Want to lower the cost per conversion of your Facebook ads? Wondering how to serve the right ad to the right audience? In this article, you’ll discover a six-step plan to test, analyze, and optimize Facebook ads, as well as the audience segments you target. Let Facebook Split Test Multiple Ad Variations When you run
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Posted by jcar7
In the nearly three years the MeetEdgar blog went live, we’ve published more than 250 posts, written over 300,000 words, searched for hundreds of .gifs, and used our own tool to share our content 2,600 times to over 70,000 fans on social media.
After all that work, it seems silly to share a post just once. Nobody crumples up an oil painting and chucks it in the trash after it’s been seen one time — and the same goes for your content.
You’ve already created an "art gallery" for your posts. Resharing your content just lets the masses know what you've got on display. Even if hundreds or thousands of people have seen it all before, there’s always someone new to your content.
In a social media landscape that’s constantly changing, building a solid foundation of evergreen content that can be shared and shared again should be a key part of your social media strategy.
Otherwise, your art gallery is just another building in the city.
But wait… aren’t we supposed to be writing fresh content?Yes! One of the biggest misconceptions about resharing is that it's a spammy tactic. This is just not true — provided that you’re resharing responsibly. We’ll explain how to do that in just a moment.
Resharing actually does double-duty for your brand. It not only gets the content that you spent your valuable time creating in front of more eyeballs (and at optimal times, if you want to get fancy), it also frees you up to have more authentic, real-time social interactions that drive people to your site from social media — since you’ve got content going out no matter what.
Did we mention that resharing is good for SEO? Moz Blog readers know that the more people engage with a post, the better your blog or site looks to search engines. And that’s only one facet of the overall SEO boost (and traffic boost!) resharers can see.
How resharing impacts SEOBig brands are probably the most prolific content resharers. Heck, they don’t even think twice about it:
BuzzFeed is a perfect example of the value of repeating social updates, because they don’t necessarily NEED to.
So why do they do it anyway? Because it gets results.
Social sharing alone has an impact on SEO, but social engagement is really where it’s at. Quality content is totally worth the up-front time and cost, but only if it gets engagement! You up your chances of engagement with your content if you simply up your content’s exposure. That’s what resharing does awesomely.
With literally zero tweaks to the content itself, BuzzFeed made each of those social posts above double in value. Chances are, the people who saw these posts the first time they were shared are not the same people who saw them when they were reshared.
But simply resharing social posts isn’t the only way to get more engagement with your content. This post covers how companies large and small do resharing right, and highlights some of the best time-saving content strategies you can implement for your brand right now.
1 - Start at the source: Give old posts a new lookLots has changed in five years — the world got three new Fast & Furious movies and LKR Social Media transformed from a consulting service into social media automation software.
We’ve done the math: three months is one Internet year and five years is basically another Internet epoch. (This may be a slight exaggeration.) So when we transferred some of our founder’s older evergreen blog posts to the new MeetEdgar blog, we took stock of which of those posts had picked up the most organic traffic.
One thing that hadn’t changed in five years? A blog post about how Vin Diesel was winning the social media game was still insanely popular with our readers:
Writing blog posts with an eye toward making them as evergreen as possible is one of the smartest, most time-saving-est content marketing strategies out there.
There weren’t a ton of tweaks to make, but we gave this popular post some love since so many people were finding it. We pepped up the headline, did a grammar and content rundown, refreshed links and images, updated social share buttons, and added more timely content. The whole process took less time than writing a brand new post, and we got to share it with tens of thousands of followers who hadn’t seen it when it was originally published.
So... check your metrics! Which evergreen posts have performed the best over time? Which have lots of awesome organic traffic? Make a list, do a content audit, and start updating!
2 - Find your social sharing "sweet spot" by repackaging your contentWhen you read studies that say many social media users reshare social posts without ever clicking through to the content itself… it can be a little disheartening.
Okay, a LOT disheartening.
You’ve probably spent tons of time creating your content, and the thought that it’s not getting read NEARLY as often as it could be is a recipe for content marketing burnout. (We’ve all been there.)
But it’s not all for naught — you might just need to experiment until you find the “sweet spot” that gets people to read and share. One way to do that is to simply repackage content you’ve already written.
The tried-and-true “best of” post offers a reprieve from the content-creation grind while still delivering tons of value to your fans and readers.
Repackaging is best when it reframes your content with a new focus — like rounding up similar posts based on a theme. (You can do this in reverse, too, and turn one great post into a bunch of fresh content to then share and reshare!)
If you can get people to your site, a "best of" post encourages readers to stay longer as they click links for the different articles you’ve gathered up, and engage with content they may never have thought to look up separately.
Most fun of all, you can repackage your content to target new or different subsets of your audience on social media. (More on that in the next section.)
3 - Social shake-up: Reaching and testing with different audiences“What if the same person recognizes something that I’ve already posted in the past?” you might be asking right about now. “I don’t want to annoy my followers! I don’t want to be spammy!”
Forget about people resharing social posts without reading the content behind the links — most people don’t see your social posts at all in the first place.
This is just one of those uncomfortable facts about the Internet, like how comment sections are always a minefield of awful, and how everyone loves a good startled cat .gif.
That doesn’t mean you should repeat yourself, word-for-word, all the time. Chances are, you have more than one type of reader or customer, so it’s important not just to vary your content, but also to vary how you share it on social media.
Savvy marketers are all over this tactic, marketing two sides (or more) of the same coin. Here are a couple of examples of social sharing images from a Mixpanel blog post:
Option A
Option B
Both Option A and Option B go to the same content, but one highlights a particularly juicy stat (problem statement: “97% of users churn”) and the other hits the viewer with an intriguing subheader (solution statement: “behavior-based messaging”). In this way, Mixpanel can find out what pulls in the most readers and tweak and promote that message as needed.
Pull a cool anecdote from your post or highlight a different stat that gets people excited. It can be as easy as changing up the descriptions of your posts or just using different images. There’s so much to test and try out — all using the same post.
4 - Automate, automate, automateRemember, your best posts are only as good as the engagement they get. That fact, however, doesn’t mean you have to keep manually resharing them on social media day in and day out.
Unless, of course, you’re into that boring busywork thing.
Automating the whole process of resharing evergreen content saves tons of time while keeping your brand personality intact. It also frees you up to have real-time interactions with your fans on social media, brainstorm new post ideas, or just go for a walk, and it solves the time crunch and the hassle of manually re-scheduling posts, while actually showcasing more of your posts across the massive social media landscape. Just by spacing out your updates, you’ll be able to hit a wider range of your followers.
(This is probably a good time to check whether your social media scheduling tool offers automatic resharing of your content.)
Now, social media automation isn’t a substitute for consistently creating great new content, of course, but it does give your existing evergreen content an even better opportunity to shine.
Win with quality, get things DONE with resharingIt’s noisy out there. The law of diminishing returns — as well as declining social reach — means that a lot of what you do on social media can feel like shouting into the void.
And there’s not a huge ROI for shouting into voids these days.
Responsible resharing is an important part of your overall content marketing strategy. As long as you keep your content fresh, create new quality content regularly, and talk to your fans where and when they’re most active, chances are people won’t see the same thing twice. The data shows you’ll get more clicks, more traffic, and better SEO results — not a bad bonus to that whole “saving lots of time” thing.
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http://ift.tt/2vhJYJDStorytelling is the concept du jour in content marketing. Make sure you have a hero, and a journey, and a harrowing tale, and a surprise twist.
It’s not bad advice. Infusing your content with a story makes it emotionally resonant, creating memorability and impact it might otherwise lack.
So, I’m absolutely on board with storytelling as a content marketing device. But just because you understand story arcs and can riff on Joseph Campbell doesn’t mean you’re now Francis Ford Coppola or William Faulkner.
Content marketing is a job, not an art form. You’re not competing for accolades and critics praise. You’re competing for consumer attention, period.
The goal isn't to be good at content—it's to be good at business because of content.
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The only job that content marketing has is to create behaviors among target audiences that benefit the business. There are, of course, a lot of ways to do so. Youtility content. Content that makes you laugh. Content that makes you cry. Content that makes you mad. But ultimately, content must prod behavior, or it’s a useless exercise.
I see more and more content marketers straying from this perspective, thinking that they are newfangled hybrid players, straddling the line between fine art and commerce. They are not. I am not. You are not.
We are using information and entertainment to sell stuff—perhaps elliptically, but the end game is the same.
So being precious about your content creation processes and approaches does nothing but fog up your windshield.
The terrific songwriter and alt country superstar Jason Isbell nailed this in a recent interview:
“I think all those trappings and all those romanticized ideas of writing are things that you learn very, very quickly belong in the world of the amateur,” he continues. “Things like inspiration, you know. All that is nonsense. If your job is to write, you write. And if you’re not too good at it, you either quit or you keep doing it till you get good at it.”
Exactly.
And he’s talking about songwriting, which many people would actually call an art form. Content marketing is not. It’s a job. Not everyone can do it. And it’s not dishonorable to have this occupation. You don’t need to disguise yourself in the cloak of the “artist” to make yourself feel better about what you’re trying to accomplish with every blog post, podcast, infographic, and YouTube video.
Content success is about perspiration, not inspiration
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Figure out who your relevant audiences are. Determine what information they need from you. Give it to them, in multiple formats. Throw in an interesting wrinkle now and again, maybe by using storytelling techniques. Test and optimize. Repeat.
Don’t make content marketing harder than it already is by thinking it’s something that it’s not. It’s a job; embrace it.
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Social media is now a significant part of any PR strategy and one that will only continue to become more important as time goes on. As such, it is important to have detailed social media strategies in place, to ensure that you maximise the results of all your social campaigns.
Be relevant
It may sound incredibly simple, but being relevant is one of the most important social media strategies, and has been proved time and time again to be a successful one. Ensure that all of the content you post is relevant to your audience and relevant to the time at which you are posting it.
A great way to ensure your social media posts are relevant is to research awareness days and include these in your content-planning calendar. Being relevant also means being visible. Your strategy should focus on keeping all of your social media channels active – as the saying goes: “out of sight, out of mind”.
http://ift.tt/2uRtdUvContent intelligence (CI) is the shiny new toy of content marketing. Like many new technologies, some users may try to adopt content intelligence technology before they fully understand it, and fail to fully realize its benefits. Content intelligence software is expanding in variety and function, so it’s important to understand the pain points content intelligence addresses.
This post offers a brief overview of what content intelligence is. It addresses some of the pain points content intelligence solves, and outlines the first step to prepare for the advent of this exciting technology.
First, let’s define content intelligence.
What Is Content Intelligence?Content intelligence draws upon artificial intelligence (AI) and big data, but it is neither of those things. Content intelligence is the systems and software that transforms data into actionable insights for content strategy and tactics. Content intelligence gives you the full context of an individual piece of content—and the body of content it sits within, to make better decisions about anything pertaining to the content in question.
Forrester analyst Ryan Skinner defines content intelligence as “technology that helps content understand itself—what it’s about, how it speaks, how effective it is at accomplishing certain goals, what emotions it calls to mind, etc.”
What Pain Points Does Content Intelligence Address?Every marketer alive today proclaims how “data-driven” they are. But if you look at how content is utilized, it’s still mostly based on intuition and guesswork. Only eight percent of marketers consider themselves “very successful” or “extremely successful” at tracking content marketing ROI (LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community), and only 55 percent of bloggers regularly check analytics (Orbit Media).
Here are five common content marketing pain points that content intelligence addresses.
1. You’re Not Sure What to Share or How to DistributeWhen it comes to content marketing, creating a killer piece of content is only half the battle. In addition to creating engaging content, your audience needs to be exposed to it. This means building a successful distribution strategy around your content beyond just a cursory social share or email blast.
Currently, there are many channels where most decisions about how to utilize content largely come down to intuition. These include social media, websites, advertisements, and so on. Content intelligence can add significant value to this process by utilizing consumer models and characterizing content from previous interactions to suggest what to share next. It can make those decisions informed, and even automate some of those decisions in a scalable manner.
Think about how hard it is to know what to promote, when to promote, and where to promote it. Over four million blog posts are published on the internet every day, while 50 percent of content created gets eight shares or less according to BuzzSumo. Content intelligence will enable highly personalized, cross-channel promotion that humans are just not wired to do.
2. Your Audience Segments Aren’t Getting the Right ContentWhen trying to find a show to watch on Netflix or songs to listen to on Spotify, you’re served personalized media based on your viewing history and personal taste. Yet on a company’s web page, you’re usually presented with the same stories everyone sees.
With content intelligence, expect instead to see stories based on your previous browsing history, your position in an organization’s hierarchy, your title, what you’ve consumed in the past, what other people in your organization have consumed in the past, and even which content—or certain pieces of content, shared in succession—has the highest conversion rate at the stage you’re currently at in the consumption cycle.
Those are just a few factors content intelligence can weigh when calculating which content to display to a given consumer. But there are literally hundreds of possible factors that can be fed into an algorithm to find the right weight for all those inputs, so you know exactly what context something has and what the right piece of content is.
This could be hugely impactful in making your content work harder for you. According to Infosys, 74 percent of customers feel frustrated when website content is not personalized, and Rapt Media says 63 percent of consumers said they’d think more positively of a brand if it gave them content that was more valuable, interesting, or relevant. Content intelligence will utilize your existing content inventory to make it as effective as possible.
3. You Don’t Know Which Content to UpdateContent marketers can use their inventory more effectively if they know when to refresh evergreen articles or update other content to help it perform better. Say a particular article or blog post performed really well, but it hasn’t been refreshed in a year. Wouldn’t it be nice to receive a prompt for this article to be refreshed and shared? Beyond that, content intelligence could recommend changing a headline or adding more images if it recognizes your existing content could work more efficiently for you.
There’s a constant stream of things a content marketer can do to be a lot more effective that don’t take up much time, but it’s hard to figure out what they are. Content intelligence can surface that information in an easy-to-understand and easy-to-act-on way, so you can login every day (or week), get some really useful feedback or advice, make those changes, and see specific growth in certain areas.
Content intelligence will allow you to do this throughout funnel stages, your website, a sales person on the phone, or emailing with a prospect. Any time you have a touch point with a customer, you can show targeted information that’s highly valuable to them.
4. You Don’t Know What to Write AboutWriter’s block has been giving content creators ulcers since before content marketing existed. Content creation is another area content intelligence can optimize.
Content intelligence can make recommendations about what to create based on what performs well, or what your competitors are doing, and the recommendations can vary based on your goals. You could say, “We have a goal of a certain number of leads or page views generated for this quarter,” and you could receive recommendations to help you achieve that. The recommendations will necessarily differ based on the goal.
While machines can mainly only create data-driven content for now, that’s evolving quickly. IBM partnered with a movie studio and created a video trailer using AI, which took over the creative process. Coca-Cola has used AI to generate TV ads, selecting the music and creating scenes.
5. Your Content Isn’t WorkingTennessee-based marketing strategist, speaker, and author Mark Schaefer coined the term “content shock” in 2014. It describes the phenomenon of an ever-increasing arms race to produce more, and more compelling, content. This content is seldom personalized, and consumers’ attention spans are resolutely finite. These two things together ultimately overwhelm people with content options, making content marketing less effective for most companies.
Content intelligence is a significant competitive advantage for organizations wanting to overcome content shock. Content intelligence offers insights that help you produce better, more engaging content. It also offers more intelligent means of distribution to get content to the right audience where it’s most compelling. Content intelligence enables you to present the right content to the right person, every time.
For example, if you’re a B2B marketer and have just downloaded an ebook, often you’ll be presented with that same ebook as a call-to-action if you revisit the site two days later. If that company has created enough great content, however, content intelligence allows them to truly tailor their brand experience to an individual level. You don’t feel there are too many products on Amazon because you only see the stuff that matters to you, based on your behavior. If content is the same way—if you only see what’s relevant to you all the time—it doesn’t matter to you how many millions of ebooks are out there.
If you want to overcome content shock, content intelligence provides a competitive advantage.
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How to Prepare for Content Intelligence
Content intelligence relies primarily on data computation to work. This means the insights it provides are only as good as the amount and quality of the data you have. To leverage this technology for competitive advantage requires as long a history as possible of well-structured, well-maintained, trustworthy data. The first step to ensuring you have good data is to conduct a comprehensive content audit (which should be performed once a year, regardless) and implement an organized tagging and categorization system for all your content.
Content intelligence can solve a wide range of content marketing problems. These include alleviating time constraints, resource shortages, strategy uncertainty, stresses around data computation, and content recommendations.
For a more in-depth look at content intelligence check out Content Intelligence: The New Frontier of Content Marketing Technology.
Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from Jay Baer at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.
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Do you use Instagram for business? Want to remain in compliance with Instagram’s Terms of Use so you’re not shut down? In this article, you’ll discover three Instagram compliance issues marketers need to understand. #1: You Grant Instagram a License to Use Your Content The bottom line is, if you’re posting images on Instagram, you’re
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Posted by MiriamEllis
The classic 1982 Activision game, Pitfall!, was so challenging that most players believed you could only win by running out the 20-minute clock. The real point of this adventure, however, was to gather up all of the treasures before the clock ran out on you.
Isn’t that just like business?
You’ve opened the doors of your local enterprise in hopes of gathering up enough revenue before it’s time to retire, and you’re determined to make enough of a success to secure some dignity in your golden years.
I’m not a professional economist, but I've read their statistics on how half of US businesses don't make it past their 5th year. I’m a local SEO, and what I’ve learned is that to be agile enough to beat the odds, local business owners have to swing over the obvious pitfalls that less savvy competitors are doomed to become mired in. A plumbing company fakes a string of locations by using their siblings’ houses to build citations, a dentist hires a notorious marketing agency to pay global workers for fictitious reviews, an auto dealership takes a quick link building shortcut and ends up with a long-term search engine penalty. Missteps like these can force a local business to bog down, coping with cleaning up mess instead of making a beeline towards lasting success.
I’m a local business fan, and I don’t want to see you fail. So hang on tight to that vine in your local jungle. This is your guide to riding high, right over those bottomless pits.
Business planThis is all about starting out on the right foot, long before opening day. Avoid these common mistakes before they become deep-seated liabilities.
1. Indistinct nameConsumers need to be able find you via a branded search, looking your business up by name after they hear it mentioned. If you name your men’s clothing shop "Yacht Club," don’t be surprised if Google shows searchers local marinas instead of a branded result for your business. You can plan to build the kind of authority that lets Google know that people looking up "Banana Republic" are searching for clothing and not a political science lesson, but in your early days, a vague name could slow the growth of your brand recognition and rankings.
If your business plan includes growth into other service offerings or other geographic markets, don’t tie yourself to a name that limits you. For example, a new lawn care business in Plano hopes to one day offer full landscaping services and open a second office in Dallas. They’ll find this harder to do if they’ve named their business "Plano Lawn Care." Be sure your name can encompass future growth. While it’s very smart to use core keywords in your business name, be sure they won’t hold you back in the future.
Don’t make the mistake of believing you can fully market a local business with a PO box or unstaffed virtual office as your public address. Both of these will render your company ineligible to create local business listings, severely limiting your Internet visibility. If you don’t yet have a real office, use your home address and list yourself on only those directories that allow you to hide your address if you have privacy concerns.
You will likely only rank in Google’s local packs for the city in which you’re physically located. If you’re opening a location beyond the borders of a big city you’re hoping to serve, don’t expect to rank locally for big-city searchers. If the success of your business depends on serving a major nearby city, then having an office in that locale is a must. To see Google’s concept of any city’s borders, look it up in Google Maps. Anything outside the red boundary is likely to be out of the running.
In the past, it was considered a best practice to locate your business next to other businesses in the same industry (think of doctors parks and auto rows). Being near this “industry centroid” was believed to be beneficial for rankings. However, since Google’s Possum update rolled out in 2016, a new business located within the same building or block as its competitors may find itself filtered out of the local results. Because of this, you may want to base your business some distance from others in your geo-industry, if possible. Depending on your city or town’s layout, this may or may not be possible to do.
Without clear staff training documentation or customer service policies, you're likely to earn more negative reviews. A lack of a user-generated content policy for your website may end up in spammy or abusive use of your blog/forum comments or onsite testimonials.
Don’t expect to open your doors on day one and unseat all of your established online competitors on day two. Don’t let any agency persuade you that it will be easy to dominate the local or local-organic results. Your competitors have likely worked long and hard to get where they are, and you’ll need to do the same. Have a realistic plan for financial survival until you reach the point where a good portion of your traffic and transactions are stemming from your web presence. Be prepared to invest in PPC if you want early traffic.
Even the best local SEO in the world isn’t going to be able to make up for a business idea that’s a non-starter. Does your city have need for another laundromat with 5 already available in your neighborhood, another book store with Amazon in the mix, a vegan restaurant when less than 1% of the local population dines that way? Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe you’ll be able to create the demand with exceptional service and marketing, but don’t expect your local SEO marketer to be able to do it for you. Business research comes first, SEO second.
If you can’t clearly communicate the value proposition of your business in a few powerful words, you can’t expect your customers or marketers to. Every day, agencies hear from business owners who are unable to verbalize what their business offers that’s valuable to the public. While good marketers can often help a company hone its message for maximum impact, the local business owner must first research their own geo-industry to hit on the realization of what makes their company a desirable community resource. Maybe their service is the fastest in town, their clients' white teeth cost less, their rooms are the only pet-friendly stays in the city. Whatever the unique selling point is, the business owner needs to be able to say what it is before the consumer or marketer can interpret it for further use.
If you can get your website right the first time around, you’ll avoid the hassle of having to undergo a complete overhaul of your most valuable online asset a year or two down the road.
10. Limiting URLAs with the business name, don’t limit yourself with a domain name that only features one facet of your business if you have plans for future expansion of services or geography. For example, don’t choose a URL like sugarlandmuffler.com if you hope one day to open full-service auto repair garages in Dallas and Houston as well. Choose your domain name with an eye to the future.
Know that .com extensions are still the most recognized type of domain name. If you want consumers to easily remember and easily find your website, get a .com whenever possible. When not possible, watch this Whiteboard Friday on choosing domain names for other options.
Long domain names are harder to type, harder to speak out loud, and may get shortened on social media. Local businesses should aim for a delicate balance between brevity, branding, and keyword usage in choosing a domain name, weighing which factors will ultimately have the most positive impact on the business.
Don’t sign up for any hosting or marketing service that a) limits the size or SEO opportunities of the website you build, or b) results in your business assets being held hostage by a particular provider. For example, a website-builder-type offer that restricts you to having a 10-page website or only 300 words on a page will stifle growth. Similarly, an agency that threatens to undo any work you’ve paid for if you choose to end your contract in future is an undesirable choice. Be sure you are in direct control of your domain, hosting, and website, and that no service you sign up for limits your growth.
Any website development technology that prevents your website from being discovered, crawled or indexed by Google represents a waste of investment. For example, websites built entirely in Flash present technical problems to both search engines and users and should be avoided. Similarly, any website development approach that fails to serve users on all devices (laptop, tablet, mobile, ambient) guarantees a loss of marketing opportunity.
On another note, should you choose to use unusual or unpopular technology to develop your website, future agencies you want to hire may not want to work with you. For example, a site built on Wix might be difficult to fully optimize, and an SEO agency may require you to switch to something like Wordpress in order to accept you as a client. Read more about the basics of SEO friendly design.
The practice of building multiple websites to represent different locations or different services of a business is particularly prevalent in local commerce. This approach often stems from a desire to rank more broadly on the basis of exact match domains, but there are many reasons why this strategy isn’t commonly endorsed by experts, including:
With rare exceptions, it’s better to pour all your efforts into building a single, powerful local brand on a single, powerful website.
16. Poor content strategyLocal businesses don't benefit by publishing website content that is insufficient, cursory, unedited, duplicative, or developed solely for the purpose of feeding keywords to search engine bots. At a minimum, each local business should create the basic pages (home, about, contact, testimonials) + a page for each main service they offer and each of their physical locations. Service-area businesses (like plumbers) should develop a page for each of their main service cities. Each page that is built should feature original, thorough, intelligently optimized copy that serves a specific goal.
Beyond the basic pages, each local business should have a plan for ongoing content publication that’s proportional to its level of local/industry competition and consumer demand. This could include on-site blogging, off-site social sharing, and other strategies.
For more on local content development, read:
If the size, complexity, or navigational options of your website are preventing consumers from getting to the pages you’ve built for their use, you're actively losing opportunities. The larger your site, the more likely it is that you’ll have to research solutions like siloing to maximize discovery of your content by the right users and resultant conversions.
At minimum, your name, address, and phone number (NAP) should be published on every page of your website, either in its masthead or footer, and you should have a “Contact Us” page highly featured in your main navigation menu. Be sure your complete NAP are the first things presented on the contact page. Phone numbers should be click-to-call enabled for mobile users. Don’t forget thorough driving directions and a map. For larger enterprises, contact information should include options for live chat and after-hours support.
Finally, beware of inconsistencies and typos. Audit the entire text of your website and all of its design elements to catch NAP irregularities. Don’t be “Green Tree Consulting” in your logo and “Green Tree Consultants” on your About page. Your website remains the most authoritative source of information about your business, both in the eyes of consumers and search engines.
19. Lack of CTAsA page without a call-to-action is a page without a point. A website exists to support the desires of consumers, while simultaneously supporting the objectives of the business. Don’t leave it up to chance that people will intuit which actions you’re hoping they’ll take; tell them in plain, bold language that you’d like them to click for further reading, to make a call, to fill out a form, to attend an event, or to take advantage of a special. Every page of your website, from homepage to landing page to contact page, should feature a totally obvious call to action.
Every local business wants to earn links that boost their visibility and ranking strength, but because of the extreme value search engines continue to place on links as a measure of relevance, the temptation to take shortcuts is irresistible to some business owners. A local business might intentionally or accidentally get mixed up in a link farm or get caught buying links. Before you take a risky step that might result in a horrendously costly Google penalty, read our beginner’s guide to good and bad linking practices.
When fundamental business changes occur, like a rebrand or a move to a new website, failure to adhere to specific best practices can result in a massive loss of rankings, traffic, and transactions. For example, a chiropractor hopes to maintain as much of their Internet visibility as possible while transitioning from their old domain, mychiro.net, to a new one, joneschiropractic.com, but they fail to set up permanent 301 redirects between the two sites and lose all of the former authority they’d built up. When a foundational aspect of your business changes, research proper technical procedures for managing the transition in a way that helps (instead of hurts) your SEO and marketing. Our Moz Q&A forum is an excellent place to search for current best practices, or to ask your own question if you’re a Moz Pro member.
They’re highly visible, highly interactive, and can drive major traffic to your website and your business, but if managed incorrectly, local business listings can end up undermining your entire operation. Take maximum control of your citations to avoid these prevalent problems.
22. Guideline non-complianceFailure to adhere to a local business platform’s guidelines can result in suspensions and/or public shaming. Guideline violations can be detected both algorithmically and manually, and can be reported to platforms by the public, competitors, and marketers. Google can read street-level signage and can tell if your businesses are located in a series of legitimate commercial offices or in a string of your friends’ houses. Before you list yourself on any platform, know its policies and be sure you stick to them to avoid negative outcomes.
Consistency of your listings on the primary data sources is considered the fifth most important local search ranking factor. This means that your name, address, phone number, and website must be accurate and consistent on the majors (Acxiom, Factual, Localeze, and Ingroup) as well as on powerful platforms like Google My Business, Facebook, Apple Maps, Foursquare, Yelp, and Bing. Inconsistencies not only weaken search engines' trust in the validity of your data, but also misdirect your potential customers. While Google doesn’t look at suite numbers and doesn’t care about differences of abbreviation (st. vs. street), conflicting versions of your NAP must be discovered and corrected ASAP. Try our free Check Listing tool for an instant consistency check.
A complete local business listing can feature your name, address, phone number, website, email address, hours of operation, driving directions, images, social media links, videos or video links, additional phone numbers, fax number, attributes, reviews, owner responses, and links to other media like menus. Whether you manage your listings manually or use software like Moz Local to automate distribution of your location data at scale, make sure you fill out as many available fields as possible. This ensures that a customer is given every chance to connect with your business in a variety of ways. Missing data = missed opportunities.
At their worst, duplicate listings can misdirect consumers, violate guidelines, and divide your ranking strength and reviews among multiple entities. For each physical location you operate, you should have just one listing per platform, unless you qualify for multi-practitioner or multi-department listings. Discovering and resolving duplicates is one of the core tasks of local SEO, and because duplicates can originate from a variety of scenarios (accidental creation, automated creation, business moves, mergers/acquisitions, rebrands, etc.) every business must be on the lookout. Not sure if you have duplicates? Enter your name and zip in the Moz Check Listing tool to begin your search.
Local business listings are critical infrastructure for nearly every local enterprise, but it’s possible to overdo it or to put focus on the wrong platforms. Rule of thumb: Get accurately listed on the major sites that serve all industries and then hand-select a few additional platforms that are authoritative for your industry and geography. Don’t waste effort getting listed on dozens or hundreds of low-level directories that receive little human use or don’t rank for your core terms.
Once you’ve built your core set of listings, have a plan for monitoring them on an ongoing basis, make edits to them as needed, post updates to them where appropriate, and respond to your reviews. Once that's done, attend to other tasks. If you and your direct competitors each have about 50 citations, you getting another 25 of them from low-quality directories isn’t going to move the ranking, traffic, or conversion needle. Shift focus to something that will.
27. Poor photosIt’s been reported that good photos on your GMB listing will earn you 35% more clicks-to-website and 42% more clicks-for-driving directions. Given that it’s increasingly speculated that user actions influence local rankings, these statistics alone encourage you to select high-quality local business listing photos. Moreover, because many platforms take a crowd-sourcing approach to the imagery that represents your business, it’s important to monitor your listing photos to catch anything that’s inappropriate.
You might choose to hire a Google Trusted Photographer, or, you can use some pro tips like these to go solo in creating the best possible imagery for your business.
Google has been known to place map markers in the middle of oceans. If something this peculiar happens to you, your best bet is to report it in their support forum as it could stem from a bug. However, strange map marker locations can also stem from an error on your part, or the placement of your marker in the center of a bunch of zip codes you’ve entered in the GMB dashboard. If the normal process of moving the pin inside your GMB dashboard doesn’t result in a fix, definitely reach out to the forum for support, fully documenting your issue. A misplaced pin can equal totally lost customers.
If your map marker is misplaced, your driving directions will be inaccurate, but bad driving directions can result from other scenarios, too. Bad or incomplete mapping on Google’s part has lead to tragic accidents and litigation, but even where no physical peril is involved, incorrect directions should be reported to Google’s forum or via this process to prevent customer inconvenience and loss.
Because of the way local data flows across the ecosystem and the way in which many listings are subject to public editing, citations aren't a one-and-done task. Ongoing monitoring is essential to catch inaccurate data appearing, as well as the appearance of new duplicate listings and the ongoing influx of consumer sentiment in the form of reviews.
The need for ongoing monitoring has led to the development of automated programs like Moz Local which will alert you if core NAP on your Google My Business listing changes, if a new duplicate arises, or if you receive a new review. For larger enterprises and multi-location businesses, the ability to scale monitoring is a major time-saver.
31. Mishandling changesRebrands, mergers/acquisitions, moves, change of phone number or website, opening or closing branches, bringing new practitioners aboard… there are many changes..
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