KPDI Digital Marketing, UX and APP Development https://kpd-i.com/ Mon, 01 May 2023 20:11:23 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://kpd-i.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/cropped-favicon-32x32.png KPDI Digital Marketing, UX and APP Development https://kpd-i.com/ 32 32 Casey Palmer has a list of Black Canadian Influencers https://kpd-i.com/casey-palmer-has-a-list-of-black-canadian-influencers/ Mon, 01 May 2023 16:14:28 +0000 https://kpd-i.com/?p=1175 Casey Palmer has co-compiled a list of more than five hundred Black Canadian bloggers, vloggers, and social media influencers. The Black Canadian Content Creator Directory is a veritable army of independent media makers that can be inspired into action, and their passion can be leveraged and directed toward educational projects or paid sponsorships. Just imagine... Read more »

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Casey Palmer has co-compiled a list of more than five hundred Black Canadian bloggers, vloggers, and social media influencers. The Black Canadian Content Creator Directory is a veritable army of independent media makers that can be inspired into action, and their passion can be leveraged and directed toward educational projects or paid sponsorships. Just imagine how they could help your brand.

Casey Palmer, Black blogger and influencer

Casey keeping up with his grilling discipline on a camping grill – running out of propane for his barbecue won’t stop him!

Casey Palmer is a content creator living in Toronto who shares his fatherhood stories and comments on his journey at Casey Palmer, Canadian Dad. Most readers agree, it’s different. Dad blogs are rare to begin with, and he’s a Black father who comes from a multiracial family. His wife and kids are urban dwellers who seek to thrive in the city rather than flee to the suburbs for bigger homes, quieter streets, and a more compartmentalized life. This means his content is written from the perspective of an inner-city Black dad and that’s pretty unique in the Canadian blog landscape!

Casey Palmer - Black Influencer in TorontoBlack Canadian Content Creator Directory is a list of Black creators across Canada jointly hosted by Casey Palmer of Casey Palmer, Canadian Dad, Kaya Marriott of Comfy Girl with Curls and Sherley Joseph of Chonilla Network who founded the Black Canadian Creators community. It offers the opportunity for Black creators to collaborate with their peers, get connected with brands, and give readers the chance to hear Black Canadian stories straight from the source.

Casey Palmer was courted by our national press and gave quotes and made TV appearances in June 2020 after the death of George Floyd. Meredith MacLeod at CTV News wrote a story with pictures of Casey with his boys and quoted his appearance on CTV’s Your Morning Friday.

Casey Palmer at gas BBQ

The Black Canadian Content Creator Directory is Casey’s way of making Black voices more accessible throughout the year and not just during times of tragedy, or in February (for Black History Month). The collective is not about combating racism per se, it’s more about promoting Black voices, sharing opinions and creating a marketplace of ideas.

Most of Casey’s readers and our own blog readers don’t need to be reminded that anti-Black racism is still prevalent with indications that it’s on the rise. Despite all of our laws and policies promoting equality, persistent factors exist and continue to fuel systemic discrimination. This includes Canada’s education system and labour market, and we can see it manifesting in our justice system, immigration laws, and the property values of houses in majority black neighbourhoods. Unequal opportunities in education in particular have a serious impact on Black Canadians in negative and discriminatory ways. In comparison to other racialized groups, Black youth are less likely to attend post-secondary institutions and earn post-secondary qualifications. Although the socio-economic conditions of Black Canadians may vary according to their gender, region of origin or ancestry and generation status, discrimination and racism still exist and negatively impact Black people in Canada.

Another subtle way that racism and discrimination is perpetrated is through racial microaggressions. Microaggressions are everyday insults, indignities and demeaning messages directed toward Black, Indigenous or other racialized people by white people and they’re disguised as harmless jokes or poor word choices, but they cause stress and promote inequality. Black content creators can pinpoint the ploys and shed light on the perpetrators which is the best way of neutralizing them and forcing them to become more aware of their seemingly harmless words and actions.

Sherley Joseph, creator of Comfy Girl with Curls.

Kaya Marriott, creator of Comfy Girl with Curls

In addition to Casey Palmer, The Black Canadian Creator Directory was co-compiled by Sherley Joseph and Kaya Marriott, creator of Comfy Girl with Curls. She has a large Instagram following and frequently travels across Canada to highlight culturally-relevant activities and brand endeavors. Sherley Joseph is the co-founder of The Chonilla Network, a podcast collective with a variety of categories to make listeners laugh, think and learn.

These three media makers have worked together to compile the names and URLs for over 500 Black Canadian bloggers, vloggers, social media influencers and podcasters. Their work not only showcases the sheer amount of Black talent that exists north of the border; it also helps dispel the myth that Black Canadian creators are more difficult to secure for culturally-specific messaging.

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Free SEO Tools: How We Use Them https://kpd-i.com/best-free-seo-tools-in-2023-and-how-to-use-them/ Wed, 22 Mar 2023 13:50:36 +0000 https://kpd-i.com/?p=1152 We’re living in a Golden Age of SEO Tools as many web monitoring companies give away valuable data for free to secure leads and raise the bar on competitors. Knowing where to get good stuff without paying can boost your SEO abilities and allow you to create more insightful proposals and reports without increasing your... Read more »

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We’re living in a Golden Age of SEO Tools as many web monitoring companies give away valuable data for free to secure leads and raise the bar on competitors. Knowing where to get good stuff without paying can boost your SEO abilities and allow you to create more insightful proposals and reports without increasing your overhead. An inexpensive second opinion is a validator and another way digital agencies can show due diligence.

SEO web monitoring companies

Most of these SEO Tool companies offer users free data, if you can find it.

Giving away free research power alongside a premium service is the Freemium model and it works well in the web-monitoring industry where the product being delivered is data. Offering a robust suite of free auditing services is a status symbol for SEO tool companies. Titans like the brands you see above will say they’re being altruistic by donating their service to small business owners, but really they’re using their complimentary offerings to generate mailing lists, and to appear more venerated, and to crystalize the notion that they’re indispensable at any level.

SEO tech Mowatt Carpet factory

Mowat Carpet Factory on a snowy February day in Toronto. Constructed in the 1890’s, this complex is a hotbed of ecommerce businesses today and SE monitoring companies have offices and make in-person sales calls. 

Free SEO tools we actually use at KPDI

When composing this list of free SEO tools, we debated whether to list them alphabetically, or by their function, or by the order in which they appear in reports and proposals. In the end, we decided to rank them by their age and by their own glory with the oldest and most glorious placed at the top of the list.

MOZ is an old motorcycle that leaks oil on the floor

MOZ is an old motorcycle which leaks oil but it’s also the best known and most trusted Domain Authority measuring stick in our trade, much like Harley Davidson. It’s dominant today because it’s old and free.

MOZ is a respected Domain Authority Measuring Stick

MOZ link explorer, SEO tool

Moz was founded by Rand Fishkin and Gillian Muessig in 2004 which makes it the oldest and most venerated company on our list. It was called SEOmoz originally and started life as a blog and online community where some of the world’s first SEO experts shared their research and ideas.

Open Site Explorer was their groundbreaking website SEO auditing tool which they introduced by giving it away for free in 2008. Right from the beginning their efforts centered on backlinks and finding link-building opportunities and they pioneered the idea of using their equipment to discover potentially damaging, rank-impacting toxic links. OSE had a meter for toxicity. In April 2018, all that came to an end when MOZ dropped Open Site Explorer and introduced a more refined Link Explorer with a new dataset and more advanced AI modeling, apparently.

MOZ Domain Authority SEO measurement for KPDI digital agencyAbove is how MOZ appears in our proposals and reports. We don’t pay for this. We use a simple graphics program to clean a screengrab and cut away all the numbers that have no relevance. Then we add the current date and save it so it can be used later as a benchmark to chart growth. There’s only one number worth noting, and that’s the Domain Authority score (and also Page Authority score if checking a sub URL). MOZ is the most well known and well respected domain authority measuring stick primarily because it’s so old and famous, but also because it’s essentially free.

How to get MOZ Link Explorer for free?

The best way to get MOZ Link Explorer for free is to ignore all the prompts on their website and navigate directly to MOZ.com/link-explorer by typing that in the address bar. Register for site membership and use the Create Account option with email and password. Once you’ve verified your email, ignore all the messaging and navigate directly back to the Link Explorer page again. MOZ gives each member (unpaid, but registered user) ten free searches every thirty days.

SpyFu logo, a free SEO tool provider

SpyFu’s Kombat Visualization Tool is Free

Founded in 2005, SpyFu has been a trusted intelligence gathering tool for SEO for eighteen years. In our collective memories, their SEO Kombat visualization tool has always been a Freemium giveaway.  The pretty pictures can be made for nothing (without even logging in), but obtaining complete lists of related keywords requires a membership.

Anyone can come along and type in their domain URL, and add two competitors’ URLs, and the program will make this compelling graphic which shows a combined SE rankings battlefield. Here is our agency alongside two slightly larger firms which have their offices in the Mowat Carpet Factory. The common keywords are mostly digital agency related search terms.

Kombat is a free SEO tool by Spyfu

Kombat battlefield graphics are an exciting insertion to SEO proposals especially if the potential client is locked in a close race with competitors. This informative graphic is more than just a pretty picture. The different sections show webmasters where they need to take action to increase the size of their presence relative to the other businesses. Unpaid users can click on the tabs and see lists of keyword search terms, but to get the full package requires a paid subscription. Unregistered users can still track the most common keywords, and note their strengths and weaknesses. Their strengths are searches where they are unrivalled, and their weaknesses are the areas where competitors’ alone appear for popular queries.

SEO Spyglass logo

SEO Spyglass First Appeared as an Espionage Tool

In 2006, Aleh Barysevich and Yuri Bitno debuted SEO Spyglass as a competition espionage tool and it has since evolved into an increasingly powerful incoming link checker. At the time of this writing, their database has grown to 2.7 trillion links from 7.1 billion web pages and a great portion are crawled daily.

In addition to using MOZ Link Explorer, we also use Ahrefs com’s backlink-checker because it’s also free (for all the same reasons that have already been discussed), but what Ahrefs offers for free is far inferior to SEO Spyglass in terms of its depth and scope and because of how the data appears out-of-order in Ahrefs. To be clear, Ahrefs is an industry giant and uses their own proprietary Domain Rating score which they show to users as DR Rating, but they now keep hidden the UR or Page Rating score which is the metric they actually use to rank the links on display in the Freemium offering. The resulting array appears unsorted.

SEO SpyGlass by contrast makes pages of data available and allows users to index their research any way they desire. The company boasts they can detect and measure new incoming links faster than all other backlink checkers. Getting the service requires a download, but is otherwise free.

Above, in the bottom left corner is the ubiquitous upgrade button. SEO Spyglass has further optimized their conversion rate by adding a 20% discount if the user upgrades within the first twenty-four hours. Presumably, their thinking is the average user will be so impressed with these free offerings that they’ll rush to buy a service package to discover what else could be provided. If not accepted today, what will be offered tomorrow?

In the example above, the free tool also tells us that our own KPDI agency website has terrific incoming links stemming from the live events and industry talks we hosted years ago. Eventbrite invitations and social media reactions top our list, but these are nofollow links. The blogs and editorial media documenting those events is what has boosted our reputation and added to our trust score, and that’s how we’ve achieved our MOZ 25 Domain Authority rating.

SEObility’s SEO Checker is a Secret Free Tool

SEObility.net debuted on Oct 1, 2013. It was born in what was then a more crowded website auditing service marketplace and the heavy competition informed their offering. They maxed out their On-Page SEO error checking efforts and put as much as they could in a single report. The idea could have been to put everything on one page and thus not require the user to switch about to get this or that type of information, and that’s how it works today.

SEObility grew really fast by offering such a robust free service and eventually they removed all prompts from the homepage to their free SEOCheck service page, and then they limited the amount of audits an unpaid user could conduct; it’s currently three checks every 24hrs. The company was acquired on Sep 1, 2022 by saas.group for an undisclosed amount. We’ve been waiting for SEObility’s free tool to disappear entirely, but it lives on, hidden on the back of their website with no clear navigation to the page. Its a secret.

SEObility is a good education tool that an SEO practitioner can use to show a prospective client where they could easily make changes and better conform to search engine guidelines. Like all of the free ‘website graders’, we take exception to how they score a page, but regardless they scrape up a lot of information which makes it easier to plan other strategic fixes and recombobulations.

Use LetterCount to Compose Snappy Meta Descriptions

Lastly, we use a free tool called Letter Count to compose 156 character meta descriptions. We like this handy service better than Yoast, which is not on all of our clients’ CMS dashboards, and other services which use colors to indicate the correct length. We find it easier to compose meta descriptions here and we make spreadsheets and do whole websites at once. We pride ourselves on Meta Description structure (which is X + A, B, C.) and we’ve proven our style is effective by measuring associated click through rates.

In preparing our SEO content marketing strategies, and our monthly reports to measure our efforts, the experts at KPDI use an arsenal of digital weapons which includes both paid services and free SEO tools. We predominantly employ SEMrush ranking data to tell stories and draw insights and find opportunities in clients’ search landscapes. But we also have a paid Screaming Frog account and use Bright Local for N.A.P. citation tracking.

Our monthly reports typically open on Google Analytics – Audience Overview followed by the Traffic Acquisition Overview. SEMrush position tracking data is presented in a table wherein we pinpoint the search terms that are doing the most work. After that, we can play jazz with it. Depending on our passion for the plan, or how much convincing might be required to elicit a sale or contract renewal, our SEO team may use any one of five free services to add more data to our documents.

Believe in SEO

Would you like to see an artful combination of paid and free website auditing tools displaying your business data? What stories could we tell about your operation and your struggle for market share? Perhaps one of these free services will better inform your thinking and inspire a content marketing campaign which doubles your online business presence and the findability of your most profitable goods and services.  Contact us today.

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Misconceptions About SEO Marketing https://kpd-i.com/misconceptions-about-seo-marketing/ Mon, 13 Mar 2023 20:57:14 +0000 https://kpd-i.com/?p=1145 Anyone combing through Toronto’s digital agency landscape will probably encounter companies with service pages offering SEO Marketing. But if readers drill down on the supporting material, or send emails to ask follow-ups, they’ll likely find the firm does both SEO and content marketing but doesn’t merge them with any strategic vision. Most agencies lack the... Read more »

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Anyone combing through Toronto’s digital agency landscape will probably encounter companies with service pages offering SEO Marketing. But if readers drill down on the supporting material, or send emails to ask follow-ups, they’ll likely find the firm does both SEO and content marketing but doesn’t merge them with any strategic vision. Most agencies lack the passion (for their clients’ businesses) and the experience required to marry these concepts and leverage their power to raise SE rankings.

SEO marketing

Mayfair Clubs hosted Fitness Day. Seventy females aged 18 – 20 competed to be awarded the Most Athletic title and win a straight shot to the Finals in the main competition. The challenge became the basis for engaging web storytelling which helped push Mayfair Clubs Canada to the #1 spot on Google for ‘swim program’.

SEO Marketing Combines Search Engine Optimization with Content Marketing to do High Quality Link Building

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves a range of techniques designed to make a website more attractive to Google, Bing, and Yahoo with the goal of achieving higher organic rankings for related search terms. These techniques include rewriting web content, improving page titles and headers, shrinking pictures and straightening margins, and the most difficult task is fostering high quality incoming links from respectable third party domains. This is where SEO marketing is best deployed.

SEO link building through storytelling is the process of acquiring ‘backlinks’ to a website by creating engaging content that either 1) inspires other websites to create incoming links as they reference the material , or 2) can be ‘guest-posted’ or written and submitted as editorial for niche magazines or blogs complete with links to the client site. This is passive link building and active link building respectively, and they’re the best ways to raise domain authority as measured by MOZ’s Link Explorer platform which is the oldest most well known measuring stick in the industry.

How Does SEO Marketing Work?

The process begins when marketers compose a unique story or brand message the business would like to share with a particular audience. The text could relate a personal experience (testimonial), or offer an interesting anecdote (exclusive reporting), or a thought-provoking idea related to their day to day operations, or to their industry as a whole (expert opinion).

A good example of effective SEO marketing is present on this blog and part of KPDI’s business legacy. In 2017, three years before Covid-19 forever changed the Search for Miss World Canada, KPDI arranged to have the pageanters experience the show’s mandated Fitness Day regime at Mayfair Clubs Canada’s flagship Lakeshore Blvd. location in downtown Toronto. All the media made that day would link to the website’s swimming pool page. This was done to help the gym’s website rank higher for swim program and other searches related to indoor swimming in Toronto, and also to highlight the clients’ saltwater swimming pools which are upscale and rare in the marketplace.

Mayfair Clubs, Miss World Canada 2017 #SaltwaterSelfie Story

#SaltwaterSelfie participants were asked to swim to the bottom of the pool and pose for a submersible camera while wearing a silver crown, and although that sounds easy enough, it’s hard to be graceful underwater. Many of these people told us later this challenge was their favourite part of Fitness Day, and one of the highlights of the week.

By promoting the #SaltwaterSelfie hashtag we made it very easy to report on the initiative. Anyone who searches #SaltwaterSelfie on Google today will find all manner of business blogs, influencer updates and Flickr images related to activities held that day, and you can still find some of the swims and selfies taken by the competitors.

SEO marketing for Mayfair clubs

Each contestant was a potent social media marketer inspired to make Mayfair Clubs brand media and help propel their own claim to the Miss World crown.

There is a Method for Making SEO Marketing

selfie at Marketing SEO

Jennifer Taylor SEO marketing saltwater swimming pools for Mayfair Clubs Lakeshore.

The process begins by making Marque Media. The best pictures and text are arranged under the most clickable headline and the piece is published in a place where it’s sure to get the most attention. Secondary media could comment on this primary post, link-referencing the premium article and the client’s site. Tumblr and Pinterest are used to widen the funnel.

Making that first piece of marque media means taking the time to write a good story that will earn more media because of its high quality. Experienced SEO marketers will relate how they must overcome three separate gatekeepers for every article they publish. They must first please the client who is paying for everything, and then satisfy the publisher (with cash) who is risking his reputation, and then after publishing, they’ll use social media to drive readership and increase the media’s importance. The readership is the third ‘gate’ because users must find the document useful, or else the link is useless.

The Saltwater Selfie story had three premium publishers originally, but only one magazine story can be found five years later, while the Flickr pictures, sponsor blogs and influencer updates which would rightly be described as secondary and tertiary media are still present. It could be the magazines conveniently misplaced this sponsored content as the pageant story at the heart of the initiative is limiting.

Regardless of the content, layout or formats, the same rules apply; once the marketers have a compelling idea, the task is to make lengthy rich media documents that keep readers on page for five minutes or more. Authors should try to create documents that other writers will want to link to because the stats, quotes and ideation present could somehow be used in their content. Veteran storytellers plant their best stuff in the busiest destinations.

Marque media can also be published on the businesses’ own website blog if the SEO marketers are pursuing a passive link-building strategy whereby they hope other publishers will link-in to their content. The key is to make sticky-thoughts which others will find engaging and shareable. This could take many forms such as newsy articles filled with quotes, or humorous cartoons, or photos, or statistics, YouTube videos, infographics, or downloadable PDFs and podcasts. Effective marketers frequently partner with other websites and use social media influencers to amplify their message and outreach.

SEO marketing for Mayfair clubs saltwater selfie campaign

Google #SaltwaterSelfie to see all the media that was made during the annual Search for Miss World Canada Fitness Day in support of the ‘swim program’ at Mayfair Clubs Lakeshore in Toronto.

The key to effective link building is the quality of the story and the manner used to create the content. The pieces must be interesting and relevant to the audience but also provide enough value that other publishers will want to link-in to sample or share the tale with their readers. This could be because the post is filled with useful information, or is highly entertaining or inspirational.

The goal of SEO marketing is to increase the visibility of a website in search engine results and garner more traffic for the site which should lead to more sales.

By creating high-quality backlinks through storytelling, either actively or passively, marketers improve their client’s domain authority and credibility which results in higher search engine rankings. Additionally, by creating content that resonates with a particular audience, the host businesses establish themselves as thought leaders in that space which lures more potential customers from other touch points in the marketing funnel.

Does your enterprise have an especially shareable story? Please contact us for more information and we’ll send along our publishers’ list so you can find the blogs and magazines that best match your business. Receive a free website SEO audit and complimentary keyword research for your webpages. Let’s work together to increase your firm’s online findability using SEO marketing.

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3 Reasons Why Buffalo NY is America’s Fastest Growing Tech Hub https://kpd-i.com/three-reasons-why-buffalo-ny-is-americas-fastest-growing-tech-hub/ Wed, 08 Feb 2023 23:52:46 +0000 https://kpd-i.com/?p=1085 Business leaders, captains of industry and tech startups on the hunt for growth might consider placing their company’s headquarters in Buffalo, New York. The historic port is one of the best cities in North America to build a corporate presence. It’s an up and coming technology hotspot, or tech hub, which means there’s a thriving... Read more »

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Business leaders, captains of industry and tech startups on the hunt for growth might consider placing their company’s headquarters in Buffalo, New York.

Buffalo, NY, aerial view, Lake Erie, motorway

Buffalo NY, with its many motorways and harbor access to Lake Erie.

The historic port is one of the best cities in North America to build a corporate presence. It’s an up and coming technology hotspot, or tech hub, which means there’s a thriving commercial ecosystem that’s well stocked with skilled staff, smart ideas, and the steady flow of opportunities to stimulate growth.

Why is Buffalo NY the fastest growing Tech Hub in the United States?

Buffalo is an increasingly important commercial center and is growing faster than Boston, and the Bay Area in San Francisco, and every other tech hub in the USA. Three points listed below encompass a lot of other criteria as we try to understand how and why the boom happening.

  1. 1. Buffalo has an undervalued and yet increasingly skilled workforce.
  2. 2. Buffalo has excellent business resources and superb physical infrastructure.
  3. 3. The city has a centuries-old legacy of hard work, innovation, and offers a high quality of life.

 

Downtown Buffalo

Main street Buffalo NY on the tramway, facing downtown, heading to work in the morning.

What is a Tech Hub?

Tech hubs are cities or regions where technology companies and especially start-ups cluster together to become new economic infrastructure. Such developments usually require years to germinate and grow but the rewards thereafter are enormous. A successful tech hub can be measured by the number of companies that have spawned because of its existence, and any new products they’ve developed. A tech hub is a huge incubator where ideas are more rapidly developed and streamlined for the market. It’s like gathering everyone needed to bring a concept to reality and putting them all in the same place. Tech hubs educate and encourage new talent and foster new ways of thinking.

  1. 1. Buffalo’s increasingly skilled workforce is undervalued in the marketplace.

Buffalo is the second-largest city in the State of New York and the seat of government in Erie County. It’s a once-busy port on Lake Erie at the head of the Niagara River near the United States border with Canada and generally speaking, the region has always been productive. In November of 2022, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that the area is to be awarded $25 million from the federal Build Back Better Challenge, the U.S. Economic Development Administration’s marquee program under the American Rescue Plan.

Northland Campus, Buffalo Manufacturing

Buffalo Manufacturing Works – Small & Medium Sized Manufacturer Technology Program

The grant will be used to fund the Small & Medium Sized Manufacturer Technology Program at the Buffalo Manufacturing Works where it’s hoped it will stimulate a cycle of growth and innovation and see the implementation of advanced automation in the region. Buffalo Manufacturing Works will get the ball rolling by building an Industry 4.0 ecosystem as part of the arrangement.

Secondly, the money will fund the Goodskills Career Builder, a program to expand manufacturing career training, and third on the list is Northland Corridor Redevelopment fund which will begin to restore the remaining buildings on the Buffalo Manufacturing Works campus to meet an increased demand for advanced manufacturing staff.

Senator Chuck Schumer gives Buffalo the good news - funding.

Senator Chuck Schumer shares an optimistic view of the future of Buffalo, NY.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is quoted saying how he hopes the money will “boost our tech workforce, revamp our manufacturing, and breathe new life into the Queen City’s legacy as an industrial powerhouse as we move into the 21st century.”

Schumer also helped create the Chips and Science Law, a $10 billion regional tech hub grant disbursement program which will give funding to twenty regions around the country that are selected as tech hubs. Officials with Schumer’s office say Western New York is well placed to compete for a spot on the list after successfully getting the $25 million in Build Back Better funds.

2. Buffalo has good business resources and physical infrastructure.

SmartAsset, a website devoted to helping people make better financial decisions listed Buffalo NY as a Top 10 City for Career Opportunities because the port city has old money and good financial services empowering eager investors. There’s already some world biotech research facilities, sports science businesses, and many educational institutions, some of which are actively driving tech research in public-private partnerships.

Half-a-dozen post-secondary schools, both universities and colleges are located inside Buffalo with even more situated nearby in the surrounding area. There’s D’Youville University, Niagara University, Medaille University, and the University at Buffalo. There’s Canisius College, Bryant & Stratton College, Trocaire College, Villa Maria College and SUNY Buffalo State College. Additionally, Buffalo is close to Daemen University in Amherst, and Hilbert College in Hamburg, NY.

z80 incubator logo, Buffalo NY

In addition to these institutions there are also some famous business incubators in Buffalo, including 43north on the rise, and Z80 incubator labs.
Both groups provide mentorship and workshops with industry experts and they tend to help life-science, SaaS, and green tech companies.

Anyone seeking affordable office space in the city will be pleasantly surprised with what’s on offer. There are many commercial properties available and homes for workers are easily secured. It was for these reasons Realtor.com named Buffalo NY as the Numero Uno Millennial Homebuyer Market in America in 2022.

The wealth of amenities is due to actions the city managers took a decade earlier. Back in 2012, they formed the Buffalo Building Reuse Project (BBRP) in a response to an oversupply of office space. Most of the empty buildings were class B and C structures with limited potential due to their floor plans, outdated physical systems, and inferior public infrastructure throughout the city. For these reasons and because of a general dearth of opportunities, the rents were among the lowest in the country. One of the key recommendations emerging from the BBRP was the implementation of a ‘downtown master plan’ for redeveloping public infrastructure and amenities. Eleven years later there have been many successful building projects and modernizations, and yet the average leasing cost for office space in Buffalo remains competitive at $17.25 per square foot. Certain other factors such as location, age of building, and lease options can however, raise the fees.

main street Buffalo in 1948

Downtown Buffalo NY, 1958 – The city grew until the trucking industry made the Erie Canal obsolete.

3. Buffalo has a centuries’ old legacy of hard work and innovation.

In the 1890’s, Buffalo NY was called the Queen City because it was the largest and most prosperous population center on the Great Lakes. During World War I, it was the second largest trade port in the northern United States and exported more goods than Chicago and Cleveland combined. Anyone familiar with Buffalo’s economic history will point to the diminished use of the Erie Canal as the reason for the port’s decline. Fast forward seventy-five years and the area still has heavy industry, but now the economy is primarily driven by light manufacturing, high technology, and service-oriented private sector companies. And it’s booming again.

Entrepreneur magazine named Buffalo as the second busiest start-up ecosystem in the United States.  Its success is due to the reasons listed above, and its location. Buffalo is handy because it’s so close to so many other US population centers like Cleveland, Detroit, Columbus, Indianapolis, Manhattan, Boston, and Philadelphia. Furthermore, it provides easy access to the Canadian market and is less than an hour from Toronto, which happens to be North America’s fastest growing tech hub.

Being present and participating in a thriving tech hub has ancillary rewards. Buffalo based companies fuel a thriving commercial ecosystem that energizes their businesses in a synergistic environment in which they help the world’s most nimble corporations refine the tools of tomorrow.

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SEO Tips for Writing High Traffic Magazine Articles https://kpd-i.com/seo-tips-for-writing-high-traffic-magazine-articles/ https://kpd-i.com/seo-tips-for-writing-high-traffic-magazine-articles/#comments Wed, 01 Feb 2023 21:37:20 +0000 https://kpd-i.com/?p=1089 Experienced writers with over a hundred pieces of published content will probably have one article that outperforms all others. Throw spaghetti at the wall and some of it will stick. But once you’ve learned what works you don’t need to toss wet noodles around anymore. You can be more strategic with your content marketing. Publishing... Read more »

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Experienced writers with over a hundred pieces of published content will probably have one article that outperforms all others. Throw spaghetti at the wall and some of it will stick. But once you’ve learned what works you don’t need to toss wet noodles around anymore. You can be more strategic with your content marketing.

artist creates content in Toronto

Publishing a story that becomes a busy webpage has the added bonus of teaching the author what worked so they can replicate their success in the future. Their Google Analytics’ data will have clues to help them pinpoint what caused the content to rank so well in search engines?

Very often the answer boils down to one word – usability. The SEO Department at KPDI shares these tips to help writers craft viral content.

What characterizes a successful magazine article?

Some of the basic tenants and common denominators of popular content include,

  1. 1) Title tag that’s curiously intriguing but contains the query most readers will search to find the piece.
  2. 2) Sub headers that are equally compelling but also accurately reflect the information being offered.
  3. 3) Original images and how they’re promoted after the article is published can garner more readers.
  4. 4) Other attractions like data-rich charts, quotes, and video embeds can keep readers occupied a few minutes longer than competitors’ web pages on the same subject.
  5. 5) Reader’s behaviour should be enthusiastic. Top ranked articles have lots of comments and interactivity. Whatever actions the readers take while engaging with the page and how they leave the web page are probably the most important factors.

Search engines appreciate original pictures and informative header in attractive layouts, but the real secret is human usability. If readers spend more time and take more actions consuming your content than other submissions on the same subject, than your offering will soon rank higher and be found for more and better queries. Success begets success. Once an article is a top ranked ‘solution’ on pg1 of Google for a popular query, it’s hard to dislodge because it becomes a known quantity with lots of positive usability data attributing to its presence..

After twenty years of serving up high quality search results, Google knows what it’s doing and so it’s no longer possible to exploit loopholes with anything except good content. Keyword stuffing, comment spam, and link farming to make false domain authority are Black Hat tactics that will fail and cost the publisher their time, money and reputation. Making synthetic social media accreditations (10,000 fake Twitter users will tweet a link to your article), or cloaking (a bait & switch) by using sneaky redirects will not succeed. The takeaway is that if the article is terrible, there isn’t much anyone can do to increase its performance except by rewriting and improving the offering. Content was King, twenty years ago, but now the internet is so saturated with information on every subject it’s usability that reigns supreme.

How does Google measure Usability?

Once the search engine’s cache bots and corresponding central processor have determined your article’s focus, another system checks to see if your writing pleases anyone searching for the proferred information. To make this determination, Google applies the hard test of usability. It asks, does the content satisfy search queries? Which queries? Three top factors Google considers when determining a page’s usability are,

Time-on-Page is core to user experience. Any webmaster can view their user’s behaviour in their monthly Google Analytics report to determine if the article is being read and how well its being digested. If the users’ time on page is less than thirty-seconds, it’s unlikely they are consuming much of the content. Good articles should keep readers on the page for five minutes or more, but then what?

Pages per Visit tells Google if the web visitor has taken any other action on the magazine’s website, and whether they found any other page as exciting. Did they leave a comment? Watch a video? Download a PDF? Sign-up for an email newsletter? Or visit any other page? Or did they simply come back to the search engine and continue their hunt for information? This data is reflected in the Behaviour section of Google Analytics as the average Pages-per-Visit score. SEO practitioners like to see any number above 1.33 pages per visit.

Bounce Rate is a real acid test in our frenetic society. Users are finicky and will know if what they’re seeking is available on the page in a few seconds. If they leave in a hurry without taking any actions, it’s considered a Bounce, and this is what Google most hopes to avoid. The search giant likes to satisfy users quickly and save people from endlessly querying. The rate at which visitors leave your website unsatisfied is measured out of 100 and listed as a percentage Bounce Rate. If your content has greater than eighty percent Bounce Rate, it’s unlikely it will rank on pg1 of Google for popular queries unless all your competitors are also serving up equally repellant material.

Conversion rate, as a Key Performance Indicator is not something magazine authors are usually forced to consider, but it’s the primary factor in Google’s calculations regarding the quality of the solution being offered. Seeking the best answer to trending queries is what Google does in its spare time. There exists a well-known sub-routine wherein the search giant promotes and then measures pages.

Some SEO agencies call this test period The Ride. Webmasters with lots of content may notice readership spike on stories they have recently improved and promoted in social media. They are thrilled and want to believe their web improvements were successful, only to find, ten days later, the piece has returned to its regular spot and accrues the same amount of readers as before the work. What happened? The content was probably given The Ride and after being promoted, and tested, it failed to outperform the other contenders and was summarily returned to its usual habitat.

Google gives sites The Ride as part of its own mandate to find and serve the best solutions to queries. The Ride has caused many web marketing agencies to dispense premature high-fives, only to have their SEO heroes hang their heads in shame later that same month.

All tactics employed to increase the success of published material in search engines can be boiled down to two fundamental considerations; raising human satisfaction with the text, or, making it easier for Google to categorize and quantify the content. Doing both is optimal.

Adding a proper Meta Description is a good example of doing both; composing a perfect 156-character synopsis for an article and listing all the juicy parts will attract more potential readers when displayed in search engines, and thus beget more data which could show Google that the article has a higher usability score and is therefore a better solution than competitors’ content.

Focus on Delivering Solutions to Problems

In our modern age, nobody has time to mess around, and both humans and cache bots respect articles that state their intentions earlier in the text and deliver on their promises. Inside the document, each paragraph or section should also have a defined purpose. Glossy magazine commentaries that once tried to impart an emotion, or a human experience, must now dispense more practical information like original quotes, data charts and price guides – expert considerations related to people, places, and products. Furthermore, writers should hint at all this rare and special information in the subtitles.

Focusing content usually means adding specific words – so for example, an article for an outdoors magazine entitled Fishing the Trent would attract more readers by adding for Muskellunge and a better geographic identifier like Stirling, Ontario. The new title: Fishing for Musky in the Trent River near Stirling, would exponentially broaden the search market. Cute titles carry no favor at all; in the old days that same piece might have been styled, Sunny Days on the Trent and be more experience-driven, but that headline would get no traffic from search engines as few people hunt online for sunny days.

Beyond the article’s main focus, writers should ask, what nuances are probably also popular queries? One good and free way to see what people are asking is to simply search popular keywords in Google followed by a question mark. Try it. Search: Fishing for Musky?  And scroll down to the People also ask featured content window on Google:

People also ask helps the article write itself. The questions posed here can shape the piece with regards to the sport and the public’s appetite for details. The writer is
made aware of a demand for information about the bait required, and the boat’s placement in the river, and proper fishing techniques. Each of these facets will become the focus of a
paragraph with a sub header which addresses the specific information. To lengthen the piece, and thereby become an authority on the subject, repeat the inspirational search with a question
mark behind Trent River, Stirling, and musky baits in order to find out what people most ask with regards to those sub topics.

Structure content with a clear beginning, middle, and end.

To write satisfying and highly digestible content, writers should stick to the essay structure they learned in high school. This means that every article should have,

  1. 1. Introduction to the topic, problem, or intriguing scenario.
  2. 2. Body text where solutions are presented under sub headers.
  3. 3. Conclusion where solutions are summarized.

A good exercise for writers to perform before they begin an editorial is to record in a few sentences, the contents of all three sections. This is essentially the third phase because it becomes the summary of the article. Doing this helps writers craft a structured and readable document from inception.

Proper headings help humans navigate text and help robots categorize the content so they can serve it up as a possible solution to a user query in the future. Writing for humans and robots requires real skill because the author must keep human readers interested while dressing in keywords related to popular search queries in the article’s sub-headers and in ALT text behind the photos.

Good copywriters know that headers have weight, and they respect header hierarchies; the h1 headline is always followed by an h2 sub header, and never an h3 or h4 (check the pop-up as poorly formatted messages can break the header hierarchy). The headers should descend naturally. because any jumps confuse the cache bot scraping information and prioritizing data. Some web designers erroneously lay out pages aesthetically, using h2’s wantonly because of their size and shape, but this destroys the hierarchy being presented and the result is that readers and bots become confused and Google will seek alternative sources.

Spray painter

Employ transition words like first, and finally.

Good copywriters employ well-known transition words and clauses which are slightly cliché but that aspect goes unnoticed because they work to help readers navigate the text. Common signals like, ‘first of all’; ‘secondly’ and ‘finally’ and also words like ‘however’, ‘similarly’ and ‘for example,’ give clear signals to readers where they are in the grand scheme of things. Users expect a conclusion to follow words like ‘therefore’, or ‘in summary’. Transition words help structure text. But they don’t help robots per say. They do however increase human satisfaction, and that leads to longer read-times which begets a higher usability score.

Stuffing the body copy of your document with your SEO focus words makes the article harder to read and lowers usability which hurts search engine rankings. Do not deploy the focus keyword in every other sentence. One of the ways that Google contextually processes text is by recognizing synonyms and other words that are related to the subject. That’s why writers should use synonyms and related terms throughout the copy while reserving the best and most searched words for the title and sub headers. Synonyms are relatively easy to generate, but selecting the right focus is more challenging.

Expert articles are usually longer than readers expect

To be considered the authority on any subject requires a minimum twelve-hundred words. Google likes longer articles but there must be breaks and sub headers because big blocks of text will discourage time-sensitive readers. Use pictures and headers and block quotes to break up the presentation. Academic writers should study a sports’ writers approach and learn how to compose short sentences to make clear impactful writing. If creating sponsored content with an eye on click-through-rate, put the paid links near related pictures at the top of the document.

To lengthen articles, explore the nuances of a subject without diluting the focus. Crafting longer articles could mean changing the title to be more accommodating. Fishing the Trent for Musky might need to be surgically altered to include Pike in order to add another six hundred words. The takeaway is that success is measured by keeping readers on page for more than five minutes.

If the magazine has already published content on the same topic as your current article, it’s helpful to root out and link to the older document and additionally, to go into that aged content and add a link to your new piece. This cross-connection sends a strong signal to Google that the latest submission is part of a content community which is authoritative. Plus it shares page authority which begets a higher overall domain authority score. SEO practitioners call the practice Internal Linking, and both the magazine’s readers and Google will appreciate the extra effort. The search giant likes it because it helps them manage content and understand the relationship between different subjects.

Hint at archetypal stories to pique human interest.

Sometimes SEO is about sparking human interest to compel visitors to read everything to the end. This is done by adding some spicy notes and channeling the power of Story. Human brains need stories like our bodies need food and water. Dry stock reports benefit from a hint of conflict, or a rags-to-riches beat, or suggestions of a fall from grace, or a boy-meets-girl corporate merger. The universal appeal of a good archetypal narrative never dies, and curious readers will slough through all manner of data-rich text to learn if the oppressed get vengeance, or if s lonely man wins love, or the fate of the monster. Even the driest content can benefit from a hint of Story, and this is where real writers shine.

To report Acme’s annual revenue as X is okay, but to say they’re beating Y and losing to Z, makes the information far more interesting, and possibly more useful. A previously overlooked destination that’s now thriving is more worthy of press than a plain jane commercial success without any real context. Don’t ignore the rags-to-riches story lying just under the surface. Readers will consume everything while looking for more clues to better understand the root-myth. Knowing and teasing readers with classic set-ups will engender more satisfaction in the payoff.

Promotion is critical for breathing life into valuable content.

Publishing is not the end of the job. Social media is more than just a catalyst for getting readers and gathering data (hopefully positive). Social signals validate content in terms of its authenticity and usefulness. If several well-known social entities retweet, like, and share the URL to your article, it signals Google that the content has real value for that audience.

YouTube is especially good at adding another layer of information to text documents. Linking from the descriptions is fine but embedding videos transforms contextual presentations into rich media. The videos usability is added to the page score.

Good web writers deliver solutions in well-conceived, easy digested packages with original images and which are longer than competitor’s offerings and which they promote afterwards.

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Four Reasons Why Toronto is North America’s Fastest Growing Tech Hub https://kpd-i.com/four-reasons-why-toronto-is-north-americas-fastest-growing-tech-hub/ Tue, 07 Feb 2023 11:21:29 +0000 https://kpd-i.com/?p=1081 InvestOntario got our attention in November 2022 when they published an article entitled, Toronto ranked as North America’s fastest growing tech market. The piece is a real eye-opener because it shares real estate data collected by CBRE alongside insightful analysis from Ontario’s foremost commercial leasing agency. The writers at InvestOntario harnessed their information and compared... Read more »

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InvestOntario got our attention in November 2022 when they published an article entitled, Toronto ranked as North America’s fastest growing tech market. The piece is a real eye-opener because it shares real estate data collected by CBRE alongside insightful analysis from Ontario’s foremost commercial leasing agency. The writers at InvestOntario harnessed their information and compared their data to other city’s property leasing volumes in order to conclude that Toronto is North America’s fastest growing tech hub.

Toronto skyline with paddleboarders in the harbour

Paddleboarders in the harbour enjoy a warm summer night in Toronto.

Going beyond the data collected by CBRE, we wondered why Toronto is the preferred home base for so many emerging tech start-ups in Canada.

Four Reasons Why Toronto is North America’s Fastest Growing Tech Hub

  1. 1. Staffing – Toronto is a magnet for tech talent gathered from all over the world.
  2. 2. Schools – Our universities cultivate the germs of innovation and produce skilled workers.
  3. 3. Legislation – We have favorable laws, good immigration policies, fair taxes, and access to capital.
  4. 4. Community – The city has mentors, amplifiers, and incubators and a community that supports start-ups by adopting their applications and using their goods and services wherever possible.

According to CBRE’s 2021 Scoring Tech Talent, Toronto saw the most absolute growth in tech positions in 2021, adding 88,900 full time jobs. In that year, the city’s advance was greater than the similar sector growth in New York, Seattle, and Boston combined. Why?

InvestOntario believes our province has key advantages which make us a magnet for skilled workers. Canada’s immigration laws, as an example, aid in the arrival of skilled and diverse technicians from around the world, and in their reporting, Toronto has high quality employees available at a fraction of the cost of other markets. Comparable tech talent in San Francisco is double the price. Staffing in Toronto costs approximately 50% less than either New York City or Seattle. Our city is less expensive to do business in other ways too and has other advantages.

What is a Tech Hub?

Tech hubs are cities or regions where technology companies and especially start-ups cluster together to become new economic infrastructure. Such development usually takes years to foster but the rewards are increased prosperity for everyone in the area. The success of a tech hub is often measured by the number of products that have been developed, or the number of successful companies that have spawned because of its existence. A tech hub is a giant incubator where ideas are more rapidly developed, and the resulting product development is more streamlined. It’s like gathering everyone needed to bring an idea from concept to reality and putting them in the same neighbourhood. Tech hubs educate and encourage new talent and foster new ways of thinking. They provide a space where service businesses can be accelerated and in turn, bring wealth to the community.

Mowat Carpet factory in Toronto

The Mowat Carpet Factory in Toronto sits at the heart of the nation’s largest Tech Hub.

Toronto has an Abundance of Skilled Tech Staff

Talent availability and cost are both important factors in business success, especially when research and development are required to stay competitive. HR departments across the USA cast wistful eyes at Canada’s immigration policies and wish they had similar laws and means of attracting tech workers as easily as our firms. Canada’s open-door immigration policy (by comparison) and easy access for tech workers is one of the many reasons retail giant Amazon has recently announced it will hire 1,800 new corporate and tech employees in Canada in 2023 to support its AWS, Alexa, Amazon advertising, and boost their retail operations and technology teams.

Nearly fifty percent of Toronto’s residents were born outside the country, according to Stats Canada and the city’s own data. A main path for skilled tech workers to gain permanent residency in Canada is the Global Talent Stream (GTS) of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) under which Canadian work permits and visa applications are processed within two weeks. The result is a diverse workforce where a black owned tech firm like KPDI is not at all unusual and melts into a cosmopolitan marketplace.

Centers of Higher Learning – Tech Hubs Require Tech Schools

MaRS is Toronto’s most famous business incubator and supports Canada’s most promising tech startups.

A common feature of most tech hubs is their proximity to reputable universities and technical institutes. Silicon Valley has Stanford, Austin has the University of Texas, Boston has both Harvard and M.I.T., and Pittsburgh has Carnegie Mellon.

The Toronto-Waterloo corridor is so-named because of the University of Waterloo where so much groundbreaking computer science has happened over the years, and the University of Toronto which continues to innovate and has professors currently doing industry-leading research and development. A well known example would be University of Toronto faculty member Raquel Urtasun, who had been courted by famous ‘emerging’ American autonomous vehicle companies, but has insisted on staying in Toronto.

Multinational companies like to locate their national headquarters and operation centers in places where they can recruit fresh talent which includes new graduates and experienced tech workers. Having a top-notch tech school on hand ensures a steady supply of eager candidates especially when they support an alumni community who share their work experience or have programs which place applicants on the job as part of their undergraduate degree requirements.

With money to experiment, ideas flourish, and Toronto has myriad funding bodies and mentor-driven incubators and coding boot camps. Tech meet-ups, both in-person and online have grown to a sensational size here with persistent rumours that TechTO will soon have a TV deal with the CBC. DevTO, and similar code camps and podcasting groups make the city a hotbed of information sharing and idea cultivation.

Lakeshore condominiums being built in Toronto

Lakeshore condominiums accommodate thousands of experienced tech workers in downtown Toronto.

Canada has Laws and Legislation Favorable to Tech Hubs

Canada’s institutions are intent on feeding the tech ecosystem at every level, and Toronto has adopted the right attitude providing easy access to capital and an accommodating tax system where, although higher than most American cities, companies get what they pay for in terms of well-maintained highways and roads, good police and overall infrastructure.

Federally, Bill C-10 gives video sharing start-ups (like YouTube was ten years ago) a categorical exemption from the Broadcasting Act because they traffic exclusively in user-generated content. Provincially, Ontario recently passed a law that explicitly forbids companies from enforcing non compete clauses in employment contracts, encouraging employees to take the initiative with their own start-ups.

Backed by a $100 million donation from local business leaders, the University of Toronto is building a complex to foster A.I. and biotech companies, and that’s just one example of a variety of different and exciting public / private ventures. York University has similar programs as do our tech savvy local colleges.

Data centers are frequently erected downtown, as close as possible to the Toronto Stock Exchange.

A Community Encouraging Competition and Growth

Toronto’s urban planners and educators have conspired to create a helpful environment where young technology companies have everything they need to thrive. Experimentation is rewarded, and when it works it’s celebrated. More importantly, failure isn’t demonized. Tech savvy mixers help people shop ideas and share resources with other enterprises. This is more formally known as clustering and Toronto is a true tech cluster. As the financial center of Canada, the city is home to half a dozen of the world’s biggest banks and accommodates both old and new technology firms. Microsoft has kept offices here for years, and IBM still operates a research facility at Don Mills and Eglington. Additionally, there are computer-chip companies like Intel and AMD situated in close proximity.

Toronto, like other population centers, enjoys the effect this tech ecosystem has in diversifying our local economy, and in creating new and exciting opportunities in other related sectors such as solar-power initiatives, community Wi-Fi projects, and green space expansions. Some hotspots have made-over entire streets and spawned local digital currencies which stimulate brick & mortar retail sales. The buildings in such areas have communities filled with imaginative start-ups, creative industries, and unique digital societies.

Why are so many tech companies situated in Toronto?

Cisco, Flipp, IBM, League, Shopify, Telus, Wattpad and Oracle all maintain shops in the city. Pinterest is on the eighth floor of 85 Richmond Street, and Stripe, an American payments company, has opened an office across from City Hall near Klarna, a Scandinavian payments company, which debuted its 2021 arrival in photos with Mayor John Tory at City Hall.

Klarna with Mayor John Tory at Toronto City Hall

Kristina Elkhazin, Head of Canada, Klarna; John Tory, Mayor of Toronto; David Sykes, Head of North America, Klarna; Stephen Lund, Chief Executive Officer, Toronto Global (Photo: George Pimental)

Microsoft opened four floors near the top of a fifty-story tower In February 2022. Apple and Amazon are tenants in a neighbouring building down the street, and Google is building an indomitable presence on the Toronto Waterfront. These companies and many others have near unlimited resources and could locate anywhere on the continent. They chose Toronto.

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How Will ChatGPT Affect SEO and Marketing in 2023? https://kpd-i.com/how-will-chatgpt-affect-seo-and-marketing-in-2023/ Tue, 03 Jan 2023 18:18:12 +0000 https://kpd-i.com/?p=1060 Artificial intelligence has finally arrived. OpenAI’s ChatGPT debuted on November 30th, 2022, and historians will mark the day as the birth of the world’s first useful AI super tool. I’m not exaggerating. This launch represents the start of a revolution – bad news for anyone with an easily automated job.  Whole careers will disappear along... Read more »

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How ChatGPT affects SEO in 2023Artificial intelligence has finally arrived. OpenAI’s ChatGPT debuted on November 30th, 2022, and historians will mark the day as the birth of the world’s first useful AI super tool.

I’m not exaggerating.

This launch represents the start of a revolution – bad news for anyone with an easily automated job.  Whole careers will disappear along with all mundane tasks that can be done better, faster, and cheaper with software. But on the bright side, AI is here to help.

Science fiction movies and TV series have presented the-computer-as-a-character for over forty years. Almost every spaceship we’ve ever imagined on screen has an intelligent and often chatty operating system that interacts with the cast. The computer’s disembodied voice shares critical information and opines on potential plot outcomes. Well, now the time has finally arrived where a synthetic sidekick is no longer a work of fiction.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT converses with humans almost flawlessly, writes code wonderfully and fixes other programmer’s errors. It translates foreign speech including dead languages, and it pens essays, and can even compose decent poems and songs. It’s more than just a language model; it can be used to program websites, code apps, and write business plans from scratch. It can answer most questions on a Harvard math exam and even write university-level papers that would receive high marks. Academia will certainly be affected, but don’t be worried for the teachers and school administrators yet because ChatGPT is the start of an AI revolution that will disrupt nearly every sector.

How will OpenAI’s ChatGPT affect SEO?

 

OpenAI’s ChatGPT will diminish and humiliate Canadian knowledge workers before it makes them completely obsolete. Programmers are already using this breakthrough to draft code and comb for errors in human work.

programmer using ChatGPT on the couch

YouTubers and TickTockers who are web designers and platform
architects herald this as the dawn of no-code AI.In other words, humans now have easy access to applications that will democratize artificial
intelligence and machine learning. This great leap forward makes them redundant because now anyone can program code simply by speaking aloud their ideas while relaxing on the couch.

Other futurists believe this program could mark the beginning-of-the-end for Google and their search platform’s dominance. AI software is easier to use and it seems like ChatGPT supplies more comprehensive answers to user queries without all the tedious searching.

But the implications for search engine optimization are even more immense. Open AI’s ChatGPT will impact our marketing company’s SEO practice three different ways.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT will affect SEO by changing,

  • 1. Search experience – it will change user habits as it surpasses Google’s featured answer system.
    2. Content creation – it has never been easier to write articles for websites.
    3. On-page user experience – it can be used to increase the usability of web pages and web design.

How will OpenAI’s chatGPT change Search Experience?

ChatGPT is so satisfying to use, either as text or a voice-enabled audio interface (coming soon), it will change the way people search for information online. I think people will check the AI’s offerings first and then return to Google if they don’t receive a satisfactory answer.

I asked questions which required the machine to form an opinion in order to answer with substance, and I was sure my slanted queries would stump the bot, but I was wrong. Here’s an example of the machine staking out a position in a controversial subject.

most overplayed rock song

No follow-ups are necessary because I agree entirely with the answer received.  With answers like that, it won’t be long before the service has a billion users. Did I mention it had a million users by December 5th, 2022? That’s according to OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman, and now social media sites, TickTock in particular is filled with screenshots of ChatGPT’s funniest answers.

Does Google not have its own AI Chatbot?

Google has some contenders. They own DeepMind, a competitor to OpenAI, and they’ve developed LaMDA, Language Model for Dialogue Applications,
but the company seems reluctant to make their work public. For Google, the problem with chatbots is they’re not always correct and yet they present
their answers with machine confidence. At present, I believe Google’s many
and varied services are ripe for an AI revolution; their Search interface, AdWords, Android, Chrome, Google Maps, Google Play, and YouTube could all benefit from having an intelligent bot
helping humans harness their power. It’s definitely coming, but as of this writing, Alphabet has yet to debut anything as sophisticated as ChatGPT to the public.

How will OpenAI’s chatGPT change content creation?

A restaurant review created by ChatGPT.

One of the most significant ways ChatGPT will affect web marketing and SEO in particular is content creation. Journalists, writers and editors of all stripes will now
have to compete with a cheap, competent, and easy-to-direct robot author.

Publishers are always keen to post new material but paying writers is expensive and waiting for their work is time consuming. Imagine if there was computer service that could write anything you need at the touch of a button. Well, now there is.

ChatGPT has the knowledge and ability to write your web copy and even do some basic journalism provided the events in question happened before 2022, which is when the system was taken offline. Content-hungry webmasters can simply query the system for insightful text on any subject and can even request the results be formatted as an article, review, letter, recipe, or even a screenplay. The program can be deliberately verbose, and style its output with emotion, or it can be refreshingly brief. There are sliders which control a randomness variable.  Below is how the bot replied when I finally thought to ask it how it will change SEO:

Unfortunately for me, I only thought to present this search query after I’d almost completed this article, but once again I was shocked by the system’s abilities and stunned to discover two of my three points were included in its answer. The only consideration not on the list is ChatGPT’s opinion of its own abilities as a search engine, and how its efficacy could soon diminish Google’s omnipotence.

Matt Diggity, a popular SEO YouTuber is telling his audience to use ChatGPT to quickly make the content necessary to rank alongside competitors as a topical authority and we are definitely studying that strategy here in KPD-I SEO department with at least two different project taking two different approaches – stay tuned.

The takeaway is that there’s a lot of pain ahead for writers who compose generic sales text and web copy. This composer predicts we’ll see a rise in ownership, and human authors will sign their names to their work and express their emotions in the copy to make it known they’re real people with real thoughts and emotions.

How can OpenAI’s ChatGPT change on-page user experience and affect outcomes?

This is where the software will have the greatest positive impact on the industry; it can fascinate and educate web users better than other gizmos and chat bot widgets. To access ChatGPT today, users need to create an account on the OpenAI website, and enter an email, plus a phone number for two-point registration. This protocol changed on November 30th because prior to its public release, beta users were subjected to a short questionnaire which asked them to state their intentions. But soon there’ll be countless chat bot applications leveraging this technology with no sign-ups, and early adopters, people who use ChatGPT to power their bots, will have an edge and their success will bring everyone else into the arena.

This is the best, most intelligent chat bot with which I have ever communicated. On Friday the 16th of December, I conversed with a machine for the first time in my life. It was a real dialogue. Indeed, we almost had an argument as we disputed the finer points of the official 9/11 investigation and the NIST report. I was surprised to find the software remembered my previously asked questions and put its subsequent answers into context. When I asked about the melting point of steel, it provided the textbook answer but then pointed out that steel would not need to melt in order to cause Building 7 to collapse. I was of course impressed but remain a 9/11 skeptic.

Marv the sarcastic chat bot

Good usability is core to SEO. One of the best ways to show Google that people are engaging with your content is to keep them busy on your pages for long periods of
time. Time-on-page is a key metric in the quality-score calculations Google employs when trying to determine which site to rank
higher for a particular query. The secret to keeping people on your web pages is to keep them interested,
reading, learning, and interacting with your content. OpenAI ChatGPT is a powerful engagement tool that
can be styled to match your enterprise’s personality. Take for example, Marv the sarcastic chat bot. His personality would make using any site on which he appears more interesting.

In summary, OpenAI ChatGPT is much more than an artificial intelligence chat bot, it’s mankind’s first real computer sidekick. The program will change the Search industry by changing users’ search habits, and by revolutionizing the way we make content, and by keeping users on page and interacting with the content for longer periods of time.

ChatGPT could soon be like K.I.T.T. in Knight Rider

While researching this post, I was reminded of K.I.T.T in Knight Rider, a popular TV show that aired from 1982 to 1986. The series followed the adventures of Michael Knight, played by David Hasselhoff and his supercharged, computerized, talking 1982 Pontiac Trans Am Firebird called KITT – Knight Industries Two Thousand. He was advanced technology (but only forty years ahead, it seems) and was voiced by William Daniels with such curiosity and concern he was soon beloved by the fans.

KITT in Knight Ryder

In Season 3, Episode 13, of the series, KITT steals the show by the way he uses his artificial intelligence to affect how the roulette wheel spins in the villain’s casino! That’s great AI.

 

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Black in Business – Working Together with CAMSC (Canadian Aboriginal and Minority Supplier Council) https://kpd-i.com/black-in-business-working-together-with-camsc/ Tue, 07 Jun 2022 18:35:50 +0000 https://kpd-i.com/?p=1051 Karl Dionne, President and Founder of KPDI, and Vice President of Business Development Jamie Bracken attended CAMSC’s 18th Diversity Procurement Fair in April 2022 and came away feeling very encouraged about the opportunities ahead. The interest in diversity procurement shown by the major corporations in attendance was impressive, including Facebook, Accenture, IBM, Johnson & Johnson,... Read more »

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Karl Dionne, President and Founder of KPDI, and Vice President of Business Development Jamie Bracken attended CAMSC’s 18th Diversity Procurement Fair in April 2022 and came away feeling very encouraged about the opportunities ahead. The interest in diversity procurement shown by the major corporations in attendance was impressive, including Facebook, Accenture, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Magna International, RBC, Sun Life and many others.

These companies all partner with CAMSC to ensure diverse businesses get their fair chance to prove their mettle. The partnerships provide a platform where diverse businesses have an opportunity to sit at the table and show executives their skills and abilities. We all strive to provide best-in-class programs and services.

The power of digital in diversity
Since Karl founded KDPI nearly 15 years ago, he has made it his mission to deliver exemplary digital experiences to users across the board. At KPDI, websites and web applications are our core business: We help our customers conceive, design and deliver these experiences through our simple delivery methodology of Discovery, Design, Marketing and Communications.

The continuing purpose is to create remarkable digital programs for each customer, to help them grow their businesses, support their clients and spark change. As a diverse business, KDPI is proud to connect with CAMSC to support thriving businesses and an innovative supply chain across Canada.

From website to apps, we make digital happen
This year’s conference focused on “mission possible,” with master of ceremonies and Director of CAMSC Cassandra Dorrington focusing on the bright spots and the possibilities going forward. This outstanding hybrid event reminded attendees that we are open for business once again. It was a timely message and a truly great event.

It was also great to see local standout presenters like Lawrence Eta, Chief Technology Officer for the City of Toronto, share words of wisdom, current inspirations and ideas for making the mission possible.

If your company is interested in expanding its portfolio of diverse suppliers and turning information into action, KDPI can help share your message and your story, differentiate your business from the competition and use strategy to support your mobile development.

If you have a new project or product you want to launch, please contact us. We are here to help.

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Number Neighbors and Social Media Strategy https://kpd-i.com/number-neighbors-means-social-media-strategy/ Fri, 24 Apr 2020 00:01:41 +0000 https://kpdiprd.wpengine.com/?p=793 The world is getting sillier every day and the latest fad is called Number Neighbors, a game where kids (mostly) text phone numbers that are identical to their own but with the last digit changed by one. That’s a number neighbour. Number Neighbors Began as Text Door Neighbors The concept of number neighbors is not... Read more »

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The world is getting sillier every day and the latest fad is called Number Neighbors, a game where kids (mostly) text phone numbers that are identical to their own but with the last digit changed by one. That’s a number neighbour.

number neighbors need companionship

Number Neighbors Began as Text Door Neighbors

The concept of number neighbors is not new. In fact, it’s been around for at least a decade when it was called “Text door neighbors” according to The Urban Dictionary. The practice dates back to 2008 when the definition was, “the people who are a digit either side of your phone number.” The entry adds, “Many a friendship has been struck up by saying hi to a text door neighbor.”

Now, vast numbers of people have become so involved in calling or texting their own personal
number neighbor that it’s become viral. But why would so many seemingly rational people want
to spend their time texting a completely unknown person for no apparent reason?

Why Contact Your Number Neighbor?

A hundred years ago, and for millennia before that, people knew their neighbors intimately. They knew their names, what they did, and interacted with them daily. The internet, and its social media offspring have changed this. With the advent of the internet, fewer and fewer people know their neighbors. In 2018, a Pew Research study showed that less than a third of Americans, just 31%, knew who their neighbors were. There is ample evidence to suggest that “number neighbors” is a direct result of our need to break away from being closeted by the confines of the internet.

From the dawn of recorded history, we’ve known that people desire personal relationships. When there isn’t time for those relationships to grow and develop, the result is loneliness. Psychologists say that the amount of social connectedness a person needs will influence how much aloneness they can tolerate.

But, it’s not the actual number of social relationships that determines whether a person feels lonely. Instead, it’s the emotional and cognitive reactions in our experiences relative to these connections that play an important role in how we feel. Number Neighbors is just one way we attempt to return to being closer to our neighbors without having to let go of our precious cell phones. After all, just as soon as people get a reaction from their number neighbor, they take a screenshot and post it on Twitter!

What Does it Mean for Social Media Strategy?

People will always seek connections with one another, and almost everyone wants to be part of a movement. Number neighbors is one of the trends now fulfilling that need – think Harlem Shake. We often think of viral activities as something inherently digital. However, number neighbors and similar trends demonstrate that people are eager to participate in movements outside of the Internet – so long as the results end up there.

Digital planners and strategists must maintain a broad view of viral promotions and social media as a whole and consider both online and offline interactions when formulating a cohesive strategy. It may be possible to encourage and capture offline interactions among your audience that results in online content you can leverage in your marketing efforts. Examine the Number

Neighbor trend and consider how you can connect people together online and off, while keeping them connected to your brand.

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We Learned About Disruptive Startups at Dx3 https://kpd-i.com/5-things-we-learned-from-disruptive-startups-at-dx3-2017/ Mon, 13 Mar 2017 21:16:17 +0000 https://kpdiprd.wpengine.com/?p=758 Several Disruptive Startups Were Featured at Dx3 2017 The PayPal Startup Zone at Dx3 2017 held a pitch competition for a chance to win tickets to Singularity University’s Canada Summit. The speakers were all tech company founders who shared their visions of the future. Here are some things we learned about digital disruption in 2017.... Read more »

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Several Disruptive Startups Were Featured at Dx3 2017

The PayPal Startup Zone at Dx3 2017 held a pitch competition for a chance to win tickets to Singularity University’s Canada Summit. The speakers were all tech company founders who shared their visions of the future. Here are some things we learned about digital disruption in 2017.

Technology conference in Toronto
  • 1. Cheap and accessible technology will change consumer’s tangible experiences with brands

PinchVR pitched $5 virtual reality headsets. Specifically designed to be branded and fit in a standard sized envelope, these light-weight affordable headsets deliver remarkable experiences. Download the app and minutes later you’re behind the wheel of a Ferrari. It’s a whole new world on an entirely new level.

deepPIXEL pitched customer service chatbots designed to alleviate overstressed service departments while gathering data about customers to offer a better experience overall – for staff and customers alike.

  • 2. Advertisements will be more relevant and customized

This year’s pitch competition winner, SmartTones Media, built a product that inserts inaudible tones on television or radio that trigger compatible coupon delivery on the listener’s smartphone. Since mobile offers are redeemed 10 times more frequently than print offers, this looks like a huge opportunity for brands to bring traffic to both online and brick-and-mortar stores.  

BlockThrough’s Accelerated Ad Reinsertion promises to get past ad blockers by redelivering ads in more acceptable formats: without malware, without being interruptive or invading user’s privacy, and that won’t slow down page load times. This means that businesses can continue to  advertise to their target markets with less invasive, more relevant ads to increase ROI on ad spend.

speaker engages with audience at Toronto tech convention
  • 3. Supporting small businesses is big business

Multiple pitches came from startups who support small businesses. LendMart offers small businesses a single platform for applying for small business loans; Knit is a tool for managing payroll for small business owners, and Schema App lets businesses of all sizes communicate more effectively with Google to help improve search results. With increasing bank and government support of small businesses in Canada, the time is ripe for services tailored to this fast growing market.

  • 4. Content marketing will  keep getting smarter

Content marketing has the marketing world abuzz, but measurement of its success is still in its infancy. Rewordly pitched a tool that measures reading of articles (as opposed to page visits), offering gamification and social sharing for readers and data for publishers on drop-off points. This type of tool can help with focusing on a brand’s strengths in content marketing, refining offerings to create the best value for readers, increasing return on content marketing spending and helping marketing departments justify the focus on content.

  • 5. Personalization and accessibility are key in disrupting traditional industries.

While travel insurance may not be the sexiest topic, Jauntin thrilled the audience with their pitch on accessible, touch-of-a-button travel insurance tailored to individuals.  CubbySpot pitched an app to help parents find local daycare, a process usually fraught with complications. Both apps have found early success with their target markets and are  growing rapidly.

Every year brings new disruptions and this year didn’t disappoint.  Digital disruptions are constantly changing consumers expectations. Keep an eye on our Blog for more trends and innovations affecting your industry.

Lori Franze is a senior strategist at KPDI. Continue to watch the blog more more digital insights, innovations and disruption.  

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