Tuesday, March 27, 2018

Local SEO | Customer Engagement | Google My Business

Local SEO in 2018: 12 Tips to Build Local Engagement

Local search is undergoing a few challenges, including review spam and listing spam. But Google is making steps to address them.

“Spam is like whack-a-mole,” according to Dana DiTomaso. “Spammers try new stuff, Google smacks it down.”

To improve the quality of its listings, Google introduced the Local Guide program where people provide relevant information about local businesses to Google.

When people search for businesses, visit their location and review them from your Android phone – all with your Location Services turned on, then Google knows where you’ve been.

Most people only have one phone and searching for a business, going there, and reviewing it are all measures of local engagement taking place on mobile.

What’s more, it’s hard to fake location data.

Currently, local search comprises of about one-third engagement, one-third local data, and one-third traditional SEO.

But in the future, DiTomaso said, engagement will become a more significant factor for local SEO – as it is the best way how Google can differentiate the quality of businesses.

Google knows so much about people – from the topics you’re interested in and the videos you watched, to the places you went to, and the things you said.

Through these bits of information, Google has a complete snapshot of your engagement with the world.
How to Focus Your Tactics on Building Engagement

We already know how to build citations so we should now shift our focus to building engagement.

Here are a few tips on how to do it.

1. Review Your Knowledge Panel

It is your basic health check so regularly review if the info in your knowledge panel are accurate and update them when necessary.

2. Check Your Google My Business Timeline

Google has rolled out a Q&A feature where people ask questions but business owners don’t get notified. This is an important feature to pay attention to.

Prospective clients are already reaching out to you and all you need is to respond.

3. Keep Your Email Newsletter Interesting & Consistent

You don’t want your customers to unsubscribe.

4. Make Your Transactional Emails Worth Reading

No one likes to be sold to.

Try to add value to your transactional emails so that subscribers appreciate it.

Social Media Marketing Strategies | Small Business, Entrepreneurs

Saturday, March 10, 2018

Faceboook - Influencer Marketing

Facebook's Recent Algorithm Change Can Boost The Effectiveness Of Your Influencer Marketing

Meaningful interactions are rooted at the core of present-day digital marketing. From micro-moments to the rise of influencers, the space is flooded with critical decision points that may result in a sale -- and Facebook is always adapting. 

The social giant modified its algorithm to alter what you see in your feed. Mark Zuckerberg commented, “I’m changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions.”

The change helps more efficiently filter content, meaning the things from your friends and those you chose to follow rise to the surface while brands, publishers, marketers and news outlets are given lower priority. Taking it a step further, Zuckerberg announced he would be surveying Facebook users about their news sources, asking them to rate these outlets for usefulness and trustworthiness.

Publishers and new organizations are, for the most part, taking these changes in stride and bracing for impact. However, it’s no secret that referral traffic from Facebook for these publishers and news organizations has been on a steady decline for quite some time.

While this change will affect the ability of brands, marketers, publishers and news organizations to appear organically in feeds, these sources are still able to purchase paid posts to garner traffic -- an approach that does not appear to be affected by the recent algorithm change.

This is where influencers come in. While this recent algorithm change diminishes the ability for brands to organically interact with those who follow their pages, it doesn’t negatively affect the interaction between content creators with large audiences and their followers. In fact, the change increases the likelihood of interactions by reinforcing connections between actual people and influencers.

Kate Hudson: Branding, Marketing, Retail | Fabletics.com

Content Marketing | SEO, Social Media, Video

7 marketing and promotion tactics to get your content discovered

It’s no secret a well-executed content marketing campaign can deliver a solid return on investment.

According to Demand Metric, content marketing generates three times more leads than most outbound marketing strategies at 62 percent less cost.

As marketers pad their budgets with more money to invest in content marketing this year, one strategy that often gets overlooked is content promotion.

According to a survey by the Content Marketing Institute, 55 percent of B2B marketers were not even sure what a successful content marketing campaign looked like!

Content without promotion is like link building without links or creating a landing page without a call to action. That’s why promotion should take equal focus with creation.

Let’s look at seven tried-and-true content promotion strategies that will drive traffic to your content and website.

1. Paid social promotion

Paid social promotion can be one of the most precise strategies available to market your content to people who are interested in and most likely to engage with your content.

For example, by using Facebook’s Audience Insights, businesses can segment audience lists by select boundaries, such as demographics, psychographics and intent. This allows marketers to create audience segments that are more in line with their brand and specific topics of content on their website.  There are several benefits of paid social promotion:
  • Increase website traffic with relevant visitors.
  • Generate more conversions by marketing to people with high purchasing intent.
  • Familiarize users with your brand.
Even advertising content over native or display ads can help to increase brand recall for customers who come across your website in future searches. Only now, they’ll think of your brand as a bit of an authority because they’re already familiar with your brand.

Paying to promote your content over advertising channels is a good way to cut through the noise and the competition.
Paid promotion is also an excellent strategy to target users who have interacted with your website or blog in the past month. Remarketing not only increases your chance of reclaiming a missed conversion, but it also helps to foster brand loyalty by providing them useful content based on their past consumption.

Before undergoing a paid promotion strategy, it’s key to have your goals outlined. These can include increasing readership for your content or generating more conversions on your website. With these in mind, you can quantify the impact of these strategies and assess their success.

2. Targeted sharing

Facebook is no longer the business to consumer (B2C) marketing giant it once was; after its last algorithm update, it limited organic reach for business posts on the platform.

One way to reach more people over social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram is through targeted sharing.
Targeted sharing is essentially tagging someone in a post in hopes that they will share your content with their audience. Here are some ways to do that:
  • Link to people in the snippet who would be interested in your article.
  • Link to sources featured in the article directly in the snippet.
  • Directly engage industry peers with a question or point of debate in the snippet to curate conversation over a topic.
Twitter’s advanced search tool allows you to find people in your niche who are close to you geographically, using certain hashtags and more.

Instagram recently introduced a “follow” hashtag that allows users to view content in their newsfeed using a certain hashtag. This has opened up an entirely new platform for businesses to reach more customers over Instagram who are already interested in your industry.

Social Media Marketing Tips - Musicians, Bands

7 Essential Social Media Tips For Musicians And Bands

Bands and artists that cultivate a strong presence on social media tend to see significant opportunity in their ability to connect with industry influencers, and reach out to fans directly to sell music and merchandise. Here we detail seven key tips for growing on social media.

Musicians and bands that maintain a presence on social networking sites benefit immensely from the opportunities that social media presents. Through these sites, they can reach out to industry influencers, connect with their fans and sell music merchandise. If you have just formed a band or just decided to become a recording artist, here are some tips to help you grow on social media.

Keep it positive

Occasionally, you may find yourself tempted to post some negative things on social media. Resist that temptation. Remember that everything you put out online will be there forever. Therefore, you should try to stay positive and avoid making things personal. Remember, your fans are not your friends and they don’t know you personally. So, even when they say something you don’t like, try and spin it in a positive way.

Be easy to find

For a band or musician seeking to grow online, you should take your presence on each social network very seriously. Create pages on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, MySpace, SoundCloud, BandCamp, etc. and connect these channels to your music website. Use the channels to keep your fans up to date with what you are up to; tell them the song you’re recording in studio, the events you will be performing, and share behind-the-scene footage of these and other music events. Maintaining an active presence will make other fans who want to connect with you easily find you.

Don’t waste valuable space on social media profiles

In your social media profiles, use every space you have to advertise your band. The cover space for instance is an excellent place to put up information about your upcoming tours, a new music video you’re about to release, etc. Remember to also regularly change that header image with updates about the next project you’re working on.

SEO - Website Marketing

What SEO Is And More Importantly Is NOT!

For a long time, all most businesses needed was a simple website that proved their company existed to potential prospects. While these “brochure sites” did serve a purpose, they weren’t created to drive new business. Today’s consumer begins their ‘buyers journey’ much earlier in the process. That means many of your potential prospects are searching and investigating solutions well before they come in contact with you and your site.

While the term SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has once again become a popular buzzword across the business community, its meaning has become wide and varied. In this post, my goal is to shed some light into what SEO is and is not, as well as make the argument that search engine optimization is essential to any business looking to grow using the internet.

What SEO is Not.

When someone asks me what I do, and I share that I work in search, it amazes me what the most common responses are:
  • That’s like Facebook and Social Media Right?
  • I need some of that, but the ads are so expensive.
  • So you try to trick Google, huh?
If you weren’t aware, none of the above are SEO. For those of you who may still be confused, let me help you out.

Social is NOT SEO

Social media marketing (SMM) is a very focused discipline that falls under the umbrella of digital marketing. The goal of SMM is to build and nurture a following on social media platforms. While SMM can help grow your brand, and having links on major social media sites is a plus, the impact social has on SEO is minimal in most cases.

This is not to say that social should not play a role. In his article for Convince and Convert, SEO Expert Eric Enge shares how social can play a role. Building a digital marketing campaign that has synergy is where the real power lies. Using social media alongside your SEO efforts can increase your visibility and generate more traffic.

Daymond John - Shark Tank | The Power of Broke

Video Marketing | Social Media Marketing

Top Tips For Using Video In Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

You only have seconds to stop someone’s thumb from scrolling and to grab their attention. Think of your video like a funnel and you will win. Grab their attention, deliver value, pitch them and then convert.

Use An Attention-Grabbing Thumbnail

With the speed consumers scroll through their social media feeds, you have to do something that grabs their attention to get them to stop on your video. Some tactics that have worked well for me are banners in video thumbnail that have a question on them similar to: “Do you want to grow your business?” or a banner with a statement like: “Don’t miss this opportunity!” Emojis in banners or an out of the ordinary picture can get people’s thumbs to stop scrolling.

Understand Why People Are Watching

When a user clicks to watch your video content, you often have as little as 10 seconds to not only grab their attention but reassure them that your video will live up to their expectations. That’s pretty difficult, considering the number of distractions and competition on social media platforms nowadays. When creating a video, it’s important that you understand your audience's goal. Why are they watching your video in the first place? Do they have an issue or problem they are trying to alleviate? Do they have an issue they might not even know about, but will?

Don’t force your product or service on them. Again, knowing the reason they are watching will help you better shape an opening. Whatever you do, you need to connect to their specific needs or issues. So start by introducing the issue or pain point they may be experimenting with direct language like “you” or “your company.” I usually ask them questions or set up a story that capitalizes on human emotion and walk them through the issue.

SEO - Backlinks | Social Media Marketing

4 SEO Mistakes That Are Costing You Traffic (And How to Avoid Them)

Do backlinks still matter in 2018? What’s with all the hype surrounding internal linking? Should you spend more time publishing long-form content?

If you’ve pondered over these questions while doing your recent site audit, then we’ve got some answers for you.

Optimizing your website for search engine result pages (SERPs) still remains a priority for most marketers. With new search engine algorithm updates and changing user perspectives, it’s important that we as marketers stay on top of the trends and constantly evolve our SEO methods and practices to rank higher in SERPs.

Having said that, some optimization techniques tend to do more harm than good, especially in the long run. To that end, here are 4 most common SEO mistakes and what you can do to avoid them.

1. Prioritizing Social Media Over Link Building

Many publishers turn to social media when they’ve just published a fresh piece of content in an effort to get more clicks, likes, and upvotes. Once the article gets the desired number of shares, it’s often tempting to abandon the link building quest completely and move on to the next piece of content.

But sadly, despite social media being a highly useful tool to promote articles, there is no proven correlation between social media shares and improved search rankings.
On the other hand, link building takes time and effort, but can help you gain more organic traffic in the long run. In fact, backlinks from authoritative sources continue to be one of the primary factors to rank high in search engines.

According to a recent study by Backlinko where they analyzed over 1 million Google search results, it was revealed that the number of domains linking to a page correlated with rankings more than any other factor.

How to Avoid it?

The quality of backlinks play a huge role in determining search engine success. If you’re able to earn backlinks from high domain authority sites, your organic rankings can improve in a matter of days. On the other hand, if you obtain links from bad neighborhood or indulge in black hat practices, your site may get penalized by Google into obscurity.

SEO Strategy - SEO Tips

5 Ways to Bootstrap SEO When You're on a Tight Budget

Every business should be implementing SEO strategies in order to improve their website’s search engine rankings. But unfortunately, there are a lot of marketers and small-business owners who are not. Why? Many of them use the “it’s out of my budget” excuse to justify their decision to ignore SEO. However, SEO is more cost-effective than many other forms of marketing, including pay-per-click ads and social media marketing. And while not every business will have the budget to spend thousands every month on an SEO campaign, there are some simple things that you can do to get the most search traffic possible on a tight budget.  

1. Google My Business.

Small businesses and brick-and-mortar businesses should focus on gaining local exposure instead of trying to target potential customers located throughout the country. One way to improve your business’s local SEO is by optimizing its Google My Business page, formerly known as Google Places and sometimes called a Google Map listing.

Start by making sure you own the page and have access to make edits to your business' listing. Then move on to filling in any information that is missing on your page. Be as accurate and descriptive as possible, and don’t forget to incorporate a few keywords as well. When choosing categories to describe your business, it’s best to be specific. For example, if you are a personal injury law firm, choose “personal injury attorney” instead of simply “lawyer” or “law firm.”  

Take advantage of all the fields, making sure to add your business hours, photos and as much other information as you possibly can. It only takes a few minutes to make these changes, but they can pay off in a huge way. After the page is complete, your business will have a listing on Google that will appear in local searches.

Data Science - Marketing ROI

Data Science Is The Key To Marketing ROI - Here's How To Nail It

This year alone, the U.S. is projected to absorb a shortfall of 190,000 data scientists — and that’s not even counting the 1.5 million more analysts and leaders needed to make use of the information big data supplies.

This is an especially terrifying prospect in the marketing world, where data science provides the signals that let marketers know their decisions have paid off. “In the end, the analytics won’t tell you the next big creative idea,” Elea Feit, assistant professor of marketing at Drexel University, says. “It will tell you when the next big creative idea is working.”

Data scientists can use data points and trends to help strategize content, tweak content to meet demand, and measure the outcomes of the actions taken by marketers. They combine the science of statistical models with the art of creative work to go past the “gut feelings” of the “Mad Men” era and into a space where marketers can not only see a payoff today, but also a payoff tomorrow.

What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You

Having a wealth of knowledge is a huge advantage — until your knowledge surpasses others’ understanding. If people don’t know how to apply a significant piece of information, that data is useless.

This is why data science is so essential to the marketing equation. “ The most powerful data scientists are those who act as bridges between insights and people ,” says Kirill Eremenko, the founder and CEO of SuperDataScience, an online educational portal for data scientists and data science enthusiasts. “There’s a science behind analytics; however, communicating insights is an art.”