Tools & Tips – Page 8

The Need for Speed. How to check your website to see if it needs a speed tune-up.

November 2, 2017 Beth Devine

When you drive a high-performance vehicle and step on the gas you can feel the acceleration. Quick acceleration makes it easy to merge onto a fast-moving freeway safely or outrun a high-speed chase (just kidding – we’re not recommending anything illegal in this blog post).

Just as it’s important to have a fast, responsive automobile on the highway to have the best driving experience, it’s also important to have a fast, responsive website on the internet if you want optimum user experience for your website visitors.

Why is website speed important?

It will make your visitors happy and more likely to buy from you. Slow websites equal frustrated visitors who leave and go check out your competitors’ websites.
It may improve your website rank on search engines and that will provide greater opportunity for more people to get to your zippy, refreshingly speedy website.

How do you know if your website is fast?

There are numerous free tools online that can measure the speed of your website. Here’s a few to get you started:

There are more. You could test all day long. But the important thing to do is to run a few tests and see where your weaknesses lie. Common problems that might be slowing you down are:

Slow server response time
Images need resizing/optimization
Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the -fold content
Leverage browser caching
Minify CSS

So NOW WHAT?

There can be a lot of technical information to comprehend in the reports. The good news is that the reports provide you with links on how to fix the problems. But even with that it can be overwhelming for the average website owner to understand the problems and make the corrections.

Just like most people take their cars to a shop for a regular tune-up, it’s a good idea to have your website tuned up on a regular basis too. So whether you’re the kind of person who changes their own oil or you prefer to drop it off at the shop, it makes sense to run a few reports to check out your score and either make some of the improvements on your own, or give your website maintenance team a call to see what they can do to help you out.

Feel the love, speed and SEO all swirled together.

New Purpose for Marketing Your Business

February 9, 2017 Beth Devine

Traditionally, we think of marketing as a business development tool. But there’s been a change in the marketing world of late – branding for the purpose of recruitment. With the unemployment rate dropping, more and more businesses are finding it more difficult to recruit talent.

Nowhere is this more prevalent than the manufacturing world. It is estimated that by the year 2025 there will be 2.5 million unfilled positions in U.S. manufacturing. Part of the challenge is due to the “silver tsunami” – for most manufacturers, 70% of their workforce is over 50. Within the next 15 years most of those people will retire. Unfortunately, over the last few decades the younger generation has not been encouraged to pursue manufacturing as a career path. Although many of the technical high schools and community colleges are making great strides, it’s a number game. There just aren’t enough people to fill existing and future positions.

That means every manufacturer is competing for the best talent available, and many of them have realized that their image is critical to this challenge. If the top graduate from the local technical high school hears that a company is hiring and Googles them only to see an old website and no other on-line presence, they are not likely to inquire about positions available. Branding is more important than ever.

Some companies have gotten creative in their marketing. We’ve all seen the new GE campaign with the kids telling their friends and parents that they’re working for GE and what a great place it is. This is all about recruitment. Other companies are getting into the community by sponsoring sports or robotics clubs. This too is part of branding.

At Web Savvy Marketers we’ve been re-designing websites, creating content and providing our clients with unique branding opportunities. After all, as the old saying goes, “You only get one chance to make a good impression” – make sure it’s the impression you want

Is Your Email List Dirty?

January 9, 2017 Beth Devine

Email still has what it takes to reach your audience. So far, nothing has managed to fully replace it. Not social media, not SMS (Short Message Service), or MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service), or any form of texting.

Email began as a way to send text communications using your personal computer. For businesses, it continues to be a sound marketing strategy. Let’s face it, people will share email addresses. They’re not as willing to share phone numbers with businesses to communicate via text. At least not yet.

With all the various ways to interact with customers, email remains a steadfast option, but you’ve got to keep it clean. A clean email list is one that’s managed and built to suit your company. Keeping your email list clean helps you avoid being flagged as spam. The spam filter is worse than being dirty, so keep that in mind as you read on.

Spam ruins your deliverability rates, and ESP (Email Service Providers) don’t like spam emails. They enforce spam laws with very strict rules. The Wild West days of spammy email are long over, and email exploits that run amuck will land your emails in the slammer.

1. Do a Data Check

First things first. You have to perform a basic data check to fix any incorrect spellings or typos. As you comb through your list, look for those data entry errors that include a missing “dot” in the “dot com” and any inverted letters (i.e., alo.com instead of aol.com).

These mistakes will cause your emails to be returned as undeliverable, increasing your chances of being sent into the black void of the spam filter. As a legitimate marketer, you don’t deserve to be there, but with the ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and spam filters working hard to reduce inbox clutter, that’s where you’ll end up with bad data.

2. What’s Your Bounce Rate?

Take a cue from your email open rates to determine if you need to do some cleaning. Are you sending to email addresses that are returned as undelivered? This can affect your bounce rate and hurt your ROI.

A hard bounce is when an address is simply invalid. There are several reasons for a hard bounce, or one that’s indisputable and means immediate removal from your email list. They include:

The recipient’s email address no longer exists (or never did).
The domain name doesn’t exist. Oops!
The email server of the recipient has blocked delivery.

Then there’s the soft bounce. An email returned for its first to third time are considered soft bounces because they simply may be experiencing a glitch. Some say allow up to five bounces before eliminating them.

Reasons for return could include:

Mailbox has reached its quota and is full.
The email server of the recipient is temporarily down or offline.
Message is too large and exceeds the limits of data allowed.

3. What Do ESPs Check For?

The more bounces you experience, the worse your sender reputation. So it’s good to know what things are being looked at in determining spam.

Here’s what ESPs are checking:

The Blacklist. This is the worst. Once you’re on a blacklist, you’re doomed. Of course, you only end up there if you’re super dirty.
The White List. This is like the TSA’s PreCheck. It’s a good thing because it means you’re pre-approved for automatic deliverability. No spam filter for you! You will see increased open rates as a result of this.
Watch Your Reputation. Sender reputation is actually a score that your sending IP source gets, and apparently, the algorithm used is a secret. That’s why I can’t tell you anything else. Mum’s the word out there.
You’ve Been Spammed. Having your email recipients repeatedly flag you as spam raises your chances for black listing. Familiarize yourself with your the Can Spam Act for businesses to make sure you’re in compliance. If your email is commercial, there are strict rules with tough penalties for violations.

4. Remove Bad Email Addresses

Who should you remove from your email list? Anything that’s irrelevant and potentially harmful to your reputation. The less you fraternize with legitimately flagged spam email addresses, the better. Hasn’t your mother warned you of this?

You’re above all that, the riff raff of email. I get it. But having bad email addresses in your list is no good, and the more you’re sending out, the worse it is for you. Here are email addresses you need to remove:

Duplicate and invalid email addresses.
Old contacts who are inactive. Old email contacts with high unopened rates have lost interest and haven’t bothered to unsubscribe.
Alias email addresses, such as sales@company.com. These aliases are generic email addresses that may be forwarded to a specific address, or they may not. Get rid of them.
Unsubscribes must be removed by law. (You must also provide an identifiable unsubscribe link.)
Bounced emails. See #2 for the difference between hard and soft bounces.
Email contacts who didn’t sign up willingly. Sending to anyone whose information was received through list buying is unethical and will hurt your sender reputation, your deliverability, and your open rates. Bad email practice all around.

The content you include in your email is another important factor in avoiding spam and keeping your list clean. Your subject line is especially important. Design your emails to appeal to your subscribers as well as the ESPs.

Keeping your email list dirty is a campaign health hazard. Remember, a clean email list gives you a more successful email campaign. Email campaigns should be measured by the actions your subscribers take, not how many subscribers you’re sending to.

Are You Missing Out On These 3 Marketing Opportunities?

December 20, 2016 Beth Devine

There are three marketing opportunities that small businesses should be taking advantage of. These marketing tools are overlooked yet simple ways to increase customer interaction and brand exposure. So begin 2017 right and take advantage of these indispensable opportunities for marketing your business.

1. Use Public Relations With Trade Publications

There are trade magazines for every industry, you just have to dig a little to discover them. They serve the people who are interested working in your field of business.

Chances are, your industry’s publications will welcome articles or press releases from your company. Hot topics include new product or service announcements, special events, and recent innovations. Be creative and choose different angles to highlight your expertise and distinguishing features.

Editors are especially pleased when you pitch an idea for a story. Finding writers for trade publications is becoming more difficult on limited budgets, and keeping the news cycle fed around the clock requires many helping hands.

Don’t forget to reach out to local publications, such as your local newspapers and small-town dailies and weeklies. Community journalism continues to be widely read by loyal followers looking for familiar names and faces.

2. Join the Video Revolution

Competing for audience attention is a growing challenge with social media, online blogs, and the numerous specialized publications being introduced into the marketplace. Digital media has helped create an instant-gratification response to already shorter attention spans.

Everywhere you go online, it’s noisy and distracting. In response to this noise, a video revolution began in 2016 and shows no sign of stopping. While text-based content will never go out of style, the power of communicating with video as a versatile and profitable tool is worth your consideration.

Wyzowl statistics show that 61% of businesses have incorporated video as a marketing tool. Some of the top reasons to use video in your marketing include:

Product videos and videos explaining how to use your product can help increase sales and conversions. Effective videos can also help build customer trust by providing useful and interesting information, an essential ingredient in content marketing.
As an added bonus, videos increase the time your visitors spend on your website. This tells search engines that your site has good content, helping your rankings.
By embedding video in your site, you are fifty-three times more likely to show up on page one of Google, according to Moovly. Google likes video, especially when you’re optimizing your videos on YouTube, which Google now owns.
Video is easy to digest, share, and create. Take advantage of the video-making platforms out there, such as Magisto, Animoto, and numerous other apps. Social media has its own formats, including Twitter’s Vine, Instagram, and Snapchat.

In five years, will you be reading an article like this, or will you be watching it on video? If you think about the rapid growth in video so far, it’s a question you need to be asking.

3. Check Your Website

Just because you have a website doesn’t mean that you’re done with it. Certain website features are an absolute requirement for growing your business. Here are three:

How’s your About Us page? Is it designed to maximize its potential to yield results? Your About Us page should be more than a poster for your team. It should help you establish a relationship with people, turning leads into customers by building trust.

Talking directly to your audience and offering them solutions in a way that connects will help them in their decision to choose your product or service. Add some testimonials, include your company logo above the fold, and be forward-thinking by embedding a video.

Do you have a call to action (CTA) on every page? There should be a clear image or line of text that asks your visitors to take a specific action. The action to take should be clear and will often include an imperative verb, or a verb that gives an order.

Examples are “call now,” sign up today free,” or “get started now.” It should also be clear what your visitor can expect from taking action. They need to know if they’re going to download a free e-book, get a coupon, or receive a quote.

Make sure to include a CTA above and below the fold if possible. Including a secondary CTA can be beneficial in certain cases, such as asking visitors to subscribe to your blog. It can also prove to be useful when your visitor isn’t interested in taking the first course of action, but they’ve stuck around to keep reading. So why not offer them another option?

Give your audience plenty of opportunities to learn about you by optimizing your site, utilizing video, and getting your company recognized in trade publications. Each of these missed opportunities holds huge potential for marketing your business.

6 Marketing Trends in 2017 for Small Businesses

November 30, 2016 Beth Devine

As a small business owner, you’re always playing catch up. You no sooner step in the door and hang up your cape – you are a superpower, after all – and the onslaught begins. It’s nearing the end of the year, and your newest mission requires a focus on what’s ahead.

Being prepared for what’s coming in today’s fast-paced, changing world means knowing what to expect in marketing. So leave your cape on the hook and take a look at the predicted trends for 2017.

1. Video and Visual

Using video is a huge trend that every marketer should consider in their visual storytelling plan. It’s a strategy that you can build on to create important ongoing messages.

In other words, don’t expect a “Chewbacca Mom” viral sensation, but focus on a visual program that reveals something unique about your company, product, or service. Video content rules the internet, with video enjoyment increasing purchase intent by 97% and brand association by 139%. Stay responsive to consumer trends by budgeting for video in your marketing strategy.

2. Immersive Experience Marketing

Who would’ve predicted that Pokemon Go would be so popular? At its high point, it was earning $10 million a day. Although the excitement has faded, the app shows us that augmented reality is a viable option with real potential for earning revenue.

The prediction is you will see more VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality) games and ads from brands. VR is a computer-generated simulation of a real life situation where the user is completely immersed and feels the experience is reality. AR involves layers of computer-generated enhancements that blend into the real world so that reality and AR enhance each other but are easily differentiated.

VR requires the use of headsets, like Facebook’s Oculus, which is equipped with VR technology, and is used for training flight simulators for pilots. You’re already seeing AR technology on score overlays for televised sports and in pop-out 3D text messages. Expect to see the use of AR holograms increase in the future.

Both give the user an enriched, immersive experience that delivers visuals in what was seemingly only science fiction just a short while ago. AR is evolving much faster than expected and will be used more in all mobile devices as a way to communicate at a whole new level. By 2017, IDC (International Data Corporation) predicts that more than a billion people worldwide will regularly access apps, content, and date through an AR/VR platform.

3. Live Platforms and Live Video

The attraction of “being in the moment” in live streaming is going to push live platforms and video into greater use. In the past several years, we’ve seen these technologies emerge as a popular way to interact with customers. There will be new live platforms like Meerkat and Facebook Live, where more brands will be willing to try out the latest in content offerings.

Live video streaming has had its shortcomings with technical difficulties, and its television competition won’t be easy to beat. However, the opportunities for brands to host live webinars, workshops, and other events where the appeal of instant gratification and immediate feedback will rival the TV audience.

Experiment with 360 videos to give your audience a three-dimensional experience with YouTube 360° or Facebook 360, and expect to see new apps and platforms adopt the technology. With a faster internet and the expansion of mobile phone use, this is a trend that’s not going away.

4. Optimize for Mobile

For several years this has been a trend that’s made the list, and for good reason. It’s still making the grade because the impact continues as mobile use overtakes desktop in retail use for the first time this year.

Putting mobile first as you optimize your website makes sense when Google is working on the same thing. They will be indexing so that your site’s mobile version will be indexed first. This mobile-first indexing means you need to have a responsive site where the primary content and structured markup is “equivalent across mobile and desktop.”

Making your site content easily digested on a mobile device is more important than ever with this major indexing shift from Google. What was a mobile-friendly concern is now more of a mobile-centric requirement if you don’t want serious problems in your search engine ranking.

5. Cross-Device Marketing

The typical digital consumer now owns 3.64 connected devices. The number of laptops, smartphones, wearables, and consoles gives brands the ability to reach an audience on multiple devices and in manifold environments.

Because of the ability to find your audience wherever they go, in essence making them a moving data target, brands have an even greater opportunity to produce and distribute content that is customer-focused. Embracing the customer experience as the heart of your marketing strategy will give you an edge over the challenge of cross-device tracking.

Because transactions are often occurring in an app, and cookies are no longer sufficient to track users, it’s a balancing act to identify the audience. What you can do until there are innovative solutions out there is work to make customer service your mission.

Listen and learn from your customers and let them determine the experience that your company needs to adopt. Then make the changes in your services or product to address these concerns. Looks like some things don’t change after all.

6. Writing

Visual content may be on the rise, but text is as important as ever because most of our communication is still based on the written word. There’s a story to write that a picture (or video) alone can’t tell. Sometimes you need those thousand words.

The problem is that most marketers aren’t good writers. And bad writing is damaging for your brand. Your writing communication must be structured so it’s easy to understand and read. It must be free of errors – spelling and grammatical. Forget jargon and committee-speak. Say what you mean with clarity, brevity, and plain language, letting the lawyers revel in creating confusion for their readers.

Ask yourself “what’s in it for the reader?” When Samsung issued a press release on their Galaxy Note7, there was no mention of the serious nature of the phones catching on fire. It was a mere “incident” involving a “battery cell issue.”

We have to do better than this. Poor writing not only makes you look unprofessional, it can destroy trust. As the amount of content keeps growing and readers filter out the white noise by skipping posts and skimming articles, you have to make every word count.

Perhaps writing is more important now than ever before.

Google’s New Ranking Penalty On Intrusive Interstitials

November 15, 2016 Beth Devine

Google penalty — “SDC19275” by Mr Thinktank, used under CC BY / Modified from original

There’s a new penalty coming in January of 2017 from the search engine giant. While it may sound like a rare and deadly condition acquired from eating undercooked beef, intrusive interstitials will be potentially lethal only to your website’s traffic.

Google revealed its latest news on interstitials in an innocuous-sounding blog post entitled “Helping Users Easily Access Content on Mobile.” The penalty on intrusive interstitials, or pop-ups, is another change affecting search engine rankings.

Like this latest move, Google has made other algorithm changes to improve user experience of the search function. In 2014 it added a label to mobile-friendly pages, indicating those sites with content that’s optimized for mobile. Mobile-friendly websites have text that is readable without zooming or horizontal scrolling, and links are spaced enough apart to avoid tapping incorrectly.

Two years later and Google has removed the label now that 85% of mobile search results are already optimized for mobile, while continuing to apply mobile-specific ranking criteria. Two years ago they also began boosting rankings for sites that use HTTPS encryption in an effort to improve security for users.

What’s an Intrusive Interstitial, exactly?

Google will suppress rankings by punishing sites that publish annoying pop-ups. This includes anything that pops up between the beginning and end of an article that blocks immediate access to site content and forces interaction with the screen. It also includes intrusive ads that come at the beginning of the article, pushing the content further down the page.

So far, it appears this will affect only mobile applications where the interruption to the screen is much greater. In its post, Google gave these three examples of intrusive interstitials:

A pop-up that covers the main content, such as a full-page ad. This could occur immediately after navigating from search results to a page or while looking at the page.
A standalone interstitial that needs to be dismissed before getting to the main content. Many sites currently have interstitial email captures that will have to go.
A layout on the screen that’s above-the-fold and looks like it’s an interstitial, with the remaining original content underneath the fold. An example is when the top portion of every page or post has a large email capture or promotion.

What this means is there’s more to pop-ups than just the technology, which is why in the post, Google used the pop-up term twice and used interstitials eight times. According to Wikipedia, “interstitials are web pages displayed before or after an expected content page, often to display advertisements or confirm the user’s age (prior to showing age-restricted material).”

The goal is to make sure your visitor sees the searched-for content right away when on mobile devices. No blocking, no scrolling, no having to find and press an “X” or a “No Thanks” button.

When are pop-ups okay to use?

There are exceptions, however, to Google’s new penalty. Your site will remain unaffected by the new algorithmic signal if “used responsibly,” where the end result for users is an unobstructed path to content on mobile devices.

Here are three exceptions to what Google considers disruptive to the user experience:

A response to a legal obligation. This could be cookie usage for age verification on a liquor company site.
Login dialogs on content that isn’t publicly indexable, such as email other content behind a paywall.
Banners that take up a “reasonable amount” of space on the screen. An example is the app install banners used by Chrome and Safari.

There are two alternative pop-ups that are still okay to use, both which are not displayed immediately. One is the two step pop-up. This is when the pop-up only appears if the visitor clicks on a call-to-action placed on the site. The second is exit intent pop-ups. The pop-up is only shown when the visitor moves to click on the back button. Sometimes this doesn’t work on mobile devices because it pops up at the wrong time, so it should be tested out.

As you read this, software programs are undoubtedly being written to help business owners tackle this new issue. Call your web hosting company if you need assistance, or attempt to handle it yourself with a new plugin.

What does it mean for businesses? In order to avoid losing any SEO traffic, it’s important to figure out other ways to make money that don’t disrupt mobile user experience.

51% of digital media takes place on mobile devices, with an average of three hours of internet use a day per adult user, versus less than one hour a day just five years ago. Instead of invasive pop-ups that will lower your SEO, create content that will draw visitors to your site. Give them the information they’re searching for and create leads through embedded forms and calls-to-action.

Do-It-Yourself Updates for Your Local Internet Listings

October 31, 2016 Beth Devine

Your Google business listing doesn’t have a “forward to” address or a “301 redirect” to help you with changes. If you’re planning a move for your small business, or you’ve made some other change to your NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number), it’s important to make the changes in not only Google, but all your local listings.

In the last post we went over the top citation services, the companies that do this for you. Here we’ll cover how to manually update your business listings and check for inconsistencies in your NAP that could harm your search results.

Where To Get Listed

Doing it yourself means you need to know where to get your business listed. Here’s a handy link to a compilation of the top 100 local listings for your business. Doing it yourself takes some serious time investment, and it involves checking all the listings so they are accurate and compatible.

Why is it so important to get listed and keep your listings accurate? The more online directories your business appears in with consistent information, the more likely Google will display your business in search results. Incompatible and inaccurate data could result in your business not showing up in a Google search.

Doing it yourself means you not only need to know where to get your business listed, but you need to maintain accuracy. This includes minimizing any possible duplicate listings as well as any inconsistencies in the data from one listing to another.

First Thing On Your To-Do List

Get started with your local listings by making sure you update your Google business listing. Because most people are searching for local businesses online and Google is the most popular search engine, you want your Google business listing to be accurate. So where to begin?

Go to Google My Business and make sure all your information is correct. Verify your business location so results will appear in Google Maps. Learn how to make edits so your hours and holidays are up to date. You can do all this for free from this one site. Next, check to see how your business shows up on Google search by going to gybo.com.

Google won’t trust your Google My Business listing unless it can verify the information with other sources. Even if the information you’ve entered into Google My Business is accurate, Google might not show your business in its search results if there’s conflicting data from other online sources. Making sure Google has consistent data as it crawls the internet includes avoiding even small typos. For example, spelling, abbreviations, and apostrophe use must all be exactly the same

Top Four Local Search Aggregators

There’s a difference between local search aggregators and citation services. Local search aggregators are like an hourglass for collecting your business data. They accumulate and analyze all the information from many sources and then redistribute it to local directories and other places.

These aggregators get their data about businesses from many different sources, including registration records, chamber of commerce rosters, phone bills. Citation building services use the aggregators to create their directories, but not all citation services use all four aggregators.

The top four biggies to pay attention to are Express Update, Acxiom, Neustar/LocalEze, Factual. Two others data aggregators to consider are Infogroup and InfoUSA. They will funnel your business information to local business directories to give you better and more accurate coverage.

A do-it-yourself method to updating your business’s local internet listings should start with these top aggregators since they feed the information to what’s known as the local search ecosystem. Check that your official address matches the US Postal Service database and use this exact form in all your listings. Follow these steps outlined by Moz for claiming your business as you contact each listing.

Doing all this manually involves an initial investment of time, but once your information is up and running (and it can take time for listings to go live), the maintenance is simple until you have changes that require updates.

Update Your Local Internet Listings With Citation Services

October 12, 2016 Beth Devine

citation edits — “Save yourself an extra call (1962)” by Eric Fischer, used under CC BY / Modified from original

If you’ve moved your small business to a different address, changed your contact information in some way, or you have a new second location, how do you go about updating all of your local online listings? And do you even know what directories your listings are in?

It’s important to track down all your local internet listings with the correct updates instead of creating new ones because duplicates are a big problem. They can lead to Google penalties in search results. Leaving incorrect listings due to a move or other change causes confusion for both the user as well as the search engines.

While it might seem like a simple matter—you just log into the existing accounts and re-verify every listing—the claiming process isn’t always straightforward and the data clean up is time consuming and requires thorough attention to avoid duplicates.

Citation editing, marketing jargon for updating your business listings, involves a comprehensive process that requires much more than a quick edit on Google. Google is a good place to start, but there are hundreds of apps and directories that direct users to the right destination and Google is watching them all.

Google constantly crawls the internet looking for updated information to provide in its search results. This means two things:

The more listings for your business, the better. The more information available to Google, the better your business will do in search results.
Erroneous information on listings can cause Google to update using this incorrect data. The more listings for your business, the greater potential for Google to find incorrect information, which it pulls from many sources across the internet.

By completing an accurate and complete digital footprint or NAP, Name, Address, and Phone number, you’re removing as many barriers to online discovery as possible.

There are many methods to updating your business citations. In this post we’ll go over the popular business citation services, and in the next post we’ll cover the top business listings you need to be on.

Yext

Called the godfather of citation building services, Yext boasts a PowerListings capability to make sure your listings have correct information with automatic updates across over thirty local listing sites. By entering information into your Yext account, including details such as special announcements or specials, you can change it whenever you want.

Pros: Fastest service available; increased accuracy when you need to update regularly.

Cons: Most expensive; limited to somewhere around 50 directories.

Cost: Ranging from $200-$999 a year.

BrightLocal

BrightLocal claims and submits directly to 1,600 sites. You select which sites and the number sites, with 70% guaranteed to go live in four weeks.

Pros: High accuracy with manual submissions; prioritize NAP fixes; duplicate removal.

Cons: Don’t currently submit to top data aggregators Factual and Localeze; don’t provide custom citation research.

Cost: Single Business – $29/month
Multi Business – $49/month
SEO Pro – SEO Pro – $79/month

Whitespark

Whitespark has two separate citation services:

Citation audit and cleanup removes duplicates, fix inconsistencies, make corrections, and claim the important listings you’re missing.
Citation building looks for relevant key listings and manually submits them.

Pros: Greater accuracy with manual submissions and cross-checking systems.

Cons: Cleanup service doesn’t provide verification of listings (although there are step-by-step instructions available); building citation service doesn’t remove duplicates but doesn’t create them.

Cost: Citation cleanup and audit $900 one-time fee includes top 30 sites. Citation Building $4 each for national directory listings and $5 each for local city level directories or industry-specific listings.

Moz Local

Moz helps you claim all the important listings, including the ones that require manual verification with Google Local. You get access to all the local data aggregators for fast updates.

Pros: Make updates at any time via one dashboard; great Q&A service.

Cons: Listings are slow to go live – can take up to three months; doesn’t create listings on all directories.

Cost: $84 a year.

UBL/AdviceLocal

Universal Business Listing is now working under Advice Local. Easy updates from one dashboard. They provide ongoing checks for consistency. Submit to top fifty directories as well as popular review sites, and will even do social media profile optimization.

Pros: Merger provides expanded local listings with full access and ownership.

Cons: Need to subscribe to higher-priced packages to get full-service offerings. Reviews indicate complaints about duplicate listings.

Cost: Packages beginning at $100 a year up to $250 a year plus $20 monthly fee.

Synup

Synup is a relatively new service that covers forty-six of the top directories. You can manually add and manage an additional 150 sites. All changes made from one dashboard.

Pros: Duplicate listings suppression and monitoring of reviews included.

Cons: Not 100% effective in identifying duplicates; can get pricey with multiple locations.

Cost: $30 a month per location.

Directory Bug

Directory Bug manually lists your business on a minimum of sixty sites without creating duplicate listings. Over 100 of the top local business directories scanned. A premium members option is available with better optimization for local SEO.

Pros: Creates report with these sites and any other existing listings found.

Cons: Requires a custom quote for updating and cleanup based on number of sites needing it.

Cost: $140 for citation audit and $169 for power listing service.

It’s not an easy choice to select a business listing service. Each one has limitations, so the decision depends on your unique business needs. None of the citation building sites are completely hands-free. Many of the big search engines require manual verification of listings. The tendency for duplicate or inconsistent listings depends on various factors, including which data suppliers used and the relationship the service has with the directories. In addition, in some cases when you stop paying for the service all of your listings may be dropped.

As a small business owner, business listing services can save you time and money. In return, you get your business out there in the local search ecosystem without spending the many hours needed for accurate, thorough results.

Why A Small Business Blog Is Important For Growth

September 30, 2016 Beth Devine

business blogging — “Blog Machine” by digitalrob70, used under CC BY / Modified from original

Information is being shared across a landscape of digital information that’s growing faster and faster. The internet population has grown by more than 60% in the last five years, with mobile phones outnumbering people on the planet. No wonder our mobile use now makes up 65% of our time over desktop.

Everyone is on their mobiles or computers, engaged in digital exchange. They’re communicating, reading, and searching on the internet for all their needs. It’s more important now than ever to meet your audience where they’re spending time and adopt a blogging strategy for your small business.

Here’s how you reach new and existing customers with a small business blog.

Increase Traffic To Your Site

Every blog post published is one more opportunity for someone to find your business and drive traffic to your site. People read blogs to discover helpful industry information. Search engines like Google read blogs to learn what your website is about, and then send the right response to users performing internet searches.

For example, every time you write a blog post about a specific process or service you provide, you’re giving people who’re looking for more information on that subject another way to find you and get answers to their questions. The more blog posts you write, the more opportunities you’re creating for people to discover your business. Write 100 blog posts and you have 100 more avenues of discovery.

Improve Your Search Engine Results

Your search engine results will reflect the amount of information you’re publishing on the internet. Your blog isn’t meant to be a static page like your About Us or Home page. It’s a brand new search result for search engines and people searching the internet for what you offer.

Blogging helps your business website get more traffic because every blog post you publish is a new URL. There are only so many product and service pages you can create, but the number of new URLs you can create with blog posts is endless. And every one of your posts will be read by both Google and people – people that didn’t realize your business sold the very product they’re looking for.

“Am I the only one who realizes you could hide a dead body or drugs on the second page of a google search and it would never be found?” This insightful bit of humor was first found on Twitter in 2011 and still holds true today, because who goes directly to Google’s second page search results?

Search engines are smart grading robots who take your written content and put it through algorithms. The more frequently you post and the better quality the content, the better grade your blog gets and the higher it will rank in search engine results.

Build Trust With Your Audience

When you’re shopping for a new household appliance, you’re more likely to buy from someone who’s spent time with you answering your questions and giving you unbiased advice. Someone with whom you’ve grown comfortable with, not someone whom you’ve never laid eyes on before.

Not only are people more likely to buy from someone they’ve spent time with, they’re also going to remember who gave away helpful information. Blogging is a way to communicate to your audience so they grow to know and trust you as a source of information.

Once you’ve established yourself as a credible resource, people will choose to buy from you over your competition, or they’ll consider working with you as a business partner rather than a business who isn’t making the effort to communicate and share valuable content.

Develop New Leads

Being a strong source of information is a conduit to being a source of value. You provide value up front for free when offer a continual source of educational, entertaining, and informative content.

The new opportunities created by blogging about valuable content are also opportunities to develop leads. For every blog post you publish, you’re creating a new call-to-action within the post. Again, 100 blog posts become 100 potential call-to-actions.

A call-to-action can be anything that asks your audience to do something else. It could be to click on a link for more help, your contact us page, a free ebook, a free quote, or another page, such as your product page, for more information.

Blogging brings you new leads because you’re writing about things you want to sell. You’re tailoring your audience to individuals who’re interested in your topics and who would feasibly purchase your product or service.

Thanks to your increased traffic due to the new ways (a.k.a. blog posts) to find you, and your improved search engine results from all the new URLs (a.k.a. blog posts), your opportunities for new leads grow.

Blogs continue to be a source of leads for years. Have you ever Googled something and got a response dating back to the 1990s? Those earliest articles or blogs are still chugging along, sending out digital data into the cybersphere, bringing in a new audience of potential customers.

It’s never too late to begin blogging for your small business. As Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the French novelist best known for writing The Little Prince, said, “The time for action is now. It’s never too late to do something.”

Website Security You Didn’t Know You Needed

September 15, 2016 Beth Devine

You’re a small business and you can’t really afford to pay big bucks for website security. Besides, who’s going to bother hacking your site when there’s big businesses to mess with?

We covered seven fallacies to website security in the last post, beginning with having a false sense of security simply because you’re a small- or medium-sized business. This actually makes you a prime target because hackers know small companies don’t have the same resources available for protecting their business online. The good news is there are some great free and low cost options to keeping your website safe.

Get A Website Security Plugin

If you don’t already have Wordfence, you’re one plugin download away from an improved security firewall and malware scanner, its two core security capabilities. Wordfence scans for any new malware and provides new firewall rules to protect against attacks, using real-time data for paid premium accounts and a thirty-day delay in updates for all free versions.

The forensic detection work is ongoing so the latest malware threats are constantly being optimized. If you’re a free Wordfence customer, your site is currently getting 364 free malware scan signatures, with another 118 in the signature line-up to be added. Last month alone nearly 140,000 websites were found infected with malware. Don’t wait to be one of them. Get your site secured with a reputable plugin, or ask your web hosting provider for help with one of their security services.

Give Up Your Username, Your Password, and Your False Sense of Security

When it comes to site security, the point of entry that serves as an easy break-in is your site’s front door. If you’re using a username that includes admin or administrator, or the name of a site author or contributor, you’re making it too easy for a hacker to determine exactly half of your front door’s access information.

Follow this post on How To Change Your WordPress Username using Cpanel to secure the front half of your website’s entry portal. The other half involves changing your password to something that doesn’t fall into the most commonly used or worst password list .

Don’t let weak passwords allow hackers access to your website. Strengthen your passwords by changing them occasionally, using password strengthening tools like Strong Password Generator or Norton Password Generator, storing them in password managers, and forcing other WordPress users on your site to use better passwords with the Force Strong Passwords plugin.

Your Biggest Source of Security Trouble Is An Update Away

Check WordPress.org to see the last update of your plugins and delete or replace the ones that you’re no longer using and those that haven’t been updated in the last year or so. While you’re there, also check the plugin’s rating and how many people have contributed to the rating. The more people who use it and like it, the more likely it will be safe to use.

Finally, look to see if it’s compatible with the current version of WordPress. If a plugin has its own website, there’s a better chance it is being well maintained. Once you’ve done the basics of plugin selection criteria, your main concern is to keep all plugins updated. Never download a plugin unless it’s from the official WordPress plugin directory.

Clever SEO Tactics That Land You In Google Time-Out

Honest mistakes made in an effort to improve your search engine ratings and boost traffic are still that—mistakes. You need to know what you shouldn’t do to boost SEO or Google will blacklist you. Blacklisting is like getting the monopoly “go to jail” card, and no one comes to visit.

Buying Links or Linking to Spam

This is going to lead to unnatural, spammy linking because most of these offers for paid links are from disreputable sites and social media accounts. Even if they promise you first page ranking, because eventually you’ll be totally unranked, and it’s not worth it.

Always check before you link to another page. If it’s a malicious webpage, it’s only a matter of time before your site could be infected with malware or Google blacklists you for the link. You don’t want Google to ever discover you’re linked to any of these malicious cyber spaces.

Broken Links

This might not land you on the blacklist, but it’s definitely going to hurt your SEO. If you have a page with several broken links, Google is less likely to see it as updated and a page without any broken links will easily outrank yours.

Yet broken links are a dime a dozen. Sites move, go out of business, undergo remodeling, and once intact links are no longer viable. So what do you do? Spend hours going through hundreds of pages checking?

Who has time for that? Go straight to Google Webmaster Tools (and make an account if you don’t already have one) and fix any broken links that it gives you.

Copyright Offense

Violating copyright is not only unethical. It’s a big Google no-no. This will send you right off the Google radar and into a black hole of oblivion. You’ll eventually get caught and lose your ranking.

Keyword Stuffing and Masking

Whether it’s irrelevant keywords or hidden text or links, Google is very clear about the repercussions. Either you’ll harm your site’s ranking or you’re violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Create quality content and stick to the high road where you’ll see authentic and lasting returns on your efforts.

A blacklisted site might show the warning “This site may be hacked” when you search for it in your browser. Go to Google’s Safe Browsing Site Status to check for blacklisted sites. Get help for blacklisted or hacked sites on Google’s help page.

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