WL Media HK

11/09/2020

Relevant backlinks and high-quality content are two of Google’s most important ranking factors. That’s why, anyone that works in SEO focuses on these two elements. Unfortunately, on most blogs you can find the same info rephrased. Writing average content is Read More

24/04/2020

Have you been to Paris recently? Before the lockdown I mean!

I wonder how the boulevardes are today.

Our guide to Boulevarde Haussmann was revamped recently.

https://www.facebook.com/Boulevard.Haussmann.de.Paris/

Please help to like the page about it!

One of the great shopping avenues of the world, see world class shops, visit fascinating museums and

30/05/2018

This is just one example of the sort of valuable content that we help our clients to create.

It helps to show them as topic domain leaders and gains traction on Social as well as Search engines while contributing positively to their field.

Get the best presentation skills tips from 27 world-renowned training and coaching experts. From engagement, storytelling to planning these essential pieces of advice will take your public speaking and presenting skills to the world-class level.

16/05/2018

Enjoy the blue skies!

Summer in Hong Kong.

12/01/2018

See our founder's story in AsiaEntrepreneur.

Prioritising family and lifestyle are what drove Winnie to set up an online marketing business. What’s your story? I was trained as a system analyst with a programming background so I started off being a bit geeky. After my son was born, I decided that being a full-time mum for my child is more im...

24/11/2017

YouTube can be a powerful marketing channel for certain types of products and services.

But just making the videos is not good enough.

They have to be promoted as well, how do you actually get them seen?

Here are 90 experts offering their advice, including our own Raymond Lowe.

https://www.facebook.com/raymond.lowe.hk/posts/1877707065874370

Learn how to rank Youtube videos from this expert roundup where 90 SEO experts share their tips. Get more viewers and subscribers to your YouTube channel.

22/11/2017

Hong Kong may fall behind its neighbour Singapore if it doesn’t keep pace with the new essentials of Internet Marketing. Each country is ahead in different areas, but there is a lot to be improved in both.

Are the major companies in Hong Kong at the forefront of Internet Marketing?
Are they doing great things with Digital Branding and their Online Presence?
Are they even doing the basics?

Read the whole study at https://www.wlmedia.hk/hong-kong-an-internet-marketing-leader-not/

Are companies in Hong Kong keeping up with the basics of Internet Marketing? Compared to Singapore the HK stock exchange listed companies need improvement.

21/11/2017

As an entrepreneur, you are always looking for new and more efficient ways to grow your business. But have you considered local monthly SEO services?

Since the internet has made the global economy accessible to nearly everyone, you’ve probably at least considered selling your company’s goods or services in overseas markets. After you conducted initial research on your chosen geographic market, you were likely pleasantly surprised to find prospective customers within the region’s expat communities. These population segments within foreign markets are growing due to globalisation and relaxed immigration rules that are in place in many parts of the world. Entrepreneurs who want to market goods or services in Hong Kong will find expats there who are technologists, logisticians, educators and healthcare professionals.

Here are five tips that will help you to reach this smart, skilled and well-travelled Hong Kong demographic.

#1 Associate Your Offerings With Popular Culture Products From their Home Countries

With a little creativity, you can endear yourself and your company’s products to members of Hong Kong’s expat community. Hong Kong hosts expats from numerous countries who are there for a variety of reasons. While these people probably would not trade their free-spirited lifestyles for anything, most of them love things that remind them of home and that cast a good light upon their native land. You can differentiate your company’s offerings to expats who live in Hong Kong by offering one of these nostalgic items as a free gift with purchase.
For instance, a company that wants to sell homoeopathic healthcare e-books, journals or a subscription e-zine to New Zealanders or Australians who now live in Hong Kong can offer their new customers a free, sample-size jar of Manuka honey. Wellness enthusiasts the world over recognise the honey for its extensive healing properties, and it is positively associated with New Zealand and Australia. A company that wants to sells skateboards to American youth who are living abroad may try offering a Vans t-shirt with each purchase. These free items are mostly non-perishable, they clearly identify with expats’ native cultures, and they enhance brands.

Not all expats are alike — don’t offer a Brit Vegemite or an Ozzie Marmite! Unless, of course, you wanted to start a comment war to increase your social engagement. Just saying.

#2 Establish Common Ground by Recognising Common Nationality

The internet offers many ways to connect with prospective customers even when they are half a world away, and that connection to home is what many expats crave occasionally. If you’re trying to promote your business to expats who live in Hong Kong, you should start blogging and posting interesting visual and textual content on social media platforms. If you or a member of your staff is from the native country of your targeted expat community, mention it periodically in your blog posts and on your website’s About Us page.

Video blogging and educational podcasts are extremely popular, and they allow you to communicate with your audience in more transparent ways. When using these communication channels, there is no need to mention your country of origin because the accent and personality of you or your colleague will attract the right audience. Make sure that the informational topics that you feature in your videos are customised to pique your readers’ interests and not just to sell them your products or services. Social media platforms such as Instagram give you another way to start and build relationships with the expat community in Hong Kong. Eventually, you will establish your business as a wealth of information that also sells great products or services.

#3 Promote Your Offerings Through Expat Clubs

Many expat clubs meet virtually, and they have newsletters in which you can place advertisements. Expats also belong to clubs and associations that have in-person meetings. Some of them promote good causes, and others facilitate social events that relate to hobbies such as cycling, gardening and language learning. When these groups want to earn extra money for their organisations, they often partner with businesses that will sponsor their causes in exchange for special advertising. You could ask to become a one-time or long-term sponsor of their events to generate buzz about your company’s products or services to new and long-time expats who live in Hong Kong.

#4 Perform Comprehensive Local SEO

While selling your company’s goods or services to expats who live in Hong Kong sounds really exciting, you’ve got to find a way to get the right expats to your website, blog or other e-commerce platform. Search engine optimisation or SEO can help you to do this. Effective SEO optimisation starts with great custom content that provides value to readers whether they become customers or not. Identifying and judiciously using targeted keywords in the headlines and body of your site’s content can help it to rank well in search engines.

Today’s search engine are more sophisticated than ever. They understand not everybody is in the same place, and that when you want a coffee, it doesn’t matter if the best one in the world is 100 miles away, you need one nearby.

That is where Local SEO comes in. It is a variation on SEO that focuses on there here and here, location location location.

Google algorithms attempt to match content seekers to information in their local areas. To attract a niche group like expats in Hong Kong to your site, you will likely need the help of local SEO services. By getting your site listed on expat-related forums and directories in local markets, it can be seen by prospective expat customers in Hong Kong even if those web surfers cannot easily pick up your site through organic searches. Sites such as AsiaXpat, Geoexpat and Geobaby offer local SEO services that allow your company to leave advertisements about offerings and links back to landing and sales pages. But don’t forget to start with the 3 step, 45 minutes, guide to being listed to promote your local business.

Company listings need to focus on actual physical addresses that are going to be close to customer locations. While Google considers “close” to mean within a few 10s of miles, it is still better than general SEO which is global.

#5 Tailor Language for Your Specific Audience Down to the Dialect

Don’t skimp on custom content. Part of effective SEO optimisation is delivering a good user experience to website visitors. Creating content that allows you to speak to a visitor in their own language and regional vernacular is one of the best ways to do this. Your audience can recognise authenticity issues a mile away, and language-specific content helps expat visitors to feel at home on your website. This type of content also cuts down on linguistic confusion because who wants to read about American biscuits when you were expecting an article about gourmet English biscuits that would go nicely with tea.

To truly connect with U.K., Australian or American expats who are living in Hong Kong, have a native speaker of their language and dialect write or at least proofread the content that you use on communication channels that target them.

Originally published as https://www.wlmedia.hk/hk-local-seo-promoting-business-online-to-expats/

Targeting expats in Hong Kong? Combine local SEO services and seo optimisation with this five-step plan action plan to succeed now!

20/11/2017

Despite some cynical predictions that are now over 20 years old, the World Wide Web shows no signs of going away anytime soon. It probably never will. More than ever, your customers are using the Internet to search for providers for their goods and services and when it comes to search engines, Google is the King. Yahoo and Bing want to be noticed, but they remain distant seconds, at best, to Google. Baidu is a contender if you are aiming for the mainland China market, but its creators have had the good sense to mostly follow Google’s lead. Until someone comes up with a better mousetrap (again!), your customers will be using Google daily.

SEO Spells Success

And if you drop the SEO ball, they will have no idea who you are, what you offer, or how wonderfully you perform. Unless your storefront or office is located next door or across the street, they will not even be able to see you, and given the bright hustle-and-bustle of Hong Kong, they may not see you then.

In other words: without good Search Engine Optimization, your business is effectively invisible. You need top-notch online marketing, Hong Kong style. We can provide that at WL Media HK, with online marketing packages for business that will keep your doors opening, your phones ringing, and your websites humming.

Not convinced? Here are five reasons why your company must commit to SEO if you have yet to do so.

1 - Your customers are using Google, so you have to be there.

Not to bang you over the head with it or anything, but search engines, especially Google, are now the Number One method people use to find the stuff they want. Do you even know anyone who uses a phone book anymore? As we go deeper into the Digital Age, old-fashioned advertising methods will wither on the vine. In particular, effective Internet marketing for Hong Kong demands effective SEO. Without it, companies die in busy markets like ours.

2 - Your competitors are using SEO already, or are planning to.

They have already learned its benefits, or they would have gone out of business long since. Then again, you may know of a few competitors who have begun to vanish recently. Never assume your marketing skills have put them out of business. More likely, it was their lack of marketing skills and their unwillingness to invest in one of the starter business SEO marketing packages that we and other good SEO firms offer. You can always do your SEO yourself if you feel up to it, and more power to you if you do. But if your SEO skills are limited to spelling the term, then may we recommend that you find a professional who knows all the rules and tricks of the trade?

3 - You are competing with the whole world.

The fact that there is so much information on the Internet, from all over the globe, makes it tough to come out in the Top 10 search results for any search. Unfortunately, research shows that most potential customers rarely go beyond the first page of results before making their buying decisions. Just because you have a website in place, and have even posted keyword-rich content, does not guarantee you a top slot in your field. While we would never guarantee results (anyone who says they can is misleading you), an experienced SEO firm such as ourselves can tune your content to a higher search-engine-friendly level — so your web copy is much more likely to end up on the first page of the search engine results. We have a long list of satisfied customers we have helped, and would be happy to provide you with a copy.

4 - SEO is a smart investment.

Think of it as a gift that keeps on giving. SEO can pay for itself with just a few sales; everything else is just icing on the cake. This makes it more of a “Rich Dad” investment than a “Poor Dad” one, because your investment keeps on paying you back, and can continue to do so for years. If you do your due diligence and pick the right SEO firm to work with, you will almost certainly make a continuing “revolving” profit. Sure, you do have to top it up sometimes, with new advertisements, fresh banners, even a little rewriting as the market changes. But you have to do that with any investment, whether based on online marketing or capital outlay.

5 - SEO is cost-effective.

The cost of paying for other types of advertising to acquire as much visibility as SEO gets you is readily calculable, but you need not take our word for it: you should calculate it yourself. For example, if you use pay-per-click or pay-per-view on Google, try multiplying your clicks in the Google Search Console times the CPC value in Google Keyword Planner, and take a look at the money that strategy brings in. If you prefer solo ads, check to see how many conversions you make per 100 or 1,000 visits. We feel confident that good SEO marketing packages, such as our own Honest SEO Monthly Package, can bring you much better returns than other online marketing methods, both short-term and long-term — especially since your keywords never just run out, unlike clicks and views.

Strategic Survival

In the tumultuous online market, especially in a busy city like Hong Kong, high visibility is key to survival. Unlike HSB Bank or Coca-Cola, you probably lack the funds to splash image/brand marketing all over the place so that people remember your name next time they want a certain product or service. On the other hand, you can bet HSB and Coke also have excellent SEO on every page of their websites. This is where you can best compete with them and everyone else in your marketplace — by ensuring that your keywords and phrases catch the eyes of not only individuals but more importantly, the big search engines like Google. Stay ahead of the game by tapping into the experience of a high-quality SEO professional firm. The gain is well worth the cost.

This article originally published as https://www.wlmedia.hk/5-reasons-why-your-company-must-commit-to-seo/ on our internet marketing blog.

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17/11/2017

5 TIPS FOR CHOOSING THE RIGHT HONG KONG SEO FIRM

If there is one adage you should keep in mind every moment of your business life, it is this: If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. If someone offers you a gold nugget at half price, it is probably pyrite; otherwise known as Fool’s Gold. This is especially true for the online aspects of your business, whether you operate a brick-and-mortar shop where you sell physical goods, a service business, or a fully Internet-based information brokerage. While most businesses are net-savvy today, especially in cosmopolitan markets like Hong Kong, you can still get less quality than you deserve if you are not careful.

Cracking the Hong Kong Market

Internet marketing in Hong Kong is just as competitive as any other advertising outlet, with dozens of companies to choose from. Selecting one based only on cost is rarely your best option; as the saying goes, when you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. Company size does not necessarily matter, either. Quality certainly does, especially when shopping for online marketing packages for business. So how do you avoid the hype and find the substance, so you can get the most for your money? Make these five practices part of your due diligence.

1. Take guarantees with a grain of salt

Never let wishful thinking override your common sense. As a businessperson, you know that all business involves calculated risk. It makes no sense for an SEO company to make guarantees, any more than it does for a physical trainer or a doctor to do so. They cannot control every variable in the equation, particularly the way you implement their changes and recommendations. If they make ironclad guarantees, then you should suspect the possibility of fraud.

2. Check references

Checking references might seem very 19th century, but references don’t have to be written in longhand on rag paper to count. All but the newest firms should have a list of satisfied customers they can provide upon request in an email. In fact, you should not have to ask for the list; it ought to be easily available on their website. If an SEO candidate does not want to provide you with a customer list, that should be a red flag. Even if you do get a list of happy customers, never just take their word for it. Can you talk to those customers? Call several prove their bona fides, and to see if they really are happy with the candidate SEO firm’s work. How did the provider do? Did they deliver on time and within budget, or even better, complete their work early?

3. Does the provider care more about keywords than your business goals?

When you hire a company to do something as significant as your meeting your SEO needs, they must be willing to do their due diligence in even greater detail than you did your due diligence on them. online marketing in virtual Hong Kong requires a deft touch and a sincere understanding of your business goals—not just a list of keywords or phrases they want to hit a specific number of times on your splash pages or homepage. Significant discussions with you, with detailed study of your needs and the quality of your existing content, will naturally produce the appropriate keywords they need to use in the SEO content they produce for you. Any other approach will likely be hit-and-miss.

4. Has the provider done anything suspect for other customers?

An SEO marketing package should deliver crisp, clean SEO content that plays by the rules, using legitimate techniques to draw customers into your business. Review the website(s) of their existing customers, once you confirm their existence and state of satisfaction. If things still look good, apply a product like SEMRush.com to one or more of those websites to perform a basic audit, checking to see if they have gotten the basics of the website correct. A site may look fine until you realize the SEO specialists have failed to use the best possible keywords and combinations, or their understanding of the company’s business goals seems somewhat off or incomplete—either by mistake or because their work lacks quality. Either way, the effect of their work will be limited.

5. Does the provider use “black hat” techniques?

Review their own websites as well as their customers’. How tightly focused is the copy? Do they key on the appropriate terms for their core business or their customer’s business? Everyone wants their website to appear on the very first page of the search engine results, whether on Google or Baidu, but you only want to get there legitimately. Have they hidden keywords in the code that have nothing to do with the content, but attract a lot of search engine attention—especially ones associated with sexually oriented sites or subjects? Not only is this a dishonest way to acquire traffic, such sites may be illegal in some jurisdictions. In any case, it will not get you customers or conversions. Similarly, do they include hidden links from websites they own or control on their customer websites? If so, that should put them out of the running immediately. So should fake or suspected fake reviews. These are written by paid writers who could care less about the products they write about and are often paid so little money they just say the same thing for each product they “review,” changing only the name. That is worse than useless. If they offer “free reviews” along with the SEO in their proposed Internet marketing package, avoid them altogether.

True Quality, True Integrity

You may be just fine hiring the first plumber or mechanic you find in the local directory, but this will not work for Hong Kong marketing, especially when it comes to the serious business of Search Engine Optimization. Do your homework, focusing on the SEO company’s integrity, willingness to work closely with you, quality of work, and legitimate business practices—practices that meet your own quality standards. If you find yourself don’t understand what they are talking about, it’s worthwhile to take a basic SEO course. Alternatively, look for a custom design internet marketing workshop that suits your needs. This way you get a better understanding what you are getting when you talk to a SEO agency next time.

Good SEO: Worth the Price

Remember, too, that you get what you pay for. Quality work requires decent rates, so bypass the very lowest bidders. Choosing “lowballers” often results in cut corners, boilerplate, poor communication, and terrible results. Take a little time to learn more about your potential SEO providers—and choose quality first, second, and third.

* Originally published as https://www.wlmedia.hk/5-tips-for-choosing-the-right-hk-seo-firm/

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