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Tag: small business

  • New Orleans: A Growing Tech City

    For those of you who don’t know, before Hurricane Katrina ripped through the Gulf South, New Orleans was on a steady rate of decline. However, the city we love to call home here at Search Influence is in the middle of a major renaissance. News sources across the nation have reported New Orleans is the fastest growing city in America.

    • Population in April 2010: 343,829
    • Population in July of 2011: 360,740
    • Change in population: 4.9 percent (national average 0.73%)
    • Unemployment rate May 2012: 7.2%
    • Unemployment rate December 2012: 6.8 % (national average 7.8%)

     

    With all of these growth changes and increase in jobs, New Orleans has also become a hub of entrepreneurial activity. Forbes recently said New Orleans is one of the biggest brain magnets in the country, attracting young, innovative minds. It is reported that 427 out of every 100,000 adults started up a new business in the New Orleans metro area, which is 40% above the national average.

    Many of these entrepreneurial efforts are tech-based. Companies such as Idea Village and LaunchPad have helped young tech and digital media entrepreneurs start their businesses, giving them advice, a place to work, and grants. Marketing firms, apps, and software are all being developed in this city, which is quite shocking considering this has always been a city known for being 10 years behind everyone else. Kickboard, started by Jennifer Medbery after teaching at a charter school, is software that provides a centralized location for teachers to record their students’ progress.

    Even Search Influence was founded during Katrina’s aftermath, and along with this city, we have grown at a rapid rate. In 2011 we made it on Inc. 500’s list of fastest growing companies, and we are now the largest online marketing firm in New Orleans. Digital media has many different facets, and we are proud to offer SEO, social media, and paid search services.

    New Orleans institutions such as the Audubon Institute, Naked Pizza, and Southern Costume Company have integrated the digital space into their marketing efforts. Naked Pizza tweets on a regular basis, and they have truly embraced pop-culture (I strongly encourage you to watch their Harlem Shake video).

     

     

     

     

     

    The Audubon Institute and Southern Costume Company have opened their marketing efforts to include social media promotions and building their brand on Facebook.

     

    Digital Media, online marketing, and social media have become vital factors for today’s businesses to succeed. It’s all about the conversation and being transparent with your customers. We are so happy to report that our city and businesses are flourishing due to technology and media advancements.

     

     

     

  • The New Facebook News Feed – What Brands and Users Need to Know

    8539089499_eb76f0393d_b Facebook announced a new look to their News Feed yesterday, which aims to streamline its appearance and cut down on irrelevant stories. In fact, the tagline on their announcement reads “Goodbye Clutter… Hello bright, beautiful stories.” The new version will focus on images, and they will appear much larger and richer than they had previously. To many reviewers, the updated feed looks like a cross between Google+ and the Facebook Mobile app. For the first time, the platform will look virtually the same across different devices. This leaves just one big question for both Facebook users and brands… Where will the ads go?

    Never fear, Facebook advertisers, this update looks poised to deliver even larger and more effective ads than those that are available on the current version of News Feed. The three column design of the new layout allows for larger images and stories from your friends, but also allows for richer, more striking sponsored stories from advertisers. And in the end, isn’t that what Facebook shareholders are demanding? The new update downplays and shrinks the traditional right side bar ads, which seems designed to push brands to utilize creative content and sponsored stories to target potential fans.

    The updated News Feed may impact businesses’ organic reach significantly. And truthfully, this may be a deliberate plan to get more brands to utilize sponsored stories in order to reach a wider audience. Facebook quietly released a “Pages” feed several months ago, which has been popping up more and more on my News Feed in the last few weeks to highlight brands I rarely click on. With the new update comes an “All Friends” feed, which allows you to only see people you are friends with in real life on your News Feed. Although Facebook claims the News Feed algorithm will not be changing, its not hard to imagine many users will be clicking “All Friends” rather than viewing their entire feed.

    Mashable has some great tips on some ways brands and publishers can get a jump start on succeeding in the new News Feed, many of which are as simple as updating your brand’s cover photo. The biggest takeaway from Facebook’s new look is that brands need to focus more intently on sharable, high quality images, videos, and links rather than plain text updates. For some this might take a bit of adjustment, but it has been a known fact for some time that posts with photos or links get far more interaction on the social media network than text-only statuses.

    Screen Shot 2013-03-07 at 3.52.03 PM For the average user, this update seems like an overall positive design change. The look of the News Feed hasn’t been updated in over two years, and quite frankly seems overrun by apps and useless stories. Personally, if the top story on my News Feed is never about “Candy Crush Saga” again (a game I don’t play, for the record) I will be one happy girl. With this redesign, Facebook seems to be getting back to what matters, content from people you actually care about. In the end, isn’t that the point of social media?

  • AdWords Enhanced Campaigns: Naughty or Nice for SMBs & Agencies?

    Yesterday, Google announced what might be the largest restructuring of the AdWords platform to date: Enhanced Campaigns. Building on (and some say attempting to boost) the influx of mobile advertisements on AdWords, Enhanced Campaigns are an attempt to simplify the mobile pay-per-click management process by removing barriers to ROI calculation for SMB advertisers. While many advertisers are less than enthused about the changes, Search Influence welcomes the new features, streamlined campaign creation process, and simpler campaign management and assessment that Enhanced Campaigns brings to the table.

    Nice!

    The official blog post on Inside AdWords is clear about the goals of Enhanced Campaigns: simplify mobile and multi-touch marketing for the part-time advertiser. Citing a study on the new world of multi-screen browsing, Google claims 90% of consumers “move sequentially” between several devices during the conversion funnel.

    Google highlights three refinements to existing AdWords features that will be live for everyone starting in June: (1) laser-targeted bid adjustment based on location, device, time of day, “and more” within a single campaign; (2) easy management of one campaign across multiple devices, which is in contrast to the previous recommended best practice of duplicating identical campaigns for different device targeting; and (3) more accurate click-to-call data and conversion measurement across devices. These changes allow advertisers to more easily set up mobile campaigns, a strategy Wordstream founder and CTO Larry Kim says only 4% of advertisers participated in despite lower costs-per-click and, in our experience, high conversion rates from calls.

    The new bidding system is based on a percentage of a basic bid which covers the equivalent of today’s national desktop campaigns. This bid can be multiplied by -100% to 300% depending on device targeted and -90% to 900% depending on geographic area or time targeted. This allows advertisers to avoid tedious duplication of campaigns simply for different targeting, while making it much easier on “part-timers” and campaigns with limited budgets to run on multiple devices and control who sees their ads.

    Combined with the recently-simplified Remarketing Lists in Analytics, the upcoming Universal Analytics, and the storyline offered in a post on SEER Interactive, it becomes clear that the other shoe dropping with Enhanced Campaigns is the continued march toward multi-touch lead attribution.

    AdWords is also dropping the direct fee for Google-offered click-to-call numbers in mobile search ads, tracking only calls over one minute as a conversion. This has been a point of contention for marketers who know that a click on a phone number and a call connected are very different things.

    Naughty!

    Not everyone is excited about the changes brought by Enhanced Campaigns. Many advertisers are concerned about the cost-per-click increase that will come with a variety of new advertisers not effectively managing their bids using combined campaigns. According to an Adobe study, the gap between mobile and desktop costs-per-click dropped by 15% between the 3rd and 4th quarters 2012, meaning that there’s already less of an advantage to advertising on mobile. Automatically setting advertisers to run on mobile means that despite the availability of new bidding tactics, less savvy advertisers will inflate the ad auction and lead the platform to be less profitable for everyone.

    Others are concerned that Google won’t be able to effectively manage the preferences expressed in the myriad targeting options provided by Enhanced Campaigns. Per Google’s Guide to Upgrading to Enhanced Campaigns, Quality Scores in upgraded campaigns are reported at a bird’s-eye view, making it difficult to see what targeting is driving increases or decreases of an already-opaque metric. Similarly, the inability to separate out tablets from desktop searchers makes some wary; there are some markets that would be highly affected by this, such as downloads of a desktop program. While this is concerning to some, it may also outline an overarching corporate goal of Google: to make the world fast and universally accessible — contrary to ideas like single-platform apps and solutions off the cloud.

    Misconceptions: Looks Naughty, but Is Nice!

     

    But some, seeing the change as a step backward for targeting, have unfairly found fault with the update. Enhanced Campaigns eliminates confusion by changing locations of settings.  Many have said that the “mobile-only campaign” has disappeared from AdWords. On the contrary, AdWords provides a checkbox to help Google figure out what device an ad should be shown. Furthermore, ads with extensions such as App Store downloads that only make sense on certain mobile carriers and operating systems will be automatically targeted to those devices.

    There’s also some worry about other platforms following suit. As BingAds has matured as a platform and international search engines have found monetization easier with cost-per-click ad auctions, it might follow that this grand experiment by Google will shape the industry. Yet BingAds has tried to forge its own path in the paid search realm; I can’t see them blindly following Google with its targeting any more than it already has — to wit, only slightly. But while the industry as a whole might not change, it is important to note the Google has over search ads, especially on mobile devices.

    How to Win with AdWords Enhanced Campaigns

    Best practices can already be parsed out from what has been released about AdWords Enhanced Campaigns, but they aren’t necessarily far divorced from current ones.

    1. Follow Google’s guide to transitioning your account to Enhanced Campaigns
    2. Be sure to take advantage of all appropriate ad extensions, which allow you to target you ads appropriately to device and location
    3. Ensure you’re using the most up-to-date version of AdWords Editor to effectively Enhance your Campaigns.
    4. Anticipate a variety of devices coming to your site by providing dynamic content and alternate conversion paths based on device
    5. Provide natural redirection to and from your mobile site if it’s required for your business to avoid issues when desktop ads show on mobile or vice versa
    6. Now more than ever, bid appropriately for your location, device, and time of day — the best strategy in a second-price auction like AdWords is to bid what that website visit is actually worth to you

    We’re looking forward to learning more as marketers start experimenting with these new tools. What do you think? Will this change the way you’re doing PPC?

  • Did Social Fall Flat on Black Friday and Cyber Monday?

    Black Friday & Cyber Monday Sales DataThe weekend after Thanksgiving was one of the most aggressive marketing blitzes in recent memory. News reports had three shopping holidays to choose from: the venerable Black Friday, which started around 1961 but didn’t gain the influence it now has until as late as 2005; Small Business Saturday, a American Express-backed venture that took advantage of a Twitter hashtag in 2010 supporting local brick-and-mortars; and Cyber Monday, coined by the National Retail Federation in 2005. These three days have only been increasing in search volume and clout, and are now at the forefront of the holiday business season.


    The IBM Reports

    In today’s Big Data world, it’s easier than ever to analyze huge data sets and IBM was one of the first to get out a report on the buying weekend. Their Black Friday and Cyber Monday Reports are troves of information, giving website analytics data for e-commerce sites across a wide swath of industries. We were hipped to this data by Mashable, who curiously reported that Twitter yielded no revenue to these clients. It seems that despite massively ramped-up social advertising spending this year, leading BIA/Kelsey to project a 19.2% compound annual growth rate to 2016, social media sites only offered .34% of referrers on sales on Black Friday and .41% on Cyber Monday. Representing a loss in revenue of 35% and 24% respectively, it might seem that social was a dud.

    However, between the three shopping days, over 447,000 people used the related hashtags, and millions more used less tech-savvy terms to talk about the events. Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites have become utterly ubiquitous, combining with the adoption of social media by people who are wealthy enough to buy the majority of gifts for the holidays — that is, parents. Was all that marketing a waste? Or was social media part of a wider sales strategy that led to an annual e-commerce sales growth of 20% on Black Friday and 30% on Cyber Monday?

    Black Friday & Cyber Monday Sales Data

    Did View-Through Traffic Matter?

    Black Friday & Cyber Monday Sales Data My immediate thought when looking at this data was that social media was being discounted, as it often is an intermediary step between product research and buying that product. Especially during sales, users will shop around, compare products, and come to the same retailer through a variety of advertising channels. Much like paid search and organic social media posts, the buying cycle can be particularly long, especially when all of your competitors are also vying for your customers.

    But even clicks aren’t particularly valuable as a metric, as many saw these deals passively through advertisements and posts in their feed. Social media acts similarly to television ads, giving snippets of information to raise interest. This kind of passive brand-building is hard to track, but certainly affects users by letting them know that there’s a sale and they should check out the site for more deals, leading to businesses over-valuing direct rather than social media traffic. While this kind of analysis is difficult, businesses have to use impression-based attribution to track the ROI of social media.

    The Power of Email

    Also left out of IBM’s analysis is email. We’ve all seen our inboxes swell with bacn as the buying season approached, warning us of the deals to come on all the sites that have acquired our email at some point. Major retailers carpet-bombed our inboxes, leaving hundreds of subject lines for us to click or ignore. Many marketers champion email as a much more effective use of marketing spend that users prefer to social media advertising. Why did IBM choose to ignore the direct-mail campaigns in their study?

    Did You Know?

    Regardless of their flaws, the IBM reports are a wealth of data for marketers both in e-commerce and keeping track of the information to strengthen their own marketing campaigns. Some key takeaways:

    Black Friday Year-Over-Year Stats

    • Average Order Value is down 5%
    • Average Session Length is down 10%
    • Mobile Sales and Traffic are up 66%
    • Sales Peaked at 8:45am PST (11:45 EST)
    • Secondary Sales Peak at 7:35pm PST (10:35 EST)

    Cyber Monday Stats

    • Average Order Value is down 7%
    • Average Session Length is down 5%
    • Mobile Sales and Traffic are up 96% and 71%
    • Sales Peaked at 8:05pm PST (11:05 EST)
    • Secondary Sales Peak at 8:25am PST (11:25 EST)

    A Quick Poll

    Please take this quick poll to see an unscientific review of the data points from the IBM reports.

    Results


  • Instagram Web Profiles Bring Nashville Filter to the Masses

    Screen Shot 2012-11-07 at 1.25.38 PMPhoto sharing service Instagram announced the release of brand new web profiles for all users last week, some two years after the launch of its iOS app. Although this is big news for your average Instagrammer, the addition is also a major breakthrough for businesses who use the app for photo editing and social sharing. The new web profiles have already begun launching, and the majority of Instagram users can expect a new profile featuring their photos within the coming week.

    Not only does the new functionality improve a business’s ability to monitor and respond to comments on photos, it also adds the ability to direct users on other networks to follow your account. Previously, it was difficult to encourage fans to follow your account within the app-only software because there was no easy way to find individual profiles without manually searching. The new web profiles add the “Follow” function directly on each individual profile, which allow businesses to link easily to their page and improve their reach. This new feature will also allow customers who do not have Instagram accounts to see your photo stream without downloading the app.Screen Shot 2012-11-07 at 1.26.12 PM

    The web profile layout is extremely similar to Facebook, with one major exception: no news feed. In order to view a user’s profile, you have to manually go to instagram.com/[username] or click a direct link. It seems likely that there may be some sort of “explore” or feed feature in the future, but as of right now it can only be used to directly visit pages. You can click on user profiles of people who comment or like your photos, which would allow businesses to follow back people who interact with their brand.

    Screen Shot 2012-11-07 at 1.59.51 PMThe new design also includes a follow button on individual photos, so Instagram users can easily add other users to their feed from photos sourced elsewhere, such as Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. I’ve already seen some businesses showing off their new web profile pages on Facebook, with links back to the page for maximum follow value. The integration of that button should help increase Instagram follower counts significantly for many business pages.

    All in all, the new design seems destined to help more users reach your business page, and will hopefully lead to increased interaction for your Instagram photos. With a little self-promotion on other social networks, Instagram profiles can now easily reach wider audiences, and showcase your brand’s identity to more potential customers. Has your business gotten a web profile yet? Check it out, and let us know what you think!

  • 4 DIY SEO Tips for the Small Business Owner

    martinis for DIY SEO

    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.

    Hurricane Isaac 2012This 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.

    Totally unscientific DIY SEO survey

    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.

    Facebook fan building#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.

    fantastic Facebook fan buildingOne 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?

  • INFOGRAPHIC: The Local Business Owner’s Guide to Mobile Apps

    We’re proud to publish this new infographic from the talented team at Avalaunch Media. If you’re a small business owner, check out this array of useful mobile tools and apps to maximize your potential.

    The world of technology is changing rapidly and small business owners need to utilize it in order to compete in the business world. With the rise in instant information through smart phones and high-tech mobile devices, it’s extremely important that business owners know which apps to pay attention to, get listed on, and spend their time searching.

    The graphic below helps you understand what the top apps in the industry to get listed on and to utilize are. Learn which apps make use of customer reviews on local businesses. These ones are important to the personality of a business and should be top priority when trying out apps. Find out which apps help connect merchants, and why your time using them is key to growing your small business.

    In order to compete in today’s business world you must get on board with mobile devices. Take advantage of apps shown in this graphic below. Check them out, get listed on them, and use them! Plus, nearly all of these apps are free!

    Copy and paste the code in the area below to put this image on your site for free.

    <p><a href=”http://www.searchinfluence.com/2012/05/local-business-owners-guide-to-mobile-apps/”><img src=”http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7232/7244922936_6a3c535d5c_o.jpg” alt=”mobile apps for local business owners”></a><br /><a href=”http://www.searchinfluence.com/2012/05/local-business-owners-guide-to-mobile-apps/”>The Local Business Owner’s Guide to Mobile Apps</a>, courtesy of Dream Systems Media</p>

  • New Kid on the Social Media Block – How to Generate Brand Awareness and Valuable Links using Pinterest

    As an admittedly addicted Pinterest user, I’d like to clear up a few things about the relatively young social media site and its potential use for marketing and SEO linkbuilding.Definition of Pinterest With Pinterest quickly rising in popularity, I’m constantly hearing it referred to as a social bookmarking tool for sharing images.  Pinterest is in fact a social bookmarking tool, but it is not only about the images. The site allows users to “pin” or save links to external sites in an organized way, with few limits to what type of site or image can be pinned.  Users can save anything from a favorite blog post to products they love, from recipes to tutorials. Each and every pin not only pulls in an image, but also a do-follow link back to the source site! Can you smell the SEO potential yet? The brilliance of Pinterest is that it combines some of the most compelling features of social media in general: visually stimulating content and the opportunity to share your ideas, interests and inspiration. Upon signing up, users are provided with fully customizable “pin boards” and can easily find friends to follow using the Facebook and Twitter connected features.
    I escape to Pinterest to avoid all the drama and bad grammar on Facebook.
    As a marketing tool, Pinterest has great potential for small retail businesses that may have a hard time competing in search results. For example, a local boutique clothing store may find it incredibly difficult to outrank Macy’s and Saks in the SERPs for a keyword like “New Orleans shopping.” When users find something they like (usually pinned by someone they follow and are influenced by), chances are they will, at the very least, click the source link. Everyday I’m introduced to new brands and products on Pinterest, and more than once I’ve used what my friends are pinning as inspiration for making purchases. There are currently few brands using Pinterest, but with its popularity and the site’s high (and still growing) domain authority, all signs are pointing to increased use by brands and businesses in the near future.

    A few tips for putting Pinterest to work for your brand:Pin It Button

    • Add the “Pin It” button to your product pages or blog posts. It’s easy to do and you can add the button along with your other social media sharing buttons.
    • Create a Pinterest account for the brand itself and reach out to “visual influencers” on Pinterest for help getting your images re-pinned. Pinterest allows any user to follow any other user without requiring a follow-back. You may also tag other users in your pins, comment on pins and re-pin (the Pinterest version of a retweet) others’ content.
    • Create boards beyond your own products and brand, but relevant to your location and industry.
    • Utilize the description fields when creating Pins by adding keywords and geo-modifiers. Not only is this SEO 101, but Pinterest addicts often use the search feature to find relevant pins.
    • Keep pinning!  The search results and Pin feeds change up-to-the-minute, much like the Twitter feed and Facebook Ticker. Maintain a steady flow of Pins to ensure your products are staying top-of-mind.

    For SEO linkbuilding purposes, the benefits of Pinterest are pretty self-evident. Some basic info on Pinterest links:

    • Each and every Pin links back to the original source site or the file location (depending on where it was originally pinned from). Unless you’re purposely optimizing for image seach, a product page or site link is probably better.

      Pin Link Locations
      Standard pins provide links to the source site in two locations.
    • A Pin provides do-follow links in multiple places. The image itself acts as a link in addition to the “From:” link in the top right-hand-corner.
    • A pin comes with embed code for syndication to other sites like Facebook and Twitter, helping to develop backlinks to the Pin itself.
    • Pins are editable! You can edit your own Pins with updated URLs or reach out to Pinners who may have pinned your images from an unfavorable source site. Pins are easy to edit and the new URL you provide does not need to host the image, though I don’t recommend you use a link without the original image.
    • Because of the visual nature of Pinterest, it is a great way to promote infographics. Make sure they are Pinned to appropriate boards and contain relevant descriptions to ensure they are shared.
    • You can even add a Pin It button to your company’s blog pages by using the WordPress plug-in.

    Thanks to the intuitive nature of Pinterest’s interface, I think the best way to get going is to request an invite and just dive in. Remember, sign-up is currently via invitation-only, so ask a friend to invite you or request one from the site (it doesn’t take long). Let me know what you think about these tips in the comments, and if my screenshots piqued your interest, follow me on Pinterest!

  • Google+ Opens For Businesses — Potential And How To Get Your Face In The SERPs

    Google+ for Apps One Bar

    Google+ for Business
    Are we not men?

    The new kid on the block has opened itself to businesses in two principal ways. Unlike Facebook, which focuses on admin-managed pages, and Twitter, which couldn’t care less if a person, place, or animal is represented in a feed, Google initially maintained its focus on people in its business-level implementation of its social network, not announcing any kind of branded pages. Then Monday’s announcement of Facebook-style business pages opened a new avenue for marketers, if only those in selected niches. Both new tools allow for the implementation of the “authority” metrics hinted at in numerous Google quality documents.

    But should a business even have a Google+ presence? Facebook of course is ubiquitous, and Twitter has proven itself to be a direct customer relations tool. Google+, however, has languished as Robert Scoble’s main soapbox and Android users’ photo repository. Google+ isn’t a lead generator, lacking the customization of Facebook tabs, and it isn’t a customer service tool, lacking the plurality userbase (8% of the US) Twitter enjoys.

    Applications of Google+ for Business

    But it’s not just those on the social network who will benefit from business applications of Google+. Integration with search and the use of the network as an authority metric seem to be major advantages of Google+ for businesses. Once set up correctly, a robust Google+ profile can give authority to local ranking and regular integrated SERP rank depending on page type. Unsurprisingly, this leaves the active maintenance lacking; however, even that aspect can be worthwhile in the right niches.

    Internally, Hangouts combined with Google Docs allows decentralized businesses a face-to-face online collaboration tool. Users can avoid the loss of communication from short text comments in edits, enriching group writing and design. This use of Docs can help a variety of businesses, both for internal meetings and for work with clients. The possibilities previously hinted at are relatively endless, and make Google+ a must-have for remote businesses, some design firms, and any company needing to build something in front of a customer or each other without being in the same room.

    But most companies don’t need that kind of ability for real-time document editing. For them, Hangouts provide a simple way to start webinars, live shows, and other almost TV-styled content. Something like SEOmoz’s Whiteboard Friday could be live broadcast with question-and-answer, recorded locally, and quickly uploaded to YouTube or another video site, then added to a website for further life out of the content. If live videos would take too much effort, even a simple video exclusive to Google+ can help drive uses both to your Plus Page and create user interaction. This kind of direct, personal, and instant communication with users and the ease of creating something for all visitors is nearly unprecedented in social media.

    rel=author SERP Display
    How Your Employees

    Keeping with the focus on both users and non-users of the network, Google+ offers ways to interact with customers outside of the realm of the social network — being the only outlet for rel=”author” and introducing rel=”publisher”, the best way to get your personal face and name ad your company’s image in the SERPs. Reinforcing the authority metrics hinted at in Panda and the related effects, Google+ is the gatekeeper for bridging the gap between semantic and visible authorship in the SERPs, and the exposure and connection of a face and name to a business can humanize and connect with customers in a way that couldn’t be done for someone who isn’t just signed into Facebook. “The face in the SERPs” is perfect for any company with a regularly maintained blog or article section. Similarly, a company might see its logo next to its web site when rel=”publisher” is implemented.

    Using Google+ to Put Your Face in the SERPs

    Happily, WordPress sites have a relatively simple solution for implementing a multi-person rel=”author”. It does the first step for you, linking to the author page with rel=”author”. Then, add your canonical Plus account url to the Website field in Your Profile under Users:

    Wordpress Website Field for rel=author
    Place your canonical Google+ url in this field under User > Your profile

    Then, you need to edit the theme, adding this to the body of either your main template, or the author template, author.php, omitting the if-statement:

    <?php if (is_author()) {
    $curauth = (isset($_GET['author_name'])) ? get_user_by('slug', $author_name) :
    get_userdata(intval($author));
    ?>
    <a rel="me" href="<?php echo $curauth->user_url; ?>">
    Visit me on Google+
    </a>
    <?php } ?>

    This will get the author name if it’s set, then get all of the user data, then display the url from that author in a link with the all-important rel=”me”.

    rel=publisher fair
    Oops! Not what you'd like to see…

    Similarly, to set up rel=”publisher”, just a link tag on all pages without rel=”author” on it will connect your site with your company Google+ Page. Why only on those pages? Because as Search Engine Land’s rich snippet test shows, Google will prioritize author over publisher.

    <?php if (!is_single()) { ?>
    <link href="https://plus.google.com/113323125805722144061/" rel="publisher" />
    <?php } ?>

    Once it’s all set up, check your url in that same Rich Snippet Tester tool, making sure it shows your face and name. The wait time on recognition from Google is inconsistent, but such connections are key to establishing authority.

    Google+ Establishes Thought Leaders

    A secondary effect of individual commercial Google+ profiles is that giving a face to a URL can create a sense of thought leadership, pulling in longer-term researchers with high quality informative articles and blogs. Having one author connected to your name will heavily associate the one person with the site; having multiple writers will strengthen the authority of each writer as an individual source of quality knowledge. A logo, if well-chosen, transforms the SERPs into display ads. Through either, one positions their employees as experts and their company as prominent: certainly an admirable position.

    Google+ might not be for every business, even businesses that rely on their current Apps as the underpinning for their online productivity. However, for businesses with the specific needs for which Google+ provides killer apps, Google+ is a perfect addition to the social media profile of your business. Furthermore, it’s ease of setup provides deep support beyond social interaction, leaving much utility even for more straightforward businesses.

    …And hey, maybe one of your employees can criticize you while still garnering support for the company in a precarious time…

    Image Courtesy Cambodia4KidsOrg.

  • Savvy Online Business Builders: The New Snake Oil Salesmen

    A Look at the Growing Trend of Internet Marketing Con-men

    We’ve all seen these people at conferences, pimping out their extra shiny business cards and talking like late-night infomercials – the online business strategists and social media experts. They claim to have the secrets to creating a successful online brand and promise “more profitable business now” if only you are willing to hear the pitch. They use buzz words like “online reputation score” and “viral marketing” to excite business owners into trusting their expertise and ultimately signing up for expensive year long contracts but never promise actual results.

    I hate these type of people.

    They prey on ignorance, offering fly-by-night schemes which promise efficient ways to generate more revenue at a low-cost for small businesses. Of course that low-cost is for the online expert’s one-size fits all advice.

    Advice that seems to always involve action plans centered around mediums that have no measurable results *cough* Twitter *cough*. These experts rarely provide their clients’ with monthly performance reports – just monthly invoices. And clients would be hard pressed to get details on how that “low-cost” investment has translated into online business.

    Who should you trust with your web presence? I’ve got a few questions you should ask before you sign on the dotted line.

    Top 5 Questions To Ask An Online Expert To Avoid A Scam*

    1. What makes you an expert?
    2. Do you have experience in my industry?
    3. Can I see some examples of your success stories?
    4. What should I expect in terms of results? In what timeframe?
    5. How do you measure your success?

    Be sure to remember question #5 – online business experts who fail to measure qualified results, such as # of leads, improved rankings, or increase in traffic, are to be avoided.

    If they can’t prove their worth with data, they aren’t worth hiring.

    In the end, someone who promises to rapidly grow your business with inspirational coaching and Twitter spamming is probably not an expert. So when you are looking for help with your web presence, find someone who sets quantifiable goals to measure success. An Internet expert should not be determined by how convincing his words are, but rather how his contribution to your business generated revenue and results.

    *Adapted from Google‘s useful questions to ask an SEO