What do Bedbugs look like? It is very difficult to detect bed bugs and hence, it’s a relevant question to ask – what do bedbugs look like? Why are they difficult to detect? It’s because they are nocturnal and very small. You can only find the symptoms & signs of infestation of bed bug sometimes [...]
While we here in the first world live surrounded by advanced technology, people in third world countries still struggle to find clean water to drink. Even with the current debate raging over health care in this country, we are still lucky enough to have hospitals that will help those who can’t pay. Many people in developing countries have no way of getting any health care at all, even if they could afford it.
To shine the spotlight on this disparity, the people behind Blog Action Day have decided that this year’s global blog topic should be that of human rights.
Blog Action Day was founded in 2007. This annual event unites bloggers from all around the world, asking them all to blog about one single important topic on the same day. Today, October 16, 2013, is Blog Action Day 2013.
In honor of this year’s theme, it’s appropriate to take a look at the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This declaration was created in 1948, at the end of World War II, and proclaims the rights that every single human being on this planet in endowed with, no matter where they live, simply by virtue of their birth.
For many, the rights included in this document are still unattainable. Freedom of religion and freedom of speech are things we take for granted, as Americans. But in some countries, that progress has yet to be made.
And that’s why one article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights stands out in particular, as being important to those of us privileged to live in freedom: Article 29, which states, “Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.”
That’s something that, all too often, we forget about. Yes, we have human rights. But we also have human responsibilities.
Enjoying our own rights is not enough. It is our duty, as part of this global community, to work towards establishing a world in which everyone, no matter where they live, can enjoy those same rights.
We here at Marketing Zen are passionate about helping our community thrive, and so we often take on pro bono work for local organizations that we believe are truly making a difference. One such organization is Heroes of Discovery, a North Texas-based nonprofit dedicated to educating and inspiring children to succeed in the realms of math, science, engineering, and technology.
As the Declaration of Human Rights states in Article 26, “Everyone has the right to an education.” The good people at Heroes of Discovery are devoted to making sure that children in underserved populations have access to their educational programs, in order to give them the same opportunities that their more privileged peers already enjoy. And Marketing Zen is proud to support their efforts.
In this small way, we hope to have a positive impact on our community, and fulfill at least part of our responsibility as human beings to furthering the human rights of others. What will you do today to make a difference in your community?
The very nature of content marketing as a helpful medium means that a lot of what we deal with as content marketers could be termed ‘low-hanging fruit’.
We know what people are searching for and talking about; we create content calendars because we have a good idea about what people are going to be talking about in the future.
That’s not to say that content marketing means quick win after quick win – great content takes time to research and plan, create and promote. What it does mean is that implementing a long term strategy that comprises of one or two pieces of big content is something that seems to be out of the reach for brands that don’t have much money.
There’s plenty of press for big brands publishing and winning fans, and it’s easy to understand why: big money for content creators. But the fact of the matter is that even small brands have to start creating content if they want to succeed online.
REALLY big content. Guess who.
Before we delve into how to plan and execute a big content piece, it would be helpful to define what we’re talking about. Firstly, I’m going to go ahead and agree with Moz’s Dr. Pete and say that big content isn’t really a thing that needs its own name. Simply put, what I’m calling big content is content that requires investment – what Hannah Smith might call “big budget content.” The reason I’m not calling it “big budget content” is because it doesn’t necessarily require a big budget to create, but if you need more reasons why big, creative content pieces are a good idea for your brand, I’d recommend watching Hannah’s BrightonSEO video. We’ll use Dr. Pete’s definition and say that what big content requires is effort and innovation.
If it’s not big budget content, you could call it big because it provides big ROI. Even content that requires a massive outlay can produce a massive return, but it doesn’t necessarily need huge financial backing. It will probably require a significant amount of time to create, but that time doesn’t even have to be spent all at once.
It’s a catch-22, but big content requires more research. If you’re going to spend more time on a project, you need to spend more time working out whether it’s going to be worthwhile. It’s also important to remember that not all ROI comes from search…
Before doing anything you should know who your audience is and what they want. This doesn’t just go for creative content pieces, but for every blog post you write, every video you shoot and every tweet you send.
You should never be taking a stab in the dark that someone will want to read something that you’re taking the time to create. The more interested parties there are in a subject that you have the authority to speak on, the more justice you’ve got to do the topic.
Providing a comprehensive resource means doing comprehensive research, but a common trope in internet marketing is that you get out what you put in. According to Google in 2011, people used, on average, 10.4 different resources before making a purchase. A convenient case for a big piece of content is to assume that this might mean that people have, on average, 10.4 questions about the product they’re looking to purchase.
Look at the question keywords coming into your site using Google Analytics, and consider answering related questions in one great, easy to use resource. An SEO brain with smarts tells you that these would make great separate landing pages; a lazy marketing brain tells you that you can stuff them all into an FAQ section.
Think about what people actually want from your page, and it’s as simple as guarantees that your product solves their problem. People don’t share FAQ pages on Twitter when their friends have the same problem; they share big pieces of content. Every (good) product is there to solve a problem, no matter how big the marketing budget is behind it, and as long as you’ve got access to Analytics you can find out what people’s problems are.
Traffic is easy (relatively speaking). Any piece of content that answers a question that people are actually asking is likely to get some traffic from search engines and from social shares. The difficulty is creating a piece of content that drives conversion. If you want people to purchase your products or take you up on your services, it helps if you’ve provided them with their Zero Moment of Truth.
Driving conversions can be a long term goal, and an example of this comes from seasonal industries – travel, for example. People generally do research before and after they’ve booked their holidays, and missing out on that all-important booking doesn’t mean that you’ve missed the boat. People book holidays every year, bear genuinely useful resources in mind and share them with friends that might not have booked their vacations yet.
If you’re thinking of creating something visual, the chances are that it will cost something beyond your own time to execute. Whether that’s the time of someone else in your company, or the cost of a freelancer, there will be bills that need paying.
Spreading the cost over time is a good idea for a couple of reasons; one is that you’re likely to need time to research the project, too, which can coincide quite nicely and the second is that if you’re paying for something to be created over a period of time, it absolutely rules out knee-jerk marketing.
Newsjacking is a great way of getting links and exposure, but spending lots of money newsjacking is not something that small brands should be thinking about. Big content should be the gift that keeps giving.
Everybody should be measuring the ROI of their content marketing efforts anyway, but if you’ve spent a lot of time creating something you should certainly make sure it was worth all the effort. Delve into your analytics regularly to see how your content is performing, and tweak it where you can.
The questions that people have will change over time, and new questions will crop up every now and then – make sure you’re answering them. The advantage of so-called evergreen content is that you’re trying to capture new leads through a piece of content that is likely to already rank fairly well. Better still, a relatively small amount of effort is required to maintain even the biggest resources once they’ve been created (think: adding new words to a dictionary compared to writing a dictionary).
Maybe you can’t edit a video, but you can add new videos to a YouTube channel that answer new questions (also remember to transcribe ALL the things). If you want to over simplify, more videos = more brand awareness, and a well-stocked YouTube channel (or even a SlideShare profile) is going to do you more good than one or two embedded videos in your own blog posts.
Small brands are already creating big content pieces, and if you’re not then there’s a chance that you’re being left behind. Companies with pretty small media budgets are creating huge hubs of information and images that make people stand up and take note. You don’t need Coca-Cola budgets, you just need to do your research and work with what you’ve got.
Poler’s strapline is “the world’s highest standard of stuff,” which does a great job of summing up the brand. Using simple techniques – such as high quality but amateur photography to create a series of “photo essays” – Poler have taken their brand global with just three full-time staff…and if you’re the adventurous type, check out the Tumblr account – simple, yet highly effective.
Norse Projects’ brand identity is broadly similar to Poler, but the Danish company have chosen to put their content focus on their products, rather than simply being excellent at curating content relevant for their audience. Check out the “Journal” for a master class in getting the most out of each of your products with visual teasers and fresh posts, and carefully repurposing that content across social networks and an unobtrusive email campaign.
Brewdog actively positions itself as a small brand, and creates incredible content that reinforces that image. Whether or not the Equity for Punks campaign is actually getting investors for the brewery (it should, and apparently it is), it’s definitely getting attention. It’s a wonderful example of a brand living in the internet age, doing something that seems to be genuine (and not for links), and actually getting links out of it, too.
Equity for Punks from BrewDog on Vimeo.
Clothes and beer are pretty interesting anyway, right? The three examples above are brands that know what their audience like about them, and utilise that to create advocates. After all, earned media now equals 80% of your reach, according to social@Ogilvy data. What about brands that are in “boring” niches?
Soap is not the most interesting of products – it’s an everyday necessity, and traditionally everyday necessities aren’t viewed as being the most researched products online (hello: ZMOT). Method has done an excellent job of taking on global megabrand rivals like Johnson and Johnson with a comparatively tiny budget. A fun blog helps, but the real winners are an interesting newsletter and an entertaining YouTube channel as part of the “People Against Dirty” campaign.
The advantage that small businesses have compared to their multimillion pound adversaries is that they’re able to listen to each of their potential customers. The chances are good that if one person wants something, there’ll be more people who want the same thing.
One thing that makes a great marketer is the ability to sell things to people who don’t know they want your things, but that can easily spread if you’re someone’s Zero Moment of Truth. The advantage of big content is that you can address each individual customer’s individual question in one place, and use that to create brand new leads as well as brand new content.
Test Post from Promovare online, Web Design si Service IT in IASI http://www.reparacalculator.com
There just arent enough hours in the day to do it all, especially if you are managing all marketing efforts for your company. Sometimes, you want to just find the easy button. While there may not be a real easy button, there are a few tools out there to help make your job a little easier. There are plenty of really cool tools out there, but I tried to highlight a few of my favorites which are free or have a nominal fee.
1. Hootsuite
One way to make your life easier is to update all your companys social profiles from one place. The tool is automatically set up for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and Mixi. There are also apps you can add to manage other social sites like Tumblr, YouTube, Instagram, SlideShare and many others. From Hootsuite you can schedule and post updates, monitor mentions of your company or hashtags, and track success with built in analytics reporting. Hootsuite has a free option with the Pro account starting under $ 10 a month.
2. Buffer
Buffer is a useful tool for the evergreen content you want to share on your social media accounts. You simply set up what times and days you want to publish content, then start adding content to your queue. Buffer will push the content you have lined up whether you are online or not. This is great for marketers who arent able to be on the social channels all day. You can check various sites or your established reader in the morning for industry news worth sharing and add it to Buffer. Then Buffer will publish the content throughout the day. It even has built in analytics to help you track performance. There is a free account or the Awesome account with advanced features is $ 10 a month.
3. Dlvr.it
When you publish content on your blog, its important to promote the post on your owned social networks. However, it can be time consuming to post on each social channel. Dlvr.it can help. You can sign up your blog and the tool will syndicate any new content across the social channels. They have a free account that will let you publish to 3 social networks. Or you can sign up for Pro account for $ 10 a month which will push to 15 social channels.
4. Triberr
Another way to get your blog content seen and grow your audience is to get active on Triberr. Triberr is a community that brings together bloggers so you can build or join a tribe of similar interests. This is great to help you share your content, but it also is a terrific way to find valuable content to share on your social channels. As you know, your posts on social channels shouldnt be all about self-promotion. Its important to provide value to your audience from sources other than you and your company. Triberr has groups around all different kinds of topics, so youre sure to find one of interest to your company and followers. Find good content and help spread your posts " its a win/win!
5. Zapier
Zapier lets you automate tasks between web services. The service works with nearly 250 services, so the options of what you can do are almost endless. A Zap is a recipe for what you want to automate. You pick the Trigger and the Action. For example you can set up a Zap that if you get a new follower on Twitter it adds the followers information to a Google Docs Row. Then later you can look at the new followers and decide who to follow back. There are thousands of suggested Zaps, or you can create your own. There is a free plan with limited Zaps per month. Or you can do a paid plan, starting at $ 15 a month, with more Zaps to meet your needs.
A Word of Caution
Marketing can be a tough job. There is a lot to do to be successful and its hard to get it all done. Often there arent enough resources like time, budget and people. Tools like these can help to ease the burden by automating some tasks. But not all tasks should be automated. There needs to be a careful balance of automation and personalization. Also, it is best if you dont automate tasks that deal with your audience. I strongly recommend against auto DMs. No matter how hard you try, they just appear spammy. Scheduling posts is okay, but make sure the copy is still personable and in your brand voice. Leave room in the day for posts as you go. More timely content will come up and you dont want to limit yourself because you already scheduled too much. Also, dont continue with scheduled content when the world is focused elsewhere. You dont want to be the brand that is still tweeting evergreen content during events like Hurricane Sandy and the Boston Marathon bombing. These tools will help you save time, but you still need to be present, pay attention and be human. It is still social media so you need to be conversational and build relationships. If done right, these tools will give you more time to successfully do just that.
Do you use any of these tools? Do you use other tools to help you save time?
Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog
5 Social Media Tools to Make Your Life Easier
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Written by Karianne Stinson,
This Halloween, learn how to keep those pesky spiders from crawling around your website with a variety of spooky (and scary) tricks and treats from Covario’s P.J. Fusco.
Search Engine Watch – Latest
Yesterday, Google announced that it was releasing a major change to its Ad Rank algorithm, which determines the order of the paid search ads on each SERP as well as how much advertisers pay in the ad auction.
In a nutshell, Google is now using the presence and performance of ad extensions in determining Ad Rank. Previously, Ad Rank had just two components: your Max CPC Bid (the most you were willing to pay per click) and your Quality Score (Google’s assessment of the quality of your keywords, ads, and landing pages). Now, the formula has three components: your Max CPC Bid, your Quality Score, and, as Google puts it, “the expected impact from your ad extensions and formats.”
I was chatting with our founder, Larry Kim, about the change, and he noted that this change is bad for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).
Here at WordStream, we’re committed to helping small advertisers succeed at PPC, so I want to dive a little deeper to give my take on why Larry is right.
Before diving into the numbers, let’s take a look at this change from 10,000 feet up.
Previously, Google had a pretty simple message for advertisers: Be highly relevant and you can reach qualified searchers at a great price. Even if the calculation of Quality Score was a little bit of a black box, the message resonated with advertisers because they understood why Google would reward good advertisers and punish bad ones.
With the new change, Google’s message has changed from the simple “be relevant” to the more vague “be relevant and use more of Google’s features.” Even if Google believes that the ad extensions make for a better paid search experience, it has to recognize that the message is significantly more complicated, which makes it harder for SMB advertisers to understand what they are supposed to be doing. Plus, it makes all of those great Hal Varian videos obsolete!
Now that we’ve established that the change makes advertising on AdWords more confusing, let’s see how requiring the use of ad extensions will actually impact SMBs.
If all SMBs already used ad extensions, then this wouldn’t be a big deal. Unfortunately, the reverse is true. According to our research on small business AdWords accounts, very few of them are currently using ad extensions. For example:
This data indicates that not only do advertisers need to start using ad extensions more, they also need to make fundamental changes to their websites so that they have enough landing pages to utilize sitelink extensions where appropriate. With this change, Google is actually influencing web design (assuming that you don’t want to get penalized by Google), which could prove to be overly burdensome for less sophisticated advertisers.
And because ad rank depends on the actual performance of these extensions, not just whether they’re there, Google has now given advertisers another thing to optimize on top of their keywords, text ads and bids. Otherwise, you risk being crowded out by larger, more experienced, bigger-budget advertisers.
The good news is, ad extensions are free to use, so you don’t need a bigger budget in order to make the most of them. You just need the savvy to know which ad extensions to use and when. This is one of the easiest ways to increase your click-through rates and Quality Scores, and now using extensions is more important than ever.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, WordStream is committed to helping SMBs achieve PPC success. We know that as AdWords continues to get more complicated, there is a greater need to help advertisers focus on the most impactful actions that they can take, so we’ll be working tirelessly in the upcoming months to help advertisers create and optimize their ad extensions. That’s why we recently introduced a set of tools to help you build landing pages more quickly and easily. It’s also why we’re currently running a contest to give one lucky advertiser a $ 25,000 marketing makeover. That’s $ 25K in free advertising spend for AdWords, plus tools from WordStream and Constant Contact to help you use it. Throw your hat in the ring here.
This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.
Internet Marketing Blog by WordStream
Once a training ground for novice SEOs, local search has evolved into a complex, unpredictable ecosystem dominated by Google. Corporations and mom-and-pops shops alike are fighting for their place under the Sun. It’s everybody’s job to make best out of local Internet marketing because its importance will continue to grow.
This guide is geared towards helping you deepen your understanding of the local search ecosystem, as well as local Internet marketing in general.
I hope that, after you finish reading this guide, you will be able to make sense of local Internet marketing, use it to grow your business or help your clients do the same.
Websites exist to accomplish objectives. Regardless of company size, business models and market, your website needs to bring you closer to accomplishing one or more business objectives. These could be:
Although not exciting, this is a crucial step in building a local Internet strategy. It will determine the way you set your goals, largely shape the functionality of your website, guide you in deciding what your budget should be and so on.
Objectives are too broad to work with. They exist on a higher level and are something company executives/leadership need to set.
This is why we need specific goals, KPIs and targets. Without getting into too many details, goals could be defined as specific strategies geared towards accomplishing an objective.
For example, if your objective is to “grow your law firm,” a good goal derived from that would be to “generate client inquiries”. Another one would be to use the website to get client referrals.
When you have all this defined, you need to set KPIs. They are simply metrics that help you understand how are you doing against your objectives. For this imaginary law firm, a good KPI would be the number of potential client leads. After you set targets for your KPIs, you have completed your measurement framework. To learn more about measurement models, you can read this post by Avinash Kaushik.
These will be the numbers that you or your client should care about on a day to day basis.
Regardless of size, every local business needs to know what is their average lifetime customer value and the cost of customer acquisition.
You need to know these numbers so you can set your marketing budget and be aware if you are on the path of going out of business despite acquiring lots of customers.
Lifetime customer value (LTV) is revenue you expect from a single customer during the lifetime of your business. If you are having trouble calculating this number for your or client’s business, use this neat calculator made by Harvard Business School.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the amount of money you spent to acquire a single customer. The formula is simple. Divide the sum of total costs of sales, marketing, your overhead, with the number of customers you acquired in any given period.
LTV & CAC are the magic numbers.
You can use them to sell Internet marketing services, as well as to demonstrate the value of investing heavily in Internet marketing.
Understanding and using these metrics will put you and your clients ahead of most competitors.
Now when you have your business objectives, customer acquisition costs and other KPIs defined, and their targets set, it’s time to talk budgets. Budgets will determine what kind of local Internet marketing campaign you can run and how far it can essentially go.
Most companies don’t have a separate Internet marketing budget. It’s usually just a part of their marketing budget which can be anywhere from 2% to 20% of sales depending on a lot of factors including, but not limited to:
What does this mean to you?
If you are selling services, you will need to have as much of this data as possible.
Now when you know what business objectives your local Internet marketing campaign has to accomplish, your targets, and your budget – you can start developing a campaign. It’s easiest to think of this process if we break our campaign planning into small, but meaningful phases:
This is the reason why you need to start with a NAP audit.
NAP stands for name, address and phone number. It’s the anchor business data and should remain accurate, consistent and up to date everywhere. In order to make it consistent, you first need to identify inaccurate data.
This is easier than it sounds.
You can use Yext.com or Getlisted.org to easily and quickly check your data accuracy and consistency in the local search eco system.
Start With Data Aggregators
Data aggregators or compilers are companies that build and maintain large databases of business data. In the US, the ones you should keep an eye on are Neustar/Localeze , Infogroup (former InfoUSA) and Axciom.
Why are data aggregators important?
They are upstream data providers. This means that they provide baseline and sometimes enhanced data to search engines (including Google), local and industry directories. If your data is wrong in one of their databases, it will be wrong all over the place.
Usually, your business data goes bad for one or more of these reasons:
If you or your client have a data inconsistency problem, the fix will start with the aggregators:
Before you embark on a data correction campaign, have in mind that data aggregators take their data seriously. You will need to have access to the phone number on the listing you are trying to claim and verify, an email on the domain of the site associated with the business, and sometimes even scans of official documents.
Remember – after you fix your data inaccuracies with the aggregators, it’s still a smart idea to claim and verify listings in major IYPs as data moves slowly from upstream data providers to
numerous local search platforms your business is listed in.
Simply put, citations are mentions of your business’s name, address and phone number (full citation) or name and phone or address (partial citation).
Just like links in “general” organic search, citations are used to determine the relative importance or prominence of your business listing. If Google notices an abundance of consistent citations, it makes them think that your business is legitimate and important and you get rewarded with higher search visibility.
The more citations your business has, the more important it will be in Google’s eyes. Oh, there is also a little matter of citation quality as not all citations are created equal. There are also different types of citations besides full and partial.
Depending on the source, citations can come from:
We could group citations by how structured they are. This means that a citation on YellowBook.com is structured, but a mention on your uncle’s blog is not. Google prefers the first type. The bulk of your citation building will be covered by simply making sure that your data in major data aggregators is accurate and up-to-date. However, there’s more to citations than that.
Conventional wisdom tells us that citation strength depends mostly on the algorithmic trust that Google has in the source of the your citation. For example, if you are a manufacturer of industrial coatings, a mention on ThomasNet.com would help you significantly more than a mention on a blog from some guy that has visited your facility once.
You also want your citations to be structured, relevant and to have a link to your website for maximum benefit.
You already started by claiming and verifying your listings with major data aggregators. Since you are very serious about local search, you will make sure to claim and verify listings with major IYPs, too.
Start with the most important ones:
You shouldn’t forget business and industry associations such as bbb.org or your local chamber of commerce. Here’s where you can find your local chamber of commerce.
Industry directories such as Avvo.com for lawyers or ThomasNet.com for manufacturers are not just an excelent source of citations, but are great for your organic search visibility in the Penguin Apocalipse.
How do you find those ?
You can use a couple of tools:
Then pay attention to daily deal and event sites. Don’t forget charity websites either. If you are one of those people that are obsessed with how everything about citations works, I recommend this (the one and only) book/guide about citations by Nyagoslav Zhekov.
While it’s possible to achieve some success using just Google Places and other platforms to market a local business, it’s not possible to capture all the Web has to offer.
Your website is the only web property you will fully control. You have the freedom to track and measure anything you want, and the freedom to use your website to accomplish any business objective.
There’s nothing more tragic nor costly than targeting the wrong keywords and trying to appeal to demographics that don’t need your services/products.
To run a successful local Internet marketing campaign, you cannot just rely on quantitative data (keywords), you need to conduct qualitative market research. This is very important as it will reduce your risks, as well as acquisition costs if done right.
Let’s start with keyword research.
Getting local keyword data has always been a challenge. Google’s recent decision to withhold organic keyword data hasn’t made it any easier. However, Google itself has provided us with tools to get relatively reliable keyword data for any local search campaign.
Coupled with data from SEOBook Keyword Tool, Ubersuggest, and Bing’s Keyword Tool, you will have plenty of data to work with.
Of course, you shouldn’t forsake the market research of the equation.
You and/or your client can survey their customers to discover how exactly they describe your business, your services/products or your geographic area. For example, you’ll learn if there are any geographical nuances that you should be aware of, such as:
Use this data against keyword research tools. If you’re running AdWords, you can get an accurate idea of search volumes. To do that, click the Campaign tab, followed by the Keywords tab, then Details and then Search Terms. This data can be downloaded. The video below shows how you can get accurate search volume data if running AdWords.
Keep in mind that the quality of data using this method depends on your use of keyword matching options. This practically means that if you want to get exact match search volumes for a certain number of keywords, you have to make sure to have those keywords set as exact match.
If you’re not running AdWords, Google gives you a chance to get a good representation of your local search market using the Keyword Planning Tool as described in this post.
Largely, your content will depend on your business objectives, brand and the results of your keyword research. The time of local brochure type sites has long passed, at least for businesses that are serious about local Internet marketing.
Local websites are no different from corporate websites when it comes to technical aspects of SEO. Performance and crawlability are very important, as well as proper optimization of titles, headings, body text etc.
However, unlike corporate websites, local sites will have more benefit from:
Links are still important. They are still a foundation of high organic search visibility. They still demand your resources.
But a lot has changed – since Penguin. Building links has become a delicate endeavor even for local websites. But there is a way to triumph, all you need to do is change how you view local link building.
See link building as marketing campaigns that have links as a by-product.
What does that mean? It means that your are promoting your business as if Google doesn’t exist. Link and citation building overlap to a certain extent. They do so in a way that makes good links great citations, especially if they’re structured.
BBB.org has an enormus amount of algorithmic trust. It’s also an excellent citation. As a bonus – displaying the BBB badge prominently on your website you will likely receive a boost in conversion rates. Similar is true with your local chamber of commerce. Would you join those if Google was not around?
You probably would.
Every industry has associations you or your client can join. You will get similar benefits to ones one can expect from BBB. However, being a member of trade associations will add an additional layer of value to your business in form of education or certifications.
Every business should give back. Sometimes you will get a link sometimes you will not but you will always benefit from this type of community involvement.
There are plenty of industry websites and and directories in almost every industry. Sometimes these websites can refer significant traffic to you but they almost always make for a good link and a solid citation.
Events are good for business. If you organize them you should make sure that it’s reflected on the web. There are plenty of websites you can submit your event to. Google is not likely to start considering organizing offline events spam any time soon.
Every state has a few good ones. It’ likely that your town has an online business directory you can join. These types of links can make good citations too. They are usually easy to acquire.
It pays to a friend of your “local blogosphere”. Try to include local bloggers in your community involvement, offer to contribute content or offer giveaways.
Whenever possible, make sure your vendors link to you:
In local search, customer reviews are bigger than life. Consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations while majority (52%) says that positive online reviews make them more likely to choose a local business. Influence reviews have on your local business go well beyond social proof. Good reviews can boost your local search visibility, while bad reviews can destroy your business.
Every organization that strives to get better at what it does should use consumer reviews to improve its business operations. Customer reviews should be treated as one of the most valuable pieces of qualitative data. You should be surveying your customers daily and use their feedback to improve your services, products, customer service etc..
This holds true for corporations, as well as mom and pops shops. It’s not complicated to ask your customers about specific aspects of their experience with your business and record their answers. It’s not expensive, either.
The benefits of taking reviews seriously are enormous:
What can you do to win at review management?
Since you need to get high rating positive reviews on different websites in a way that doesn’t break any guidelines and keeps you out of jail, your best bet would be to use reviews as a customer service survey tools.
This means that you should seek customer feedback systematically in order to improve your or your client’s business. You can ask your most ecstatic customers to share their experiences with your services/products on major local search platforms. Remember that you cannot provide any type of incentive for this behavior.
To save time, you can use a tool such as GetfiveStarts.com. This tool will do everything described above.
Internet marketers tend to be blindly focused on organic search. It’s understandable – organic traffic is relatively cheap (in most markets) and seemingly unlimited.
It’s also a mistake.
Organic search channel is getting increasingly more unstable. And with that, more expensive to acquire. Since you’re aware of your customer acquisition cost and have a measurement framework, it’s easy to know how affordable traffic from other sources is for your business.
Paid search advertising works, especially if you did a good job gearing your site for conversion. You shouldn’t leave your PPC budget to Google, though. Bing/Yahoo! are a more affordable source of paid traffic with similar conversion rates.
If you’re planning to run a local paid campaign, don’t forget to:
You can also read this post by PPC Hero on what you should keep in mind when running local search advertising campaigns. You can also check out this post on Search Engine Land about managing and measuring local PPC campaigns.
Sites like YellowPages.com or SuperPages.com don’t have the traffic Google or even Bing get, but they do have a significant amount of traffic. They also have traffic that’s at the very end of the buying cycle. This is the reason one should be serious about IYPs.
What does that mean?
It means that you should have most of the big IYP listings claimed, verified and optimized to the best of your ability. So use every element of your listing to sell your products/services. In a lot of markets, it’s wise to explore advertising opportunities, as well.
If you want to take an extra step, or simply lack the time, you can sign up with a service such as Yext.com and control the major IYP listings from a single dashboard.
Keep in mind, though, that Yext.com doesn’t come for free, and you will have to pay a few hundreds dollars for a year of service.
Another avenue to take would be to outsource this process. In this scenario, you will most likely pay a one-time fee for verification and optimization of a predetermined number of listings. However, if you would like to change some of your business information somewhere down the road (such as name and phone number), you will have to go through this process from the beginning.
These days, social media means a lot of things to a lot of different people. Local businesses should use social media platforms to connect with customers that love them. Empowering these customers and giving them an incentive to recommend you to their family and friends.
You should automate as much of your social media efforts as possible. You can use tools like HooteSuite or SocialOomph.
Always try to add value in your interactions and never spam your follower base.
It’s amazing how many businesses miss to build their presence on classified sites like Craigslist.org. Even though Craigslist audience the type of audience that is always on the lookout for a great deal, the buying intent is very strong.
If you’d like to get the most out of Craigslist and other classified sites, remember to make your ads count. You need:
Other sources of non-search traffic you should explore are local newspaper advertising, ads on big industry websites, local blogs and others.
If there’s only one thing local businesses should care about, it’s tracking. As we established in the beginning of this guide, everyone needs to know how much they can afford to spend in order to acquire a customer.
Proper tracking ensures that you don’t make a mistake of spending too much on customer acquisition or spending anything on acquiring a wrong type of customer.
You can use a number of free or low cost web analytics solutions, including Clicky, KissMetrics, Woopra and Google Analytics.
If you’re like most people and don’t care if Google has access to your data, you can use Google Analytics. Take advantage of custom reporting and advanced segmentation.
In order to make the most out the traffic you get, and to get more of the traffic that is right for your business, you should create custom reports. They will enable you to know how you’re doing against your targets.
To create a custom report, click the “Customization” tab in Analytics and then click the “New Custom Report” tab.
Pick your metrics first (I recommend a Unique Visitors and Conversion Rates and couple that with the geographic dimension)
This step is crucial for local businesses that want to measure performance. Fortunately, this is not as complicated as it sounds. Depending on the type of your campaign, you can use tracking phone numbers, web-only discount codes as well as campaign-specific URLs.
Avinash Kaushik has written extensively on best ways to track offline conversions. I highly recommend this post.
Focus on improving the quality of products you sell and/or services you provide. Remember that every Internet marketing campaign works better if you’re able to provide a remarkable experience for your customers.
Build your brand and make your customers fall in love with your business. That would make every aspect of your marketing, especially Internet marketing, work better.
Vedran Tomic is a member of SEOBook and founder of Local Ants LLC, a local internet marketing agency.
In the wake of the release of Windows 8.1 we are releasing a new tool inside Bing Webmaster Tools that helps web publishers manage the page previews that are shown in one of 8.1’s new features: Bing Smart Search. Using the Page Preview tool, which you can find in the Configure My Site section, you can now view, block, or a refresh of the page preview image shown for a given page on your website in the Bing Smart Search results.
Windows 8.1 contains a new search feature called Bing Smart Search. Smart Search organizes search results in a clean, graphic manner, with rich answers for the top queries and page preview images for the results. These page preview images are generated by loading the HTML we already crawled for the “regular” web result into a headless browser — a browser that can process pages in an automated fashion without a visual user interface — and storing a thumbnail of the page in our index. For example, when searching for “Bing Smart Search” in Windows 8.1, the results will not only show the usual title and description for a page in the results, but also a thumbnail to give you an idea of what you’re getting before you tap or click:
Naturally, as a content publisher you are going to have a vested interest in the visual representation of your pages in our search results, in the same way that you care about your titles and descriptions. One thing to know is that, in most cases, all we need is the HTML we already crawled using our regular web crawler (Bingbot) to create the page preview image. However, if we need to generate a preview image on the fly — for example, based on a user request for a page for which we do not have a thumbnail in our cache — or if we need to fetch additional files to generate a high-fidelity screen capture, we use specialized crawler that identifies itself as BingPreview/1.0b. For the best possible images, make sure to not disallow this user agent access to your pages and to always show the same content to this crawler as to Bingbot and regular users.
Bing always tries to generate high quality images, but there can be cases when the page preview image didn’t turn out as well as it could have. In those cases, you might want to request us to update or refresh the image to see if this improves. In other cases, the page preview may contain information that is (or was) present on the page, but that was erroneous or contained information that shouldn’t have been published in the first place. In this case you may request a temporary block of the page preview image. To do this, we are adding another powerful tool to your Webmaster tool belt: the Page Preview tool.
If you are simply interested to see what image we have in our index, simply navigate to the tool, enter the URL of the page for which you would like to see the preview image in the Preview URL text box and click or tap Fetch. You will now see the image we currently have in our index by, along with the exact date and time we last updated it. If we don’t have an image in our cache, we will go and fetch it on demand. Once you have loaded the page preview image, you can click Cancel if you are done or you can chose to perform one of the two available additional actions:
In both cases you can add a reason for the request which helps us analyze our service over time. Once you click Submit you will send the request to Bing. In most cases these will be completed and reflected in our index within 24 hours. Note that all Page Preview Blocks that are currently active will be shown in the Page Preview blocks table lower on the page. Active Page Preview Blocks can be either removed or extended to the maximum expiry window of 90 days from today at any given time.
Are you eager to find out what your page previews look like in Bing Smart Search? Log into Webmaster Tools now and find out or go our Page Preview help article to learn more today!
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Vincent Wehren
Senior Program Manager – Bing Webmaster Tools
@vincentwehren
Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.
Search Engine Roundtable Stories:
Other Great Search Forum Threads:
You often go shopping on the internet and start with a Google search? Then you’ve probably noticed those ads with a special format appearing on the top right: …
Google said, “ad extensions typically improve clickthrough rate and overall campaign performance because they make ads more useful.” Now, because that is true, Google feels it is an important factor to include in their ad rank algorithm.
Here are some more details on this from Google:
Forum discussion at Google+.
