Businesses in Orange County are savvy to the latest marketing trends. However, we are often surprised at the strategies that local businesses are overlooking with their search engine optimization.
That’s why we’ve put together this resource of three SEO strategies that we see overlooked far too often. The good news is, if your business is guilty of neglecting these strategies, that can be reversed starting today. (more…)
Let’s put them in reverse order, too – from least to most important.
If you’re reading this, you probably don’t quite understand the thing that happened with mobile, and that’s ok. It’s not a trend. But it’s not a challenging thing to understand either. There’s been a lot of hype, and that’s mostly only hurt the calm, reasonable people like you. It’s almost worth wagering that part of the reason your site is not mobile friendly is because there’s just been so much hype.
In short, smartphones interrupted the way people use all computers, including those on the internet, and marketers have had to catch up with people so we can better meet their needs. We all make money along the way. (more…)
SEO used to be the only thing flying in Internet Marketing.
Find tons more traffic through search engine ranking and you’ll get tons more sales.
Google’s Penguin update in April 2012, and several important subsequent updates to the way that Google ranks and displays search results put a huge damper on all that SEO hysteria. It wasn’t an Earthquake that was immediately apparent, but the devastation to SEO practices has been near total.
Amateur SEO buffs have still not recovered and probably some half of all the people working in SEO still do not quite know what a post-Penguin SEO strategy should look like.
For folks whose only strategy was optimizing with ample keywords and keywords in just the right places, SEO may very well be dead. It simply stopped working. But… (more…)
Here’s a great, simple explanation of SEO 101 from the folks over at SearchEngineLand.
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The restaurant website is a continually evolving animal.
Getting it to do what you want is a lot easier said than done. In most cases, restaurant websites act only as brochures and so getting people to click through still requires classic SEO techniques rather than flashy website antics and bells and whistles. That means, it’s got to show up in the results, and then it’s got to inspire a click.
Schema Markup is first and foremost being used simply to make your website stand out on the Google search results page. It’s unfair, but it really is that simple. That’s not to say that you should consider Schema Markup only as a way of adding some lights around your search results listing, but you could think of it that way. And for most restaurateurs.
Schema.org designed a way to label some of your site’s HTML content so that search engines – like Google, Yahoo and Bing – can better read the content and know exactly what it refers to. When they’ve done that, then they can re-present some of it to searchers on that search results page. Take a look here at exactly what Schema.org thinks restaurants should be indicating.
You won’t be immediately loading up your entire website with every possible Schema code, but because Schema is relatively new (or at least, because it’s only slowly being adopted), it’s a fast way to bump your click-throughs from search engines. In part, that’s because few of your competitors are going to be yet using it. Let’s get going. (more…)
2014 was a year of great reckoning for Organic Search Traffic and in a lot of other areas, too. SEO is not dead and it’s not going away. It’s also probably not getting a lot easier. Some might argue, though, that it’s a little bit more fun.
For people searching for things on the internet, Google arguably got their backs, and for that, the internet itself is a lot more fun. Were it not for a lot of the changes that Google has made, the Internet would undoubtedly have collapsed under the weight of so many hot air filled SEO consultants convinced that what they’re doing (sometimes on behalf of their clients and sometimes not) is not spam. Technically, maybe it’s not spam, but just about every SEO way of tricking Google has gone under the bus, and the bus keeps rolling on.
If you’re running, or continuing your website in 2015, here’s the most important SEO points you should know for keeping and growing that essential Organic Search Traffic. (more…)
Any SEO project can take a little sweat and quite a lot of know-how. Images are one of the easier things to tackle, and the surprise is that they’re often one of the things that get overlooked.
Whatever images you’re currently showing on your website, you can probably tweak them just a little bit and get a big return on the effort. All major search engines scan the Internet to now what’s out there, and to deal with images they actually rely far more on the graphic data itself. There are just a few text fields, then, that are of key importance to making sure that Search Engines scan and understand your photos accurately. (more…)
In its infancy, SEO was primarily something for specialists and experts. Social Media was only for kids. Between the two there was essentially no interaction; and nobody cared.
Today, any business looking for even minimal success on the Internet needs to invest at least some time and effort into BOTH SEO and Social. There is still an argument about how much of either you may need, but it’s absolutely NOT a question of one vs. the other. No matter what your business model, B2B or B2C, it’s in your best business interest to understand both fields as two sides of the same coin. Here are the four important reasons why: (more…)
No one’s feeling the bite of Yelp’s review filters more than Yelp themselves.
Slated to be the “TripAdvisor for everything else,” Yelp’s heavy-handed, review-crushing filter has lots of small business owners looking elsewhere for listings and reviews. Any positive reviews faked by friends and family are gone, but then, plenty of real reviews – good and bad – are gone, too.
In short, you can’t really automate review editing with a filter. TripAdvisor relies on travel fanatics to prove themselves via multiple reviews. But TripAdvisor will also human-edit where a negative review sounds too fanatical, or a positive review too friendly. But not every broad sector of the market can rely on such a public to correct them. (more…)
Almost nothing in Social Media Marketing is fast. Though at some point in the future you will see fast results, the lead up to that moment can seem like it’s slow going.
Don’t let that stop you.
We’ve spoken to small business owners with hundreds of friends on Facebook and yet no idea how to use Social Media for Marketing. This is the fastest, most effective way we could come up with, for getting started, and for getting something out of it. It shouldn’t take more time than regular, offline marketing and other than the person or persons you’re paying to manage it, it shouldn’t take more money either. (more…)