townsend.bunksite.com

Blog

Search Influence Team Becomes Bing Ads Certified

As of September 28th, the Search Influence account management team has 12 Bing Ads accredited members on staff in addition to the 12 team members who received Google AdWords certification last spring. We are constantly striving to improve our training and credentials so that we can provide the highest level of knowledge and most value for our clients. With both Bing and Google ad-certified professionals, we are the most accredited Online Ad team on the entire Gulf Coast. You can see the full list of accredited SI employees in Bing’s Find a Pro Directory. We’re very excited about our expanded knowledge in the Bing Ads program, and loved the interaction we received from Bing about our enthusiasm for the program! Talk about great customer service.

Congratulations to our Accounts team for this very cool achievement!

October 9, 2012
Read This! — October 2012

Spoooooky October greetings to you, faithful SI readers! We’re back with another Read This, our monthly roundup of the best news you can use to take to the Internet and support your business. Let’s dig in!

• Content Recall: Stop Creating Great Content and Produce Memorable Content Instead — Blind 5 Year Old

The mantra of the Internet is “great content floats to the top,” but the exact definition of “great” is a whole ‘nother rodeo. Instead of flailing around trying to define your content’s greatness, focus on a more advertising-centric metric: memorability. AJ Kohn of Blind Five Year Old takes us through just how you can tweak your efforts to make them more “sticky” and fundamentally appealing to the reader. It’s worth point out that the post itself is a great example!

• Google Analytics Guide: 4 Easy Tips For Getting Started With Analytics & Website Goal Setting — TopRank

So you have Analytics running on your website, but you don’t know how to leverage the facts and figures to get more traffic. Never fear! This concise and handy guide can tell you the important points of setting up alerts, goal tracking and more, helping you to sort through the morass of data and create a game plan for your site with the help of Analytics’ clearly-defined user data.

• A Marketer’s Guide to Reddit [Infographic] — SocialTimes

Reddit.com, the self-proclaimed “front page of the Internet,” is a bastion of memes, cat pictures, self-referential humor and a whopping 2.5 billion page views per month. The mostly self-policed community displays its content based on the votes of its users, so a popular link that’s deemed worthy of the front page can attract huge view numbers. Does that mean that a savvy businessowner can’t utilize it to promote his or her brand? Of course not — check out this handy infographic from SocialTimes for some interesting statistics and handy tips! The main takeaways? Don’t spam, do participate, and above all make sure what you’re bringing to the table is relevant and interesting to the 40,000,000+ strong Reddit “hivemind.”

• Promoting Your Brand on LinkedIn Groups — AboutSocialMedia.com

LinkedIn is the preeminent social network for professionals, but did you know that you can go beyond just networking with colleagues? LinkedIn’s Groups features provides a space for you to share content and connect with potential partners and customers!

• Social Media ROI: How To Define A Strategic Plan — Search Engine Watch

We all know that participating in social media helps your business, but finding out where to start can be overwhelming. Take a look at this Search Engine Watch piece that goes over the process of creating a map to clarify your objectives, select your tactics and follow through by measuring the success with defined metrics.

October 8, 2012
5 For Friday — Links, Stories & Posts For Your Weekend

• Why Traditional Marketers Are at a Crossroads — Hugo Guzman

According to Hugo Guzman, the “Mad Men” days of marketing are over. Of course, marketers no longer smoke cigarettes and guzzle bourbon in the office (or do we?), but Guzman also asserts that marketing professionals are foregoing creative brainstorming sessions in favor of statistical, analytical approaches to advertising.

• Facebook’s New Custom Audiences: What They Are and How You Can Use Them – Part 1 — SEOMoz

With the unveiling of Facebook’s New Custom Audiences, marketers can now target people who have already interacted with their business using email addresses, phone numbers, or Facebook user IDs. In addition to Custom Audiences, marketers can add other Facebook targeting options. This article provides initial concepts of how best to use Custom Audiences. Think of the possibilities!

• The Insanely Great Chart of Apple’s History — Mashable

The recent release of the iPhone 5 prompted this timeline of Apple products since the introduction of Mac almost 30 years ago. Follow your technological progression through the years!

• Welcome To The, Um, Second Social Media Election — Read Write Web
The social media backlash from the first presidential debate has resulted in many articles regarding social media’s role in this election. With the exponential increase in Facebookers, Twitterers, YouTubers since the 2008 election, social media will shape the 2012 election for many voters. How are your political tendencies influenced by social media?

• Steve Jobs’ Shadow Lives on in Tribute MacBook Pro laptops — CNet

In honor of Steve Jobs, who passed away a year ago today, Uncover announced an auction of three Steve Jobs tribute laptops. These three MacBook Pros will contain Hong Kong artist Jonathan Mak’s rendition of the Apple icon with Steve Jobs’ silhouette and a quote engraved on the bottom of the computer.

October 5, 2012
3 Reasons Your Company Should Be On Instagram

We all know by now that a social media presence is essential to your company’s marketing strategy. Whole new strategies on how to best use the various networks are being developed every day. Though it may seem like only yesterday your business’s Facebook account was the only one you needed to concern yourself with, there are plenty of other networks to worry about now. One of these, Instagram, has 80 million users and has just launched a business-focused blog aimed at helping you use their platform to benefit your company.

Here are 3 reasons why your company should be on Instagram. By creating a profile and engaging your community, you can:

• Use it as a feature of other social networks – If you are wary of getting involved in yet another social network, don’t think of it as separate, at least not at first. Think of it as adding more content to your current social media strategy. With Instagram, you can share your photos to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, and Foursquare. Look at it as enhancing your presence on the networks you already use.

• Humanize yourself, your employees, your company – You can show pictures of your products, but don’t limit it to just that. Show your customers that not only are the people behind your company creative but they are also human. Share photos of your product being made, behind the scenes shots, the view from your office, and almost anything else. The possibilities are practically endless. One of the reasons Instagram is so popular is that it gives you the ability to make photos of even mundane things look more interesting. Use Instagram as a different sort of marketing by making your posts less formal than your posts on other social networking sites. Especially if you own a small business, include some photos of your personal life. Make yourself more human.

• Make yourself relevant and get people talking – Just like on Twitter, Instagram allows tagging. Find out how people are tagging their photos on Statigram to join the conversation. If you are at some industry event, find out if the promoters have created a hashtag for attendees to use. You can use this to connect with colleagues and possibly clients. You don’t just need to join conversations; you should be starting them. You should also be using the comment feature to engage your audience. Ask questions in your photo’s caption and reply to the comments followers leave. With hashtags, you can even get people to do your job for you. Encourage users to take photos of your product and use your company name to tag. Just like with Facebook, you can hold “Fan photo of the day” contests to motivate users.

Instagram’s blog suggests that once you decide you want to put your company on Instagram, you should start a personal account. This will allow you to do a little research. You’ll quickly learn what and how you like other users to post, and you can take that information into account when developing your company’s strategy. You will also figure out what types of photos people enjoy by paying attention to how many likes certain types of photos get. Also be sure to check out how other companies and organizations are using Instagram. To get started, you can have a look at this 5 for Friday from a few weeks back that links an example of how the US Olympic basketball team successfully put Instagram to use.

October 4, 2012
Search Influence Joins Forces With Youth Rebuilding New Orleans [VIDEO]

The whole Search Influence team was thrilled to host a meetup in honor of Mashable’s Social Good Summit at Oak Wine Bar last Monday. In addition to enjoying the delicious drink specials and appetizers by the talented chefs and mixologists, we spent a lot of time talking about social media, the digital global action movement, and how we can start leveraging the Internet for greater good. On that note, we’re proud to announce that Search Influence has adopted the local New Orleans non-profit Youth Rebuilding New Orleans.

Like many non-profits that have applied for the Google Grants program, YRNO has had difficulty taking full advantage of the program due to lack of knowledge and resources to run campaigns — and we couldn’t be happier to step in to help. Above, you can see our CEO Will Scott giving a brief talk about YRNO and Search Influence’s involvement.

To read more about our new collaboration with Youth Rebuilding New Orleans, check out our press release on PRWeb!

September 27, 2012
4 DIY SEO Tips for the Small Business Owner

My husband and I have some friends who are in town every year at the end of August, without fail, so we know we have a dinner date with this couple at the peak of hurricane season every year.

This year, we met our friends on the Saturday night after Hurricane Isaac passed through. Our friends had another couple in New Orleans who had been without power going on five days, so they were desperate to get out of their hot, humid house and enjoy good food in the air conditioning and possibly have a drink or three. The more the merrier, so the four of us were meeting the two of them at the bar.

This restaurant is usually very popular, but was especially hopping that night because they had power. Most of the items on the menu were sold out, but we enjoyed the few things the kitchen still had. So in conversation she asked did I work?… what did I do? … the way these conversations usually go. When I told her, her eyes lit up, and I was her best friend that evening. She had a 2 year old yoga studio that was doing decently, and she wanted the yoga business to be strong and really successful. She recognized that the web was an untapped potential for her, and she was overwhelmed with her known options and with the options she knew probably existed but didn’t know about.

Search Influence has a mission that simply states “We are here to help small business succeed online.” It is our company goal to help this small business owner who was sitting across from me, and I would love to be able to help her dominate the yoganistas in her city.

I have had this experience more than a few times, where a very small, very local business has absolutely no marketing budget, but they know they need to do “stuff” online to grow or even just to survive. I’m not talking about businesses local to their city; I’m talking about businesses that serve their neighborhood primarily. Super local.

A few suggestions for a very small business who has done almost nothing online yet.

If I met the owner of a very small, very locally-focused business who had done virtually nothing online and had very little time to devote to online marketing, what priorities would I tell that SMB owner for DIY SEO?

I polled our Account Managers to see how much they agreed/disagreed with me, so these priorities are the collective answer of most of our accounts team. The difficulty is there is so much an SMB owner could be doing, but my intent was to focus on those things that are not technical — i.e. no website edits. A lot of business owners that I meet that offer services to a very specific community don’t know how to edit their websites because they have never had to, and they are busy working on growing the business, taking care of personnel, managing operations, et cetera.

With that in mind, here is by no means a comprehensive list of all things a business owner can do on his/her own — just a few things that came up in my conversation and then bounced around our accounts team.

Countdown of DIY SEO Tips based on number of responses of my totally unscientific internal survey …

#4 — with only 1 survey responder considering it as the priority for an SMB’s very limited time and money … monthly newsletters. Monthly newsletters are a great tool for many businesses. However, the business has to build up an email list of recipients first. You can buy a list, but it’s so much better to build the contacts yourself with your customers optioning in to receive your message in their inbox. You also have the challenge of deciding what message makes an impact on your business but also is interesting to your email group.

You need to grow your email list first, and realize that you are messaging people who are likely already customers. In all I agree that this is a valuable tool, but not for a super small business at such an early phase of operations.

#3 – 1 response suggesting an offer made through Facebook. This also is a valuable tool, but again, the business generally has to have some Fans on Facebook before they start offering coupons and contests and all of that jazz. My yoga-diva dinner companion did not have a Facebook Page worth mentioning, so this would not be an option for her yet.

#2 – 4 responses voted for regular Facebook updating. Our accounts team sees every day how a well-maintained Facebook Page can work for a small business. It’s exciting to see strong fan building, active commenting, and referral traffic driving to the client’s website. All of this can be very effective (and fun!). It absolutely be a valuable tool when developed at the right time in a business’s growth.

One of our accounts team responded to my internal survey, “Facebook Updates and Newsletters are great, but they are worthless unless they have a following. To me, Facebook could be easier for one person to manage, but significant effort would have to be made to promote the Facebook Page.”

Just like monthly newsletters and making an offer on Facebook, you have to build to a level where you have an audience to whom you can broadcast your message. Lots of work has to be done for the Facebook Page before it’s going to work for you.

#1 – Tied for #1 … 5 responses for “Create/edit listings in 10 online directories other than Google+.” If a small business owner had only 1 hour to devote to their online identity, 5 of our accounts team suggested that s/he should review the businesses’ listing in 10 directories other than Google+. My totally unscientific survey didn’t indicate which 10 directories, but it can be assumed that the list would include directories such as Yelp, Yahoo, Bing, YellowPages, and Superpages. There are countless other examples, but you want to devote your time only to those directories that you have seen often enough like Kudzu or Merchant Circle.

#1 – Tied for #1 … 5 of the accounts team responded that claiming Google+ Local Page is the thing you should spend a few minutes claiming and filling up with your business information, maybe some pictures.

This was my priority suggestion at dinner that night. She wasn’t sure what a Google+ Local listing was, a lot of business owners don’t, and they should.

(TIP! If you claim your G+ Local listing, claim it in an email box that you won’t mind sharing with an SEO agency — that is, don’t claim G+ with your personal email account. One day you might hire a website promotion company like Search Influence to help your rank better in Google results, and when you do, you will want your account manager to have the login to your G+ — but if it’s the same account as your personal email, you might not want to share it.)

There are countless small business DIY SEO tips for the savvy owner out there. What are some of your favorites?

September 25, 2012
5 For Friday – Links, Stories, & Posts For Your Weekend

• 9 Facebook Marketing Tips to Improve Engagement – Social Media Examiner

Often, small businesses let their social media accounts get pushed aside due to the lack of time or knowledge of how to successfully engage with consumers. Connecting directly with your fans can help grow your business and expand your brand. Here, Andrea Vahl explores a number of great and easy ways to interact with your client base.

• Ways Social Media Impacts SEO – Search Engine Journal

Think social media isn’t necessary for your business? Think again. As social media – such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+ – becomes more and more of a vital tool for businesses of all sizes, this article takes a look at how actively using these accounts can help with your internet search presence.

• iOS 6 Upgrade Has Its Share of Troubles – Mashable

Ever heard the saying “You can’t make everyone happy”? Like with any new technology, there is always criticism. Barely out for 24 hours, Apple’s new iOS upgrade for iPhone & iPad is no different.

• Kid Tech, According to Apple – Infographic Journal

How times have changed. When I was 13 – which wasn’t much more than a decade ago – tablets didn’t exist, mp3 players were just being invented and having your own cellphone was unheard of. Now, these devices are handed to kids before they enter kindergarten. This infographic takes an interesting – and I think shocking – look at the popularity of these smart-devices among kids today.

• YouTube Is Top Free App In iTunes Charts; Google Maps To Be Next? – Marketing Land

Wait – YouTube didn’t have an iPhone or iPad app until a week ago? Until it was released, most didn’t realize that YouTube did not have an actual app on Apple smart devices. Now that YouTube has been removed from the iOS update and developed a #1 iTunes download, many wonder: will Google Maps will be the next former default program to receive an app?

September 21, 2012
The Power of Website Content: How to Improve Your Rankings
Today I’m here to tell you a little story about the power of website content. My cardinal rule is “If you want to rank for it, you better say so on your website!” The first step to improving your rankings for a given keyword is ensuring that your website provides valuable information on that topic.

Once you add that helpful information or “content” on that topic, laced subtly with keywords that people may search when looking for the product or service, you have a much higher chance of being found!

About 18 months ago, we started working with Audubon Nature Institute. Audubon is an everyday name here in New Orleans, as every child in the city and many beyond enjoy the Audubon Zoo, Audubon Aquarium of the Americas, Audubon Butterfly Garden and Insectarium, and more. As a result of their prominence, and their .org domain, auduboninstitute.org is an incredibly strong and authoritative website.

Audubon also has many offerings that go beyond the things to do in New Orleans that most New Orleanians and visitors think of each day. They also offer catering, children’s and adult birthday parties, tennis lessons, horseback riding, meeting space, wedding and event spaces, and many other things that one might not immediately think of Audubon for.

We wanted to help Audubon’s presence in search results for these other offerings, as they bring in revenue that helps support their attractions as well as conservation efforts. Their site at the time did have information on these offerings, but not in such a way that was keyword friendly for the search engines.

Through the process of optimizing existing pages and adding new pages focused on our topics at hand, Audubon’s website traffic for non-branded search related to these offerings increased in the triple digits, ranging from over 200% to almost 500% increases when looking at 8 months in 2012 compared to the same 8 months in 2011.
- 221% Increase in Non-Branded “Party” and “Parties” Related Visits
- 300% Increase in Non-Branded “Catering” Related Visits
- 437% Increase in Non-Branded “Wedding” Related Visits
- 498% Increase in Non-Branded “Venue” Related Visits
Minimal addition of links to these pages was required in order to improve the rankings that led to these increases in traffic.

In fact, before any link-building was done to these pages, and immediately after the optimized content was added and crawled by Google, their rankings for targeted keywords improved. Check out this shot of the top 28 keywords we were tracking. This shows rankings on Sept 1, 2011 compared to August 1, 2011. (The position on Google is to the left of the arrow, and the number indicated on the right of the arrow is the change in position. Where there is a “+,” that means the website is ranking on the first 2 pages for the first time for the given keyword.)

In this case, the power of targeted content is very evident! If you are a well established business with an authoritative website, review the information on your products and services and ensure you are making the most of the information. If you happen to be a smaller website, you should still complete this exercise, but you may need some additional authority-building for your domain as well.

Two Easy Ways to Improve your Existing Website Content:
- Write descriptive titles and headings.
Before:“Our Services”

After: “Our Accounting Services”
- Reference your product or service by name instead of using pronouns or generic terms.
Before: “The procedure lasts between 1 and 3 hours.”

After: “The breast augmentation procedure lasts between 1 and 3 hours.”

These are natural ways to reinforce what your website and your business is all about, and to help Google find you more relevant.

Share your experience with us! Do you have any experience with improved rankings due to small (or large) content changes? If you try our tips above, take a baseline to see where you are ranking before the edits, and then let us know how your rankings improve after a month or so!
September 21, 2012
Google Glass: The Fierce New Face in Fashion

This blog post was written so I could make RuPaul’s Drag Race and other pop culture references. The opinions and thoughts stated on the actual topic are of very little consequence.

Condragulations to the legendary mother of the wrap dress Diane Von Furstenberg, who recently teamed up with Google to unveil Glass at 2012 New York Fashion Week. In case you ain’t in the know, the tea on Google Glass is it’s a hands-free alternative to smart phones. Despite looking like a first-gen VISOR from ST: Next Generation, Glass is designed to use natural movement to navigate the operating system (you can use your eye to make calls… I think?). Glass’s ability to capture life from the wearer’s perspective is nothing short of an Eleganza Extravaganza!

Squirrelfriends for Life.
You might be asking yourself: what do jersey knit wrap dresses have to do with smartphones? Nothing, on the surface. However, when you realize the fashion industry generates $20 billion annually, it is obvious why the GOOG chose fashion as its newest squirrelfriend. By making Glass fashionable, Google is ensuring that every fashionista will shill out $1,500 for a pair. On the other hand, I ain’t got a stack and a half to spend on anything but the rent. The price point is the only complaint I have with Glass. While it’s almost guaranteed to be as amazingly fantastical as Google is making it sound, the retail price is too damn high. You gotta be nuts to spend that much on an item you will sit on and break, drunkenly lose at a club, or get jacked while walking down the sidewalk. Let me just run down to Canal Street and haggle on the price of the Chinese knock-off.

Can You Hear Me Now?
After the underwhelming reveal of the ultra-thin Apple iPhone 5… actually, hold up. Let’s stop for one moment and address the public’s addiction to anorexic smart phones. We really are living through emaciated electronic epidemic. Not only do our fashion models, TVs, and a menagerie of other things need to be paper thin, but so do our phones? Yes, it is super convenient having light-weight and portable phones, but am I the only one who misses the early 90’s when this was the face of mobile phones?:

The Zack Morris phone may have been a massive brick that would never fit in your pocket, but I bet you would never lose it. Plus, it was multi-functional! You could lift it like a dumbbell for working out, hammer a loose nail, or even defend your life against a Malaysian sunbear. What can you do with your smart phone? Read War and Peace? Watch the (far superior) British version of Being Human? Listen the newest Nickelback song? How about this — make a phone call? But for real though, if Apple’s big reveal is “faster and thinner,” it stops being about bleeding edge tech and becomes more about making the most with the least. They could have done heaps with the iPhone 5 in ways of innovation; instead they make Minecraft (pocket edition) load faster? Apple: seriously, girl, you better practice “It’s Raining Men,” ‘cause you’ll be lip-synching for your life…

Doesn't Take a Psychic To Know Apple In Trouble

Far from being a rehash of old technology in an expensive new package, Google Glass represents a brand-new paradigm in the way we think of smartphone capabilities and instantaneous first-person sharing. As a futurist, I’m very excited about Glass and the possibilities it brings to human interaction and social technology — and as a person who has seen every episode of America’s Next Top Model, I think Google’s decision to pair up with the fashion industry is genius. Positioning Google Glass as a fashion accessory will guarantee it to be popular with both the “it” crowd and the “IT” crowd, and ultimately mean more coins into Google’s already-deep pockets.

That’s it, kids, enough reading for day. The library is closed and it is time for me to sashay… away.

September 20, 2012
The Suite Life of Google Plus Local Address Issues

With Apple in position to steal some of Google’s mobile maps glory, the search giant is starting down a warpath. By boasting to the BBC about the superiority of Google Maps and touting their fancy Ground Truth technology that uses Street View data as an additional factor in verifying Maps data, Google is giving a clear message that they are not taking the replacement lying down.

While I’m sure the battle will be viciously fun to watch, the point that I find interesting is that Google is actually highlighting their error correction capabilities as a selling point. As someone that has spent more time than they would like reporting errors in G+ Local and editing Map Maker listings, I can assure you this isn’t an area I would necessarily be bragging about.

While the current “report a problem” system and Map Maker are definite improvements over previous support features, the whole error reporting system, from a business owner’s perspective, is still an overly convoluted experience that often requires repeated attempts for seemingly simple issues. For example, something as simple as a suite number not appearing where it should can take a significant amount of time and effort to fix, causing major headaches for customers trying to find the location in the meantime.

I’ll elaborate on the suite number issue because it clearly illustrates the struggles that many business owners go through with Google Maps error reporting systems.

Lately, suite numbers haven’t been properly displaying on live G+ Local listings. This has happened even if they were entered in the second address line field in the Local Business Center as is instructed in the Places quality guidelines.

One issue in resolving this is that the “report a problem” interface in G+ Local only offers a single line for editing the entire address. So when you attempt to get the suite number corrected using this method, Google automatically reformats your correction to exclude the suite number. You can override this by selecting your original formatting; however, it seems that then the address incorrectly transfers over to Map Maker as only one field rather than separate address and suite number fields, and the problem usually goes uncorrected because the fields are not properly linked between the two error reporting systems.

Map Maker handles suite numbers differently because, as opposed to the U.S., the majority of the world places the suite number at the beginning of the address rather than at the end. This can cause issues when editing suite numbers in Map Maker; if you place the suite number in the correct field in Map Maker, it typically transfers over to G+ Local incorrectly, with the suite number appearing at the front of the address line. One then has to use the “report a problem” feature to get the attention of someone on the G+ Local team to manually place the suite number in the correct location which involves them going against the correct Map Maker format.

Ultimately, Google needs to create uniform address fields that are correctly mapped throughout all of the databases connected to their local ecosystem. To me, this seems like it would be pretty easy to implement for a company that has the capacity to verify traffic directions by analyzing the road signs captured by their nearly world-wide fleet of Street View vehicles, but it seems I am wrong in that assumption. Maybe Apple has the right idea in using third-party providers to deal with these types of issues for them. Sure, relying on another company seems like it would take longer, but if there is any company that can strong-arm its data providers to meet their demands for quickly-updated, accurate and stable local data, it would be Apple. Let’s keep an eye on this story — as the maps giants duke it out, those of us down on the ground will have to adapt.

Have you had difficulty getting your address to show up properly in G+ Local? How was the process of fixing it?

September 18, 2012