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Oct 15 News
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Thanks MBA for letting me present
Today I had the honor of presenting a talk on Internet Marketing at the Montana Brewers Association meeting. Special thanks to Blake of Bonfire Branding to the invitation.
What a great group of people. I love how collaborative these businesses are. I get the sense they all want to see the industry as a whole success, and are willing to lend a hand. Local craft Breweries create jobs and bring in tourist dollars to the community. I really enjoy working with them.
I was happy to do my part, and hope my presentation helped some folks.
In case you missed it, OR if you were told I’d send you a link if you signed up for my newsletter, you can find my presentation online HERE.
If you have any questions about the content of my presentation, please let me know.
Thanks.
– Andy
One of the areas that is most confusing in my line of work is helping businesses decide how to claim and update all the various directory listings.
Having accurate listings in a multitude of online directories IS important for a variety of reasons.
a. They can be a helpful ranking factor in getting your site higher in the search results, especially for local type searches.
b. Those directories might come up before your own website in a search result, and you want to be sure your businesses is on the results that directory provides.
c. You want to be able to make any changes, and respond to comments or reviews.
d. If you don’t claim your listing, a sneaking competitor might, making life harder on you.
So it’s not a matter if IF you should claim those listings, but HOW.
Here are the best options I have found. There is no one answer that is right for every business. Hopefully, this list will help you decide what you should do.
Ways to Claim listings.
– Manually
– Using a service to help you claim your listings
– Using a premium service that claims them for you and allows you to update them via the service
As with many things, there is a Time/Cost trade-off. Let’s discuss each.
Option 1: The manual method
To claim your listings manually, you need to visit each of the directory sites, find your listing, and then go through a process of proving you are the one who should be allowed to control the listings. This usually means filling in a form, and then either getting a phone call from an automated system asking you to enter a PIN, or waiting for a letter with a code you must enter. This proves you really are at the business. I certainly recommend this for your Google Business listing, but for most of the others, the time it takes to claim your listings is not worth it.
Option 2: Get a system to help you claim your listings:
The next level up is to use a system that will go out there and automate the claiming of your listings for you. This means entering your business information once, and perhaps passing along the logins of sites you’ve already claimed in the past. The system will then help you claim the rest, and submit your site to the 5 main data aggregators, which are databases that many of the other directories use to get information about your business. My favorite is called Moz.com/local and it runs about $50 per year at the time of this writing.
Option 3: Use a full service system
This is the set it and pretty much forget it option, but it comes at a price.
If you tend to update your business hours frequently, or want to make sure it’s all done right, and quickly, you can work with a company called Yext, who has partnered with most of the important directories. You simply fill out some forms, and Yext will update your directory listings in the matter of a few hours to days. This CAN be good, and if the price isn’t too shocking, it’s a good way to go. This service runs about $800 / year if you buy it directly from Yext. However, I’m currently a Yext Partner, and can get you a year long subscription for $500. Note, while super fast, if you stop paying, they unlock your listings that they have been managing, and everything reverts back to the information the directory had on file prior to the Yext override.
Now you may be wondering what your listings currently look like. I actually have a neat little tool for you to use. Now, I’ll warn you, I recommend you use MY tool rather than visit Yext.com directly and check your listings. Going direct will almost guarantee a call from a sales rep, who likely can’t give you as good a price as I can. My tool uses Yext, but they don’t share with me who is using the tool, nor do they make sales calls after someone has used it.
The special link to my tool is here: http://www.yext.com/partner/andycommonsconsulting/diagnostic.html
This will give you a good idea of how your business is currently being listed in many top directories.
I hope this gives you some direction on which way to go for managing your online directory listings. If I can be of any assistance, please let me know.
-Andy
If you’ve seen banner ads start to appear everywhere you visit on the web after visiting a certain website, you’ve been on the receiving end of “Remarketing”. Many companies now offer this service, including Facebook and Google Adwords.
As an advertiser taking advantage of this, there can be an almost unlimited number of ways to target people. It can be overwhelming. Google has recently announced they will help with that problem.
It’s called Smart Lists. With Smart Lists, you can now let Google watch the response of users, and based on performance goals you establish, Adwords will adjust where your ads are shown to help maximize your ad’s performance.
Now this sounds great, but remember, this is a computer program making decisions for you. So I recommend you try this out with only a portion of your daily budget and use another portion of your daily budget for a separate campaign that you run yourself. This way you can compare and decide for yourself if the Google automation is really working well for you.
More details about this are found on the Google Analyics blog at:
http://analytics.blogspot.com/2014/04/smarter-remarketing-with-google.html
If you find this idea intriguing and want some help getting started, then give me a call. Helping you with your Adwords campaign is part of what I do.
-Andy
A few times each year I have the pleasure of speaking on the fascinating world of Internet Marketing.
Recently, I was invited to speak again at a group of young professionals, many of whom work in the non-profit area. The audience was attentive and asked great questions! (I’ll mention a few below).
I promised them I’d share some slides with them… and if you are a reader of this blog, or perhaps got my latest newsletter, you of course are welcome to review the slides as well.
Here is the link to my 2014 Internet Marketing presentation!
But if you haven’t clicked yet, hang on. I wanted to share a few of the questions (and answers) that were asked, and point out a few other resources on this site you may want to take advantage of.
Question 1
One student asked a great question about incoming links. They had someone who took a differing view from their blog post and then linked to it from their own site. The result was even more ‘haters’ coming over to bash their blog post and leave nasty comments. They asked if they should take down the blog post, or somehow block that incoming traffic. I said No, and here’s why: Just like there is no bad PR, in my humble opinion, there is no bad traffic or links… except for totally spammy links, which is a different story. In that case, I think the inbound link is doing more harm than good in terms of better search engine rankings. But in the student’s case, not only are the inbound links valuable, the student is getting people that disagree with them to take notice and engage. Now it might be hard or uncomfortable to engage with those who don’t agree with you, but it’s a good opportunity to at least try to reason with them to get them understand your side of the issue. You may not win them over, but how you treat them will say a lot about you and your blog. Do it well and you might gain some new fans.
Having said that, if the comments on your blog are downright nasty or hateful, then you have every right to remove that comment from your blog. It’s YOUR blog, and you can control the narrative. But just know that if you start removing everything that doesn’t agree with you, then you are not really engaging them, and they will likely take notice of all the deletes.
Question 2
We discussed directory listings and how important they can be. On my homepage, I offer a free tool that will let you check your listings. PLEASE use my free Listing Checker found here. If you go directly to Yext and run their tool, you’ve just given a sales rep your company name, address and phone. You WILL get a sales call from someone. My tool however doesn’t send anyone (not even me) your info. So you can check out your rankings, and then if you are interested in learning more, you have to reach out to me.
Question 3
Finally, someone asked if posting content to a Google Plus business page is worth the effort. I can only say that I use a tool such as Hootsuite to automate posting to Google + at the same time I post to Facebook and LinkedIn. So it’s no more work, and there are rumors that a link from a Google + page is helpful in Search Rankings. So I say, why not!
So again, please enjoy my 2014 Internet Marketing presentation!
And if you know others who might benefit from this, please feel free to share this blog post.
Thanks.
Wishing you all the best and online marketing success….
-Andy
PS. If you are not on my newsletter list, please sign up. You won’t get too many emails, but when I do send one, they just might have a golden nugget you can use in your business.
What’s with all the facial hair?
If you have been seeing a bunch of scruffy guys, some of whom just aren’t shaving and others who are trying (with varying degrees of success) to grow a moustache, odds are it’s November.
Two men’s cancer awareness campaigns are in full swing this month. Each have a similar goals.
Movember – is a world wide program to raise funds and awareness for men’s health issues. Here are some sobering facts: 1 in 6 will be diagnosed with prostate cancer, and more than 30,000 men will die from prostate cancer this year.
No Shave November – is sponsored by the American Cancer Society. It also aims to raise cancer awareness and funds. Even women are encouraged to “let it grow” (i.e., don’t shave legs). Guys who love their current facial hair and don’t want to shave it off per the rules of Movember can still do “No Shave November”.
You can support me with a donation to my Movember page, or support someone else you know who is participating. We all need a little reward for the itching and, for some of us, the ridicule.
If you have any questions, feel free to drop me a line at andy@andycommons.com. Thanks.
-Andy 406-962-5683
As more people are moving to tablets for daily web surfing and ditching their old flip phone for a smart phone, it makes sense that more and more of your website traffic is going to be “mobile”. Depending on the site, mobile traffic can be well over 50% of all your traffic.
With this major shift in surfing behavior, business owners need to be sure their website looks good and treats those mobile users right.
A website that requires a smartphone user to “pinch-zoom” and scroll all over their website is going to see a drop in page views and engagement from those users. To improve the experience for mobile users, we need to offer up a website that is designed for them.
Picking a Mobile Strategy:
There are several ways to go when deciding how to “make your site mobile”.
a. Redo your site with “Responsive design”
b. Offer up a different ‘mobile version’ of your site
c. Create an “App”
d. Do nothing and let the mobile users suffer
Let’s look at each approach.
Responsive Design:
This may be the best way to go, but can also be the most expensive. A responsive site is designed to reformat itself depending on the size of the browser window. As the window goes from a huge desktop screen, down to tablet size and then to a smart phone, the design automatically adjusts to fit well and look good.
You can tell a site is responsive, even on your desktop, by grabbing the right hand border of your browser window and sliding it to the left. Instead of cutting off images and text, the site keeps adjusting itself as the browser window gets smaller. Here’s a good example from Capital One.
While it works great, there is going to be a high costs of development compared to some other solutions. So this solution would be recommended if, for instance, you have already been planning a website design overhaul. Be sure to insist your web-design team uses Responsive Design.
Mobile Version of your site:
A simple mobile site is a good step that you can take now. It is fairly inexpensive to implement, and it gets you that mobile site you need. Your web team can either create mobile versions of your pages, or you can use a third party tool such as DudaMobile. (aff*)
With this approach, when someone visits your site with a mobile browser, your web-server redirects them to mobile versions of your pages. Most of these systems will even update the mobile pages when you update your desktop site, so keeping things in sync is not an issue.
Create an APP:
There are compelling reasons to have an APP created for your content. For one thing, you can really offer some great features through an app, one of which is the ability to push out updates as alerts on a phone. I’m raising money for Movember.com this month (and trying to grow a moustache). (Donate here if you wish). They offered a cool app that lets me quickly check up-to-date donations, sends me a reminder once a week to update the sorry looking moustache photo, and allows me to post a quick update to my status page.
If you have people that are passionate about your brand and interact with you on at least a weekly basis, then it might make sense to go the App route. But for the rest of us, the expense is probably not justified.
Do Nothing:
There is another choice of course. That’s to do nothing and let your visitors suffer. Depending on your site’s traffic and the complexity level of your site, this may be the best choice. As with most things, there is no one answer that’s right for everyone.
If you’d like me to review YOUR mobile situation and give you my opinion, please feel free to contact me.
Thanks for visiting my site. I hope you will stick around and read more.
If you have any questions, feel free to drop me a line at andy@andycommons.com.
-Andy 406-962-5683
Google recently announced a big update to their search engine ranking algorithm. Unlike the hundreds of small updates of the past, this is being touted as a brand new algorithm called “Hummingbird“. We haven’t seen such a big change to how Google works since 2001.
While the new version still tries to show search results based on the keywords entered into the search bar, Hummingbird is based on something called Semantic Search. It tries to figure out the intent of the search, and dish up search results that best fit what the use was really searching for.
Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Land has a good FAQ that goes into the details, if you really want to dig deep.
But essentially, what it means to you, the website owner, is that you need to consider what phrases people are actually searching and be sure your content best matches that intention.
The example Danny gives in his FAQ is that today, especially with mobile searches, someone might ask their phone, “What’s the closest place to buy the iPhone 5s to my home?”. While in the past Google would have only heard “Buy iPhone 5s”, now it can take the entire phrase into account.
The full sentence tells us a lot more about what the person wants. They actually want to visit a physical store (not shop online), and Google will now adjust the search results accordingly.
This is another nail in the coffin for the old school spammy link building techniques such as buying hundreds of links, sending out dozens of copies of a slightly modified article to other websites, or heaven forbid, creating fake profiles on forums with a link back to your site.
Instead, you should be creating engaging content that people want to share with others.
In addition, there is a lot of indication that the larger number of Likes, Tweets, Pins and Shares your content gets, the better off your entire site will be in the rankings.
If you want higher rankings for your website, and you want to discuss your situation with a seasoned Search Engine Optimization specialist, give me a call or drop me an email.
Also, be sure to like my Facebook Page for almost daily tips right in your newsfeed.
Best wishes on your online marketing adventures.
-Andy Commons
www.andycommons.com
A recent post by searchengineland.com covered the latest thinking on the often uttered words “SEO is Dead”.
I’ll try to recap and give you my thoughts.
1. No, SEO is not dead. You still need your site set up the right way, and to do the basics like have keyword rich title-tags and well written content on a variety of topics in your nich.
2. Yes, you need to keep adding well written articles (let’s call them blogs) to build your authority.
3. The article points out that “Social Signals” are now part of the mix, but are not the only thing. I would say, being active on social media, posting links to other good articles AND your own, helps establish you as an authority.
4. They mention that Local search is going to be more important. If you don’t already have well optimized listings in the top directories, you are missing out on the traffic they bring, and the value of those listings give you in terms of rankings.
I’m working on a solution for you to get that done in a cost effective way. Stay tuned…
now, if you want to dig deeper, check out the article.
http://searchengineland.com/the-future-of-seo-157803
Oh, and if you want to help my “social signals” please like, share, tweet etc, this post.
Thanks.
-Andy