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Five for Friday: Survived Mobilegeddon? Check Out What Google’s Doing Next

1. Immediate Mobilegeddon Aftershocks – Moz

Following the much-anticipated release of Google’s mobile update, a.k.a. “Mobilegeddon,” SEO authority Moz has taken its first look at the immediate aftershocks since the rollout. MozCast Mobile tracked the performance of mobile SERPs across a 10k keyword set over 10 days, but since Google says it could take days or weeks for the update, accurate measurements remain difficult to obtain. Stay tuned, because as more page-one URLs show the “mobile-friendly” tag, better Mobilegeddon data could be right around the corner.

2. Google+ Launches Collections – Blumenthals

Interested in using Google+ for your business but unsure how to organize groups of posts? Google+ has a new feature—Collections—that has the potential to help local businesses get more first-page exposure by allowing the organization of posts by topic. It remains to be seen how much of an impact Collections will have, and it very well may depend on Google’s direct marketing and exposure of this new feature.

3. Hope For Mobile Ads – Marketing Land

As mobile traffic continues its upward climb, advertisers are finally jumping in and starting to focus on the user experience, particularly as more consumers are looking at content in-app and from social media rather than on the mobile web. Publishers are actively working to figure out how to profit from rapidly growing mobile traffic, while advertisers are grappling with creating ads that will work well on all screen sizes and moving away from trends like ads that are specifically placed to force the user to click on them.

4. Google Gets Personal – Marketing Land

Are you ready to optimize for personalized search results? Google is reportedly in talks with advertisers to gain access to their customers’ first-party data and incorporate it into more personalized search results based on enhanced user profiles. If you haven’t done so already, now may be the time to optimize your content by focusing on your product or service and specifically targeting searcher profiles rather than using broad keywords.

5. Google+ Shows Signs Of Life With Its First Tweet – Marketing Land

Google+ has faced ongoing rumors as of late over its future, and for the most part, the social network has remained relatively silent, leaving onlookers to wonder if it would quietly split into its separate products: the social network experience, photos, and Hangouts. Instead, the social network recently showcased its sense of humor by surprising everyone with the network’s very first tweet, signaling that it is still alive and well. Google+ did make sure to point out its longstanding feelings on Facebook by commenting, “Still not on Facebook.”

Image sources:

Google Collections

May 15, 2015
Eight Years of Influencing: The Amy Arnold Story

Amy Arnold, director of research & development at Search Influence, recently celebrated her eight-year anniversary with the company April 30. Amy, one of Search Influence’s original employees, is known for her extensive knowledge of the online marketing industry, and her contributions to our company’s progression are something to pay tribute to (and also because she has some wicked dance moves).

Amy’s Journey

Amy’s journey before Search Influence began in advertising. She started her career working for the original Internet—you know, the Yellow Pages—where she sold ads in a phone book, which was a great advertising tool that has lost its value today. Next, Amy moved onto online advertising for phonebooks and was introduced to a load of technical elements. Picking up bits and pieces about HTML and coding along the way, she was able to develop basic Internet knowledge, which brought her here, to Search Influence.

In the beginning, Amy recalls late nights and weekends (say what?), and she describes the first two years as “weird and wild.” The work in the beginning had to be accomplished extremely quickly, and it was both difficult and time consuming; Amy says she truly had so much fun during these years. One of her most memorable experiences during her early years here was when she would sit around her kitchen table with other employees and develop training and processes that our team still uses today.

During her time here, there have been crucial changes to Google that affected our business in totality. In 2013, there were a combination of Penguin, Panda and Hummingbird updates that Amy remembers as a defining moment in our culture: “That was the time to take a critical look at things we were doing.” The company changed many processes that year because of these updates. In that time, Amy was reassured that although much was changing, many of the tactics and processes in place were tried and true and weren’t going anywhere. Growth like this is something that propelled our company to what it is now.

The Future of Online Marketing

The future of our business and the Internet as a whole is unpredictable, but Amy has her guesses: “Apps are going to become more important.” They are quite influential now, of course, and apps have a specific purpose because they serve a specific need. “Google wants us to provide a need to customers,” Amy believes, and apps are designed specifically to do that. Also, data security is a hot topic right now for Internet users, and this is a tangible thing Google can track. Amy predicts this affecting Google trust for businesses in the future (you heard it here first, from Amy Arnold).

When I asked her about some of her more memorable moments here, she mentioned how Will and his wife, COO and Co-Founder Angie Scott, decided to grow a local team here in New Orleans. She described it as an early stepping stone for the company’s maturity into what it is now. Even though Amy is utterly irreplaceable here at Search Influence, she had this to say about her time here: “Will and Angie had the vision and courage to make a pretty bold decision, and I’m happy to be a part of it.”

I used to live by this saying: “I’ve always dreamed of growing up to be Amy Poehler.” – Amy Poehler. Now I’ll be amending that to my new favorite Amy, Amy Arnold.

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Amy Poehler gif

May 14, 2015
How Infographics Can Give Your Online Strategy a Facelift

No industry knows the importance of image more than plastic surgery. Before and after pictures are worth a thousand words, and prospective patients heavily rely on visual information derived from those pictures when deciding which cosmetic procedures to explore. However, plastic surgery websites do not have to restrict themselves to just pre- and post-op imagery.

Introducing Infographics

Simply put, infographics are images that visualize information or data in a compelling, creative, and colorful way.

Businesses are increasingly turning to infographics to present their industry contributions. For example, Web company Unbounce, estimates that the use of infographics has seen a huge surge in recent years—an 800 percent increase from 2010 to 2012. Research conducted by AnsonAlex, a tech company specializing in producing tutorials, found that publishers with ample infographics grow website traffic 12 percent faster than those with no infographics.

Infographics are clearly more than a passing trend; they are a strategic marketing opportunities upon which the plastic surgery industry can capitalize.

Infographics Make Eye-Catching Websites

If you are looking for a new way to promote your plastic surgery clinic’s webpage, infographics are a surefire strategy for keeping eyeballs glued to your site. A single infographic has the potential to reach as many as 15 million Internet users through web searches, according to an infographic by Top Marketing Schools. In fact, searching ‘plastic surgery infographic’ yields 283,000 results on Google. Create and post infographics on your site to take advantage of this pool of interested users.

The average page visit lasts under a minute, but an infographic can keep a user reading for longer. In fact, a Search Influence-produced infographic detailing the legendary New Orleans Mardi Gras renewed interest among people that visited the official New Orleans tourism guide website. While visitors to the website typically spend an average of two minutes browsing, visitors to the Mardi Gras infographic page were spending upwards of eight minutes.

Ninety percent of the information processed by our brains is visual, so it’s only logical that we are more drawn to vibrant images than walls of text. Readers are likely to skim the infographic, absorb the information, and then explore the site further to learn what else you have to offer.

Be sure to add some written content outside the graphic. Site crawlers cannot scan images, so your optimized content must also appear elsewhere on the page in order to attract search engine hits.

To keep your users on your website, it is vital that your infographic loads quickly! The average user expects a page to load in under three seconds and will not hesitate to close a window that does not deliver fast enough. The quicker your site loads, the better your conversion rates will be.

Infographics Boost Social Media Reach

Your plastic surgery clinic can also use infographics to attract more social media followers and shares. That’s because images perform well on Twitter—even better than videos! For example, images get 128 percent more retweets than video tweets, according to Quicksprout. Similar to web pages, our eyes are instinctively drawn to tweets with alluring images.

To properly post your infographic on social media, however, you have to make sure it is shareable and easily traced back to your site. Use an embed code in the infographic so other industry professionals can easily add it to their sites. On the graphic, place your website address and the name of your clinic in bold letters. If your link or commentary is deleted through sharing, your clinic name will still remain. Using easy share links such as ow.ly or bit.ly can also make it easier to share on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest.

May 13, 2015
Taking Flight in 140 Characters or Less: Twitter Advertising 101

Twitter advertising can be a great way to increase your follower base and drive traffic to both your social media pages and your website. It is relatively cost efficient, and it can help you drive the right traffic to your pages. There are three different types of Twitter ads all used for different purposes.

Promoted Accounts

For those of you who are familiar with Facebook advertising, this type of ad is very similar to Facebook fan-building ads. They are used to grow your follower base and draw more attention to your Twitter account. Promoted accounts typically range between $2-4 per follower. This price is dependent upon targeting: the more specifically targeted the ad is, the more it costs. The cost of these ads is subject to results, because you are charged when a user clicks on the ad and follows your account, but you do have the ability to set a maximum budget.

Promoted Tweets

Promoted tweets can be used to promote a specific product or service, and they can also be used to get more attention and exposure for your quality tweets. These ads help promote user engagement and show your content to people who are not necessarily following you on Twitter. These ads are also on a “pay per” basis, but instead of paying per follow, you pay per interaction. “Interacting” includes clicking, replying, retweeting, or favoriting your tweet. These interactions typically cost between $0.50-$2, depending on your targeting. Just like with the promoted accounts, you can set a budget so that you don’t end up spending more than you can afford (due to the awesome success of the campaign, of course).

Promoted Trends

This type of Twitter advertising is really meant for the iconic brands of the world. These will only work for you if you are looking for significant exposure in a short amount of time. Promoted trends are guaranteed placement in the “trends” section and are shown to everybody. The types of businesses that do this appeal to the masses (McDonald’s, Nike, Chase, etc.). Another reason that this type of ad only appeals to huge companies is the large price tag: it costs $200,000 to run a promoted trend for one day.

Targeting

For promoted accounts and tweets, you can get pretty granular with the targeting. Twitter allows you to target based on a multitude of different demographic and behavioral factors. Advertisers can target based on behaviors, gender, region, device (mobile, desktop, or tablet), and more. Social media targeting is a delicate balance because as you get more specific, the price per click or interaction goes up, but it is important to be specific enough that you are targeting people who are likely to convert.

Twitter ads can be a really great way to drive more followers, engagement, and even traffic to your website. Using this ad platform also allows advertisers full access to Twitter analytics so they can see what types of tweets perform the best, which helps them choose which ones to promote in the future. Happy tweeting!

Image sources:

Twitter targeting image

May 12, 2015
More Locations, More Problems? Optimize Your Franchise SEO—Part 2
In part two of this two-part series about how to successfully optimize your franchise SEO, you will find three more winning strategies and steps for multi-location or franchise SEO.

It’s All About Location

The effort to have each location found in its own market is often perceived as the most challenging part of multi-location SEO. In part one of this series, we discussed the importance of building the central brand. Now we will tackle how to deal with individual location information, and the ways your franchisees can help to best optimize your franchise marketing and location SEO.

1. On-Site Location Pages

Now that you have built up your central brand, it is time to focus on your individual franchises. Each franchise location should have its own location landing page on your company’s website. Taking extra care to create separate location pages allows search engines to better understand that you have individual locations in specific geographic areas. It also gives you an opportunity to tell users about the unique products and services offered at each different location.

Here is a list of the necessary elements for an effective location page for Internet franchise opportunities:
- My Map to Google+ page
- Unique content for the specific location
- Directions to the location from different landmarks, highways, surrounding cities, etc.
- Photos of the location
- Reviews of the location (probably best to have a separate page for these)
- List of products and/or services (should link back to the main products/services pages)
- Schema MarkUp to the name, address, and phone number
- Link to the individual location’s social profiles
- Link to staff member profile pages
- Strong call to action
As with all web pages, it is a best practice to implement unique, compelling content on your location landing pages. Users expect a rich experience when navigating your site, and bland content may turn them away. At the same time, content that is too dense with information or full of keywords may deter users from your web page. To keep site visitors interested, give them valuable information using bullet points in case they are in a hurry. Some multi-location businesses leave a portion of these elements to be completed by the individual franchise owners and managers. In an ideal world, this would be an effective solution, but knowing that these kinds of franchise marketing requests are often put on the backburner, it is best to have a solitary stakeholder in the corporate office responsible for these tasks.

2. Citation Building

Citation building is perhaps the most daunting exercise when approaching multi-location SEO. As it is with SEO for single-location businesses, consistency of name, address, and phone number in your online business listings is key. You will often see name formats including the location, such as “Company Name – Lakeview Location.” However, this is not a best practice for SEO purposes. Instead, remove the location information, and keep the business name exactly the same for all of the locations. The different addresses and phone numbers for each location will be enough to differentiate them for both Google and your potential customers.

Each location should have a unique business description written for its online listings. This task may be best completed by individual franchisees, as it might be difficult for any one individual to write multiple, unique descriptions for essentially the same business.

On the other hand, you should choose the same categories and logo for every location. Adding unique pictures of each location and its staff would be a nice touch, as well, but it may not be worth the trouble if you have upwards of 10 to 15 locations. Some directories will offer more fields than others. It is in your best interest to provide as much information as possible.

Rather than taking on the incredibly time-consuming task of doing this for each individual business directory for every single location, consider using Moz Local. This tool makes pushing out each location’s name, address, phone number, categories, business descriptions, etc., to major directories as easy as a simple click of your mouse.

As you can see below, the major online data feeds and directories share their information with each other, which should allow Moz to take care of most of your citation building and cleanup. Just 90 days after you submit the listings to Moz, go back and see where you stand. Some manual cleanup may be required.

Expanding your search for niche directory opportunities for your company’s industry and each franchisee’s market is also highly recommended. By getting listed in these hyper-specific and hyper-local directories, you are giving search engines that much more information about what you offer and where your business should be found.

3. Enlist the Help of Your Franchisees

Enlisting the help of your franchisees may be a time-consuming task for some, which is why everything preceding this recommendation can be taken care of by one single source.

Allowing each of your locations to manage its own social presence can be both empowering and helpful for your visibility in search engine results. To help manage the challenges that may arise, you should create a clear social media policy outlining what is and what is not acceptable. Make your branding and the content of the posts a top priority when creating this social media manifesto. You will also want to make this a working document just in case someone finds a loophole that needs closing.

Each location should also be responsible for collecting positive reviews and testimonials from their customers. I would highly recommend incentivizing this effort and coaching your managers on the proper way to approach their customers. Written testimonials on the website serve as phenomenal selling tools. Reviews on Yelp, Google+, and other third-party review sites are even better.

Getting everyone on the same page with webinars can also be advantageous to the cause. Some topics that you will definitely want to cover include social media branding, social media posting, social media interaction, and how to ask customers for reviews. Break each of these up into bite-sized chunks, and keep your focus on the industry’s top three social media platforms. Side note: record all of your webinars, and make them available to your franchisees at their leisure.

Get Started!

As you can see, there is plenty of work to be done in order to achieve success with multi-location SEO. As your franchise grows and brings on new franchisees, use the above recommendations as a checklist for each new location. You can get most of this done within a week’s time for each new franchise location. Doing so will save you a lot of trouble down the road. It may be in your best interest to contact Search Influence for your online marketing needs, especially including the complicated maze of managing multi-location SEO and franchise marketing.

Image source:

Local Search Ecosystem image
May 11, 2015
Five For Friday: Death to G+, Facebook Video Calling, A Tech Movie Rec & More

1. Schema Marks Up Gmail – Moz

Not too long ago, thanks to a pair of excellent blog posts from David and Ian, we learned all about schema—what it is, what it does, and how it can dramatically help a client’s online marketing strategy.

After that wealth of knowledge was handed down, it should come as no surprise that schema.org markup can improve your email, too. It aids in allowing people to take action on Gmail quickly and simply. The Moz blog gives a comprehensive introduction explaining who should be using schema markup in their emails and why.

2. Is Google Plus on its Deathbed? – Marketing Land

Mark Traphagen, a columnist for Marketing Land, addresses the persistent rumors that Google Plus is going to dismantle the network and its social media component because of its perceived lack of popularity. To counter, he offers several key points that show why these Google+ detractors are misguided.

3. Why Video is a Marketer’s Best Friend – Marketing Land

Search Influence has been using videos for online marketing purposes for as long as I can remember (i.e. the year I have worked here). As the Video Coordinator (<—- a fancy, self-given title) over on the Production Team, I have learned why and how videos are so important. For those who may not know, Marketing Land breaks down why video is the perfect medium to enhance all online marketing strategies.

4. Facebook Announces Video Calling – Search Engine Journal

Facebook announced on its blog two new updates to its messenger services: video calling and a new app called “Hello,” which functions as a caller id, call blocker and search tool.

5. SI Movie Recommendation: New Sci-Fi Thriller Ex Machina – The Independent

In the new sci-fi film Ex Machina, a tech genius and CEO of Bluebook (a fictional Google-Facebook hybrid) has managed to successfully create a robot with artificial intelligence using the data collected by his worldwide, all-knowing search engine. The film touches on some really intriguing themes, such as consciousness, voyeurism, technology and human-machine “singularity.” It is a really interesting and exciting film that, as an employee at a tech company, really resonates—and it’s getting rave reviews across the board!

The film is rated R for language, nudity, and some violence. It stars Oscar Isaac, Domhnall Gleeson and Alicia Vikander. It is written and directed by Alex Garland (28 Days Later, Sunshine and The Beach).

Image sources:

Missy Elliot Gif

Ex Machina

May 8, 2015
A Family Affair: Teaching Mom a Thing or Two About SEO

Here at Search Influence, I have had the opportunity to work with a diverse group of clients—business owners from all kinds of different industries. But the best thing about coming to work every day? I have the privilege of working with a very special client: my mom.

“So What Is It Exactly That You Do?”

As the owner of two audiology practices, my mom has always been fascinated with the online marketing work that we do here at Search Influence. She understood well the need to strengthen her website and her practices’ online visibility in order to attract new patients and keep her business thriving. I encouraged her when she was ready to design a new, up-to-date, and well optimized website (something she desperately needed).

Let’s Make This Official

Although I was able to provide guidance and support, my individual capabilities were limited. Fortunately, though, I have the privilege of working with an extremely talented group of people with a wide array of skill sets. The next step was clear: it was time to get the Search Influence team involved and make my job as her “marketing consultant” official.

Giving Back

I feel a great sense of satisfaction knowing that I am able to give back to such a hardworking, supportive, and inspiring individual. Through her SEO and online advertising campaigns, I have helped her attract more patients, strengthen brand awareness, and remain relevant in the highly competitive online marketplace.

Working with her has been overwhelmingly positive. She is inquisitive, trusting, and always willing to help when needed. The only strange part has been adjusting to addressing her in this new professional capacity…for example, beginning a formal business email with “Hi Mom.”

May 8, 2015
This National Small Business Week, Step up Your Online Marketing

It’s National Small Business Week—time to celebrate the successes and the insane amount of work small business owners put in. The struggle is real.

You know you’re a small business owner when…

…Your nightmares are about getting bad Yelp reviews.

…Your social media “strategy” consists of bribing your college-aged daughter to handle your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

…Your holiday hours did not quite make it to the Internet, and customers actually showed up only to find your business closed.

To cure these and other headaches, start with a little TLC for your website and your online marketing strategy—after all, both of these play a huge role in bringing you customers, but they may unfortunately also be keeping you up at night. Follow these top three online marketing tips for small businesses.

If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Join ‘Em

It may sound upsetting that Yelp listings are front and center in a Google search for your business while your own website is far down the list of search results. But savvy small business owners know that Yelp and other large online directories can win over customers with minimal effort. So if you can’t beat the Yelps of the world, join ‘em!

This strategy is also known as Barnacle SEO. Basically, your business needs to attach itself to large, fixed objects and then wait for customers to float by in the powerful current. Identify the large, high-ranking online directories that matter to you most, such as Yelp, and add your information there in the hopes of “borrowing” some of the page one rankings. There are many trusted online directories like Yelp out there you can barnacle up to: Angie’s List, Foursquare, Google+, Avvo (for lawyers), Healthgrades (for doctors), and even TripAdvisor.

And this tip comes with a bonus: this strategy also works well for customers searching on smartphones because these websites are optimized for the mobile experience—providing the targeted information that local customers searching on their smartphones really need. When you perform a Google search for “hair stylists New Orleans,” for example, the top results are mostly from Yelp:

Target Your Social Media Efforts

Another thing that keeps you as a small business owner up at night? Social media—or more specifically, finding the time for it. For starters, why is social media worth your time? The latest statistics from the Pew Research Center paint a pretty compelling picture that customers are on social media: 74 percent of online adults use social networking sites.

As a time-starved small business owner, you must get the most for your social media time. This requires targeting your social media efforts. Start by channeling your ideal customer. What is your typical customer’s age, marital status, and family status? Where is your customer physically located? Do your customers fall into a certain income bracket?

Once you know who your target customer is, find the social media channel that appeals to them. For example, Facebook still skews significantly female and is the top-used social network for U.S. teens, making it ideal for fast-moving consumer goods, according to Business Insider. Instagram is also popular among females ages 18 to 44, so clothing, accessories, and those types of brands tend to perform well on this network. While LinkedIn is most popular for adults, Twitter is primarily a news source and attracts mostly male users. YouTube reaches more adults ages 18-34 than any single TV network. Pinterest is the place for food and drink-related information as well as parenting tips.

But remember, whichever social networks you decide to focus on, automate your posts with these quick tips.

Avoid Customers Crying in Your Parking Lot

If you’ve ever done a Google search for your business, you’ve likely seen this kind of result:

But what happens when you have special holiday hours? Will customers see your normal hours in a Google search and show up in your parking lot over the holidays? Currently, Google My Business has not built out the functionality for saving holiday-specific hours ahead of time. As the profile setup currently stands, you’ll need to manually edit the hours of operation on a given day when your business is open (or closed) outside your standard hours of operation. See Google’s steps on how to update your business’ hours.

Also, remember to let folks know when you are, in fact, open on the holidays. For instance, let everyone know your restaurant is open on Independence Day and post your holiday-specific menu for the day or highlight any patriotic specials. Is your medical practice open for limited hours on Memorial Day this year? Post a piece to your blog or social media profiles highlighting the top summertime health hazards from boating accidents to severe sunburns.

May 7, 2015
More Locations, More Problems? Optimize Your Franchise SEO—Part 1

Do you ever feel like your efforts to market your business with more than one location are ineffective? Do you live with the constant doubt about whether or not you did as much for one location as you did for another, or if your franchisees are doing something counterproductive that will painfully squander your efforts? You may also be wondering how to get users from all of your markets to find their corresponding local franchise business. How much is too much when it comes to overstuffed keywords for franchise SEO and duplicate web pages with franchise marketing?

You don’t need to be an industry professional to know that comprehensive search engine optimization (SEO) requires a balance of more than a dozen simultaneously active elements. From consistently monitoring your targeted keywords to constantly generating new, compelling website content, maintaining high search engine rankings proves to be a multidimensional effort. It seems like all it takes is one surprise update or manual action from Google, and your entire SEO strategy can collapse like a house of cards. For multi-location businesses and franchises, this balancing act becomes even more complex, which is why Search Influence is here to help you not only maintain, but maximize the results of your Internet marketing and digital franchise efforts.

In this two-part series, you will receive a five-step guide that should answer all of your questions about multi-location or franchise SEO. This first piece will focus on building the corporate brand—a frequently forgotten necessity in effective franchise marketing for any business, regardless of the number of locations.

Build Your Brand

This may seem logical, but many times, webmasters and marketers get so caught up in the challenges that come with the individual locations that they forget they have a brand to promote. These recommendations have nothing to do with location-based information; however, they are just as significant to your franchise SEO and Internet marketing success.

1. Focus on the Main Pages

When I refer to the main pages, I am referring to the homepage, the “about us” page, your blog, and your products and services pages—in other words, any page that contains content that is applicable to the brand and its offerings.

These pages need to contain the best content on your site, as they will likely be the most visited. Depending on how many locations you have, you may want to include each location in the title tags of these pages, but I would avoid this practice if you have more than three, as title tags should not appear forced or spammy.

The blog, on the other hand, can be more versatile with regards to the content that you create. Your blog should be focused mainly on industry-specific topics, but it should also have a touch of personality. Things like showcasing your community involvement or a franchisee’s achievement are both great blog topics. Search engines love active blogs, because they show that you are keeping your site up to date by offering the latest and greatest industry knowledge in a timely fashion.

Having a mobile-friendly site is important to your franchise’s digital marketing efforts, especially with our heavy reliance on smartphones today. As Google rolled out one of its most significant algorithm updates in April 2015, your site could have been practically wiped off the map if it was not mobile-friendly, and the same is just as true today.

2. Off-Site Authority for Your Brand

Since Google’s more recent Penguin updates, the link building game has changed. Instead of worrying about getting links to your website and becoming keyword obsessed, we need to be thinking about building authority and a stronger overall presence for the brand.

The simplest way to do this is by creating social profiles for your brand. This is not to say that franchisees cannot or will not create their own individual pages, but you should own the brand and its voice by claiming and being active on the major social channels.

What are the major social channels, you ask? Google+, Facebook, and YouTube are all surefire winners here. But why Google+ and YouTube? One, they are both owned by Google, and you always want to make friends with the decision maker. Two, YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world. By regularly posting content to these profiles, search engines will get a better sense of what you offer and, in turn, what you should be found for. Note: you will have to rely on your franchisees to help you verify their individual Google+ listings.

Listing your company in categorical directories can also help the cause of brand building. If there is a relevant directory for the product or service you offer, your business should be listed, along with all of the details of your offering. In this scenario, becoming a part of industry associations can have as much of a benefit online as off.

There is nothing that can beat real, newsworthy press. Whether it be a press release, a magazine article, or a blog post, when your brand is mentioned online, Google is going to recognize it and correlate the content around it to your website. A link back to the site in these cases can prove helpful as well.

Now that you have a better sense for basic brand building, stay tuned for part two of this blog series, which will explain how to manage the optimization of all of your individual locations. At Search Influence, we are best equipped to help you succeed with your franchise marketing plan and franchise SEO efforts. Contact us today with any inquiries regarding how we can guarantee a successful online marketing strategy for your company.

May 6, 2015
Google Goes InZayn: How Malik’s Different Direction Broke the Internet

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know by now that Zayn Malik has left One Direction. This was news that affected not only fangirls like myself and some coworkers, but also the world. On March 25, 2015, the news broke, and the Internet went into a frenzy.

According to Google’s trending searches on March 25, more than 1 million searches were made related to his departure.

Between the desperate tweets of devastated fans, tearful Tumblr reactions and tributes, dads completely trolling their daughters, and millions of Google searches, it’s clear that Zayn dominated the search engines and the Internet that day.

@presley_breigh We mean no harm… just love! 🙂 Trying to get smiles during these difficult times.

— J-Si (@JSiChavez5) March 26, 2015

*quietly weeps about Zayn* pic.twitter.com/RjN7voQpyU

— Spencer Althouse (@SpencerAlthouse) March 25, 2015

Using Google Trends, we are able to see how his searches progressed over time throughout his 1D career:

Google Trends is a great tool to find out what people are searching for at a given moment in time. You don’t have to be a complete fangirl to check it out, either. Businesses and marketers alike can use this tool to research and leverage relevant search topics for ideas on content, videos, infographics, etc.

Or, if you’re a fangirl like me, feel free to use the tool for things of utmost importance, like figuring out which One Direction member gets searched most often. Let’s be clear about one thing: Harry is steadily searched more than Zayn, minus the spike during his attempt to abandon his fellow band members and launch a solo career in March. It’s an outrage.

Please comment on how Google Trends helps your day-to-day life and/or if you were one of those who were affected by Zayn leaving One Direction.

Image sources:

Ahhhh gif

May 5, 2015