Creating the Perfect LinkedIn Pulse Post for B2B Industries

LinkedIn is all about representing yourself and/or your company, what you know, who you know, and how you know them. In February of 2014, LinkedIn announced Pulse, a popular newsreader for web and mobile that would make LinkedIn even more of a “professional publishing platform.” Although Pulse has been part of LinkedIn for over two years now, it seems as if a lot of B2B industries are not utilizing the publishing platform that can connect them with millions of executives, entrepreneurs, and workers. In fact, roughly 90% of CEOs turn to LinkedIn as their daily news update, since they can find industry-related topics. If you are a B2B business, NOW is the time to dominate LinkedIn Pulse. BUT, don’t jump the gun just yet – publishing to LinkedIn is nothing like creating blogs for your company. The audience, the tone, and the overall appeal of content on LinkedIn Pulse are unique.

Surveys have shown that the majority of companies, corporations, and agencies who are not yet publishing on LinkedIn simply don’t know how, so here’s Tandem’s guide to publishing on LinkedIn Pulse:

Navigation and Implementation: Creating the Perfect Pulse Post

·         The main status bar of your LinkedIn should denote: “Home,” “Profile,” “My Network,” “Jobs,” and “Interests.” Under the “Interests” section, you can select “Pulse” and then click “Publish a post.”

·         The second way to publish a post on LinkedIn is through your homepage, where it says “Share an update,” “Upload a photo,” or “Publish a post.”

·         While you are drafting up your piece to publish in LinkedIn Editor, the top left will give you current potential topics and related ideas in case you are experiencing writer’s block. However, Tandem recommends that businesses try to choose a topic that has not yet been fleshed out and published on Pulse, in order to try and dominate that discussion.

·         Choose your title wisely – a lot of the success of your published post is going to rely on your title. If your title is not either keyword rich or engaging, you can expect that it will not receive much engagement.

·         Every time you publish a post, your connections will receive a notification email that has the title of the post in it.

·         “How-To,” “List,” and “Visual” posts perform the best on LinkedIn; “Questions” do not.

Tandem Interactive is a boutique online marketing agency in South Florida, and is always implementing industry-best-practices for our clients, including LinkedInPulse articles. Your LinkedIn publication should not be a simple re-sharing of a blog or article on your website, but constructed to be informative for your industry, readable by executives and potential B2B partners, with a very soft sell. LinkedIn Pulse is a great way to show that you have the experience and knowledge that your profile denotes and gives you ownership to the content in which you publish on its platform.

Best Practices for Local SEO in 2016

With the majority of people turning to mobile devices to perform their searches, local SEO has become more crucial than ever.

Find out how you can enhance your local SEO efforts in 2016 from Fort Lauderdale online marketing agency, Tandem Interactive:

1. Geo-tag your images on Google My Business – Google My Business (GMB) now has a feature that allows you to tag the location of an image you upload to your GMB page. Many businesses have reported receiving great results from doing this.

2. Prepare for voice search – More people are becoming comfortable with using voice search on their phones, such as Siri and Google Now. In 2016, be sure your local SEO marketing agency is using voice-friendly keywords to prepare for the future of voice search.

3. Use an address in the area you are attempting to rank in – Even if you don’t have a physical location in that area, use a virtual office or mail forwarding service to claim an address in a desired city. For example, if you run your business from your home in Jacksonville, Florida but want to target customers locally in Miami, find a virtual office in Miami that offers mail forwarding services and obtain a unique address from them.

4.  Pay attention to your site’s Direct Data – Google is constantly improving on its ability to give people exactly what they are searching for. For example, if a person is searching for a hair salon, they will most likely want to know prices, hours of operation and services provided. Therefore, Google is going to show results for hair salons that list all or most of the pertinent information customers are looking for.

5. Acquire and respond to customer reviews – Encourage your customers to leave reviews on your Yelp and GMB pages. Businesses with 4 and 5 star reviews have greater authority and better local search results.

6. Update your local listing – Build your business’ online credibility by taking the time to complete a local SEO audit of your company to determine where you currently stand as far as listing consistency and completion. Software, such as Moz Local, makes this process easy and can be done for as little as $84 a year. Once you complete your local SEO audit, prepare a schedule to begin fixing any incorrect, inconsistent or missing listing information. Every listing should have the exact same name, address and phone number of your business.

7.  Make sure your site is mobile-friendly- Although our online marketing firm doesn’t consider this a “new” local SEO effort, there are still businesses that have yet to update their websites to mobile-friendly status. These businesses are significantly losing out on local visibility.

8.  Maintain presence on social media platforms – If you haven’t already, incorporate social media engagement into your local SEO strategy in 2016. Try to interact with your audience on a regular basis, whether it be twice a week or twice a month.    

Social Media Tips to Improve SEO

Using search and social data to create content was one of the biggest SEO trends in 2015, and it’s not going away anytime soon.

Long gone are the days of creating content for content’s sake, as search and social data are a huge part of increasing engagement for clients and to attract the right customers. While content is imperative to the conversion of customers, search optimization plays just as important of a role.

Social media presence can greatly increase your search rankings, while quality SEO can improve your social media reach. Having a website that is well integrated with social media platforms will start to define successful online marketing in 2016 more so than a site’s ranking. Having a prominent online presence means that companies will have to optimize their social media as well.

Coupled with the growing importance of mobile apps and the increasing amount of customers using it, social media content needs to be optimized for these searches. This means using vocabulary that customer’s use along with targeted keywords. Engaging content, high-quality images, and links back to the website’s blog will be one of the most important SEO trends in 2016; website development and social media are getting more and more integrated together.

In order to improve your SEO in 2016, check out these three social media tips from Tandem:

Optimizing posts. Pre-existing content allows for another way to search. Along with articles, Google favors popular social media updates in the top sections of its SERPs. In order to optimize a post, you need a strong anchor. It can be anything from a video, infographic, or a link to an article. Once you have a strong foundation, perfect your posts with text that is SEO optimized in order to grab your customer’s attention, as well as improve your chances of showing up in search results.

Brand awareness. Increasing your reputation on social media leads to increased brand awareness, which translates into more branded searches on Google. The more branded searches your company receives on Google, the higher it is going to rank for non-branded keywords. Social media will give your company greater search visibility across the board.

Number of followers. How many followers you have will play a major influence in your rankings. Because Google can detect the quality of your followers, building your brand following organically is imperative. Growing the number of followers you have may take a while, but it is effective; the key is to be consistent. Your brand should post consistently and uniquely, with helpful articles, tips, questions, and discussion starters shared on a regular basis. Following up with any users by engaging them in conversation are the key to growing your number of followers and to increasing your conversion rate. 

5 Google Analytic Strategies Critical to Measuring SEO Success

Unfortunately, Google does not provide a step-by-step set of instructions for optimization that encompasses every single website. Every website is unique and every Search Engine Optimization strategy is specific to each website and is critical to the website’s success. All of the websites on the World Wide Web represent new and interesting optimization challenges and all require a degree of experimentation. Most SEO strategies follow strict methods of testing, monitoring, and measuring so that we know what is working for your strategy and what is not working.

At Tandem Interactive, we know that keywords are a great measure of SEO success but, reporting solely on keywords devalues the marketer’s roles and does not paint a full picture of exactly why SEO is so important to an organization. Once you go beyond keyword rankings, marketing teams will be able to showcase what is truly effective, how organic search is bringing revenue and profit to a business. Fortunately, there is an amazing tool that is freely available to measure SEO success- Google Analytics!

SEO specialists know that every enterprise is unique and that each website has different metrics that contribute to its success; however, this blog aims to encompass the 5 universal Google Analytics techniques to convert data that directly correlates to the success of your business’s SEO efforts.

1.       Viewing only organic search traffic.

Contrary to popular belief, the decline in overall website traffic does not mean the loss is due to a decline in organic search traffic, which is a common conclusion drawn by companies. Digging a little deeper will actually reveal that organic traffic is up while other sources of traffic are down, resulting in an overall traffic decline.

The first step to looking at Organic Search traffic will be to open your Channel Grouping report, where you will be able to see traffic sources segmented by channels. Selecting the “Organic Search” channel will bring you to a more detailed report that includes only organic search metrics. From this report, you will be able to determine the top landing pages for search traffic, keywords that drive the most traffic, search engines that contribute the most to search traffic, top exit pages and much more.

2.       Measuring the quality of SEO traffic.

Many people hold the notion that “quality” is subjective and therefore cannot be measured. However, SEO agencies in South Florida believe that there are a lot of ways to measure the quality of a traffic source. One way to measure the improvement or decline in the quality of search traffic is via the Assisted Conversions report. 

You will have the option to select a month-to-month comparison of conversions directly from search, or conversions where search played a role but is not directly attributed to the conversion. If you noticed a decline in conversions from search, yet your overall search traffic is steady, it’s easy to determine that the traffic from search is either un-qualified or of high quality.

3.       Identification of slow landing page time.

This aspect to an SEO strategy is often overlooked. Slow loading pages affect the user’s experience and have become a major factor in search rankings. If a company is investing time and money into SEO and keyword rankings, it will be useless if your website has slow loading times.

The report that measures page load times will show the average page load time site wide, and the average exit percentage on a page-by-page basis. As page load time surpasses the site’s overall average, the exit percentage will sky rocket. Once the page load time is optimized, you will be able to compare the new report with the old data to show how much search traffic is being retained.

4.       Assign monetary value to organic traffic.

This is a good strategy for businesses who seek a more traditional way of understanding the value that SEO strategies bring to their business by assigning a dollar value to their organic traffic results. To assign a monetary value to a site’s organic traffic, you can compare how much the keywords would cost if they were purchased in a Google AdWords campaign, then cross compare them with the keywords that are being targeted in their SEO campaign. This is great strategy to visualize the amount of money a business’s SEO strategy is saving them, that they would otherwise have to pay for.

5.       Create an SEO dashboard.

Present Google Analytics and SEO data with the use of the built in Dashboard interface, which will pull all of the individual reports into a single view that is easy to access, share and print. Having this dashboard will also cut down on time spent reviewing, analyzing, and interpreting Analytics, which will allow you to focus on physically doing the SEO work.

SEO Trends to Look Forward to in 2016

The practice of SEO is ever-evolving, with Google constantly updating their algorithm. Because of this fact, it may be difficult to anticipate the future of SEO marketing.  There were a lot of changes in 2015 that affected search, and with 2016 right around the corner, it is only natural to eagerly await the new trends and updates that Google has planned.

Tandem Interactive visited one of the largest and most trusted SEO conferences this year, Pubcon, and found that there was a lot to learn about the future SEO trends coming in 2016. Here are a few of the biggest 2016 SEO trends that Tandem reported.

1. Keywords are still the base of your SEO campaign. Keywords and keyword targeting are the most basic and longest running aspect to SEO campaigns. They remain intact and will be one of your most useful SEO weapons in 2016.

However, Google’s Hummingbird update has shifted focus from targeting specific keywords to researching groups of related terms and synonyms. In 2016, your keyword research goal should be to group interconnected terms instead of individual keywords.

2. There will be an increase of Google’s rich answers. Rich answers are built upon public data or data licensed to Google. If your SEO strategy is built on public domain data, you better switch up tactics, since it will only become more difficult to get search traffic from Google.

If you have proprietary, high quality, and creative content that allows Google to answer a searcher’s question, then rich answers are a resourceful tool for your SEO strategies. There are a few tactics to get your site featured in rich answers:

• Long tail keywords
• Developing content that directly answers questions
• Make sure the content is genuinely helpful and adds additional information on the subject that the consumer/searcher may not have known, exceeding their expectations.
• Make sure to share your content through social media platforms.

3. The page speed of your site is of utmost importance. Page speed will affect your ranks and the site that loads faster will outrank an equivalent, competing site no matter what. A slow loading site will waste your allocated Google crawl budget, since the Google bot will not stay on your website for longer than a specific period of time.

4. High Google ranks does not translate to more organic clicks. Attention grabbing search engine results page (SERP) elements like paid ads, knowledge graphs, and rich snippets can draw clicks away from the #1 ranking website and will influence your organic clicks in the 2016 Google.

Before you dedicate your efforts to optimizing for a specific keyword, you should take a look at the search result page and determine if there are SERP elements that are stealing clicks from your organic listing. You should next determine if it will be more beneficial to launch a Google AdWords campaign for the particular keyword query.

5. User behavior is not yet a ranking factor, but it surely will be in 2016. User behavior affecting rankings is a debated topic. Even if user’s behaviors are not affecting your rankings right now, logic says that they will be in the near future.

Factors of user behavior that will surely affect your rankings in the future include, but are not limited to:

• Engagement of content and how long users stay on your site due to usefulness
• Social signals such as shares, likes, or linking back to your site, which all result in loyalty and relevancy to your site
• The efficiency and accessibility of knowledge on your site.

Creative Strategies for Unique SEO Content

SEO is the bread and butter of online marketing, even though it is the sometimes underestimated and overlooked tactic to pump up your website’s ranks. However, as under appreciated as content may be, producing unique and captivating content is vital to the success of your website. In the reality of SEO, content is king, but it is important to keep in mind that not all content is created equal.

There are many concepts of content creation, but there are some key principles to creating unique content that can help your site continue to grow. Tandem Interactive uses only best practices for creating unique content for our clients and has a few tips to share.

·         Bring perspective, originality, and captivation to your SEO content. There are more than hundreds of thousands of content pieces written on similar topics as yours. You need to be asking yourself what you can do to make your content stand out and, best case scenario, be better than any piece of content ever written on that subject.

Bring unique perspective to the topic. Play up your own experience in dealing with the given subject using personal anecdotes. Provide a unique spin on the information that the user cannot find anywhere else by using a personable approach that users will relate. Use info-graphics, photos, charts, and anything else that is visually appealing for users. Grab their attention! Make it quirky, funny, easy to understand, etcetera. Make users want to continue past the first sentence and paragraph, and make it something that they want to share.

·         Evoke your reader’s emotions. There is a growing trend for purposefully writing content that will touch a reader’s emotions, and titling the post with a captivating headline that will draw users in. If your title is boring no one will want to read it and no one will click on it to even view your content.

Marketing messages have shown to be two-times more effective when they touch the reader on an emotional level. There are many emotions to play on when writing content, be empathetic when you are writing original content and place yourself in the consumer’s position.

There is a reason why a post of a dog that is best friends with a dolphin is getting over a million likes and shares on social media – it’s cute, it’s unique, and most people have never experience it so they are curious.

·         Write concise and pointed content. Eliminate all of the fluff in your content, which can be challenging, but will make for significantly better composition. A lot of online marketing agencies will fluff the crap out of the content they create for your company – look for one who won’t. If you notice that your content is being fluffed with nonsense, bring it to your marketer’s attention so that they can fix it and create a better strategy. Fluffed content is not typically original or unique, or engaging.

A brief, short, and to the point piece of content that is filled with information is better than a longer blog post. Users have a short attention span and you have limited time to tell them what your major points are – so do it wisely.

·         Communicate your message better with images. Everyone learns differently. Some people learn better by reading or hearing, while others learn better visually. An important thing to keep in mind is that no one learns any less through visual aids. Using visual aids such as pictures, videos, or diagrams can help illustrate the point of your content. Add images that add value to your content and that are interesting. 

Pubcon Las Vegas 2015: Branding, Mobile, and Beyond

Tandem Interactive's Organic Search Manager/Editor Kimberly McSweeney at Pubcon Las Vegas 2015.

This year, I was fortunate enough to attend Pubcon Las Vegas with Joe in the beginning of October, and to say that I learned a wealth of knowledge during those short four days would be an understatement. For those who may not know much about Pubcon, it is the world’s leading online marketing conference and has been named a must-attend conference by Forbes, and I have to say – they hit the nail on the head.

If you missed Pubcon you arguably missed the largest sharing of SEO/SEM and PPC knowledge to ever take place under one roof. With daily speakers, such as the leaders of the search marketing industry, this was the place to be for those who do SEO and/or have a business or startup.

After day one at Pubcon, it was clear that the theme for the year was branding. Pretty much, if your company is not creating content that serves consumers and gets your name out in the world as a reputable company that is not just there to take your business, you are not doing enough to meet the needs of users. Users don’t only want answers to their questions, they want answers that exceed far beyond the question they asked. Although this may sound impossible, with amazingly engaging content – it isn’t. As Founder of Seer Interactive Wil Reynolds put it, if you are not creating the best piece of content ever written on a subject, you are not doing content right. Users want content that will serve them in a way that will make them better. They want to read your content and be able to take something from it that makes them better, smarter, and…well…serves their egos.

“People don’t buy products, they buy better versions of themselves.” – Wil Reynolds

Once you have the most amazing piece of content created – you need to socialize it. Coupled with creating the best optimized content, socializing content will help build your brand. If you write amazing content and no one can see it on multiple social media platforms, your brand is not going to be engraved in their brains. Users’ minds need to constantly see your ads, your helpful content that answers their questions, your videos, your photos, and logos on Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and whatever the new social media platform will be, in order for them to build awareness of your brand, as well as trust.

Of course, every business with a website wants to know about mobile. As the industry leaders put it at Pubcon, if you are just now thinking about mobile, you are behind. If you are thinking that mobile is going to be big, you are behind. Mobile is here. Mobile is now. If your site is not mobile-friendly you can bet that users are going to your competitor who is mobile compliant. Not only should your site be mobile- friendly already, but if your mobile load times are slow – you can bet users are moving on to a competitor. It may be sad for you and your business, but it is true. With every new generation, attention spans are decreasing and demands are increasing – you need to take the heat and turn it into fire for your company, or get out of the kitchen.

Pubcon Las Vegas 2015 featured the following keynote speakers and hyperlinked is Tandem’s live-blogged coverage for each:

Rand Fishkin: Founder of Moz:  SEO In A Two Algorithm World

Gary Illyes: Google: Generations XYZ

Wil Reynolds: Seer Interactive: The High Cost of Free Traffic

Daune Forrester: Bing: Data is the New Oil

John Brown & Richard Zippel: Google AdSense: Open Format Q&A

Guy Kawasaki: Canva: 10 Tips for Perfecting Your Marketing Campaign in the Age of Social Media

Other Pubcon Sessions Covered by Tandem:

Micro-Moments with Google’s Matt Rogers

Google’s Leo Sei Unmasks AdWords Automated Scripts

Jeffrey Eisenberg (chief Executive at BuyerLegends.com) and Alex Harris (creative director at AlexDesigns.com): High Conversion Landing Pages and the User Persona, The Most Popular Tools for Creating Landing Pages and Campaigns, 8 Measurement Terms for Buyer Legends

Frederick Vallaeys on Google Quality Score: What It Is and How to Improve It

Frederick Vallaeys: AdWords Scripts: Automation and Bid Management, Pubcon Tracks Conversions with Frederick Vallaeys

Michael Gray (Atlas Web Services president and owner of GrayWolfSEO.com): Top WordPress Plugins to Clean Up and Speed Up Your Site

Barry Adams (founder of Polemic Digital): Barry Adams: Crawl Waste & Optimization

Perfecting PPC Ads with Brad Geddes