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Local Search Marketing with Video: Case Study in the Making

local search marketing It’s no secret that local businesses like dentists, plumbers and chiropractors depend on local search marketing to attract new customers. I have worked with a fair share of these folks over the last 6 years. And I can tell you that they are obsessed with being on Page one of Google. And who can blame them?

If you’re new to an area and your faucet starts leaking? What do you do? My guess is, you probably pull out your smartphone and Google “city name + plumber.” And if your company’s website is NOT on page one, it’s highly unlikely you’ll get the call.

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Google’s Mobilegeddon: Much Ado about Nothing?

mobilegeddon

mobilegeddonGoogle changed its search algorithm on April 21 to reward mobile-friendly sites with better ranking on mobile devices. This so-called “Mobilegeddon” threatened to change the landscape of mobile search by penalizing websites that weren’t mobile ready.

But did it really?

According to a recent article in Website Magazine, “the scale of this radical change by Google is… minimal at best.” The article went on to quote Google spokeswoman Krisztina Radosavljevic-Szilagyi who said, “The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal – so if a page with high quality content is not mobile-friendly, it could still rank high if it has great content for the query. The ranking update will not make it rank below lower quality pages that are mobile friendly.”

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Why Meta Tags are Important for Search Engine Marketing

meta tags and search engine marketing

meta tags and search engine marketing If you have a website for your business, I can almost guarantee that at one time or another, you have been approached by a company to engage in search engine marketing. This is a type of Internet marketing that involves promoting websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) through optimization and advertising.

One of the first steps in optimizing a website for the search engines is to add keywords to your website’s meta tags.

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Why “DIY” Website Builders and Lazy Web Designers Make Me Mad!

DIY websites I talked with a private school principal this past week about her website, and the discussion about broke my heart. She hired a web designer to build a website for her school, but there are misspellings on the site, and she can’t get her web designer to fix them! She’s also frustrated because she’s not getting any inquiries from the website because it’s not showing up on Google.

I told her I’d look at her website and call back with my findings and make some recommendations.

DIY Platform isn’t Google-Friendly or Mobile-Friendly

I discovered three major flaws with her website:

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3 Reasons Why Good Quality Content Pays Off

quality content By Alvaro Bellido

1. Fresh content is a key ranking factor

We have heard many times how important updating your website with regular content is. However, your website structure should not be changed regularly because it would confuse your users, that’s the reason why blogs are the perfect tool for publishing regular content.

I have always wondered if the publishing frequency was actually an important factor, so I decided to test it myself. During a period of 2 months, I increased my publishing frequency from 1 to 3 articles a week in my blog. The result was a 1,000% increase in traffic coming from Google. A similar experiment carried out later by a fellow blogger under similar conditions confirmed that this is a key ranking factor and that blogging frequently is a great way to increase traffic to your blog.

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Which Social Media Platform is Right for Your Small Business [INFOGRAPHIC]

small business social media
Does your head swim when you think about social media marketing? If you’re a small business owner, and in particular, a solopreneur, I suspect it does. There are so many social networking sites available: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+ and YouTube, and don’t forget about Vine! How can you be expected to maintain a presence on these sites and still run your business?

The short answer is, you can’t. Not well anyway! When I work with clients, I recommend that they focus on one social network first and master that one before starting a presence on another site. But not every business is suited for every social networking site.

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How to Increase Google+ Engagement [INFOGRAPHIC]

Does your business have a Google+ presence? If not, you may want to start one. Since it’s getting near impossible to reach Facebook fans without paying for ads, Google+ presents an opportunity for businesses to actively engage their target audience.

According to Social Media Examiner’s Social Media Marketing Industry Report 2014, Google+ is the social network marketers want to learn most about. 54% of marketers currently use Google+, 65% want to learn more about it and 61% are preparing to increase their activities on the site this year.

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Manage Your Social Media in 30 Minutes a Day [INFOGRAPHIC]

Are you struggilng to manage your social media? If you own a small business with only 1 or 2 employees or you’re a solopreneur, I know how tough it can be to manage all the social networking accounts like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. This is one of the areas I concentrate on when I work with clients.
There are only so many hours in the day to get work done. You need to have a life outside of your company! I was thrilled to come across this terrific infographic from Pardot that gives you a schedule to manage your social media in just 30 minutes a day!

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Are You Making These Mistakes with Your YouTube Videos?

YouTube videos can be a powerful marketing tool for small business owners, as long as you do things correctly. A new client has been uploading videos to his YouTube channel, but he’s not getting the benefits he should be because I noticed that he’s been making several crucial mistakes. Here are just a few missteps you need to avoid if you want to be successful at video marketing:

Video Marketing Missteps

1. Videos aren’t optimized – YouTube is the second largest search engine, after Google. But your videos are going to be tough to find through a search, if they’re not properly optimized. Make sure you include keywords in the video’s title, description and tags, as well as in the video content itself.

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