SEO and usability experts who understand this secret!

Happy SEOing and Happy Usabilizing!

Facebook outnumbered Google as the most visited website in US, revealed a Hitwise report. Does this mean social media is all set to kill the need for searching internet?

No matter how well Google keeps improving its search quality I would rather trust that recommendation from a known friend or that anonymous expert rated well for his answers and with social updates, tweets, RSS feeds, ratings, reviews, expert blogs its becoming easier than ever to get that right answer.

Today all I need to do is just update my status on Facebook or simply tweet about or may be ask a question on niche social network what I am looking for and within a few minutes I would have received several good answers. What drives not only my friends but friends of friends to answers my questions? Evolving social media? Well if social media keeps evolving this way then I have rest of the people in this world only six degrees away.

As internet evolves we may experience relatively lesser need for search. Why else do you think Google has only about 7% share of internet visits in US compared to about 70% in India?