Do you want to increase visibility for your business on Instagram? Have you thought about getting your employees involved? In this article, you’ll discover how your employees can use their Instagram profiles to boost your business’s Instagram marketing efforts. #1: Encourage Your Employees to Use Instagram Your first task is to encourage everyone in your
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
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An important first step in any local SEO strategy is to claim and verify your local business’ Google My Business (GMB) listing. Getting on Google My Business can increase your chances of showing up in Google’s Local Pack, Local Finder, Google Maps, and organic rankings in general. Qualifying local businesses can claim this free listing on Google and include basic information about their company, like their address, phone number, business hours and types of payments accepted.
If you haven’t claimed and verified your Google My Business Listing yet, that’s the first step. To get started, visit http://ift.tt/1pNiNe9.
Many local businesses just claim their GMB listing and forget about it. What most businesses don’t realize is that there are a variety of other features you can use to optimize your Google My Business listing and several reasons why you should frequently check your business listing to ensure that it’s accuracy stays intact. Want to know more?
Complete all the information Google asks forThere are a variety of questions you can answer to complete your Google My Business profile. When done, your listing will have valuable data that will make it easier for potential customers to find your company. And if you don’t fill that information in, someone else could. Many business owners don’t realize that anyone can suggest a change to your business listing — and that includes competitors.
When a searcher clicks on your GMB listing they can see a “Suggest an edit” option:
When someone clicks on that option they can literally edit your Google My Business listing (and make some pretty dramatic changes, too):
This is just one reason why it’s very important that you login to your Google My Business dashboard regularly to ensure that no one has attempted to make any unwanted changes to your listing. You'll see a notification that changes are pending if someone has made suggested changes that need your approval.
Also, it’s important to realize that Google encourages people who are familiar with your business to answer questions, so Google can learn more information about your company. To do this they can simply click on the “Know this place? Answer quick questions” link.
They’ll then be prompted to answer some questions about your business:
If they know the answer to the questions, they can answer. If not, they can decline.
Now, some business owners have cried foul, saying that competitors or others with malicious intent can wreak havoc on their Google My Business listings with this feature. However, Google’s philosophy is that this type of “user-generated content” helps to build a community, more fully completes a business’ profile, and allows Google to experiment with different search strategies.
After you get your Google My Business listing verified, continue to check your listing regularly to be on the safe side.
Google My Business PostsGoogle Posts are “mini-ads” that show up in Google search in your Google My Business listing (in the Knowledge Panel and on Google Maps.)
You can have fun with your Posts by adding an image, a Call to Action (CTA), and even including a link to another page or website. If you’re using Yext, you can create GMB Posts directly from your Yext dashboard.
Here are just a few Post ideas:
The possibilities with Posts are endless! Posts stay “live” for seven days or “go dark” after the date of the event. Google is great about sending you reminders when it’s time to create a new Post.
TIP: To grab a searcher’s attention, you want to include an image in your Post, but on Google Maps the Post image can get cut off. You might have to test a few Post image sizes to make sure it’s sized appropriately for Maps and the Knowledge Panel on desktop and mobile devices.
To get started with Posts, login to your GMB dashboard and you’ll see the Posts option on the left-hand side:
Do Google My Business Posts help with search rankings? Joy Hawkins and Steady Demand tested whether Posts had an impact on rankings, and they found that making Google My Business Postsmaking Google My Business Posts can improve rankingsimprove rankings.
Booking button featureGoogle’s new Booking button feature can really help your business stand out from the crowd. If you have any type of business that relies on customers making appointments and you’re using integrated scheduling software, people can now book an appointment with your business directly from your Google My Business listing. This can make it even easier to get new customers!
If you have an account with one of Google’s supported scheduling providers, the booking button is automatically added to your Google My Business listing.
MessagingDid you know that you can allow potential customers to send you text messages? This is a great way to connect directly with potential customers.
If you don’t want text messages sent to your personal phone number, you can download Google’s Allo app. When you set up your Allo account, use the same phone number connected to your Google My Business account. Now when someone messages you, Allo will send you a notification instead of the message appearing in your personal text messages.
To get started with Messaging, login to your GMB dashboard and click on “Messaging”:
This feature is still in its infancy, though. Right now, messaging is only available to mobile web users and is not available to mobile app or desktop users. People also won’t see the Messaging option in the Knowledge Panel or on Google Maps.
The ONLY way someone can message your business is if they perform a mobile web search on Chrome. (I expect that Google will expand the Messaging feature once they work the kinks out.)
Questions & AnswersQuestions & Answers is a relatively new feature to Google local search. It’s very cool! Just like it sounds, Q&A allows people to ask questions about your business and you can answer those questions.
Here are a few things to keep in mind about Questions & Answers:
TIP: It’s important to note that just like “Suggest an Edit” on GMB, anyone can answer questions asked of your business. Therefore, you want to keep an eye out and make sure you answer questions quickly and ensure that if someone else answers a question, that the answer is accurate. If you find that someone is abusing your GMB listing’s Q&A feature, reach out to the Google My Business support forums.
Google My Business online reviewsUnlike Yelp, which vehemently discourages business owners to ask their customers for reviews, Google encourages business owners to ethically ask their customers or clients for online reviews. Online reviews appear next to your listing in Google Maps and your business’ Knowledge Panel in search. Reviews can help your business stand out among a sea of search results.
Additionally, online reviews are known to impact search result rankings, consumer trust, and click-through rates. According to BrightLocal’s 2017 Consumer Review Survey:
If you follow Google’s guidelines for Google My Business reviews, you can ask your customers for reviews. (However, if you violate any of these policies, your reviews could be removed.)
When customers leave reviews for you — good or bad — make sure you respond to them. Not only does it show that customer that you appreciate their feedback, it also shows potential customers that you care.
What happens if you get a negative review? First, don’t freak out. Everybody has a bad day and most people recognize that. Also, if you have a troll that gave you a one-star review and left a nasty comment, most people with common sense recognize that review for what it is. It’s generally not worth stressing over.
To learn more about strategically getting more online reviews, check out this article from Moz.
Get more out of your GMB listingHopefully these features have given you a new reason to login to your Google My Business account and get busy! If you have any other questions about optimizing your GMB listing, let me know in the comments.
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http://ift.tt/2AaS4C8ClearVoice, a collaborative content management platform, explores the biggest challenges of marketing content in their new survey. The poll uses open-ended responses from 1,000 marketers to provide insight on challenges like time, content quality and creation, idea generation, and distribution.
The simple question, “What’s your biggest challenge with content?” yielded a variety of responses and identified the various elements of a successful marketing campaign, including reaching the appropriate audience and channels—in addition to crafting content that shows genuine passion and credibility.
1. Time Is Constantly on the MindThe survey notes the word “time” as the most frequent single-word submission, highlighting the numerous ways that time can impact the marketing process. Time is where most of the difficulties arise inherently, although many of the responses highlighted specific instances that lead marketers to feel as if there’s not enough daylight.
Disorganization, an over-abundance of goals, and poor collaboration can all lead to the feeling of a time crunch. Organization can help create more room for great ideas and content creation, with time and organization going hand-in-hand.
Time significantly outweighs management and planning as a challenge. Examples of time-related challenges include scheduling the calendar, managing the review process, involving all stakeholders, and collaborating with various departments.
Marketers cite 'Time' as their greatest challenge while on the job.
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2. Content Production
Marketers feel challenged when trying to come up with original ideas. Even when you have an original idea, it can be difficult making that idea compelling for readers. You need an idea that is not only original but also appealing to the target demographic, as well. It’s not a surprise that 27 percent of respondents find producing creative content to be the biggest barrier to getting in touch with their creative side.
Marketers spend ample time trying to make their content feel genuine while also being clear and concise. Some brands have upped their engagement by intertwining original ideas with compelling storytelling, helping make abstract ideas more tangible for their audience. Airbnb accomplishes both innovation and storytelling in immersive form, via Airbnb community stories, which they integrate across various marketing platforms and campaigns, such as the “Belong Anywhere” campaign.
Airbnb shows they value their users’ artistic and giving nature—a great strategy for a business whose infrastructure is fueled by users providing homes and seeking places to stay.
3. Establishing Credibility51 percent of marketers cite content quality as the biggest challenge to establishing credibility—more than twice that of engagement. Naturally, quality content tends to engage, hence the 51 percent to 23.6 percent difference.
Titan Alarm is one example of a brand that provides a good range of quality content on their blog. It features a mix of how-to posts, local guide posts, and posts capitalizing on recent trends. Each post appears well-researched and is accompanied by helpful visuals that help readers more easily digest the information presented.
Feeling genuine is another challenge for content creators—often a difficult quality for corporate entities to capture. Still, several brands achieve a very genuine feel regarding their credibility, especially when showcasing their passion. For example, Asana’s marketing goes a great job of establishing genuine credibility. Their site lets visitors know NASA, General Electric, and Airbnb use their product, immediately establishing credibility. Their product tour uses a NASA space mission as the project example, reinforcing the NASA collaboration and showing passion in the uniqueness of each user.
For marketers worried about hitting their KPIs, six in 10 marketers point to lead generation or conversion as the biggest challenge. By establishing credibility and showing passion for their niche, marketers can better turn content to conversions while delivering ROI.
4. Abundance of Marketing ChannelsThere’s such an abundance of content channels that marketers rarely referenced them by name in the survey. Google has one mention; Facebook has two mentions. (Marketers seem more focused on social sharing in general instead of individually specifying channels.) The survey audience specified a number of traffic challenges, including virality, reaching their audience, and being visible on search and social media.
Producing viral content is a common aim among marketers. Mercedes-Benz achieves viral success with its #MBPhotoPass campaign, which began in 2014. The company provides social media influencers with the keys to a Benz, helping them tell a story using the vehicle. In recent years, they utilized YouTube’s 360-degree video technology, shown in this video featuring Instagram celebrity dog Loki. The campaign generated 173 million impressions and 2.3 million likes/comments.
The ClearVoice survey revealed time, content quality and content, scaling content, idea generation, talent, distribution, and strategy to be the biggest challenges to marketing content, in order of mentions. (Time earned the most mentions.) Keep in mind, marketers were asked to cite their “biggest challenge”—not their only challenge.
Marketers and brands continue to overcome these challenges, as shown in the above examples, but difficulty remains when it comes to time management, producing content, and establishing credibility across a variety of channels.
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Wondering how to improve the visual and written content you produce? Looking for a list of tools to help? In this article, you’ll discover 18 helpful apps from the Social Media Marketing Podcast’s Discovery of the Week. #1: Character Count Online CharacterCountOnline.com helps you edit text to fit a social media platform’s character limit. Whether
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Posted by bridget.randolph
We’ve been hearing a lot about mobile-first indexing lately, as the latest development in Google’s ever-continuing efforts to make the web more mobile-friendly and reflect user behavior trends.
But there’s also a lot of confusion around what this means for the average business owner. Do you have to change anything? Everything? If your site is mobile-friendly, will that be good enough?
IS THIS GOING TO BE ANOTHER MOBILEGEDDON?!!
In this post I’ll go over the basics of what “mobile-first indexing” means, and what you may need to do about it. I’ll also answer some frequently asked questions about mobile-first indexing and what it means for our SEO efforts.
What is “mobile-first indexing”?Mobile-first indexing is exactly what it sounds like. It just means that the mobile version of your website becomes the starting point for what Google includes in their index, and the baseline for how they determine rankings. If you monitor crawlbot traffic to your site, you may see an increase in traffic from Smartphone Googlebot, and the cached versions of pages will usually be the mobile version of the page.
It’s called “mobile-first” because it’s not a mobile-only index: for instance, if a site doesn’t have a mobile-friendly version, the desktop site can still be included in the index. But the lack of a mobile-friendly experience could impact negatively on the rankings of that site, and a site with a better mobile experience would potentially receive a rankings boost even for searchers on a desktop.
You may also want to think of the phrase “mobile-first” as a reference to the fact that the mobile version will be considered the primary version of your website. So if your mobile and desktop versions are equivalent — for instance if you’ve optimized your content for mobile, and/or if you use responsive design — this change should (in theory) not have any significant impact in terms of your site’s performance in search results.
However it does represent a fundamental reversal in the way Google is thinking about your website content and how to prioritize crawling and indexation. Remember that up until now the desktop site was considered the primary version (similar to a canonical URL) and the mobile site was treated as an “alternate” version for a particular use case. This is why Google encouraged webmasters with a separate mobile site (m.domain.com) to implement switchboard tags (which indicated the existence of a mobile URL version with a special rel=alternate tag). Google might not even make the effort to crawl and cache the mobile versions of all of these pages, as they could simply display that mobile URL to mobile searchers.
This view of the desktop version as the primary one often meant in practice that the desktop site would be prioritized by SEOs and marketing teams and was treated as the most comprehensive version of a website, with full content, structured data markup, hreflang (international tags), the majority of backlinks, etc.; while the mobile version might have lighter content, and/or not include the same level of markup and structure, and almost certainly would not receive the bulk of backlinks and external attention.
What should I do about mobile-first indexing?The first thing to know is that there’s no need to panic. So far this change is only in the very earliest stages of testing, and is being rolled out very gradually only to websites which Google considers to be “ready” enough for this change to have a minimal impact.
According to Google’s own latest guidance on the topic, if your website is responsive or otherwise identical in its desktop and mobile versions, you may not have to do anything differently (assuming you’re happy with your current rankings!).
That said, even with a totally responsive site, you’ll want to ensure that mobile page speed and load time are prioritized and that images and other (potentially) dynamic elements are optimized correctly for the mobile experience. Note that with mobile-first indexing, content which is collapsed or hidden in tabs, etc. due to space limitations will not be treated differently than visible content (as it may have been previously), since this type of screen real estate management is actually a mobile best practice.
If you have a separate mobile site, you’ll want to check the following:
With mobile-first indexing, there is only one index (the same one Google uses now). The change to mobile-first indexing does not generate a new “mobile-first” index, nor is it creating a separate “mobile index” with a “desktop index” remaining active. Instead, it simply changes how content is added to the existing index.
Is the mobile-first index live and affecting my site now? If not, when does it go live?Google has been experimenting with this approach to indexing on a small number of sites, which were selected based on perceived “readiness”. A wider rollout is likely going to take a long time and in June 2017, Gary Illyes stated that it will probably take a few years before “we reach an index that is only mobile-first.”
Google has also stated the following on the Webmasters Blog, in a blog post dated Dec 18 2017:
“We will be evaluating sites independently on their readiness for mobile-first indexing based on the above criteria and transitioning them when ready. This process has already started for a handful of sites and is closely being monitored by the search team.Will Google only use my mobile site to determine my rankings?
“We continue to be cautious with rolling out mobile-first indexing. We believe taking this slowly will help webmasters get their sites ready for mobile users, and because of that, we currently don't have a timeline for when it's going to be completed.”
Mobile-first means that the mobile version will be considered the primary version when it comes to how rankings are determined. However, there may be circumstances where the desktop version could be taken into consideration (for instance, if you don’t have a mobile version of a page).
That being said, you will potentially still see varying ranking results between mobile search results and desktop search results, so you’ll still want to track both. (In the same way that now, Google primarily uses the desktop site to determine rankings but you still want to track mobile rankings as these vary from desktop rankings based on user behavior and other factors).
When might Google use the desktop site to determine rankings vs. the mobile site?The primary use case I’ve seen referred to so far is that they will use the desktop site to determine rankings when there is no mobile version.
It is possible that for websites where the desktop version has additional ranking information (such as backlinks), that information could also be taken into consideration - but there is no guarantee that they will crawl or index the desktop version once they’ve seen the mobile version, and I haven’t seen any official statements that this would be the case.
Therefore one of the official recommendations is that once the mobile-first indexing rollout happens, if you’re in the process of building your mobile site or have a “placeholder” type mobile version currently live it would actually be better to have no mobile site than a broken or incomplete one. In this case, you should wait to launch your mobile site until it is fully ready.
What if I don’t have a mobile version of my site?If you don’t have a mobile version of your site and your desktop version is not mobile-friendly, your content can still be indexed; however you may not rank as well in comparison to mobile-friendly websites. This may even negatively impact your overall rankings on desktop search as well as mobile search results because it will be perceived as having a poorer user experience than other sites (since the crawler will be a “mobile” crawler).
What could happen to sites with a large desktop site and a small mobile site? Will content on your desktop site that does not appear on the mobile version be indexed and appear for desktop searches?The end goal for this rollout is that the index will be based predominantly on crawling mobile content. If you have a heavily indexed desktop version, they’re not going to suddenly purge your desktop content from the existing index and start fresh with just your thin mobile site indexed; but the more you can ensure that your mobile version contains all relevant and valuable content, the more likely it is to continue to rank well, particularly as they cut back on crawling desktop versions of websites.
How does this change ranking factors and strategy going forward?This may impact a variety of ranking factors and strategy in the future; Cindy Krum at Mobile Moxie has written two excellent articles on what could be coming in the future around this topic.
Cindy talks about the idea that mobile-first indexing may be “an indication that Google is becoming less dependent on traditional links and HTML URLS for ranking.” It seems that Google is moving away from needing to rely so much on a “URL” system of organizing content, in favor of a more API type approach based on “entities” (thanks, structured data!) rather than URL style links. Check out Cindy’s posts for more explanation of how this could impact the future of search and SEO.
Is there a difference between how responsive sites and separate mobile sites will be treated?Yes and no. The main difference will be in terms of how much work you have to do to get ready for this change.
If you have a fully responsive site, you should already have everything present on your mobile version that is currently part of the desktop version, and your main challenge will simply be to ensure that the mobile experience is well optimized from a user perspective (e.g. page speed, load time, navigation, etc).
With a separate mobile site, you’ll need to make sure that your mobile version contains everything that your desktop site does, which could be a lot of work depending on your mobile strategy so far.
Will this change how I should serve ads/content/etc. on my mobile site?If your current approach to ads is creating a slow or otherwise poor user experience you will certainly need to address that.
If you currently opt to hide some of your mobile site content in accordions or tabs to save space, this is actually not an issue as this content will be treated in the same way as if it was loaded fully visible (as long as the content is still crawlable/accessible).
Does this change how I use rel=canonical/switchboard tags?No. For now, Google has stated that if you have already implemented switchboard tags, you should leave them as they are.
Has this overview helped you to feel more prepared for the shift to mobile-first indexing? Are there any questions you still have?
I’d love to hear what you’re thinking about in the comments!
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Are you wondering how social media marketing will change this year? The social platforms are constantly changing, and that means marketers need to change as well. To find out how marketing on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest will change in the coming year, we reached out to expert social media professionals to get their
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What if you found a coupon for a 50% discount on something you really wanted? Even if you’re not a shopper, a 50% off deal is bound to push your bargain-hunter hot button. You’d take a second and deeper look at it, right?
At the very least, you’d probably save that 50% discount coupon to use later if you could. And if the deal was worth sharing, you’d pass it along to friends and family so they could use it too. Discounts, deals, sharing… those are the concepts that make Facebook Offer Ads so appealing. It’s also why they will generate leads for your business.
Seducing a Captive Audience
If you have a Facebook Page for your business, you know it takes a lot of effort to get new Page likes. It requires even more time and energy to engage visitors, and your efforts might not convert viewers into customers.
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