Local Search Focus

Not long ago, online marketing was considered to only be important for internet retailers and large companies promoting high profile brands. Today, as the segment of the population using smart technology continues to grow, online marketing has become essential for nearly all businesses, including local businesses. It is important to have a well-thought internet marketing plan that includes online marketing strategies for your local business.

If you are new to online marketing or have not made as much of an effort to market your local business online as you know you should, it may be overwhelming to think about where to start. The following are four key online marketing essentials for local businesses.

Local Listings

Both Google and Bing provide users with quick access to information about businesses in their area through local listings. It is important for local businesses to create, claim, and verify their  Google My Business and Bing Places for Business listings. Accurate and detailed local listing information lets prospective customers know you are open for business. Local listings typically include contact information, store hours, location photos, and other details. The more people know about your business, the more comfortable they will feel buying from you. (more…)

Google My Business is one of our favorite things with it comes to local marketing. Whether it’s their Google Posting feature, their Texting feature or the ability to add ‘women-owned’ to the business as an Attribute, we love it and often see great successes when implemented.

However, one thing that we’ve noticed that’s missing in the way of SEO is the ability to use keywords to describe the place of business. Back in 2016, when Google+ existed, you used to be able to add a short description about your business. You focused on keywords, what it is that your business does and address any real pertinent questions regarding your organization. This was an excellent way to optimize your listing for search, thus gaining traction in the search results with a really solid description. (more…)

Internet marketing strategies aren’t something that should be avoided or put aside during the complete overview of the business. It may be overwhelming deciding which internet marking strategies to add but we’ve put together our top four most important strategies for small business owners.

Top four most important strategies for small business owners: (more…)

If you are running a small business, chances are you’re probably asking yourself if online blogging is worth your time and effort. We believe the short answer is ‘yes’. Blogging on a regular basis can seem daunting, but it can actually be a very easy, relatively inexpensive way to enhance your inbound marketing efforts. There is one catch though, you’ve got to blog effectively! You can’t become part of the 57% of companies, according to Hubspot, who have reported acquiring a new customer from their blog if you don’t follow some crucial steps.

Join the 81% of folks who have revealed that their business blog is useful and critical when it comes to their business. (more…)

There has been a time or two when someone wrote a review on a listing that is clearly not at the right business. You may be really worried about the negative review and your first instinct may be to remove the review. We really hate to be the ones to tell you this but you cannot remove a review on Google (at least at this time of this blog post is written). Google will remove a review if it doesn’t fit in the review policies. Google review policies state that the review cannot include advertising, spam, phone numbers / email addresses / URLs, off-topic review, conflict of interest, illegal content, copyrighted content, sexually explicit material, impersonation, personal and confidential information, or hate speech.

Google will need time, sometimes a few days, to look over the review on the listing but in the meantime we have some tips to help you handle the situation: (more…)

As business owners & managers, you can appreciate it when we say, ‘It can be really hard to find a great, new hire’. Whether you’re hiring for your company regularly or you’re seeking new hires every couple years, it can be an arduous process. Our clients often contact us to help them cast a larger net when it comes to the participants they have to choose from. We offer a variety of ways to help our clients, some opportunities include:

• Create a hiring process on the website that includes a resume uploader
• Help post job opportunities to social media
• Utilize Facebook’s NEW Job tab
• Plus several other ideas that we’ve got up our sleeves!

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Google My Business has rolled out a new feature to several accounts where you can post news, events, savings, etc. publically to your business listing. If you received an email from Google inviting you to the program, you’re eligible to start posting right away.

We performed a test for a client we saw the new Google Post update on and are seeing it in action in Google search. We look forward to this being rolled out to all of you in the near future. It’s typically anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to see it on most, if not all, accounts. The pilot is available until January 10, 2017, according to Google.

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For years, SEO enthusiasts have been trying to understand if there was a SEO value of having keywords in your domain URL. Despite this being up for debate, it’s certainly clear that a page’s URL can fill a number of important roles. Just think, when you search for something in Google, they show you the domain URL to help you better understand what the page or article is about. Check out these search results for a skincare blog we follow – the readability of a link is crucial. Why else would they show the domain name?

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Google My Business listing information is like online gold. It’s helpful for potential customers to find your listing on Google and it’s helpful for business owners to know helpful listing data. It’s basically a win-win situation!

Before we dig into the online gold that Google My Business listing data has to offer, we have to make sure that your business listing is claimed on Google. Here is how you determine if your listing is claimed or not:

• In the Google search bar, enter the name of your business and the zip code
• There should be a section to the right on the page that has your business information on it
  –This is information that Google has gathered about your business such as the address, hours, phone number, etc. More than likely this information came from your website or another listing such as Yelp.
• If the listing says ‘ claim this business ’ on the pop out then your business is not claimed on Google

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Who would have thought that Google would actually use real humans to improve search results!? Google is using a new way to better identify content that is potentially offensive or upsetting to searchers. The goal of this is to allow for only factual, accurate & trustworthy information to show up first in search results & they’ll be using humans to achieve it!

In fact, we can think of them as an army. Over 10,000 contractors worldwide will be used to evaluate search results. These raters will be given actual searches to conduct, then they will rate the pages that appear in the top results as to how good they really appear to users.

These army of raters won’t have the power to alter Google’s results directly. A rater marking a particular result as poorer quality than the others will not all the sudden take a plunge in rankings. However, in time, there may be impact on low-quality pages that are identified by these raters as well as ones that aren’t reviewed directly. (more…)