For Local Businesses

If you have a physical location then you need to be aware of how local search works.  While it initially seems fairly opaque with terms like Local Pack, Three Pack, NAP, Citations etc - it’s actually pretty straightforward

Steps To Take

On-Site

There are a few things to check on your existing site.  If I built it with you the only thing we need to look at is correct schema setup in the footer for NAP, schema for on-site reviews and maybe the amount of content and internal linking on some of the major pages.

Off-site

This is about NAP consistency and the amount of citations you have in local directories.  This is something you can do yourself - which takes time - or you can have a third party do it.  You’ll be looking at a few months at around $225 a month to get everything set up.

Behavioral

Generating reviews on Yelp and Google+ is now a must for any local business.  If you’re speaking to customers on a daily business how hard is it to bring up the topic of online reviews?

If you change your mindset to accept that a review will increase your local visibility in search - why would you not talk about this with your customers?

What Next

Every business is different and will have different priorities.  If you’d like to talk about your business and work out a plan of action, drop me an email and book a session.

Written while listening to: Andy The Barman 1105 by music2work2

Image Credit: Map by Amber Case on Flickr

Nap Time

As far as your business is concerned, NAP stands for

• Name

• Address

• Phone Number

You would be shocked at how many variations there are of your business’ NAP “out there!”

Local Directories For Local Businesses

If you’re a local business, i.e. you depend on people finding you in a certain physical location, your presence in local directories is a must.

When you can’t compete against the heavy SEO and Adword budgets of the national chains, local search is your best chance to become visible

NAP Consistency Is Important

The more listings you have in local directories the more visible you are in local search, however - you must ensure that the NAP used across your local is the same.

This means making sure you use the right telephone number format, ensuring that if you use the +4 digits on your zip code in a few listings you use it in all your listings. The general thinking is that it doesn’t matter if you use Blvd. or Boulevard so long as you consistently use one.

What Do You Look Like?

Want to see what your business looks like in Local Search and how effective your current approach is?

https://moz.com/local/overview

If you’d like help working through the results, give me a shout.

Written while listening to: 191 BPM Session 1 by music2work2

Image Credit: Please take one by uncoolbob on Flickr

Science - Yay!

Were you a Geeky Kid?  

Were you fascinated by how stuff works and eager to rip it apart and get to the bottom of things?

I wasn’t - I was far more concerned with using whatever it was to make things and quite happy to leave what went on inside a mystery.

Your website is a complex thing

Today's technology is designed so well that you can create a beautiful website without having to touch a line of code (almost!)  

This is ultimately great however, if you don’t know how it works - how do you know it is working correctly?

SEO is a science

As content proliferates, search engines are giving more weight to the basics of how everything works. Things like title tags, headings structure, keyword consistency and all the other on page SEO stuff are becoming even more important.  

Add in site speed, mobile scalability, internal / external linking and a myriad of other variables and I can actually feel my eyes glazing over as I write!

Get Geeky!

It’s likely that there are some low hanging technical fruit that you can quickly change to improve your visibility in search.

There are plenty of free tools out there that will help you identify where to start  - I like woorank as the interface is pretty clean and not too geeky, although you will need to start a free 14 day trial:

https://www.woorank.com/

Enter your website’s home page into the url and see what it has to say.  If you’d like help working through the results, give me a shout.

Written while listening to: Andy The Barman Dev 11 by music2work2

Image Credit: Mad Science Invitation 4 by Martin Cron on Flickr

Link Building Advice from Beagles

Just like you - she can’t see them, but she knows they’re there!

Links!

Beautiful, tasty, high quality pieces of deliciousness - the more you have, the better life is!

Look at that guy on the right, he’s got bags of the things, how fair is that!?!?!?

Content first

Links are given to those that deserve them. 

Digital marketers share a lot with Beagles in this regard.  While they have to learn specific behaviors like sit, outside, walk, get off the couch!, our behaviors are more concerned with learning how to consistently produce content so good that people might throw us a metaphorical bone.

A smart puppy can suss this in a few weeks.  It can take a smart business owner years.

The thing about links

They’re not just lying around.  You can be the best trained Beagle on the planet but someone’s gotta notice you and have a link to give in the first place.

Once you’ve mastered “quality content production” the next step is to find those people who have links to give (and quality ones at that - not those lame ass Farmer John’s breakfast things)  and ask for one.

Here’s the bad news

Link building, it’s not easy

Getting good links is almost as challenging as creating the content in the first place.  It isn’t as hard in terms of bare brained creativity, but it takes time to do it right, and you really don’t want to do it wrong.

You could of course go off and spend a grand a month (for a minimum of 4 months) and have an agency generate 2 (yes, that’s right, two) quality links back to your site.

Or you could learn how to do it yourself.

But who has time for that?

Links are everything

The biggest factor in determining whether you appear in search is the number of quality links you have coming into your website.

If you feel you’ve got to the point where your content is worthy, maybe it’s time to start looking outward.  If you’d like to learn more about link building and how it would work for your business, drop me a line.

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Written while listening to: Breathe by music2work2

Image credit: erwartungsfrohes Warten an der Wursttheke by Axel Kuhlmann on Flickr

Gift Horses, Mouths and the Network You Should Revisit

Back on the 11th of this month Justin Bieber had his wisdom teeth pulled, 3 days afterwards a sole tweet consisting of the hashtags #pain and #wisdomteeth had over 83,000 strangers wishing him a speedy recovery.

I’m guessing you’re not a Belieber - but have a think about that - what does it mean for your business?

Straight from the horse’s mouth

Twitter is about strangers - it’s about opening communication between people who don’t know each other, without filters, direct to the individual.

If you’re in the market for new customers and clients - Twitter’s ½ billion users would seem like a good place to look.

What’s new with Twitter

Here are three things that have got me looking at Twitter again for my own businesses:

New Analytics

Twitter’s new analytics interface is super clean, easy to use, focuses on the key metrics and makes compiling KPIs a dream.

Google Indexed Tweets

A recent study a few months after the Google / Twitter deal showed that tweets are now 4 to 5 times more likely to appear in search results.  And while those tweets tend to belong to authority users, it’s a clear indication that Twitter’s becoming more visible again.

Persicope

The moving selfie (thanks @lizmarshall) is here and it’s just going to grow, here’s a great article explaining what Periscope is and how it works.  

With Twitter buying periscope they’ve turned themselves into the #1 network for streaming video.

When was the last time you looked at Twitter?

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Written while listening to: The Bench 163 V 1 by music2work2

Image credit: Horse Macro_5251 by Kit Logan on Flickr

Lawyers, Insurance Agents, SEO and Golf!

Driving’s for show - Putting’s for dough

Ask a golfer what it feels like to hit a great drive and they’ll grin at you - there’s just something insanely pleasurable about thwacking a ball hundreds of yards into the distance.  And, if it goes in the wrong direction, well - you have a few more shots to make it right.

Putting on the other hand is a serious business.  Matches are won and lost on the green and there are no second chances.

Blogs are for SEO

Blog posts are how you generate links to your website, they are the content people find when searching for solutions and by their very nature, need to reflect your core business. 

Like driving, blog posts can be great fun!  The better you get the greater the distance they travel - multiple shares across social media and links from influencers can feel just as good as a 325 yard drive straight down the middle!

Newsletters are for dough

Newsletters however are serious business.  They’re how you convert potential customers to actual customers and by their very nature, need to be consistently interesting.

For many businesses (like mine) the content in a newsletter and blog post can be the same - if there’s always something new to tell your clients the newsletter can be educational and reflect what’s going on in your world. 

Where it gets challenging is when people don’t want to learn about your business - think the law or Insurance - this is when the newsletter becomes a lot tougher to write.

Repeat: Newsletters are for dough

If you’re operating with an opening rate around 30% it’s an indication that you need to change your strategy.  If you’re re-purposing your blog posts as newsletters then maybe you need to allocate more resource to what is potentially your biggest revenue generator.

The challenge I’m giving myself this year is to drive my opening rate from 60% to 70%.  I don’t yet know how I’m going to achieve that but I am going to allocate more time to the newsletter than I ever have.  Maybe you should do the same.

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Written while listening to: New Fazioli tracks by music2work2

Image Credit: Getting ready to kill it by Jennifer Pauley on Flickr