Google has been cranking out the updates this year for Local Search, and the latest thing to hit the SMB market is Google Posts. This new feature allows you to publish your events, products and services directly to Google Search (in the Knowledge Panel) and Maps. Here’s an example of what a Google Post looks like on mobile: I’ve been testing this feature for a while (one of the perks of being a Top Contributor) and have made several observations that I wanted to share. I collaborated with local search expert Mike Blumenthal and came up with the top things you need to know to get the most out of Google Posts for your SMB. Make sure you track click activity with UTM codes. Since Google posts don’t integrate naturally with Google Analytics, it’s hard to get any insights beyond the standard number of views and clicks Google provides inside the Google My Business dashboard. By creating a custom URL to use in the call-to-action link, you can see more … [Read more...] about 12 things to know to succeed with Google Posts
Things to know
The most important thing to know about Facebooks ad load problem
For almost a year, Facebook has warned that sometime in the middle of 2017 the social network will max out the number of ads it can squeeze in people's news feeds. As a result of hitting that ad load ceiling, Facebook's ad revenue growth will slow down "meaningfully" in the second half of 2017, said CFO David Wehner during the company's Q1 2017 earnings call on Wednesday. But there's a but. When Wehner talks about ad load, he is only referring to the ad load in Facebook's news feed, a Facebook spokesperson confirmed after Wednesday's earnings call that was once again dominated by ad load questions. That distinction is important because it means that Facebook's ad load problem may not be much of a problem for long. Facebook may be running out of room for ads in people's news feeds, but it's starting to put ads in so many other places that ad load on Facebook may be stagnating, but ad load across Facebook Inc. is just beginning to ramp up. For example, the number of ad … [Read more...] about The most important thing to know about Facebooks ad load problem
25 Things To Know Before You Take The Plunge
Enterprise Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not rocket science. In fact, it is not even as faceted as many other sectors of SEO in which practitioners have to perform many more nuanced SEO tasks (and often by themselves). Because Enterprise SEO is much more like Supply Chain Management than it is Marketing. As an executive considering investing in an Enterprise SEO initiative, hopefully you can learn from this primer and my experiences over the last decade leading large institutions into SEO. Setting The Stage 1. Find some religion. I have seen dozens of large business deploy a ton of money into an Enterprise SEO initiative only to find out that Organic Search just was not as critical to their business as they would have hoped. We are talking real time and money here, so it would not be imprudent to do an exhaustive feasibility study into how Organic Search actually drives your audience or customer acquisition economic models. Those “free” search results are not going … [Read more...] about 25 Things To Know Before You Take The Plunge
6 Things To Know Before Using Facebook For Local Search, And 6 Reasons FB Search Can Dominate
Not too long ago, Mark Zuckerberg hinted that Facebook could eventually replace Web search, at least to some degree. A step in that direction came when Facebook announced a couple of weeks ago that it is vastly expanding its search capabilities by providing search results from all two trillion public posts within its social media platform. Although Facebook previously had a large search volume of 1.5 billion searches a day, those searches did not include results from posts outside of friends’ posts or Pages liked, even if a post was otherwise publicly visible. The biggest impact seems to be in real-time news, where hot topics and trending stories that normally come up in a News Feed can be searched. Results will display stories from publishers and media outlets, public posts and any links to stories in those posts, as well as conversations from your friends about the story. So, what about local search? Right now, the search component does not search the web. While Facebook did … [Read more...] about 6 Things To Know Before Using Facebook For Local Search, And 6 Reasons FB Search Can Dominate
5 Things to Know About #SEO Friendly Web Design
As a small business owner getting ready to build your first website or redesign your existing one, you might wonder what you should be considering in terms of making your web design search engine friendly. There are lots of things to take into account, but here are the five key things that you should know about SEO friendly web design and how it can benefit your visitors, too! 1. It Needs to be Responsive For small businesses, especially local ones, having great rankings in mobile search is incredibly important. Why? For starters, 50% of consumers who perform a local search on mobile devices visit a store within a day of their search. What’s even more exciting is that 78% of mobile searches for local business lead to offline purchases. If you want to do well in mobile search results, you will want to have a mobile-friendly design. Responsive design is the easiest to aim for because it offers a similar user experience to desktop visitors, tablet visitors, and smart phone visitors. … [Read more...] about 5 Things to Know About #SEO Friendly Web Design