A high ranking in local search has a crucial role to play in the success of any business, whether a local business or a global brand. It boosts the visibility of your business among local searchers, which enhances your chances of drawing more local traffic. However, it’s quite tricky to optimize your site for local search, and your efforts might not be successful if it’s not done right.

The Relevance of Local SEO

In today’s digital times, we are increasingly looking for specific solutions and answers that hold relevance in certain situations. Google responds to our searches by showing us local search results. Two conclusions can be drawn from this:

• Local SEO is incredibly essential for local businesses.
• Your business’s mobile website is strongly connected to local searches.

It should be noted that consumers that do local searches are action-oriented since they need a shop quickly in the area. Local consumers taking action online are more willing to make the purchase, converting more. So, online marketers and entrepreneurs should focus more on local SEO to boost their local search ranking.

Before delving into how to optimize your website to boost its local ranking in Kolkata, let’s first understand the factors that influence your local ranking.

4 Factors Influencing Local Ranking of a Website

Local SEO has its challenges; nevertheless, there are ways that can help you improve your local search ranking. This starts with understanding all the key factors affecting your ranking. As per a report by Moz, the following are the top factors influencing local search ranking:

1. Link Profile

Similar to regular SEO, you need to build a sound link profile for local SEO. The quantity and quality of your inbound links have a vital role to play in your site’s local search ranking. Focus on building high-quality local links, and take the help of reputed local publications and websites for this.

2. Keywords

The relevance, quality, and quantity of keywords you use also influence your local ranking. It’s important to use a relevant and high-ranking keyword, and use the name of your target location as the main keyword. Then, distribute this keyword throughout the content, like meta descriptions, meta titles, H1s, H2s, etc.

3. GMB Signals

Make sure you update your business information completely and accurately on GMB (Google My Business).

Hence, details such as state, city, categories, and proximity play a major role when it comes to ranking well in the search results of a user.

4. Social Signals

The social presence of a business plays a crucial role in its local search ranking. A high rate of engagement and a large following can boost your social presence, thereby improving your local ranking. Acquire more followers through engagement with influential people on social media. Moreover, generate content that’s highly engaging and interesting.

Besides these factors, there are others too that can influence the local search ranking of your business. The other factors include Domain Authority, anchor text quality, review signals, and more. Understanding these factors well and trying to improve them will help boost your local ranking.

Tips to Improve your Business’s Local Search Visibility

Now, let’s look at what you can do to improve the local SEO of your business in Kolkata, thereby increasing its local ranking.

1. Insert Keywords in Multiple Listings

In local SEO, it’s important to get brand visibility through multiple local listings. Add your local keywords in unique descriptions across various listings. Ensure that you include current photos and your business category. After a list is compiled, promote it. Reviews are important to improve your ranking as well as for encouraging visitors to take action.

2. Attain Local Coverage

An effective technique of improving your SEO is appearing in prominent publications as Google indexes them quite high. For improving your local SEO, try getting coverage from the top local publications. Build and strengthen relationships with prominent local journalists to get your news covered by them on a constant basis. Once you attain that coverage, you’ll see substantial improvement in your local SEO brought by these links.

3. Improve your Internal Linking Structure

The website architecture of most local businesses is not sound enough, often with the important pages being linked to only from the footer or main navigation. Wherever relevant, add internal links from within the content of your pages, including chief service pages, informational pages, and blog posts. Improving the internal linking structure of the website results in a boost in rankings, both organic and maps.

4. Get High-Quality, New Links

The quality as well as the number of links that are directed to your site significantly impacts its local search ranking. To get quality links, consider publishing an article online, giving a presentation at a local college to business students, or leading a discussion at meetings of regional business organizations. Ask the associated organizations to link to your business website.

5. Optimize your Title Tags with a Local Keyword

To improve the local ranking of specific pages, optimize the title tags with a local keyword. An example of a title tag can be – restaurant in Kolkata or a real estate agent in Kolkata. This title tag signals search engines that the corresponding page is related directly to Kolkata. This page is more likely to appear in searches carried out from your geographic region as well as searches explicitly done for this local term.

6. Claim your GMB Profile and Optimize it

A simple way of improving local SEO is to claim your GMB (Google My Business) profile. Your GMB profile is a business listing that appears for local searches. To claim or set up a listing, your business should have a street address and a physical location. Optimize this profile with business hours, images, contact information, and category, to improve your local search considerably.

7. Make Local Business Profiles

Build your presence on your industry’s prominent review sites, such as Yellow Pages, Just Dial, Four Square, Hotfrog, Indiamart, and other business listing sites in India. Every local profile created by you serves as another “platform” where local visitors land on. This is an amazing opportunity that lets you establish social proof and better your local SEO, which in turn, would drive visitors back to your site.

8. Tie your Business with a Geographic Area

Tie your business with the area you operate in by starting with Google Maps and finishing with local listings, citations, and your website. Without being spammy, convey to the search engines which area your business wants to dominate, as well as your full-service area. The job may not be simple, but would certainly work.

9. If you’re a Multi-Local Brand, Create Hyper-Localized Content

If you’re a multi-local brand, lay emphasis on generating hyper-local content. For many businesses, the location page content is the same for all locations. Avoid this and create unique content for every location page. Instead of merely replacing the city name in the pages, conduct some research and generate content that’s engaging, relevant, and useful for every location’s neighborhood.

10. Be Authentic with your Business Details

Be completely authentic when you list your company on sites like Hotfrog, Indiamart, Bing, or Google. Fill in your business description and update regularly. Upload high-quality and current photos. Also, keep in mind that photographs that seem to be photoshopped can affect your SEO ranking adversely. When you find someone reviewing your business, whether negatively or positively, always respond with proper, constructive feedback.

11. Don’t Ignore Small Tags

Small details are often overlooked while uploading an image or posting a blog; nevertheless, avoiding this makes all the difference. HTML elements like titles, meta description tags, and alt tags are as important as the content or image. These details appear in the search results, and so make sure the verbiage is relevant and concise to your local market.

12. Provide Google Virtual Tour

Google Virtual Tour is a new tool related to local SEO for businesses. Now you can include your business’s 3D photographic tour to its Google profile, which would appear when your business is searched on Google Maps. Search results that have photos have more chances of drawing interest. Moreover, the search algorithms of Google provide preferential treatment to profiles that have included this feature.

13. Focus on Reputation Management

Be proactive about your business’s online reputation management for improving your local SEO. You can use various tools to proactively garner, manage, and track reviews; however, your focus should be the reviews on your GMB page.  Good reviews enhance your business visibility.

14. Manage Citations Efficiently

After claiming the Bing Places, Yelp, Google My Business, and other listings, business owners should claim their business with major Indian business directories like Just Dial, Indiamart, Sulekha, HotFrog, and Express Business Directory. Ensure that your name, address, and phone number (NAP) are correct. These serve as the chief data providers for a major section of business information available online. In case these data providers don’t have accurate information about your business, the incorrect information may reach other citations.

15. If you’re a B2B Marketer, Address Customer Needs

Most B2B buyers don’t search for your service, product, or brand. Such buyers use search phrases that are needed- or problem-oriented. Ask your customer-facing coworkers about what are the most common information requests made or questions asked by customers. Identify about 3 to 5 chief customer pain points that your business helps to solve. Organize your content and navigation around those.

16. Optimize your Website

Use high-ranking and relevant keywords with your location names for optimizing your website content. This involves optimization of titles, URLs, image alt attributes, and meta descriptions with keywords and relevant location names.

17. Make the Physical Address of your Business Visible

If you wish local searchers to find your local business in Kolkata, it’s necessary for them to know where your business is located. So, it makes sense to clearly mention your business name as well as its exact address on your site. This may sound like a no-brainer, but it’s surprising that how many businesses don’t do this. Let your address be completely local. This implies that your address should be very close to the location for which your business needs to have visibility in local search results.

18. Put your Location on Google Map

Put the location of your business on the map. Include a map in your website, on the ‘Contact’ page, with the help of Google Maps. This would enable visitors to instantly see the location of your business on the map. A new map can be created easily through Google My Maps.

19. Leverage Social Signals

Consider setting up automated daily social shares with the help of a Buffer subscription of $10. In case you don’t have any idea for content, simply share your reviews daily – one each day – linking back to your reviews page or website. Alternatively, you can hire a trusted social media marketing company to create and share impactful content so as to attain maximum visibility for your business on social media. No need to use every platform for sharing, but consider using the platforms Twitter, Facebook business page, and Google+ at least.

20. Schema Up your Website

Schema.org (also known as Schema) is a semantic tag vocabulary (or microdata). Adding the schema to your HTML improves the way your page is read by search engines and represented in SERPs.  If your website uses WordPress, you can follow these tutorials on schema Markup: Advanced Schema Markup and Basic Schema Markup. Irrespective of Schema, include your NAP on each of your website pages, preferably in the footer.

Wrapping Up

While global SEO is always important, local SEO cannot be underrated, for it has its own unique advantages. Research shows that 50% of consumers that carry out a local search through their mobile phone visit a shop the same day. If your local business in Kolkata doesn’t have a high search engine ranking in your region, your physical store may lose out to competitors.

The local search optimization tips discussed above, when applied right, can immensely help your business rank higher locally. So, start implementing these tips today and watch your local ranking soar higher!

It’s often believed that branding is limited to large-scale businesses. However, in today’s world of keen competition, building a brand is important for any business, whether large or small, to flourish and keep the revenues flowing in.

So, how can small businesses create a brand identity? 

With all big names to compete with, how can small and local businesses attain brand recognition?

Well, branding for small businesses differs from branding for big businesses.

Though small businesses may need to compete with big brands, what many small businesses get it wrong is they compete with the big names on their platform. For instance, trying to equal a big brand on selection or price poses an immediate disadvantage to a small business.

Small businesses should rather compete on their strengths and turf. Small and local businesses are valued by consumers for quality work, trustworthiness, and personalized service. Branding for small businesses should focus on these areas.

Nevertheless, the greatest asset of a small business is its location. Being a part of the community, a small business is able to understand the culture and dynamics of local consumers and can become “one of them”. This is indeed an asset small and local businesses should leverage.

Local businesses are trendy and their appeal to consumers is gradually increasing. 82% consumers have reported that they have shopped from local businesses in the past few years, and almost all of them (98%) would continue to shop or increase shopping locally in the years to come. It’s smart to brand locally; it enhances your online visibility, raises your profile, and eventually heightens your bottom line.

If you are a small business based in Kolkata and want to build your brand, grow your reputation, and increase your search ranking locally, the following are some effective tips to help you do so. Read on…

1. Engage in Person and Online with your Community

Amy Cuddy, a Harvard social psychologist, states that when people meet a person, they develop two main impressions about the person – firstly, people decide if they can trust that person; secondly if they can respect that person.

Well, people make the same evaluations about small businesses and their brands. To prove that you are likable, personal, trustworthy, and active, you need to engage and communicate with your audience, thereby increasing your familiarity with them.

With the popularity of social media increasing steadily among consumers, it’s a great medium for branding. Engage with your audience on social media to build brand awareness. This would result in social media activity like check-ins, followers, fans, and likes. The volume of social media activity serves as a brand signal for Google indicating that your business and products/services are liked by consumers, and your products/services are a likely match for people looking for similar products/services.

Ensure that engagement is frequent and regular. It need not be long; in most cases, simple and short works best. It’s better to split your longer posts into shorter pieces and break up the content into a number of posts.

2. Let Consumers Share Something

Consumers love sharing their unique experiences and moments. Getting treated specially, receiving pleasant and unexpected surprises – all such things trigger positive responses from consumers. Try offering them ad hoc discounts or an extra cake piece. A shout-out through a post or picture or a personal note, are all free but amazing ways to make someone smile. Such moments inspire people to share, whether, through a like, comment, post, or review, and Google takes notice of it.

It’s also effective to involve in the community that is outside your shop. Sponsoring or participating in local events suggests that you belong to the community. It would also provide you content for sharing that is likely to facilitate consumer interaction online or chatter from the local media outlets.

3. Get Customer Reviews

Reviews represent your reputation. In the present times, consumers project their impression of you and your brand through different review outlets. A recent survey by Moz shows that the decisions of around 67% of consumers are impacted by reviews.

The quantity of reviews is an important signal to Google indicating your business’s popularity amongst independent, third-party consumers. A large number of consumers leave a review when asked. So, ask your customers for reviews not only on Yelp, but TripAdvisor, Google, Yellow Pages, and other directory listings also.

Bad reviews matter too, both to search engines and public perception. The inevitable bad reviews should be managed individually and it should be realized that a number of good reviews would counter the effect of the bad ones.

4. Target the Local Publications of Kolkata

Who’s talking about your business and brand are important. Getting a world-renowned magazine, website, or other sources to link to your website or mention you would indeed be a big deal; however, local sources are even better for you considering your purpose. Why? Because local community magazines and news sources are the places people most often go-to for getting local information. Hence, when your site is linked to or your business is written about by a local news source or magazine of Kolkata, it builds brand recognition for you through the audiences of those publishers.

All major cities have local publications, and when your business is mentioned, linked, or listed in them, Bing and Google would reward you with an increase in your local search ranking.

5. Target the Smaller Hyperlocal Publications of Kolkata Too

Being mentioned or linked to by the hyperlocal publications can prove that your business is truly local. There are several publishers serving specific communities, such as communities residing in a particular area of the city, or the ones speaking a particular language. There are other hyperlocal sources that publish hyperlocal content like current events in a specific area, restaurant and store openings, road construction, etc. Your small business can get valuable citations and links from these hyperlocal sources.

6. Use Lingo Showing you’re Local

In every locality, certain districts, streets, or areas have nicknames. Use these nicknames when describing your location. Additionally, use local landmarks. This suggests that you know the locality and are a part of it.

Celebrate the culture and local events of the area in which your business operates. Consider offering special offers or discounts during local festivals or occasions. Local sports teams – of a high school, college, or a pro – often have large fan followings. Conducting events surrounding games depicts your local roots.

7. Leverage Content to Showcase your Expertise

The second prong of Amy Cuddy for creating an impression is – whether people could respect a person. This, in other words, means whether the person has adequate competence or expertise. Small and local businesses are expected to offer better customer service and high-quality services or products. So, you need to demonstrate your ability.

Publishing content that’s not sales-based, but is related to your business niche and is educational, would demonstrate that you know your business. It would also provide confidence to consumers that it’s right to make the purchase. You can publish blogs and send out email newsletters offering useful information and helpful tips related to your business vertical. This is a great way to demonstrate your expertise.

Once you get consumers’ confidence, you would get higher clicks to call, greater click-through rates from searches, and other online activities that can be captured as customer engagement with your local business.

8. Concentrate on Branding, and Not on Conversions through Ad Impressions

Admeasurement ‘impressions’ usually have a bad reputation in the world of digital marketing. Right from small and medium businesses to the big brands – all are critical of its ambiguous reach, transparency, and pricing structure.

This criticism arises from the lack of measurable ROI generated by impressions in comparison to calls, clicks, and the question of whether an ad is truly viewable. To assure ‘viewability’, it’s necessary to redefine what comprises a viewable impression, which includes, among other factors, requiring the time given to an ad to be a minimum standard of 1 second.

However, it was found by MIT researchers that the human brain has the ability to process an entire image in just 13 milliseconds, which is 0.013 of a second. This implies the human brain is capable of processing 77 images every second. Hence, a viewer can process even an ad’s very brief view. While the viewer may not always take an action, there is value in building familiarity of the viewer with an image, or the brand.

9. Borrow Some Prominence from National Brands through Co-Op Programs

Co-op programs offer compensation to local retailers when they display national brands in their advertisements. For instance, if local tire dealers display logos of Bridgestone, Michelin, and Goodyear in their own marketing, they, in return, receive payouts for brand exposure. Nevertheless, the benefits of co-op programs to you, as a local business, extend beyond financial subsidies. National companies make heavy investments in their branding, and when a local business is affiliated with a national brand, the local business’s reputation gets a boost.

From an SEO perspective, brand names have authority with search algorithms. The brand names would help correlate your local business to the business niche those national companies are associated with.

10. Sponsor Local Charities

Sponsoring local charities is not only an effective way to get your local business name out; it also indicates that your business works for causes within the community. When sponsoring a charity, request the organizers to mention the name of your small business on their social media pages, website, printed materials, t-shirts, or signage. This would raise your business or brand name recognition locally.

11. Use Custom Hashtag

Take the use of hashtags on social media a step further by using a custom hashtag. Using a custom hashtag would boost your brand recognition in the local market. Use it when posting on different social media channels, especially on visual platforms like Instagram. Such a strategy helps your target customers associate the hashtag with your business, increasing the likelihood of name recognition.

12. Flaunt your Business Name

Make your business known to the world…especially to your locality! Increase your business name recognition by posting the name of your business anywhere you can. You can list your business name on your personal Facebook profile under the section of employment. Create a page for your local business on Linkedin. If you post at industry or community forums, include the name of your business in your bio. People on these platforms might not be aware that you are the owner of a business, and they might seek the services you provide. You might even get your next customer from these platforms!

Use pens that have the name of your business on them and carry extras when going out. When making new personal connections, hand them out your business card that has your contact number.

 Summing Up

There are two challenges involved in marketing – the first one is being found and the second one is being chosen.

Google’s search algorithm considers the brand to be an important factor. Local businesses can boost their chances of being found by promoting their brands in their community, where it matters the most.

Increasing brand recognition helps with the second challenge of being chosen too – when the search results feature your local business and your business name is recognized. If your brand name happens to be on top of the minds of your audience and they enter it as a search term partially or in whole, that’s even better. Hence, brand-building should be a part of all your marketing campaigns and strategies. And the winning tips mentioned in this post would greatly help you build a solid local brand in Kolkata.

Colors have always caught human imaginations and have become subjects of scientific and psychological studies over the ages. Knowing about the best background colors for websites will help you get more leads and earn hardcore profits.

Colors in websites have proven to dramatically raise the sales graph and marketers have always performed A/B testing on colors that convert the best.

See how the primary color red is used by leading brands to play on the impulsive emotional side that humans have. Bold and prominent, the color strikes a bold chord and brings out the most passionate side of humans.

We provide you with a list of colors, the corresponding emotions that they evoke, different industry verticals, and the way they are used on their websites.

Armed with the knowledge of the basic colors and the effects they wield on human minds, you can now effectively plan your website and marketing campaigns. It is the key to tap on the right aspect of your clients’ psychology and make quick business conversions!

Best WordPress GDPR Plugins

As the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is about to take effect from May 25, 2018, WordPress website owners are quite concerned about how the law is likely to impact their websites. The goal of this EU (European Union) law is to allow EU citizens to control their personal data as well as change the approach of organizations around the globe towards data privacy.

If you are a WordPress site owner wondering whether GDPR applies to your website, the answer would be YES. The GDPR text applies to all businesses across the world and not just the businesses in the EU. If your business website gets visitors belonging to the EU countries, then the GDPR text applies to you.

Well, making your WordPress business site GDPR compliant won’t be a challenging job or an expensive affair, owing to the wide range of services and tools available that are aimed at helping your website meet the GDPR text guidelines. Besides, there are lots of WordPress plugins you can find online that can help you carry out some of the essential modifications required for making your WordPress site GDPR-proof.

Here we’ve discussed some of the best WordPress GDPR plugins that can help your WordPress website become GDPR compliant:

WP GDPR – The Best WordPress GDPR Plugins

The role of this plugin is to allow your users to access their personal data. The plugin does this by generating a unique URL which would be sent to the user via email upon the user’s request. The user can then view their personal data contained by your website.

On that special page, the user may download all the sensitive data that your website currently contains – a chief requirement under GDPR text.

Moreover, a user can revise comments as well as issue requests to remove any individual piece of data.

Currently, WP GDPR can be integrated with several popular add-ons, like:

• MailChimp
• Gravity Forms
• WooCommerce
• Flamingo
• Contact Form DB7

Features:

• Enables users to request, update, access, and download their data, or request to delete their data
• Offers an overview of data requests by users to the site owners along with rights of the admin to delete data
• Determines the plugins that collect personal data and information and requires a checkbox for approval as per GDPR guidelines
• Currently comes in the languages English, Swedish, Spanish, and Dutch

WP GDPR Compliance

Although different from the first plugin mentioned in this list, the role of WP GDPR Compliance is quite similar to that of WP GDPR, emphasizing user consent along with integration with important add-ons.

This plugin can be easily integrated with four vital add-ons, and it promises to offer support for other add-ons shortly, like HTML Forms and MailChimp. The add-ons with which the plugin can be integrated are:

• Contact Form 7
• WooCommerce
• Gravity Forms
• WordPress Comments

Features:

• Keeps user consent logs for the supported plugins
• Creates checkboxes to request explicit user consent
• Ensures user privacy through anonymization of data and encryption of audit logs
• Supports Swedish, English, German, Dutch, and Czech

Ultimate GDPR Compliance Toolkit for WordPress

As the name suggests, Ultimate GDPR Compliance Toolkit for the WordPress plugin helps WordPress business site owners abide by all the GDPR text requirements.

The plugin features seamless integration with many add-ons, like:

• Events Manager
• MailChimp
• Gravity Forms
• Contact Form 7
• WooCommerce

Features:

• Allows users to access all their personal data and information contained by your website currently through providing a dedicated form
• Creates consent boxes for cookies and blocks cookies until the reception of consent
• Sends email notifications to the users in case of any data breaches
• Supports Russian, Polish, Spanish, Norwegian, French, German, and English

GDPR Compliance Suite

The GDPR Compliance Suite plugin is packed with several features aimed at attaining GDPR compliance.

When it comes to integration with add-ons, this plugin is leaner compared to other plugins listed here, with WooCommerce being the only add-on that’s compatible. However, it’s necessary to install WooCommerce to reap all the benefits of this plugin. This is because only on WooCommerce installation, the plugin can get user consent when a user creates an account or places an order.

Features:

• Restricts access in case a user hasn’t accepted the Privacy Policy or Terms & Conditions on the site
• Processes user requests to erase data automatically
• Enables users to submit data rectification requests and generates a dedicated table for processing of such requests by the site owners

Gravity Forms Encrypted Fields by PluginOwl

Do you store the entries of Gravity Forms on your site?

If yes, you can protect the entries by encrypting them. The Gravity Forms Encrypted Fields plugin is used to encrypt the Gravity Forms entries.

Features:

• Encrypts user data within the database
• It helps you configure who are permitted to see specifically allotted entries, which may be needed, especially on collection of high-risk and sensitive personal data (such as medical information or Social Security Numbers), which should not be accessible to all WordPress administrators and editors.

Delete Me

One of the rights issued by the GDPR is the “right to be forgotten.” This implies that WordPress website owners should erase a user’s personal data, if requested by the user, within a specific time span. This can be done manually; however, the Delete Me plugin allows users to do this themselves. With this plugin, you can allow your users to erase their personal data stored on your site.

Features:

• Allows users to delete all of their links and posts, along with their reactions to different articles
• Highly useful if you own a subscriber website or have active user groups that respond to your articles regularly

Conclusion

Website owners need to get a thorough understanding of the GDPR text and make their sites GDPR compliant as soon as possible. These plugins can help you significantly in abiding by the guidelines of GDPR. Save both effort and time by downloading one of these WordPress plugins and applying it to your WordPress website.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect on 25th May 2018, and it should matter to you if you are a website owner. To remain on the right side of the law, there are certain changes that you have to make to your website while also keeping customers happy.

One EU law for collecting personal data online

Earlier, each EU country had its individual privacy laws that are now being replaced by the singular GDPR. With the new GDPR replacing the Data Protection Act (DPA) of 1998, it will provide all EU citizens a higher control over all personal data that are collected from them online.

GDPR is all set to be the global standard for all data protection being applicable to everyone in Europe and also organizations and businesses situated outside Europe providing services or selling anything to people in Europe.

Even with UK leaving the EU within the next few months, businesses that are connected to EU residents directly come under the purview of the law.

The text below is an exact quote from the GDPR regulation:

“Any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person.”

The penalties involved

In case your website is not compliant with the new GDPR, and it ends up floating it,

• At first, you are given a warning and a certain time period to abide by the law.
• The second time you are given a reprimand
• The third time you may have to suspend all data concerning EU citizens depending on the diplomatic relationship your country has with the EU.
• Finally, you will get slapped with a fine that can be up to 4% of your total global turnover or up to €20 million.

The elements concerned:

• Data Subject is an EU citizen whose personal data your website collects.
• Personal Data like name, address, online id, information about demography, health, or anything that is personal and unique to a person’s identity.
• Data Collector could be an individual business or an organization with a website.
• Data Processor or 3rd Party Processor to whom the data collected through the website is passed on. This 3rd party may be a virtual assistant, web developer, web host, digital marketing company, email newsletter, plugins, or any other services connected to your website.
• Transfer of such Personal Data outside the EU is not permitted except to the authorized few countries. Canada is among the authorized countries, and a Canadian SEO company can use the data, but it can be passed out to the company’s offshore site in India as India is not among the authorized countries.
• Even if your website lies outside the EU, it could be visited by any EU citizen. Also, a lot of people now hold dual citizenship, which means that even if they do not live in the EU and are accessing your website from a non-EU IP address, the law applies.

Immediate remedial measures for your websites

Earlier, it was enough to have a privacy policy page that was linked to every other page making users give implicit consent to give out personal data when visiting your site. This is no more the case from 25th May 2018 when the GDPR comes into place.

• You will have to ask for the explicit consent of the users to collect their personal details such as name, email ids, phone numbers, and other information.
• If your website had pre-ticks on the opt-in box that made it necessary for users to actively opt-out, it has to be changed. Instead, the forms should give users an active opt-in choice.
• In case you are asking your users to accept terms and conditions, a separate form asking for their explicit consent should be in place.
• Each process that the website carries out should ask for separate explicit consent from the user and should not have any pre-ticks.
• The forms that take in consent should be easy to use. The user should be able to give and take away consent with a simple click.
• Each party for whom the consent is being taken should be clearly mentioned. If your company has sister concerns for which you would want to take the personal details, the fact should be clearly mentioned in the form.
• Your website terms and conditions have to be updated, saying for how long you wish to use the personal data received through your website.
• In case people want their data to be moved to another provider, you will have to comply with it within four weeks, and the data should still be clearly read.
• For e-commerce websites or any website that has a payment gateway, it is normal that the customer information is first collected by your site and then passed on to the payment gateway. Your website process has to be modified so that all personal customer data is removed after a certain time period. Though GDPR does not mention the time period, it is up to the reasonable discretion that you can defend as necessary.
• If your website makes use of any third-party marketing and tracking software, the issue lies in the grey area. These automatons receive personal data in ways for which users have not given consent. But again, the suppliers of the applications assure that they are completely GDPR compliant.
• In the case of a data breach, you are obliged to inform the authorities and the people affected by the breach within 72 hours of the breach intimation. Failure to do so will attract a penalty of up to 2% of worldwide annual revenue earned or €10 million, whichever is higher.

It’s your website that has to be GDPR compliant to stay away from being penalized in any way.

Be future-ready on all fronts.

In case you have plenty of personal data in different business places, get a documented record of them coming with explicit consent. Even when you have the consented data, it is your responsibility to keep them secure from all human and technological glitches. WordPress website users can make use of GDPR plugins to make your website GDPR compliant.

Sure GDPR will have an immense impact on the way that websites are designed and also on digital marketing activities, including social media. But, in the days to come, it is set to be the way that online personal data will be governed, and you have just about the time to set it all right concerning your website to be on the right side of the international law.