Month: June 2018

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What type of social media post will get the most likes

It is not a secret that to have an effective online marketing campaign you need to have an engaging social media presence that attracts Facebook likes and shares, Retweets, and thumbs up on YouTube. In fact, increasing the organic presence in social media timelines requires a higher interaction of followers and friends. With that said, recent studies have shown a decrease in engagement of many types of posts including text, large slow loading photos and links. However, many authoritative sites such as Buzzsumo.com have demonstrated that video posts are driving significantly higher shares than any other type of post on Facebook. In fact, according to their study, average shares have increased over 100% since last august for videos.

One of the key factors is that Facebook has an autopay feature with the sound turned off on a user’s timeline. So what happens is that a user sees a video starting to play, and the motion catches their eye. However, they cannot hear what is going on in the video unless they click on it. As the old adage goes, “curiosity killed the cat”, and the user clicks on the video to add sound and find out what going on. The point of this is, if you want more people to share your posts and “go viral”, video is a must.

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Are you focusing your SEO efforts on Local Search?

google searching for local results

For many years, desktop and laptops were the medium of choice for people searching for websites. However, in today’s new mobile age, consumers are relying more and more on their cell phones, tablets and even in dash GPS systems to search for local products and services. This paradigm shift presents a massive opportunity for local businesses. Mobile users search for local information on their mobile devices in a variety of places including at home, at hotels & motels, out shopping, at work, and even while driving in their cars. It is important to take into consideration that a consumer who conducts a local search is further down the buying funnel and in many cases actually in their car looking for a physical place to buy a particular product or service. In addition, recent research clearly demonstrates that local searchers are more inclined to buy today than in the future.

Individualized results are becoming more standard from search and social media sites. Yelp, Facebook and even Google are all able to generate specific results based upon the person who is searching and their proximity to a location. As long as you’re logged into an online account, your search history and your geographic location both play into the type of results you see.

As an example of the foregoing, Facebook ads allow hyper-local targeting of potential customers that live in or have recently visited the area around your business location, serving and limiting ads to users who are as close as a one-mile radius, and can further target your audience by gender, age, income level, profession and even based upon other Facebook pages they have liked.

What does this mean for a small or start-up business? It is quite simple, targeting geocentric and location-specific terms in your search engine marketing efforts can be worth the effort as the research illustrates that consumers searching for products or services in a particular area know what they want and more importantly, where they are going to get it. These consumers are much more likely to be enthusiastically searching for something or somewhere to buy rather than just casually browsing the web for fun.

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What Should Be Your First SEO Activities

Google report

When you launch a new website, or decide that it is time to optimize your current website for search engine ranking, you need to prioritize your steps. There is so much information out there about what factors Google, Bing and other search engines use in their ranking algorithms, especially SEO for start-ups.  Do you concentrate on on-site or off-site tactics? Do you concentrate on link building,  social signals, or do you simply focus on local search?  There really is no one size fits all answer, as each SEO program needs to be tailored to your specific goals. However, for the purpose of this article, we will presume a small business that needs people to find it and walk in the door such as a restaurant or retail location with a brand new website.

When you have a new site, we typically break the tasks down into 3 specific components, regardless of whether it is on-site or off-site activities. The first component is basic optimization and analysis to set up your site for success and then analyze monthly reports to track your progress. The second component is local search activities to ensure when someone searches for your city or town and your service, that you show up on the SERP map or Yelp reviews. The final component is based upon building content for long-tail terms and encourage new inbound links each month. This is not really a “secret sauce” that only those in the know use, but rather simply grouping your SEO practices into logical steps to help organize your process.

With the foregoing plan in mind, the first thing that we suggest for a new website is to determine the 10 – 20 keyword phrases that you believe your customers will search for to find a solution to their needs. Once you do that, go through your website to ensure that each page is targets one of these keyword phrases and then set up titles and Meta descriptions on each page. You also should create some sort of analytics package, such as Google webmaster tools.

Once you know the terms your website is going to try to attract and have a way to track your audience and new inbound links, you want to ensure that when someone searches for your keyword and location, you show up on the Google and Bing maps. This can be accomplished by submitting to and maintaining local directory citations such as Yelp, Foursquare and creating a Google and Bing business page. You may also want to create a Facebook fan page that contains your contact information.

Finally, you need to have a plan to build content and generate new links each month to grow your site and rank for lesser searched terms. The use of a blog and videos are a great way to do this. Often times, you can even take your original keyword list and use it to develop 20 – 40 blog topics that you can write about and then post to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc., as well as include a social signal button to promote others to share your content.

As we said earlier, this may not be the optimum solution for every business of every size and type, but is a pretty good game plan for most new sites and local businesses. For more information, please contact a reputable white hat SEO company to discuss your needs.