Google+ Local can Kill Your SEO Strategy

Sure, everyone wants PPC and everyone wants content. After a while, you may be hassling your marketing agency on why you are not number one in Google yet, but how does your Google+ page look? The reality is, is takes a lot of time and patience to rank in Google organically via a content strategy. At the end of the day, your site’s fate falls in their hands. One of the best things that you can do, is build out your Google+ Local page.

Google+ Local is an extremely crucial element of your local SEO strategy, since it drives your company’s results on Google Maps.

Think about it: If I want to find the best Italian restaurant in Miami, Florida, and I search Google for just that, if your Italian restaurant does not have a Google+ Local page with reviews, you might not even show up in my results.

One of the biggest pitfalls for businesses when it comes to using Google+ Local, is thinking that you can just create your listing page and be done; never sharing and updating content, and never completing Circle Outreach. Without Circle Outreach, even if your posts are set to “public”, your reach will not be as wide as it could be.

When completing Circle Outreach, think of your consumer demographic. If you are an Italian restaurant in Miami, essentially you could add any Miami resident to your Circles; so search for “Miami Circle” and try to find some residents and maybe even business offices surrounding your restaurant, to add to your Circles.  Building out your Circles will allow the content that you share to reach those people, allowing them to share your content or +1 it if they choose. It will also create brand awareness for your company by word-of-mouth, or by people in your Circles converting into customers.

Using your page to create brand awareness: After you setup your Google+ location page, it is important that you do not forget about it. Updating it is part of what makes your page relevant and can drive reviews. If you are an Italian restaurant, make sure that your address and phone number are correct. Then, add pictures of your cuisine, share events that will be taking place there, add photos of the interior, exterior, parties, and etc. Create posts of specialty menu items and chef’s specials.  The more that you share, the more that the people in your local Circles will see, and the higher your chances of gaining customers who will leave reviews will be. When you share content, make sure that you include keywords that target your industry; you can even hashtag them in your posts. Another content sharing tip: share content from your Facebook or Twitter, so that you draw a following on there as well. 

Perhaps one of the most important Google+ Local practices for your business – encourage consumers to leave a review.  The reviews will show in Google search results and can convert online local search consumers into in-the-door customers. For even the most competitive industries, having a lot of Google reviews (that give you a good star-rating) WILL get customers in the door.

Example: Search Google for “personal injury attorney” and these are the results that you will see (in Fort Lauderdale, FL).

These results are not organic search results in terms of content, they are organic in the sense that they are Google+ location pages (Google Maps) and the location's Google+ reviews. These results, in a perfect world, are easier to result as a facet of organic results, rather than content oriented organic search results. As a consumer, you would most likely choose the attorney with the highest rating, from the highest amount of reviews.

Tandem Interactive can help build out your Google+ location pages, so that you receive reviews and get customers in the door. 

The Real Deal About Content Marketing

Those who are invested in SEO know that content is king. Well, let me be a bit clearer: QUALITY content is king. If your organization is spending a lot of time creating dynamic and creative content, it is important that you are using it to its full advantage. That is where content marketing comes in. There is a lot of talk about the strategy these days, and sometimes it is more of a buzzword than an actionable plan. Tandem can give you the inside scoop and offer a bit of guidance, to make sure you are getting the most out of your content.

What Is It?

Sure, we have all heard of content marketing. But some of us may have more of an idea of what it is than an actual grasp. To be clear, content marketing is the creation and distribution of relevant and quality content to the right audience to (hopefully) drive engagement. It might even increase your customer base, but we can’t make any promises. J

Content marketing is valuable to its audience. They want to consume it and share it. It entertains them as much as it educates them. It makes them curious about your brand. Sounds good, right?

Who Is It For?

Content marketing is created with a particular audience in mind. It may take a lot of trial and error to figure out what that audience will connect with, but once you do, the real journey begins. Because that is what content marketing is…a journey.

It is a long-term strategy that tries to touch its audience over and over. It is a brand awareness adventure. And once you share enough relevant and quality content with your audience over Facebook, or Twitter, or LinkedIn…wherever your audience is, they will begin to remember who you are.

What Is a Good Example?

The go-to example of content marketing is an infographic, because people eat ‘em up. They are fun ways to digest information, so it makes them hot commodities on social media. Have a topic that is tough to make exciting? Infographics can add some pop and flair to not-so interesting content, topics, or industries. If you have a graphics person on your team, put them to work!

Other content that is great for marketing includes: industry resources like whitepapers, case studies and e-books. If you want to get more visual, videos, GIFs and slideshows can all have great success and grasp a consumer’s attention.

It is important to see the difference with these examples. Things like infographics and GIFs almost beg to be consumed and shared. People in your target audience should want to download your whitepaper; it should drive people to your site. That is what makes a good piece of content marketing.

Why Should I Bother?

Like many other marketing strategies, content marketing does not promise a sharp increase in sales over night. It is a long-term investment that seeks to connect with an audience. During the course of your content marketing journey, you will build tons of valuable resources. This can have all sorts of positive SEO and social media implications. After you have truly honed in on what your audience wants to see and read, and built your brand up in their minds, you may start to see some of that audience converting.

Whether your business is big or small, content marketing is a worthy cause. While it may take a lot of work, and you may not see a lot of immediate pay off, it is a long-term investment that will help you learn about your audience and even your own company.

To learn more about content marketing or any kind of content strategy, contact Tandem Interactive and one of our team members will be glad to answer any questions you may have!

Five Important To-Do’s before Publishing Content

Every marketer has heard the phrase “Content is King”, but that statement should come with asterisked. While content is important, there are certain factors that can make it king or make it an enemy.

Content development is important for every business and should have a strategy behind it. If you are creating content, just to have it with no purpose or structure, you could be doing more harm than good.

Make sure that all content you are creating is relevant and unique. Your customers like to read fresh, new content catered towards your industry, and so does Google! So “Relevant Content is King”.

Once you have created awesome content for your company, follow these 5 important to-do’s before publishing:

1. Get a fresh set of eyes. While you may be an excellent writer and editor, we tend to overlook common spelling and grammatical errors. It is important to have a co-worker or friend double check your work before making it live.
2. Do an ‘SEO’ proof.  Once your content has gone through a regular edit, conduct an ‘SEO’ proof. This means read through your content and check for relevant keywords and any missed opportunities to enhance the SEO. Use keyword research tools to help decide which keywords are optimal for content development.
3. Images need love too. Sometimes we focus so much on the content itself that we fail to optimize the image we insert into our blogs or articles. Double check that all images being published with content, and individually, have been optimized with Alt Tags.
4. Link Up! Content is not made to cover everything, and realistically it can’t. Find relevant content to link to within your writing, this helps to enhance your information and building relationships with others in your industry. Adding a link acts as an endorsement, endorse others and they will endorse you.
5. Encourage readers to amplify the post. If you have created engaging content, prompt your users to share your post. Adding share buttons to your content can make the amplification process easier for users and could result in more shares.

So remember, while ‘Content is King’, it is only king if it is relevant and optimized for your readers.

For more tips on how to develop SEO rich content, or to speak with a SEO Content Specialist contact Tandem Interactive directly. 

Keywords that Can Actually Increase Traffic to your Site

If you own a business and are currently paying a marketing team to build out your content…make sure that they are building content that can actually increase traffic to your site, WITHOUT keyword stuffing.

As a business owner, you are probably well aware of the negative effects that Black Hat SEO can have on your site and more importantly, on your relationship with search engine master Google.

If you are not aware, here are some tips to avoid a penalty and keep in mind for organic content:

• Google wants websites that produce QUALITY content, NOT necessarily QUANTITY. While it is good to be building your brand with a decent amount of content each month, the quantity of keywords should not be overbearing. If you produce content that has one of your keywords, sprinkled around once every 100-150 words or so, you are on the right track. If your content pumps keywords each sentence, you will most likely be flagged. While it is great that your business is getting a lot of traffic, if you are not giving the searcher the information they want, that traffic to your site is essentially useless and they will leave your page, after they deem you as unreliable.

• Choosing the right keywords for your brand can be more difficult than you think. You may know the obvious keywords, but the truth is, unless you already have an internet presence, you will not rank for those keywords as compared to larger competitors. However, there are ways to determine / find the ideal organic content keywords for your product.

To find ideal keywords, your marketer should be using Google Adwords and MozPro in coordination. Why use both tools you ask? Start in Google Adwords. Search for keywords that have a good amount of AVERAGE MONTHLY SEARCHES and a LOW to MEDIUM COMPETITION STATUS. Then, use MozPro : Research Tools : Keyword Difficulty, to plug in the keyword you found with Adwords, in order to see its DIFFICULTY SCORE and SERP Analysis Report.

You will notice that if the keyword has a Difficulty Score of 60% or more, then it will be a highly competitive keyword that you should not use.

To further explain this: The Lower the Keyword Difficulty Score on MozPro and the Lower the Competition via Adwords, the easier it will be for your company to create individual content pages to achieve top results.

HOWEVER, this only applies for smaller businesses or lower authority domains; meaning a local moving company trying to rank for moving key terms against a large, nationwide moving company.

The SERP Analysis Report will tell you the reasoning behind the difficulty score. So if a keyword has a difficulty score of 60%, the SERP will say “Moderately Competitive: Search results require high authority domains with well-targeted pages OR lower authority sites with powerful individual pages to achieve top results.” Meaning: if you are a smaller business, you can rank for this keyword by using “powerful individual pages”, and if you are hiring the right person to write your content, and they are creating powerful, unique content, you have a higher chance of moving up in the rankings! SCORE!

EX. You own a small, local moving company. You most likely will not rank high for “moving company”, so try searching for “relocation” in Google Adwords. The keyword “relocation” has an average of 14,800 monthly searches and a Medium competition status in Google Adwords. When you go to MozPro, “relocation” has a Keyword Difficulty of 58%, which is lower than 60% so you are in the clear, as a lower authority site, and are able to use this keyword in your content in order to improve your rankings. YOUR WELCOME!

Finding the proper keywords for your specific brand and target audience will take some playing around in SEO tools with, but it WILL benefit your business in the end. After all, who wants to pay for Organic Search Content creation that does not work?!

Facebook coming in hot with mobile growth

The hits just keep on coming for the Winklevoss twins.

Facebook just released its fourth quarter and full year 2014 financial results revealing a modest $12.47 billion in revenue for 2014.

Earning an all-time high in quarterly ad revenue - $3.59 billion – Facebook surpassed all expectations for Q4 ad spend.

Zuckerberg can say thanks for much of this leap in revenue to continued growth in advertising, more specifically, mobile advertising. Case in point: mobile ads contributed to 69% of Facebook’s total $3.59 billion in ad revenue for the year. And oh yeah, mobile ads brought in a record high of $2 billion in quarterly revenue.

And it’s no surprise that none other than Facebook continues to lead the pack with the growth of mobile. Facebook now has 1.39 billion monthly active users; of those, 890 million users access the social network on a daily basis. More than half a billion users now only access Facebook from mobile.

A report from We Are Social recently released that web traffic from laptops and desktop computers grew 13 percent, while traffic from mobile devices and tablets grew 56 percent.

Further asserting their dominance in the mobile growth and innovation, Facebook silently introduced Facebook Lite to eight countries last week. A lightweight Android version of the full app, Google Play describes the app as “fast to install – the app is less than 1 MB.” Countries benefiting from the new app “designed for 2G networks and areas with limited connectivity” include Bangladesh, Nepal, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and Zimbabwe. While Lite takes up less than 1 MB of space on phones, the full app uses 27 MB.

"We got a lot done in 2014. Our community continues to grow and we're making progress towards connecting the world," said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO.

Google is Strongly Encouraging Mobile-Friendly Sites

How many times have you been told that mobile is becoming increasingly important or the next big thing in search? Have you taken steps to ensure that your site is mobile-friendly? If not, the time has arrived for you to make sure that your website provides an optimal user experience. Google has even confirmed that they are experimenting with using mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal in November. If that does not make you take mobile seriously, only a penalty will.

Google also began sending mass notifications to webmasters who have less-than-mobile-friendly sites. These notifications came with a threat that under-optimized pages would “be displayed and ranked appropriately for smartphone users” (yikes!).

First thing’s first: is your site mobile-friendly or not? Google has made it pretty easy to check with its Mobile-FriendlyTest tool. You can also use Webmaster Tools’ Mobile Usability feature to check for errors and other usability issues. If you find that your site has issues, make it a priority to fix them. Some common fixes are:

• Make sure that your site’s content is readable without zooming and scrolling
• Use inks and navigation that are easy to click on from a mobile device
• Avoid software that is not mobile friendly, like Flash, and avoid excessive JavaScript
• Ensure that your landing pages and contact forms are easy to fill out from a mobile device

Once your site is officially mobile-friendly, Google will slap a “mobile-friendly” label on your organic listing in the SERPs (score!).

Mobile traffic is skyrocketing, but plenty of webmasters are not even sure how much of their traffic is coming from mobile devices. Make sure to check out your site’s mobile traffic in Analytics. It can be found under Audience>Mobile>Overview. You may be shocked to see just how many users are funneling in through their phones.

MTV recently redesigned several of its web properties and reported a 92% boost in mobile visits and 297% increase in time spent for their MTV Shows page. Those are results that speak to the power of mobile!

Whether you are an e-commerce, B2B or B2C website, it is in your best interest to have a mobile-friendly site. Your mobile traffic—and quality of mobile traffic—will see increases, and oh, Google won’t blacklist you from mobile listings. So take the time and make your website is mobile-friendly today! 

3 Free SEO Tools From Google To Track Your Site Accurately

Being in digital marketing can get exhausting and confusing. Creating codes to accurately track conversions, clicks, traffic, referral sources, etc. can become complicated, and code implementation can turn into technical issues.

While the responsibility of accurate tracking and code implementation is shared between the marketers and the developers, it is important to be familiar with Google Analytics to ensure that setup is done correctly.

Here are three Google Tools that can help you with Google Analytics tracking:

1. Google Analytics In-Product Diagnostics

This is the official ‘Notify Me’ report from Google Analytics on any possible issues in tracking. Launched as a Beta in June 2014, this feature has now rolled out to help GA users quickly understand high level issues within their account.

Analytic Diagnostics works by scanning our site for problems specific to your GA account (that you have access to). The diagnostic will inspect tagging, account configuration, data/reporting issues, etc. by reviewing…

• GA tags that could be missing or not properly coded
• Filters within the code that cause conflictions
• Presence of other ‘entries’ within the GA reports

These Analytic notifications should be considered part of the technical audit of your site.

2. Google Tag Assistant

While Google Analytics overall is a simple system, the features within GA can become complicated when using advanced settings. Help simplify the code with the help of Google Chrome’s extension, Tag Assistant.

Tag Assistant is a powerful tool that helps identify errors, warnings, and suggestions in Google’s tags; including: Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, AdWords Conversion Tracing, Trusted Stores, Floodlight, and the new Remarketing Tag.

Once Tag Assistant is installed, you will be notified with an alert if tags are found on any page you browse. Tag Assistant will identify any errors in the code, verify that the code is tracking properly, and/or make suggestions to help optimize the installation that was made.

3. Google Analytics Debugger

Yet another Chrome extension available at your fingertips is the Google Analytics ‘Debugger’; a powerful extension that enables the debug version of GA Javascript for all sites that you browse. This allows you to see useful information in the Javascript console while browsing.

Some information that is listed in the Javascript console include: error messages and warnings regarding your Google Analytics code, tracking different campaign parameters, visitor ID, and page names.

Tandem highly recommends conducting quarterly audits for technical errors with code implementation. It is important to audit codes (whether you are running Google Analytics or not) to guarantee the best possible data and metrics. These three free tools from Google contain everything necessary to perform routine audits on GA codes and/or tags.

If you need help checking your GA codes or uploading Tag Manager, please contact Tandem Interactive to speak with one of our team members.