Local SEO is a potent way to drive people to your physical business location. It also helps ensure that your business appears real, legitimate, and authoritative within the Google search results of nearby potential customers.

Consider these 5 things when optimizing your website for Local SEO in 2022:

Local SEO Thing #1: Optimize For Voice Search

No one thinks that customers always and only search for things with their voice (although 41% of users now search using their voice once per day). However, we strongly suspect that the way your customers search for your product or services is closer to the way they speak; people tend to search with natural language (phrases or meaningful sentence fragments) more so than with the keyword-only searches typical in the past.

When someone is out on the town and feeling hungry for pizza, they do not typically Google “Pizza.”

Instead, they will look for ‘Pizza Near Me’ or ‘Best Pizza In [CITY NAME].’

Optimizing your site and content for the way people actually look for things online will help you rank better for these localized searches. It will also futureproof your site for the continual growth of voice assistants.

For more talk on voice search, check out How to Optimize for Voice Search.

Local SEO Thing #2: Be Consistently Consistent

The little details matter when it comes to Local SEO. Presenting your business information consistently—especially the physical address—is crucial because Google assesses your legitimacy through such consistency.

It may sound like nitpicking, but if your business is located at 123 North Christmas Ave, then you should always refer to it as such—and never 123 N. Christmas Ave. Be consistent with your location information because it helps reduce issues with local listings, and it shows the bots you care about your local business data.

Local SEO Thing #3: Actually, this is Hyperlocal SEO

You don’t just live in your city, you live in a neighborhood. So do your customers.

When optimizing your content for hyperlocal SEO, make sure you include the neighborhood you are located in and also the locations your customers may live, work, or shop in. This helps drive local searches including those specific keywords, as the algorithms will understand the local nature of your content and deliver it to local searchers.

If you have a business in Bushwick, Brooklyn, your business is located THERE—not just the more general New York City. Optimizing for all three—Bushwick, Brooklyn, and New York City—will net you the best possible ranking potential.

Thing #4: Own Your Listing

Your Google Business Profile listing is one of the most important tools in driving local traffic online. Make full use of it.

If you haven’t already claimed your listing, do so. If you have, then optimize! Here are five easy to complete areas you can use to improve your Google Business Profile listing.

1. Flesh out your business description to include language that will drive a user to want to engage with your business.
2. Showcase your products directly within your listing.
3. Add photos. Photos help boost engagement on your local listings.
4. Use the Posts functionality of Google Business Profile; it’s like a micro-blog for your local listing page that gives information to users directly within the search results and allows you to promote sales and products to local searchers.
5. When it comes to your Primary Category within GMB make sure you choose wisely. If you are a pizza place, make sure you choose the category Pizza Restaurant and not just Restaurant. This attention to detail is necessary for Google to understand when to show your business over another location.

The more you put care into your business information online, the better it will likely perform in search.

Thing #5: Show Authority

It’s not enough just to rank locally. If potential customers have doubts that you are a reputable business, they are not likely to spend their money on your goods or services. To satisfy the need for credibility, you need a local review strategy.

Encourage your customers to leave 5-star reviews when they are satisfied with your business. Whether this is via a card you hand out to a customer or through a follow-up email, reviews are a major factor in convincing a local customer to make a purchase. They will have a big impact on your local performance.

Once you have reviews, show them off. Use plugins to feature the reviews on your website, and share every good review you get on social media. Respond to the reviews you get from customers on Google and Facebook. It is this attention to detail and care that may sway another customer to your side. And it shows local searchers that you are to be trusted.

When it comes to local SEO, no one of these tactics alone will bring your business success within the search engines; rather, a finely optimized and cultivated combination of the 5 areas above can help drive traffic with higher buyer intent.

At DOM, we’re local SEO wizards and more than ready to get you optimized for local traffic. Feel free to reach out today and let’s put together a plan that works for your SEO needs.

The post How to Do Local SEO in 2024 appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Imagine that it’s 1984 and you have just earned your business degree. Your father, Mick, owns a tavern and has always instilled in you the importance of hard work. Unfortunately, his tavern is on the verge of bankruptcy and you realize that maybe, just maybe, you can help!

Your first job, prior to college, was at a local pizza restaurant and you got pretty good at making a superior-quality pizza. So, you swallow your pride and sell your most-prized possession. A gorgeous 1971 Z28 Camaro for $2,800.00.

You use the money to buy used restaurant equipment and turn the broom closet at the back of the tavern into the perfect spot to make your pizza.

Fast-forward one year. Your pizzas are delicious; the locals love them: you are able to open your own space (close to the tavern, of course).

Do you know whose story I’m telling yet?

Fast-forward 15 more years to 2001, and now you are the first pizza chain to offer national online ordering. Fast-forward a further 7 years to 2008, and you have topped $1 billion in e-commerce sales and $1 million in mobile web orders.

Does “Better Ingredients. Better Pizza.” Ring a bell? If you haven’t figured it out yet, I am telling the story of John Schnatter, the founder of Papa John’s.

Why Is an Online Marketing Company Telling This Story?

Why is an online marketing company telling stories about a pizza chain?

Well, thank you for asking!

Tomorrow, Google will be joining us as we host an interactive digital marketing seminar in Louisville, KY. Before this event, we wanted to point out some of the online marketing wins of one of the major employers in the area. And who doesn’t LOVE pizza?

Headquartered in Jeffersontown (a suburb of Louisville), Papa John’s continues to be on the top of its game when it comes to technology and its website’s search engine optimization (SEO).

Local SEO Tips For Better Search Optimization

What Do Papa John’s Best Local SEO Tips Teach Us?

There are a number of key factors that should be considered when optimizing your website’s franchise location pages for local search engine optimization.

For the sake of this post, let’s take a look at the Papa John’s franchise located at 5709 Bardstown Rd., Louisville, KY 40291.

1. Search Engine Friendly URLs

The first thing that Papa John’s did right for local search engine optimization was creating a dedicated page for each franchise location. In such a situation, the URLs should include the country, state, town, zip code, and street address.

https://www.papajohns.com/locations/usa/ky/louisville/40291-1913/5709-bardstown-road/10

While this may be a bit long for some types of franchises to duplicate, it certainly helps your customers and search engines determine where each franchise is located. Keep in mind that when your customers do a search for your products or services, Google usually knows where they are located and will serve results that it believes to be most relevant to that user. Including location information in the URL can boost your local SEO efforts.

2. Meta Titles for Local SEO

While meta titles cannot be seen on your site itself, they are one of the first things that visitors will see in search engine results. Meta titles are the bold headings above each search result. Below, you can see the meta title for the page that we are reviewing.

The title includes the street address, brand name, city, state, and zip code. When optimizing for local SEO, keep in mind that you want to use the most relevant keywords for each page. You should also keep your title between 50 and 60 characters (although Google has been displaying up to 70 characters in the recent months). The more relevant your meta title is, the less likely Google will re-write it and the more likely it is to catch your customer’s attention!

3. Meta Descriptions for Local SEO

Like meta titles, meta descriptions are not visible on your site, but rather in the search engine results. You want to think of this as being the place to describe what the page is about while including relevant keywords ranging from 150 to 160 characters. Google will bold the words that match those in the user’s query.

We can see in the image above that Papa John’s included their top keyword “pizza” as well as the street address, city, and state in their meta description. They also let the searcher know that this page will give hours and contact information for the exact location being searched.

4. On-page Local Search Optimization

Let’s now take a look at some of the tactics that Papa John’s has used for on-page local search engine optimization.

Each page on your website should have one heading or H1 tag that contains your top keywords and one that tells your visitors what the page is about. Since this is a franchise location page, it makes absolute sense to include the brand name (Papa John’s Pizza) and the city and state (Louisville, KY). Directly beneath that, the street address (5709 Bardstown Road) is tagged as an H2, as well as the second mention of the address beneath that.

Mobile searches are popular. So it’s a great idea to have the phone number prominently displayed and coded so that a user can click on it and instantly be connected with the store to place an order.

5. Local Citation Link Building Best Practices

As an agency that offers local SEO services, we can assure you that local citation link building must be one of your first off-site tactics. Once you have your location pages optimized, you’ll want to then ensure that you list your NAP (name, address & phone number) consistently across all areas of the local search ecosystem.

In general, the top citation sites are the same; however, Moz has published a super helpful list of citations by city that links to each directory in the order of importance for that area. If nothing more, you would want to ensure a proper listing in each of these sites.

If you need to check the status of your local listings, Moz Local will show you where your listings are complete, incomplete, and inconsistent, as well as if you have any duplicate listings.

Using these resources as a guide will help ensure that you have a good basis for local link building by displaying exactly what is missing to ensure a complete profile on each site.

A Great Story Always Ends “Happily Ever After!”

Just like John Schatter’s “happily ever after” of having the world’s third largest take-out and pizza delivery chain AND getting his 1971 Z28 Camaro back in 2009 . . .

. . . we hope that these local SEO tips from Papa John’s will help you optimize your company’s location pages and have a “happily ever after” of your own.

PS – this post from our friends at DesignRush have even more helpful trends to take advantage of as part of your efforts to improve SEO for franchises.

The post 5 Local SEO Tips for Your “Happily Ever After” appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Simply put: it’s not easy to be in charge of kickstarting growth for treatment facilities and rehabilitation centers.

Scammers and third-party lead generators have increased the difficulty for organizations to rank their websites to be found by the 23-million-plus Americans in need of treatment. 

But the biggest Google change challenging SEO efforts for treatment facilities and rehabs isn’t the scammers…

Instead, it’s the government. 

Learn how the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) has been impacting your ability to rank at the top of the search results. Then, get a glimpse into 12 of our top ideas to rise above SAMHSA in the search engines so you can get your growth plans off the ground.  

SAMHSA’s Impact on Digital Marketing for Addiction and Mental Health

Back in February 2018, Google rolled out a significant change to how it presents search results in the United States when users look for services and information related to substance abuse and mental health.

That change? The placement of the National Helpline page provided by SAMHSA as one of the top three search results for high volume keywords like:

• “anxiety symptoms” — 77,500 monthly searches*
• “drug addiction” — 22,200 monthly searches*
• “signs of alcoholism” — 18,100 monthly searches*

The rise in the ranking presence of this page was exponential. According to data from SEMrush, its presence in the top 10 of Google results increased by over 1,100% in just the first month.

But that was just the beginning. Today, many of those same searches continue to show the SAMHSA National Helpline, and the number continues to grow.

For instance, as of August 2020, you can now find it listed on the first page of Google for over 89,000 terms. As a result, traffic estimates to the site have also grown by enormous leaps and bounds.

If you are responsible for confidently growing admission applications at a substance abuse or mental health facility, this change has forced you to rethink a few of your tactics. The good news is that rehab facilities like yours can respond and succeed despite this.

Get started with the extensive list we’ve created for you below.

Below, you will find 12 alternative marketing tactics – three using PPC strategies, and 9 using SEO strategies – that you can leverage quickly to compensate for SAMHSA’s ownership over the most clicked-through keyword positions in the search engines.

Our 12 Top Addiction Treatment Marketing Tactics

PPC And Digital Advertising Tactics

1. Go ‘Legit’ to Run Search Ads
2. Advertise On The ‘No. 2 Search Engine’
3. Strategically Stay Top Of Mind On The ‘GDN’

SEO And Content Marketing Tactics

1. Get Listed in SAMHSA’s Locator
2. Create Content For Every SERP Feature
3. Market The Map With Local SEO
4. Explore New Markets With Hyperlocal Pages
5. Review Your Past (Optimize It For The Future)
6. Capitalize On Question-Based Searches
7. Expand Upon Your Program Features
8. Blog For Your Decision-Making Audience
9. Barnacle To Top Content Publishers

1. Go ‘Legit’ and Get Approved to Run Ads In Search Engines

For a long time, Google and Bing accepted search engine advertising from rehab and mental health facilities in the same way they accepted ads from other medical service and healthcare providers. But, as the opioid crisis in the United States continued to escalate, the rules for addiction treatment centers started to change. 

Why? Because scammers started taking advantage of those in need.

To help separate the scammers from the legitimate treatment facilities, Google partnered with LegitScript to setup an independent, third-party verification system. Since then, any in-person treatment facility, crisis hotline, or support group has been required to be LegitScript certified to advertise in Google. You can learn more about the LegitScript certification process from our friends at FHE Health, a healthcare institution that delivers quality, medically integrated personalized treatment for those suffering from behavioral health disorders located in Deerfield Beach, FL.

Why LegitScript Certification For Search Ads Became A Need

In case you missed it, here’s a timeline of how the bans and reinstatements of rehab facility advertising in search engines progressed:

• September 2017: Google began restricting ads from showing for searches related to addiction treatment after it noticed that some facilities running ads did not provide a high enough quality of care to help patients recover.
• January 2018: Google followed suit in the UK as well and eventually Google extended the ban globally.
• April 2018: Google announced its partnership with LegitScript. By July, LegitScript planned to verify about 30 facilities and Google would once again reopen advertising to in-person facilities, crisis hotlines, and support groups.
• February 2019: Bing announced it would also require LegitScript certification for all addiction treatment advertisers and would no longer accept third-party lead generators. 

To be fair, there’s no doubt that running PPC campaigns in substance abuse and mental health niches is a costly marketing strategy. In addition to your monthly PPC marketing budget and associated agency fees, LegitScript requires an application fee per facility and an annual fee for verification.

With that said, search engine advertising is likely to be an ROI-positive endeavor if managed correctly. It’s also the only 100% viable option for getting a top page position for a keyword currently occupied by SAMHSA.

Plus, LegitScript certification keeps a lot of the less ethical facilities and scammers from competing for clicks and driving the costs per click higher.

Similar to becoming a listed facility in the Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator from SAMHSA (more on that below), getting your facility listed will take some time, but the process is pretty simple.

If you are a representative of a facility interested in starting a LegitScript application, you can click here to submit one.

2. Advertise On YouTube, The Internet’s ‘No. 2 Search Engine’ 

If you clicked here, you were expecting this to be all about advertising on Bing, weren’t you? Or maybe one of the search engines that’s popular in international markets, like Baidu or Yandex?

Well, it’s not. Instead, you need to take a moment and think about leveraging the search opportunities provided by advertising on YouTube. A site that generates more searches on its platform than Bing, Yahoo!, AOL, and Ask.com… COMBINED.

Added bonus: it’s also widely considered to be the no. 2 social network, making it a great place to boost your social media marketing.

While it’s not a traditional “search engine” in the way you might normally think about them, there are nearly 3 BILLION searches per month done on the site, according to data compiled by Mushroom Networks. 

That breaks down to over 1,100 searches per second. 

Although it was acquired by Google back in 2006, LegitScript certification is not required at this time to advertise on YouTube. Therefore, it can be a more attractive advertising solution for smaller facilities with cost barriers to traditional search marketing on Google and Bing.

4 YouTube Advertising Tips To Maximize The Performance Of Your Videos

While LegitScript certification isn’t required, you’re still going to need to have a commercial or video ad ready to go for a YouTube promotion. Once you have your creative completed, here are a few ideas on how to get the best performance from a YouTube campaign.

• Use the appropriate format. Here’s a quick list of which type of YouTube ad is best for your campaign, based on your goals.
  • Brand recognition: 6-second bumpers.
  • Clicks: 15-20 second pre-roll ads (bonus: they can’t be skipped).
  • Conversions: 15-20 second pre-roll ads
  • Re-purposing a TV commercial: 30-second In-Stream ads.
• Utilize closed captioning. Provide the best user experience for your viewers with accurate, verbatim transcriptions.
• Target smartly. Find your audience using the options for gender, parental status, interests, or target specific channels they are likely to watch.
• Deploy an end card. You’ve made some great content, now reinforce your brand and inspire the viewer to take their next action by directing your viewers to their next destination – a landing page, your website, or your YouTube channel page.

There are definitely some benefits YouTube can bring to your marketing efforts with a dedicated advertising budget.

In addition, leveraging YouTube can also bring benefits to your traffic and visibility through SEO and referral traffic. Interested in learning how it can help you in these areas? Check out one of these helpful links.

• How We Grew YouTube Traffic 6,800% For This Retailer
• Video Hosting: YouTube or Vimeo?
• 6 YouTube Tips To Improve Your Results

3. Strategically Stay Top Of Mind On Google’s Display Network

According to Google, its far-reaching Display Network reaches 90% of Internet users around the world. 

Websites. Blogs. News sites. Even Google-owned properties like Gmail and YouTube.

All of them have an advertising opportunity available to your facility through the Google Display Network.

Depending on the business goals you have for your campaign, Google can also manage the campaign for you on autopilot. Just set your budget, upload your ads, and off you go!

But just because it sounds easy, however, doesn’t mean it’s that simple. Sure, automated bidding is handy, but it’s only as useful as the strategy you put behind it. Similar to YouTube advertising and LegitScript approved PPC advertising, you’re going to want to pay a lot of attention to your targeting if you want a display campaign that will lead to conversions. 

Oh, and you’re going to want to keep your ads fresh. You ever get tired of seeing the same ads from leading brands over and over? If you answered yes, then you can assume your audiences will too. Don’t bore them to death with your creative.

With the Google Display Network, you can proceed with confidence. Just be aware that patience and persistence are going to be key in this channel if you want it to pay off. 

THIS TREATMENT CENTER
IMPROVED THEIR ADMITS BY 300%
USING DIGITAL ADS. LEARN HOW.

4. Getting Listed in SAMHSA’s Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator

One of my favorite online marketing strategies comes from the adage, “…if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” From some of our research into how Google presents this SERP listing for SAMHSA, the link for the National Helpline will often include a site link to SAMHSA’s Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator right underneath its meta description.

The fact is that Google favors displaying links from SAMHSA over other possible search results prominently, so getting your original content or sales-driven pages to rank above SAMHSA will be extremely difficult — almost near impossible.

However, SAMHSA has an online treatment finder, and rehab facilities can request to be added to that list of treatment providers.

How To Get Listed In The SAMHSA Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator

Getting listed in the SAMHSA services locator is a great SEO tactic for your campaign. For starters, you’re gaining a backlink from a .gov domain — one of the highest-value links you can obtain.

Need a reason beyond that? The site generates an estimated 60,000+ visits per month in the United States from Google searches alone. The high volume and highly specific type of people visiting the site and then being referred to your facility create a great source of well-qualified traffic for your site.

If you represent a newer facility, or your facility is not currently listed in SAMHSA’s locator, getting listed will take some time. Overall, though, the process is pretty simple. Here’s how it works according to the FAQ on the locator’s website:

1. You request the addition of your facility by completing the I-BHS Facility Application Form.
2. The BHSIS Project Office verifies that your facility is eligible by contacting your local representatives or SAMHSA/CBHSQ. As an alternative, you can also contact your state mental health or substance abuse agency to help with verification.
3. You receive a survey in the mail from I-BHS, complete it, and return.
4. About a month passes, and pending final approval, your facility should be good to go. Just know that they typically add new facilities on a monthly basis.

To maintain your listing, you are required to respond annually to either:

• the National Survey of Substance Abuse Treatment Services (N-SSATS), or
• the National Mental Health Services Survey (N-MHSS)

These surveys go out every March, and your facility will be required to provide updated information each year after your facility was added to the list.

5. Create Content For Every SERP Feature

If you have spent time doing searches on Google and Bing for answers to almost any question, or for information on any general topic, then you have probably been served with a featured snippet result in the past.

What’s a featured snippet? According to Google, it’s that special box at the top of the search result before the standard listings. Featured snippets include:

• a quoted block of text from a webpage in paragraph, list, or table format
• a link to the webpage the text was originally quoted from

The content is also frequently read aloud by the Google Assistant if you do a voice search. 

While that is the general description of a featured snippet straight from Google, they are just one of many top-position-snatching Google features. Google search engine results page features (SERP features) can take many different forms and shapes. In fact, according to SEMrush, there are over 20 different SERP features to keep in mind if you are using SEO as a growth strategy for your facility. 

While some of the features SEMrush monitors will not have a direct impact on an addiction treatment or mental health campaign, many of them will.

12 Actionable Ideas You Can Use To Put SERP Features To Work

6 Ideas That Are Completely Within Your Control

• Local Pack: verify your GoogleMyBusiness listing and get citations on as many of the major local directories as possible (more on this in tip no. 6) 
• Site Links: add links to your top resources and services pages in the footer of your website.
• Top Stories: Have your blog added to Google News. 
• Knowledge Panel: if your facility has a Wikipedia page, or if one of your executives is a published author, one of these may be available for you to claim. 
• Reviews: deploy schema markup in your site header files with star ratings and review counts from sources like the National Rehabs Directory, the fix, ChooseHelp, or Rehab.com.
• Twitter: publish your most valuable blog content and resources in your Twitter feed using keyword-rich hashtags at the end of each tweet. 

6 Ideas You Can Influence (But Google Controls)

• Featured Snippets: if you have a page that ranks in the top 5 of a search term with a featured snippet at the top, create a subheading that includes the keyword, then publish content that matches the featured snippet type, using the keyword phrase 2-3 times in your text. 
• People Also Ask and FAQ: answer the questions Google showcases in the People Also Ask box in an FAQ section on a top traffic page. 
• Image Pack and Image: optimize the file size and dimensions of your image files and utilize up to 100 characters of your alt tag for keyword-rich descriptions. 
• Featured Videos, Video Carousel, and Video: embed your YouTube videos on pages of your site that also rank well for terms with video carousels. 
• Instant Answer: provide calculations and short, simple to answer questions on your top-performing webpages. 
• Jobs: deploy schema markup in your site header files for the pages featuring any of your open job listings. Note that this only applies if you are hosting your job openings on your site. Platforms like Glassdoor and Indeed already do this for you.

6. Leverage Local SEO To Rank Where SAMHSA Can’t Be Featured

While SAMHSA will continue to dominate organic search results, they technically only have one physical location in Rockville, Maryland. As far as Google is concerned, SAMHSA can’t be featured in local SEO search results because they are not considered to be a provider of local treatment services. SAMHSA will always be your biggest competitor for traffic in the search engines, but one area Google is leaving open for you to own continues to be local SEO.

On desktop searches, a map listing with three facilities is included with nearly every top searched keyword phrase related to substance abuse and mental health services.

On mobile devices, the map takes over all of the SERP real estate above the fold. At a bare minimum, if you have not taken over ownership of your Google My Business listing, or verified your business with the following top local directories, opportunity is leaving you behind:

• Apple Maps
• Bing Local
• SAMHSA
• Yelp

If you already have your business confirmed on all five of the platforms listed above, you are off to a great start with maximizing your online presence in your local area. But you’ll want to take it further with local SEO as there are still as many as 22 other local directories we deem to have a “high” or “very high” citation value.

Because of the presence of the SAMHSA listing at the top of the search results, the fact that you want to reach your target audience on a local or national level will not matter – you’re going to want to leverage every ounce of opportunity local SEO has to offer. Don’t get left behind — local SEO needs to be a critical part of your drug rehab SEO strategy.

7. Go Hyperlocal

There are a lot of well-established websites in the substance abuse and mental health niche that have leveraged hyperlocal keyword searches very effectively over the years for their own addiction treatment marketing.

In fact, many of the most highly trafficked sites in this niche leverage creating a directory of treatment facilities and drug rehab centers as one of their main marketing tools to drive referrals to advertisers. Sites like SoberNation and Rehabs.com have done this for years and become so successful with this as a marketing strategy that they can now get you to pay them for traffic.

Because of how well sites like this perform in the SERPs, these types of directories can be a good source of both relevant referral traffic as well as qualified admissions leads. It can be tough to justify paying to be listed in a directory, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore these opportunities entirely.

Think of it this way — if you can justify paying to be part of your local chamber of commerce, you could probably justify paying to be listed in a directory that can help grow your admissions. Outside of becoming listed in rehab focused directories, you can also apply a hyperlocal approach to your website. If you know zip codes, names of popular suburban areas, or names of specific cities and towns within a dedicated drive radius of your facility, then you can leverage localized content to rank for some highly targeted long-tail keyword searches.

Want to go into more depth on hyperlocal digital marketing? Here’s a few blog posts worth your click. 

• What is Hyperlocal SEO and Why Should I Be Doing it Right Now?
• How You Can Use Hyperlocal Ad Campaigns

8. Revise Your Past (Then Optimize It For Your Future) In Addiction Treatment Marketing

Historical optimization is the practice of updating old content on your site and improving its SEO value for the present and future. Over the past few years, this tactic has become an incredibly valuable SEO play for facilities with a large archive of content.

To briefly summarize this tactic, find a blog post or article on your site that was published at least six months ago. Prioritize pages on your site that either:

1. Generate a lot of traffic, or
2. Convert into admission inquiries

Then refresh the content, improve the on-page SEO, add an author bio, and re-publish it with a more recent “updated” date.

Search engines reward webpages they can rely on being “there” when the crawl the internet. This tactic presents your facility with the opportunity to avoid writing about the same topics over and over again. Instead, it helps your website establish cornerstone pieces of content that will reliably provide your site with traffic from search engines. 

As an added bonus, historical optimization can help you establish your administrators and clinicians as thought leaders in the addiction and behavioral health industry.

Historical optimization in your addiction treatment marketing is a great way to get long term value out of content you published long ago.

9. Take Advantage of Question-Based Queries In Your Addiction Treatment Marketing

According to research compiled by Jumpshot and analyzed by Moz in March 2017, roughly 8% of Google searches are phrased as questions. With voice search only continuing to rise in popularity, the percentage of question-based searches are sure to grow accordingly.

Do you have an FAQ page on your facility’s website?

When you publish blog content, are you writing titles and subheadings in your posts in the form of a question? Take the time to answer both common and uncommon questions. Try to compile questions you may often get from admission prospects and their families about your treatment approaches, facilities, or warning signs that a loved one needs to know. There are two major benefits to taking this approach with your addiction treatment marketing strategy:

1. You will be building trust and helping inform people who need help but are not ready to call.
2. Your site will benefit from a larger number of entry points from keyword searches, lessening the impact that SAMHSA’s top positioning will take away from search traffic to your facility.

What questions are your admissions team, or your clinical staffers, uniquely qualified to answer? Give them a laptop and have them start writing!

10. Don’t Forget About Your Program Features In Your Addiction Treatment Marketing

Of the over 89,000+ keyword phrases where Google displays the SAMHSA National Helpline link in the top three results, above you will see just a small sample of the monetary worth of some of the terms, sorted by top monthly search volume estimates.* That’s a very small sampling of the data SEMrush has on rankings for the National Helpline page, but with a pretty quick glance, you will notice some trends across the keywords that Google is using to trigger this result.

• Different forms of addiction
• Someone researching reactions to substance abuse (withdrawal, side effects, etc.)
• Someone is looking to find/get help (AA, NA, rehab, etc.)

Now, in contrast to that, you may have noticed that keywords related to general program features were not in the above example. These days, no substance abuse or mental health facility is the same. Dig in to communicate what makes the approach of your recovery centers unique from other facilities.

3 Questions You Should Think About Answering In Your Content Marketing Plan For Your Rehabilitation Center

• Does your program take a mindfulness approach to relapse prevention?
• Do you leverage the outdoors as a therapy method?
• Does your staff have multiple advanced certifications or education credentials?

Whatever makes your facility stand out from the rest of the facilities out there, now is the time to capitalize on it. Make sure your site has dedicated pages related to those treatment programs and features and support those dedicated pages with press releases or blog post content. Optimize the dedicated pages for maximum search visibility by applying on-page SEO best practices and leverage link building strategies from the supporting content to heighten the importance of the dedicated pages to search engines.

With this addiction treatment marketing tactic, every page on your website can be an entry point to put you in touch with those in need of help.

11. Addiction Treatment Marketing Should Cater Content to Your Audience

In response to these developments in Google search results, a lot of digital marketing agencies are going to suggest you try to leverage content marketing strategies only with the intention of generating interest from top-tier publishers. The idea here is that getting coverage in front of a national audience should generate backlinks and a lot of impressions. The concept can also be referred to as viral marketing — because “going viral” is super easy, right?

To us, this feels like an expensive fool’s errand; unless, of course, the idea of a campaign with a large expense and little to no attributable ROI sounds like something your facility wants to try out.

Addiction treatment marketing shouldn’t be about more awareness of your facility. Instead, it should be about connecting with people who love and care for those who need your help.

5 Content Ideas To Help Establish A Better Connection With Those Who Need Your Help

Going with a “10X content” approach that will have an impact on the attention your brand receives and little else, the more sensible approach is to cater your content directly to your audience. Here are several alternatives to making “viral” content that could be better suited to get your facility highly-relevant traffic:

• Answering questions for the family members of potential admits
• Recapping research conducted in the industry that validates your approach to healing
• Sharing video testimonials from alumni who have dramatically improved their lives after release
• Providing helpful guides on niche topics related to attending a treatment facility, such as a legal term glossary
• Reviewing national and international news topics and explaining how they are directly impacting addiction and mental health treatment

For all types of people, it’s tough dealing with substance abuse and mental health. If you seek to be a resource for people by providing useful information at the right time, they will reach out when they need you the most. Don’t rely on occasional brand mentions in big publications with the hopes that people will remember you when the time is right.

12. Barnacle Your Brand To Top Ranking Content Publishers

Barnacle SEO is not a new strategy, but it can be a highly successful approach when situations like this occur. The term was coined by Will Scott of Search Influence about a decade ago and there was a must-watch Whiteboard Friday about it several years ago, too.

The idea behind Barnacle SEO for rehab centers as an addiction treatment marketing tactic is pretty straightforward – leverage the top rankings of other sites for your gain. Ever since April 2018, ranking for the top keywords in the substance abuse and mental health space became exponentially harder due to the update of SAMHSA’s National Helpline. Now, in addition to competing with other facilities and online publishers for top keyword rankings, getting them is almost impossible because of the injection of SAMHSA.

What can you do? Create content specifically on other sites that rank for your targeted keywords. Five of our favorite target domains to leverage for this strategy include:

• Medium
• Pinterest
• Quora
• Wikipedia
• YouTube

The value of links from these domains to help boost your search rankings is debatable. However, the referral traffic opportunity from all of them is great, and the frequency with which content on these sites ranks on the first page of Google results is high. While getting a Wikipedia page about your facility may be difficult, creating a profile and submitting content to all of these platforms should become a high priority online marketing strategy this year.

Closing Thoughts On Addiction Treatment Marketing Strategies

Many people are turning to Google to find answers to their troubles. With locations in Wheeling, WV, and Pittsburgh, PA, the team at DOM is well aware of the US’s opioid crisis. We are also sensitive to the fact that there is no “one size fits all” fix.

We think it’s a good thing that Google is trying to get people help when they need it from a neutral source. This is also not unfamiliar territory for Google. Back in November 2016, they made a similar change to the top of results for searches related to suicide.

But this change over the last two years does force substance abuse and mental health treatment facilities to shift. They can still use search engine marketing strategies to create opportunities for themselves. 

They just need to get more creative in order to provide care to the nearly 23 million Americans in need.

The top 12 ways we suggest facilities shift their addiction treatment marketing strategies are:

1. Become a LegitScript certified advertiser so your facility can run Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising
2. Extend the reach of your commercials and video content with YouTube advertising
3. Strategically tap into the near-limitless advertising opportunities in the Google Display Network 
4. Get listed in the SAMHSA Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator
5. Find keywords you already rank well for and structure your content for Featured Snippets
6. Maximize visibility in local SEO by completing and verifying any available citations
7. Create content on your site dedicated to hyperlocal communities that are in need of your services
8. Keep top-performing pages up to date by adding more text and updating visual content every three to six months 
9. Invest time in creating a comprehensive FAQ or writing blog posts to answer common questions
10. Optimize pages on your site for rankings around the unique features of your programs
11. Create content tailored to the families and individuals struggling with these issues
12. “Barnacle” content published by your facility to top publishing platforms for better exposure

Want to check out more of our actionable ideas from our Pittsburgh marketing firm to grow confidently online in the medical and health industry? Check out some of these blog posts below.

• Google Medic: How to SEO Proof Your Site in the Trust Authority Era
• How Do People Find Answers To Health Related Questions?
• How To Optimize Your Hospital for Local Search
• Healthcare Marketing Research & Survey Results

To get more information on this topic, contact us today for a free consultation or learn more about our status as a Google Premier Partner before you reach out.

The post 12 Marketing Plans For Your Rehab Center To Kickstart Its Growth (Updated March 2022) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

That magical time of the year has come around again. Yes, it is time to make your new year’s resolutions.

To help you get started, the talented team at DOM has put together our favorites for digital marketing.

Below, we’ve compiled 14 resolutions from our team of digital marketing professionals to help you improve your campaigns in the coming year.

New Year’s Resolutions 2022: The Digital Marketing Edition

1. Spend Less $

Check Your PPC Campaigns for Broad Keywords Today

From Nikki Powley, Director of Operations

Reviewing an account for broad match keywords is one of the first things I do when completing a Google Ads account audit. They are one of the biggest offenders in the wasted spend category.

There are three keyword match types: exact, phrase, and broad. Straight broad match keywords allow ads to show for your keyword and any variation of the keyword that Google believes could be similar.

For example, you add the keyword “shoes”. Your ad could display for searches of women’s shoes, tennis shoes, or even horseshoes.

If you want to reach a larger audience, but not horse owners, utilize the fourth match type (I know I said three, but stick with me). Modified broad keywords are created by adding a + before words. This requires a user’s search phrase to include a synonym of each word in the modified broad keyword. For example, +womens +shoes allows ads to trigger for variations of women’s shoes like ladies’ shoes, but ads will not show for unrelated terms like kid’s shoes or horseshoes.

Check out 8 more of my cost-saving PPC tips!

2. Save More $

Leverage SEO For Your Top Converting Search Queries In Google Ads

From Jonathan Bentz, Senior Digital Marketing Strategist

If you have been running a Google Ads campaign or any other paid search campaigns, then you can review your list of top search queries in the account and use that information to customize a results-oriented SEO strategy.

Here’s an actionable step by step process:

1. Download your list of top converting search queries from your advertising campaigns
2. Sort the list by the search queries with the highest volume of conversions
3. Improve your keyword rankings in organic search for the top converting queries by optimizing
   • Page title
   • Meta description
   • Content on the page
   • Image alt tagging
4. Search the other pages of your site with an “intext” search operator in Google to uncover keyword rich link opportunities.
   • Here’s a sample search query – site:directom.com intext:”Google Ads”.
     • This search will uncover mentions of your top converting queries inside the body of content across your entire domain.
   • Adding these internal links will improve the relevance of your page for the converting keyword, and reduce the likelihood that Google will consider another page on your site to be a better result.

Historically, studies have indicated a potential lift in clicks of as much as 53% when a brand appears in the top positions of paid and organic search. While those numbers may have changed some with Google’s current layout, the opportunity is still there for the taking to improve your conversions and traffic from organic search in 2020.

Launching a new online learning course as one of your new year’s resolutions? Here’s 20 ideas I’ve curated for how to promote a training program.

3. Lose Weight

Let Go Of Keywords You Love If They Aren’t Getting You Conversions

From Leland Reed, Senior Digital Advertising Strategist

Losing weight can be tough. Letting go of bad habits that are impeding your progress is one of the hardest steps to committing to weight loss. The same can be said about making changes to your PPC account.

You thought for sure that the keyword was going to work, right? You just needed to find the perfect combination of ad text and bidding. As the days and weeks go by, the keyword is getting plenty of impressions but no clicks. You know with a little more TLC, you can make it work.

If this sounds like you, maybe it is time to let go of that keyword and start fresh. Don’t be afraid to get rid of anything in your campaigns that are not working. By cutting out poor performing keywords, you can save money and time which will allow you to try new, exciting things in your account.

Is revitalizing your Google Shopping campaigns one of your marketing new year’s resolutions? Here’s 5 ways for you to do that!

4. Travel More

Take Advantage Of Every Feature In Your Google My Business Listing

From Stephanie Mahnken, Senior Client Success Manager

Throughout the last few years, Google My Business (GMB) has really ramped up the game for local businesses, making it easier than ever for you to get in front of local customers. This is a good thing as roughly 46% of all Google searches are seeking local information! Not to mention that “near me” or “close by” searches have grown by over 900% in the last two years.

And the best part? GMB is free!

Here’s a list of just a few of the new features added to GMB in the last few years:

• Google My Business Shortnames
  • An easy to remember URL that brings users directly to your business profile
    • Makes review solicitation much easier for small business owners
• Online Ordering Now Available for Restaurants
  • Google now owns the transaction
  • Multiple food delivery partners
• Google My Business Product Editor Expands to Most Categories
  • The Product Editor is for small- and medium-sized individual businesses
  • Don’t pass up this opportunity for free Google real estate! Get Creative!
• GMB Welcome Offers
  • A great way to thank new customers for following you on Google!
• Google My Business Messaging Feature: “Request a Quote” 
  • A sure-fire attention grabber in bright blue
  • Appears on mobile and desktop SERPs

• Service Area Business Updates
  • Limit of 20 service areas
    • Can include cities, counties, states, zip codes or metropolitan areas
  • SABs using a service area radius were automatically updated to the closest named areas above
• Google My Business Marketing Kit 
  • • Create images from existing customer reviews
    • Free posters & window clings for brick & mortar businesses

While it can be time-consuming, completing and updating your listing consistently is absolutely worth the effort.

Bonus tip: Google wants to show the best possible results to its users so remember to be thorough, honest, and don’t try to add a target keyword or geographical keyword phrase to your business name if they are not part of how customers would identify you!

Want to generate more visibility locally as part of your marketing new year’s resolutions? Here are 5 more local SEO tips you can learn from the pizza industry giant Papa John’s.

5. Grow Professionally

Look At Core Metrics Less And Focus On Long-Term Growth

From Dana Schumacher, Senior Digital Analyst

When you focus on increasing long-term growth rates, you are looking at the rate of change of core metrics over an extended period of time. Growth does not always mean an increase in total revenues, as that growth in revenue also depends on the size of your industry and the interest of your search queries over time.

Short-term clients should expect to see an increase in linear growth, while long-term clients can expect to see an increase in logarithmic growth.

Need to improve goal tracking on your own website as one of your marketing new year’s resolutions? Here’s a simple step-by-step guide I created for Tracking Buttons Using Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics so you can better monitor your progress this year.

6. Keep Your Resolutions

Tidy Up Your Ads

From Ryan Norman, Digital Advertising Account Manager

Get Ready for the Sunset of ETAs in Summer 2022

Take the leap and embrace Responsive Search Ads because the old standard—Expanded Text Ads—are going away.

Google has announced that you will no longer be able to create or edit Expanded Text Ads within standard search campaigns after June 30, 2022.

Any Expanded Text Ads that you currently have running (or create before the deadline) will continue to serve after June 30, 2022. You will also maintain the ability to pause and resume Expanded Text Ads.

Responsive Search Ads will, therefore, become the primary ad type available to advertisers in search campaigns.

If you don’t have the time, inclination, or people to run your own A/B tests of ad messaging, then RSAs are a boon. You can give Google some headlines and descriptions, and then sit back and relax while the algorithm tries to sort out what’s the best-performing ad copy.

Read our blog to understand why RSAs matter more than ever.

7. Learn Something New

Try Coding!

From Jim Foreman, Senior Content Specialist

The web is still where we do most of our activity on the ol’ internet, and as long as we digital marketers have to make content for it, we’re going to be doing it with our old friend HTML. It might be on version 5 now, but it’s not going anywhere. You’ll be surprised how a little snippet of code can save your day. If that’s not enough to convince you to learn HTML, check out my whole dang blog post about it.

Coding HTML is one of the easiest entry-level coding languages you can learn, and you’ll be able to see the results instantly in your browser. Who knows, it might even make you so excited about coding that you’ll start looking into other languages, like CSS or Javascript.

8. Be Creative

Create Videos To Show Off Your Business Or Brand

From Carl Zappa, Digital Advertising Account Coordinator

It’s never too late to start being creative. Make 2022 the year your business stands out with a short video that shows who you are.

Why don’t you make more than one? Show what you sell and why your product is different from the others!

Then, test TrueView videos as a part of your PPC strategy. With video advertising, you choose the audience that (might be/is) interested in your product and you decide how much you want to pay. You can run different video formats and lengths. Your video will appear on YouTube and throughout the Google Display Network.

Doing more online video advertising as one of your marketing new year’s resolutions? Let us help you settle the great debate between YouTube and Vimeo for your video hosting needs.

9. Enjoy Life To The Fullest

Get The Most Out Of Your PPC Campaigns With Some CRO

From Mike Criswell, Digital Advertising Strategist

This year, ensure that you are getting the most out of your PPC campaigns by doing a bit of conversion rate optimization.

A great start would be to run A/B or multivariate tests on your PPC landing pages. Test your current landing pages against as many variants as you can to ensure that your landing pages are top-notch and getting you as many conversions as possible.

Also, don’t forget that just because you get improvements with one variant does not mean that there is no better option. Always keep testing!

Just getting started with CRO but want to make this one of your marketing new year’s resolutions? Check out my beginner’s guide here.

10. Become More Engaged With Clients

Gain More Best Friends

From Robbie Netz, Senior Client Success Manager

During this past year, I’ve learned it’s more important to develop meaningful relationships with people. I love the friendships we’ve built with clients, but I want to continue to help them grow. Here are some important takeaways I’ve learned:

1. Treat your client as a friend. I love getting to know what everyone does on the weekend, how their pets are, etc. It allows us to connect on a deeper level so everyone looks forward to our calls vs. “ugh, I have to go speak to that agency again.”
2. Brainstorm out-of-the-box ideas together. It’s always fun to chat about ways to meet their goals on campaigns, but even better to discuss new ideas….like TikTok!
3. Work together as if you’re in the same building. Even though we’re sometimes halfway across the globe, it’s great to use tools to work together as a team. Some of the best projects have been when we communicate via Slack or message one another back & forth in Asana.

Is improving the response of your consumers to your brand one of your marketing new year’s resolutions? Click here for a comprehensive list of email marketing strategies.

11. Spread Your Wings

New Year, New Advertising Platform.

From Adriana Parra González, Digital Advertising Account Manager
If you are looking for a new tool to advertise this year, LinkedIn Advertising could be for you.

This platform works well when you are looking for other businesses to buy your service or product from you. It lets you target by job titles, company size, job function, industry, and more.

Do you have content pieces and don’t know what to do with them? What if you use that content in exchange for the lead information?

LinkedIn Advertising is growing over time and it could be a great way to capture the leads for your business in 2021.

12. Keep Your Eyes On the Prize

Conversions Matter Most

From Carla Waters, Digital Marketing Coordinator

While optimizing landing pages or blog posts for keyword targets, I often focus on the keyword by creating a new title, meta description, headers, internal links, adding semantic terms to the copy, adding FAQs throughout, and CTAs. But does this page I’m working on convert? I need to continue to ask myself this question.

This year, I want to focus on the user, their navigation path, and if I have accomplished clear next steps to create a conversion while improving the on-page SEO.

13. Trust Your Instincts, But Confirm With Data

Lose That Gut!

From Jason Ohsie, Strategy and Analysis Department Manager

The days where gut-feeling marketing dominated the competitive landscape have long since passed by the wayside. No matter your niche, if your company is relying solely on the direction of your company’s HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion) without regard to a strategic, data-driven approach then your company is running at a significant disadvantage versus the top players in your respective industry.

Much like diet and exercise, a commitment to this approach requires discipline in the following ways:

• Commit to properly tracking and measuring your marketing efforts
• Understand what KPIs matter for your business
• Focus on the mission-critical aspects of your marketing efforts that drive the most impact
• Listen to both your existing customers and your biggest haters
• Be open-minded about what the data tells you

A failure to do this often manifests itself in the following ways:

1. A website redesign that looks aesthetically pleasing but has resulted in markedly lower conversion rates.
2. A sudden drop in organic traffic to your website without an understanding of why this change occurred and how much this has impacted sales.
3. Wasting ad spend on PPC campaigns that just won’t convert properly.
4. Stagnant growth or loss of market share despite an investment into marketing.
5. B2B marketing efforts that have resulted in poor lead quality.
6. Top-of-Funnel marketing efforts like blogs and webinars that fail to gain traction or engagement.
7. Poor ROI overall in digital marketing channels.

Sound familiar? A strategic approach to digital marketing that is not rooted in data can result in failure for even experienced marketing professionals. Proper benchmarking and conversion tracking, clearly defining the KPIs that actually matter for your business, rigorous testing, and the proper mentality should provide the framework for your marketing efforts.

14. Make Sure You’re Looking Your Best

Short Animations Are Excellent Attention-Grabbing Tools

From Matt Merlino, Graphic Designer

If we’ve learned anything throughout the course of the ongoing pandemic it’s that it is perfectly acceptable to sit around and do nothing in our free time. While there’s not necessarily anything wrong with staying still, we should at least try to get up and move after that streaming service continues to prod if we are “still watching.” The same can be said for your next set of creative pieces!

When creating your next set of ads, consider testing some animated HTML5 assets against some of those static ads. A subtle bit of motion is a great attention-grabbing technique to drive more clicks.

Just make sure not to go too crazy or all of that sudden movement could be painful. You’ll want to keep basic design principles in mind to refrain from cluttering your ads and hurting your conversion rates.

• Refrain from Hard-to-Read Fonts
• Construct a Strong CTA that Directly Relates to Your Imagery
• Keep Brand Colors Prominent and Consistent
• Use White (Blank) Space to Your Advantage

It may seem daunting, but you can do it! Push the text in, make the button pulse, or have some fun with the imagery. Whatever you choose to do, add that extra movement to captivate your viewers and take your next campaign to new heights.

Now Go Get Started!

This list doesn’t only include tactics you can use as a New Year’s resolution, almost all of them can be implemented today and included in your digital marketing strategy at any time of the year! You can also check out the rest of our blog for more tips and tricks. To get more information on this topic, contact us today for a free consultation or learn more about our status as a Google Premier Partner before you reach out.

From the entire DOM team, Happy New Year and best wishes for a successful 2022!

The post New Year’s Resolutions: Digital Marketing Edition (Updated For 2022) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Google and other search engines will continue to deny their search algorithm factors put any serious weight on social media.

However, there is a lot of correlating data which suggests they influence one another.

There are several schools of opposing thought surrounding how much social media affects SEO. The two affect one another both directly and indirectly with specific impacts on content marketing and local SEO.

These social platforms speak to the masses, and they must be taken seriously when it comes to optimizing your brand online.

Social Media – The New Standard for Businesses

Social media has become an integral part of our lives as well as one of the primary ways people interact with the world’s largest brands.

The rise of the Internet has birthed a number of various ways to connect — most commonly through written blogs, online forums, visual media sharing sites and social media.

At this point with social media nearing peak saturation across the web, the number of social media profiles brands can leverage is huge.

From business-focused platforms like LinkedIn to procrastination-inducing sites like Reddit, everyone can find a number of communities that speak to their interests and philosophies. The Internet has given the world a new method to connect through the many varieties of social media.  

Social media has given large and small businesses a way to connect with their audiences beyond selling products or promoting their services. For many companies, social media has become an effective outlet for public relations.

Take for example the disturbing trend of late 2017 where teenagers would film themselves eating Tide detergent pods and post to social media.

To address the viral trend, Tide sent out several tweets discussing the risks of consuming their product with just a hint of humor behind them.

Only things that should be on today’s menu: nachos, wings and plenty of team spirit. Save your Tide PODS® for the stains later.

— Tide (@tide) February 4, 2018

What should Tide PODs be used for? DOING LAUNDRY. Nothing else.

Eating a Tide POD is a BAD IDEA, and we asked our friend @robgronkowski to help explain. pic.twitter.com/0JnFdhnsWZ

— Tide (@tide) January 12, 2018

Living in a connected world has become second nature for smartphone users. Up until now, we’ve known how important social media has become, but less about its impact on other marketing channels like organic search.

The Link Between SEO & Social Media

In large part, Google has said that it does not factor social media data into its algorithm for search results. However, many SEOs posit that the more your brand name or keyword shows up across the Internet, it will influence the algorithm to rank higher.

When it comes to judging how Google values links on social media, the answer is quite complicated. We only have these two videos from Matt Cutts at Google, which are from 2009 and 2014 respectively.

Between all the back and forth, we come back to the “correlation does not mean causation” argument.

Your social shares and profile links don’t provide much value in the way of “link juice,” yet they will ultimately help your SEO efforts in other ways.

Here’s a look at a few ways SEO and social media influence one another.

Increase Link Awareness

Generally, sharing your links on social won’t bring you higher rankings, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t increase awareness for your content.

Think of it this way: Google doesn’t necessarily value links from social media, but real people will. In many ways, a social media platform can act as a search engine of its own, with users who more and more do their research for products and services by looking at a business’s Instagram feed or Twitter content. 

The more people clicking on a link to your content means a stronger likelihood for them to share it on their profiles or potentially their websites.

Click through rates from the SERPs are thought to have an impact on your rankings which means:

More clicks = more SEO value

A common question that comes up is whether the same logic can be applied to referral traffic generated from social media.

It is unclear whether increased social traffic is calculated by search engines since there is little data that supports this idea. Increased social traffic should instead suggest something more insightful about the quality of content being shared.

Increasing Brand Awareness, Credibility

The more active your business is on social media, the higher chances you have of engaging with new users and potential customers.

Being active on social media should naturally accrue more brand mentions. Increased mentions can, in turn, have a positive impact on how search engines perceive the value and trustworthiness of your brand.

The more people see your brand as an authoritative voice, the higher the chance of them clicking when they come across your content.

With any business profile, you can grow an audience on social platforms and establish your brand as an authority within any industry or category relevant to your business. Consistent activity on social media provides a signal to search engines and users that your brand is a credible source for your services or goods.

Natural Distribution Method for Your Content

Social media is a natural vehicle for sharing your content and pushing it out into the world.

With so many marketers in agreement about the vital role content plays in a broader SEO strategy, the best content in the world is useless if no one consumes it.

Along with email, sharing original content via social media is a primary method of distribution for most businesses. When more people like and share a brand’s original content, this positive feedback proves how valuable a piece is or how it’s resonating with followers.

Content which performs well on social media should also mean it is good content for users in the search engines. But many still debate over whether social traffic, shares, and engagement have any sort of impact in search algorithms.

Another critical aspect of content distribution is whether a site is scoring new backlinks from external, non-social media websites.

Google and SEO professionals all state backlinks have a tremendous influence on a website’s SEO performance.

Proper content distribution aims to drive traffic while also increasing the chances other sites provide backlinks without needing a dedicated link building outreach campaign.

Increasing In-Person and Web Traffic

For brands concerned with local exposure, social media offers an important way to optimize for local SEO.

When examining a brand’s local SEO profile, social media profiles, local business directories, and customer review aggregators provide contextual information about these businesses to search engines.

Most often, search engines try to make sure that certain information across the web is consistent when trying to deliver results for local queries.

What is this information exactly?

Many SEOs refer to this as NAP consistency –

N ame
A ddress
P hone number

In addition to checking NAP data consistency across the web, search engines also check for things related to links, domains, languages, boilerplate descriptions, relevant industries, services, etc.

In many cases, businesses don’t have the resources or tools to manage every single local listing. At a minimum though, businesses should revisit every social profile they have access to and ensure their NAP information is locked down.

When optimized, social profiles have the power to direct foot traffic to your physical location and traffic to your website.

The more often your address is listed online, the more likely it will show up in the map results and Knowledge Graph for local keywords.

Local Pack Results

Knowledge Graph

By creating and claiming multiple profiles pointing toward your permanent location and phone number, this will increase your business’s rankings within local search results for both your website and social profiles.

SEO and Social Media in Tandem

Because of the benefits, there’s little reason why marketers shouldn’t be using social media and SEO to complement one another. With a rise in the prominence of voice search, optimizing your local footprint and creating valuable content with users in mind will be just as important in the future as it is now.

Tips for Maintaining Social Profiles

1. Define your target audience and communicate with them. This establishes your brand within your category as an authority and targets those who would already have had an interest in what you have to offer instead of spending time trying to reach everyone.
2. Consider subscribing to third-party software — we recommend something like Agorapulse or Buffer —  to manage all accounts in one platform. This will save you hours of time because it will syndicate all of your posts into one place and even schedule them out ahead of time, so you only have to put attention towards it when you have the time to do so. This will help immensely with content distribution if you’re planning on creating new content anytime soon.
3. Set up profiles so that your brand voice isn’t confusing between the platforms. Messaging consistency is a huge concept to keep in mind not just on social media, but anywhere else someone will have an interaction with your brand. Establish a brand voice and rules for how to post on each platform. People gravitate towards different platforms for their own reasons, so learn to speak the language.
4. Don’t just focus on promoting your goods or services – promote the whole business (employees, functions, etc.). People want to engage with your brand – especially if you aren’t constantly trying to sell them on something. Fun pictures of the people behind the scenes give a human face to any brand.
5. Get your local NAP straight. If your business name, address, and phone numbers are not consistent across wherever your business is listed, you aren’t doing yourself any favors in the eyes of the search engines. Besides, this is another opportunity to ensure new users have a consistent experience if they want to learn more about your brand or if they want to visit your location in-person.  
6. Take advantage of both free and paid content distribution. Every original piece of content your business generates should be pushed out across all of your social media profiles. But as social media is slowly moving towards a “pay-to-play” model, don’t be afraid to invest a few dollars in promoting your best pieces of content.

If you’d like to learn how we can help you leverage your social media and SEO in ways you might not have considered, get in touch.

The post How Important Are Social Media Profiles to SEO Anyway? (Updated 2020) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

And I don’t just mean about how Google’s algorithm works or how to understand which metrics really matter. 

(BTW, if you’re in this boat check out our free CMO’s Cheat Sheet to Understanding SEO Metrics.)

No, what I’m referring to is the agency selection process. Universally, everyone hates it.  Why? Let me count the ways:

Here are just a few reasons why choosing an SEO agency can feel like an awful chore:

• Our industry is filled with charlatans.
• You know maybe some basic points of how SEO works, but not well enough to feel like you can judge plans or experience accurately.
• Most agencies don’t explain to you how SEO works in any kind of substantive way or what they’ll actually do for you in detail.  “Just trust us.”
• Several agencies say they specialize in one area, such as technical SEO and that that aspect is most important.
• Even when you do get details of what agencies will do for you, they’re all over the map.
• Pricing and terms of contract vary.
• SEO is critical to your company’s success, which just heightens the pressure.
• When taken altogether, it doesn’t just feel like comparing apples to oranges; it’s like apples to shady underworld mobsters.

I could go on, but Yogi doesn’t have a big enough flower.

Doing Your Homework: How to Ensure the Right SEO Agency Fit

Let me let you in on a secret—there’s no perfect agency for every company.  

We’re not a match for every business, and I’m kinda biased.

So how do you go about evaluating the right fit for you? Start by finding answers to the following questions.

Know Your Goals

What do you want to accomplish with SEO?  

Are you looking for exponential traffic growth?  

Top rankings on important keywords?  

Recovery from a poor site migration?

Lay out your goals with as much definition as you can muster. Bonus points if you can name specific metrics you want to hit (e.g., 15% increase in organic conversions; 20% organic traffic increase YoY).  

If you don’t feel you’re able to define specific metrics, it’s OK.  The right agency ought to be able to work with you to determine realistic goals for your specific situation.  

Understand What You’re Up Against

Speaking of your situation—what is realistic for you?  

A 10% YoY increase for a long-established, well-optimized site in a competitive industry might be fantastic, while a 30% MoM increase for a new site with virtually no traffic to speak of might be awful.

You should know—or find out—the following:

• How old is your site?
• Geographically, where do you want to show?
• What keywords are most important to you?  How much are they searched for? How competitive are they?  How do you rank on them and who ranks ahead of you?
• Are there technical site issues holding your SEO back?
• What kind of trust signals have you built up (e.g., backlinks), especially compared to your competitors?
• Do you have engaging content?  Not as in “my mom reads all my blog posts.”  More along the lines of Google Search Console and analytics data showing low bounce rates, multiple pages per visit, etc.
• Have you ever had any Google penalties or past SEO efforts that could be hurting you today?

You can also request an SEO audit to cover some or all of the above and more from an SEO agency.  Some are free, and some cost money, but many agencies will offer these audits without requiring you to sign a full-service contract.

With this knowledge, you’re ready to start researching agencies.

Bare Minimum SEO Agency Requirements

All agencies will have their unique positioning and how they approach SEO.  But any legitimate agency needs to have the following. Think of this as your “Stop! Do Not Pass Go” moment.

“Hey Kids!  It’s Digital Marketing Board Game Night.  Kids. Kids?”

• Longevity: Digital marketing agencies come and go all the time, so it matters when an online marketing agency stays in business for more than five years. Even better is if you’re able to find an agency that’s been executing on SEO campaigns since the early days of Google (think 10+ years).
• Size: How big is your agency?  Is it a two-person shop where a vacation or unexpected illness stops everything?  Or a behemoth where your account gets the ‘C’ team working on it? Try to get a feel for how equipped an agency is to carry out what they’ve promised.
• Process: Many agencies approach SEO differently.  The best ones have carefully created their own process to account for every single step of the way, including potential bumps in the road.
• Account Manager: Another important minimum requirement is whether or not your agency will provide a dedicated account manager. This person ordinarily serve as your primary point-of-contact (POC), and they should have a comprehensive understanding of every aspect of your campaign, coordinating with their team members accordingly. Account managers are there to serve you and should make themselves available to answer questions or provide insights with reasonable turnaround times.
• Team: In addition to having an account manager, ask about backup contacts at the agency.  Bonus points if you will have a dedicated backup who is knowledgeable of your account. You may want to know other team members who will be working on your account as well.
• Experience: Selecting the right SEO agency should always involve evaluating their experience, but there are different approaches in this regard. You could choose an agency that has demonstrated proven results in your industry or similar vertical. On the flip side, you could go the opposite way and seek out an agency that has produced results in other industries, bringing a fresh perspective to shake things up with newer tactics.
• Updates & Reporting: No matter where you turn, reporting on performance is always a bare minimum. However, run-of-the-mill or mediocre agencies fail at consistent communication and thorough analysis. What you don’t want is an agency that creates a strategy and lets your SEO campaign run on auto-pilot indefinitely without recurring discussion.
• Clarity: Your agency of choice may be the expert on SEO, but you may not be. Companies turn to agencies either because they don’t have the bandwidth to do it on their own, or they want to trust a team of experienced individuals who are the experts. You’re relying on their expertise but never settle for an agency that doesn’t do what it takes to make everything easy to understand. You need total transparency and clarity.

If you’re not 100% sure about any of the above requirements, move onto the next agency.

Getting the Right Fit

The must-haves listed above will help you weed out unqualified agencies. Now you want to find the best fit for you from the many shops that do check off all those boxes.

How do you make sure if you’re Officer Trainee Hightower you don’t get a Citroën?  Think about the following.

(Consider this reference our test of which side of the age-40 line you fall)

• The Right Size: Depending on what your needs are, this consideration needs a “Goldilocks” approach—not too big, and not too small. Small agencies are better equipped to provide more hands-on client experience, but the quality of work may be lower and you may be stuck if a key person becomes unavailable. On the other hand, a very large agency can get results but overlook offering a human touch in their communication and are less flexible in trying new things (not to mention a considerably heftier price tag).
• Matching Your Needs: A crucial consideration; your needs are almost always dictated by your overall goals. Do you already have content or do you need a partner to set strategy and deliver content on a regular basis? Is there some other effort you need more comprehensive help with, such as link building or lead generation?
• Desired Communication Intervals: The right SEO agency should be flexible enough to accommodate how you want to communicate and how often. Whether you want weekly email touchpoints, bi-weekly phone calls, or monthly in-person meetings, try to get a feel for what’s important to you. Bonus tip: The more engaged you are with your SEO agency, the more you’ll get out of your relationship with them.
• Good Rapport with Your POC: Human beings are highly social creatures, and it’s OK to be selective about who you work with. It always helps when you have a good rapport with your designated POC. (And if you ever find that you don’t have a good relationship with your POC after signing, don’t be shy about asking for a new one.)

The Contract Offer

The actual contract is key. Knowing and understanding what’s involved allows you the best chance of comparing apples to apples, or at least pears.   

Look for:

• Services: You should know specifically what you’re getting, what won’t be done within the scope of the campaign. Also, understand what you’ll be expected to do or approve.
• Length: Many agencies will try to lock you in for extended periods, so before moving forward, take a hard look at the commitment. <cough>Some agencies even offer month-to-month contracts.<cough>
• Terms: The fine print can be a killer if you aren’t careful. Always ask about anything where you’re unsure.
• Pricing: Of course, pricing is another really big concern as there’s a huge range and even different pricing models. Be sure to ask about additional fees which may not be covered in your contract.  I leave this point last as it really should be the final consideration, assuming the agency is within the range of what you can afford. Go for your best fit – not the cheapest or the most expensive.

As a final note, I want to bring up clarity again. If you don’t 100% understand what everything in the contract means, ASK! It’s okay to get answers verbally so you can have a conversation around it, but for any key features, make sure to get things in writing. It’s up to you if you feel more comfortable with a revised contract or an email representing the agency’s position.

Hope you find this guide useful.  Happy SEO agency hunting!

The post This Process Sucks! How to Choose the Right SEO Agency with the Least Loss of Hair appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

They might not be doing the same thing you do, but they all want the same hard-earned dollars you want for your business.

There are different kinds of competitors, and here’s how you might identify direct, one-to-one competition:

• Local company at networking events that has their own version of your business—Competitor!
• Regional cash cow with a product/service similar to yours—Competitor!
• National conglomerate with top-of-mind awareness, spending millions on TV ads—Competitor!

In the real world, identifying competitors is a straightforward pursuit. Because the identification of your real-world competitors is easy, benchmarking against them for advertising and marketing solutions also becomes a pretty simple task.

• They attend networking events? We need to attend networking events!
• They have a more diversified service offering than we do? We need to add more value!
• They advertise on TV? Let’s do a commercial!

In digital marketing campaigns, however, your competition is more difficult to define. Which makes benchmarking against them a far more difficult challenge.

Such a task is not impossible with the right mindset and appropriate tools.

In this post, we’ll cover four ways you can do your own competitor benchmarking with several free tools. The first step is identifying your digital competitors.

How to Identify Online Competitors

As eluded to previously, identifying competitors in the real world is a pretty cut and dry proposition.

On the web, however, pinpointing your competitors is a far more complex endeavor.

The business world doesn’t dictate your competitors – search engines do.

Many of our clients are surprised to learn who they actually compete against online. Consider the below search engine results page (SERP) for the keyword phrase “furniture paint”:

For a furniture paint retailer interested in ranking on the first page of Google for that keyword phrase (searched for about 40,500 times per month), they have to compete against:

• Two pages from Valspar, a leading paint manufacturer (boasting a $4.1 billion revenue in 2017)
• Home Depot & Lowes — retail giants in the home improvement DIY market, ranked no. 23 & 40 respectively on the 2017 Fortune 500  
• Two extremely reputable online publishers — the DIY Network & Apartment Therapy

Looking at the above example, it’s important to keep in mind that there will be some websites which will be very difficult to compete against.

Ubiquitous web giants like Wikipedia and Amazon dominate many keyword phrases, so you may not want to qualify these kinds of sites as your “competition.”

Check out this simple process you can use to identify your online competitors:

1. Perform a few manual keyword searches for phrases you want your products, services, or content to rank for in search results. For a good survey, do anywhere from three to ten searches.
2. Create a spreadsheet documenting all of the results on the first page of Google for each keyword phrase.
3. Tally how many times various domains show up on the first page of Google for those searches.
4. Sort your tallied list in descending order.

If you’re interested in checking out a sample of how this process might look, we created this Google Spreadsheet.

Once you have taken the steps above to identify your online competitors, you can officially start benchmarking your site against them.

While we use a proprietary process and advanced tools for creating competitor benchmarks, we’ve included several web tools and Chrome extensions you can use for free where available.

Below are four tactics we use to benchmark against competitors for our clients.

Competitor Benchmarking Tactic No. 1: Keyword Gap Analysis

After identifying your online competition, one of the easiest ways to benchmark your site against theirs is to run a keyword gap analysis.

Try to compare your domain against your competitors to find what phrases your sites have in common, and how many ranking positions separate you.

Compile your findings and check in from time to time, taking note of any changes that happen.

An analysis like this can possibly reveal untapped opportunities regarding keywords that are unique to your competitors.

Once you have this information compiled, benchmark how many keywords you have in common and the number of ranking positions separating your sites.

As you review your progress on a regular basis (monthly or quarterly is fine), you will want to see growth in the number of keyword phrases in common and a decrease in the number of ranking positions separating your sites.

Here is a free tool from The HOTH.com you can try if you want to see some results of your own.

Competitor Benchmarking Tactic No. 2: Backlink Gap Analysis

Similar to a keyword gap analysis, a backlink gap analysis can be a great way to benchmark your site against your competitors.

In a backlink gap analysis, you are analyzing the backlink profile of your website against your competitors.

This can help you discover newer backlink opportunities, which can improve your ranking signals for keyword searches and create new sources of referral traffic.

Primarily for SEO campaigns looking to improve rankings in the standard SERPs, local businesses could also leverage this backlink analysis tactic to improve upon their local link building strategy.

In the interest of using backlink gap analysis as a way to benchmark against your competitors, compile the total referring domains linking to your site against your competitors.

As you review your progress (again, monthly or quarterly is fine), you should expect to see the total number of referring domains your site has grown at a similar rate to that of your competitors. In addition, the total number of domains you have listed as untapped should go down.

This analysis will be really difficult to accomplish without leveraging a premium tool like Ahrefs, Majestic, MOZ or SEMrush. You may want to consider getting a subscription to one of these tools or partnering with someone who has extensive experience with them.

Competitor Benchmarking Tactic No. 3: Content Audits

Performing a content audit is a very time-intensive process, whether you are auditing your site or benchmarking against your competition.

With that said, a content audit can have major implications for SEO campaigns.

To get started, select parts of your website and the website of your competitor that are common.

Blogs are an easy place to get started, but if you don’t have a blog, resource libraries or customer success forums are also great examples.

If your content shares a similar structure or purpose to that of your competition, start there.  

In a content audit, try to answer the following questions to get a baseline for your benchmark:

• What content ranks the best for them?
• What content do they have that gets the most engagement on social media?
• What topics are they writing about that we are not? Are these topics applicable to us?
• What topics do they cover extensively? How can we catch up?
• What content do we have in common? Is their content more comprehensive? Is their content more recently updated?

Because of the large undertaking that content audits require, we suggest doing these quarterly.

Try looking at tangible metrics like the total number of blog posts published or social engagement received on similar posts versus your competitor.

Alternatively, you could also try to identify patterns in their content plans. This can include observing how often they are posting, how regularly they are updating old content, etc. You can then take these finding to adjust your own content strategy.

As mentioned before, this is a very manual process to do well even if you have premium tools. There are several free auditing tools out there, and many of them simply review the SEO metrics for a given page of content.

To do this right, you will need to make a concerted effort on your own or consult with someone who has done this before.  

Competitor Benchmarking Tactic No. 4: Tech Stack Comparison

There’s no question that you can complete the above benchmarking tactics and then successfully start taking traffic away from your competition.

So, by now you’re ready to dive in, right?

The last question you need to ask yourself — is your site actually ready to compete with your competitors to convert that traffic into new business?

Specifically, your website needs to leverage the right technology in order to support your online growth goals. The technology behind your website—often referred to as a tech or technology stack — can either help or hurt your chances of besting your competitors online.

There are a ton of tools out there to compare your website’s tech stack against your competitors, and you will likely need one to benchmark yourself against your competition. When you make a tech stack comparison, focus on the reports related to the following areas:

• Advertising
• Analytics and Tracking
• Content Management System
• Widgets

A few questions that you’ll want to find the answers to —

• What tools are your competition using that you are not?
• How easily can you deploy the tools you need to level up?
• What tools do you have in common?
• How realistic is it for you to utilize everything in your arsenal to make the most of the traffic you receive?

Depending on the results of your tech stack comparison, you may or may not have to put considerable resources down to catch up with your competitors.

While this comparison is a valuable part of benchmarking yourself against your competition, it is probably best to perform this audit once, maybe twice per year at the most.

Tons of tools exist that compare website tech stacks — here are three good ones we recommend.

All of them are Chrome Extensions – BuiltWith, Wappalyzer, and WordPress Themes/Plugins Detector.

Test them out, figure out which one works the best for you, and start analyzing how you can get the most out of every visit you acquire.

Final Thoughts On Benchmarking Against Your Competitors

If you are just getting started with digital marketing, or if you are trying to revive your digital marketing efforts, benchmarking against the top companies in your niche is going to be a critical first step towards success.

To confidently complete a competitor benchmarking analysis for your digital marketing campaigns:

1. Make sure you know who the right competitors are for your business by identifying the people you compete with in real life AND in digital life.
2. Leverage gap analysis reports for keywords and backlinks to find out what opportunities you are missing out on so that your competitor stops eating your lunch.
3. Audit your content to make sure you have informational assets on your site that your new business targets actually want to consume.
4. Arm yourself with a tech stack that will allow you to capitalize on the increased traffic these tactics will bring to your site.

There are several tools out there for free that can help you do specific pieces of your competitor benchmarking.

You’ll either want to invest in premium tools or partnering with an agency or consultant who has experience analyzing how businesses like yours stack up.

If you’re interested in learning how you can drive better results with search engine marketing, schedule a digital marketing consultation to see how you stack up against your competition.

The post Online Competitor Benchmarking: How to Stop Competitors from Eating Your Lunch appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

You may be wondering if and to what extent you will be affected by this rollout. There are a few things website owners can do to determine whether their site is mobile-friendly, understand the extent of potential repercussions, and then prioritize any needed changes. Here’s our breakdown of the different ways to tell if your website will survive the continued roll-out of Google’s mobile-first index.

Steps to Analyze your Site’s Mobile Usability

The entire reason behind Google’s push for this change to search is because Google has been a pioneer in the realm of making the Internet a friendlier place for users on mobile devices. Mobile traffic doesn’t seem to be tapering off anytime soon, so site owners need to prepare for the worst if their site is not designed to satisfy mobile users in addition to traffic from desktops.

Many websites have already been acknowledging their need to be mobile-friendly, but some still have yet to catch up. When it comes to judging whether or not a website will be negatively impacted by the new mobile-first index, the most important place to start is by understanding a site’s relative mobile usability. These steps will go a long in way in helping you analyze your site:

1. Open your website on a mobile device

This may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how many barriers to customer conversion on mobile sites can be discovered by simply opening your phone and clicking around a bit.

2. Analyze mobile vs. desktop traffic

First things first — if you don’t have Google Analytics or another website analytics solution integrated with your site, you need to get that done ASAP. If you’re worried about what that involves or don’t feel equipped to do it yourself, let us know and we’d be pleased to talk with you to help figure out your options.  

If you already have traffic data at your disposal, then you’ll want to take note of what traffic to your website looks like. Desktop traffic from search that is significantly higher than mobile traffic from search can sometimes be a signal for issues with the mobile version of your site. Note: Latent independent variables can have strong effects in some verticals, so this does not always hold true. For example, you could see desktop conversions and acquisition metrics to be skewed toward mobile on B2C ecommerce sites where average order value is over $150.

You can dive slightly deeper by viewing organic search acquisition by device by following this path:

•        Analytics > Mobile > Overview  
•        Select Medium from the secondary dimension dropdown.

3. Test for responsive design

Test whether your website has a responsive design by opening your site in Google Chrome and pressing Control+Shift+J (Command+Option+J for Mac users) to bring up the Chrome Developer Tools console panel. Then click CTRL+SHIFT+M to toggle the device toolbar. You will see a toolbar appear at the top of your chrome window that looks like this:

This toolbar allows you to see your website as it would appear on various devices. You can also select responsive from the dropdown and enter a custom width and height.

4. Check mobile usability in Google Search Console

Open Google Search Console and go to the mobile usability section. Here you will see mobile usability errors that have been detected by Googlebot. What Google tells Search Console users:

“Websites with mobile usability issues may not rank as well in mobile search results.”

This is a very useful tool for testing whether a page on your website is mobile-friendly according to Google’s own metrics. You may also find it helpful to view Google’s developer documentation/guidelines for mobile site creation.

Barriers to Enhanced Mobile Usability

The following is a list of the most frequent errors that we find during the initial screening process for our new clients.

Rendering flash

This technology is rarely supported/leveraged by mobile browsers and should generally be avoided if possible. From an SEO perspective, this is an antiquated technology.

Small font size

We often see small font sizes in cases where sites have taken the time to define a default viewport width but have not implemented dynamic content scaling based on device size. Defining a viewport allows your website to define the outer limits of your page design. Without conveying this information through the meta viewport tag you are risking having content that displays off-screen.

Element padding

Some people have small phones and fat fingers! Keep these people in mind when designing your website and be sure to include adequate spacing between touch elements.

Fixed width viewport

One of the most important concepts for making a site mobile-friendly is responsive design. Users are going to access your website via a number of devices that will have varying screen sizes. When a site has correctly implemented responsive design, content will be dynamically scaled using a viewport width scale where necessary.

Off-screen content

It’s no secret that the dimensions of mobile device screens are smaller than desktop monitors. If your code does not account for this variation in screen pixel variability by using dynamic sizing, users may not be able to view some content because it is located outside of their viewport.

Subdomain configuration

While Google has declared it has no preference for mobile subdomains versus primary domains in the rankings, we have seen a large number of sites penalized for incorrectly implementing this method of mobile optimization. We recommend staying away from mobile subdomains where possible. In cases where there is no getting around a mobile subdomain for the mobile version of your site, it’s important to remember to:

1. Use the <link> tag with rel=”canonical” or rel=”alternate”
2. Detect user agent strings and redirect them correctly

Moving Forward with Mobile Users in Mind

Most Google searches are now being done through mobile devices and the future is looking like traffic from mobile devices will only continue to increase. According to internal statistics released on Google’s developer guide for mobile sites, 94% of smartphone users use their phones to search for local business information and 77% of all mobile searches are conducted during the workday.

The mobile version of your website continues to play an ever increasingly important role in your business growth. Following the steps outlined above should give you a good idea of the barriers that your users are encountering over mobile and the technical issues that Google sees when crawling your site.

Implementing fixes which can either help analyze or improve your site’s mobile usability may or may not be a challenge to you depending on your resources and technical knowledge. If you think you have the in-house technical capability to implement Google’s recommended changes, you should refer to the official mobile friendly best practices document and mobile SEO configuration guidelines. To ensure that these changes are necessary and will provide an ROI to your company, we suggest contacting a trusted digital marketing expert like DOM.

To get more information on this topic, contact us today for a free consultation or learn more about our status as a Google Premier Partner before you reach out.

The post Here is How to Tell if Google’s New Mobile-First Index Will Crush You appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

The realm of search constantly evolves; rarely does anything remain constant. Whether it’s fundamental changes to how search algorithms function or alterations in search results to serve more ads, we—and you!—must keep up by adapting.

To grow the ad side of their business even more, Google has made several changes in the past year to insert more paid advertisements at the top, pushing organic results further down the page. Google recently made its two most fundamental changes to PPC ads since its existence. The first was phasing out right rail text ads while also adding an additional ad (for a total of four) at the top. The second and more recent was increasing the size of text ads (in beta / coming soon to all advertisers).

Now Google has made an even more significant change to search results, at least as it impacts businesses concerned with their local markets.

For local search results on Google, users will now see 2 organic results and 1 paid ad in what is called the “local pack.” This has several implications moving forward, so we decided to break it down and explain what it all means for both paid search and search engine optimization.

SEO Impacts & Perspective (by Stephen Hoops)

In the old days when SEO was a relatively new beast and it was considerably easier to achieve results, search engines over time became more complex in efforts to serve better search results to their users. But in addition to the search engines releasing algorithm updates that can render certain techniques useless in a matter of weeks, SEO practitioners also have to contend with changes to the layout of results when the search engines begin to favor serving more paid ads.

Simply put, paid ads diminish the value of scoring page 1 rankings if you aren’t in the top 3 as more ads will only push organic results further down the page. This is the truth many of us came to realize when Google released the changes to search back in February.

Shaking things up yet again, Google recently announced during SMX Advanced that ads will now be featured in the local pack. When a user triggers a local search result, this is what it would currently look like for someone in New York City looking for pizza:

After local ads begin to roll out, the top result will no longer be an organic listing and will be available as a paid advertisement. So this may be great news for believers of paid search, but this poses a unique set of challenges for SEO.

Just last August, the local pack used to have 7 listings before Google search was changed to only display 3. Getting into the local pack may not seem to be such a big deal, but for SMBs that have several competitors in a particular locale, things are about to become very competitive.

When your business is featured in the local pack, you also have the opportunity to be listed in the organic listings below, giving your business greater exposure. And with Google’s push for optimizing experiences on mobile devices, the local pack is an extremely effective way of reaching mobile users.

• So what now?

First, these kind of changes are to be expected from a search engine like Google. They want a good experience for their users, but they also need to make money, too.

But fear not because this does not mean the end of the world. There are 2 important things to either keep in mind or to begin thinking about with this change if your local business could be impacted:

1. Local SEO campaigns have just become that much more important. Make sure that you’re addressing your local SEO strategy to maximize efficiency and reach your goals.

2. If you haven’t thought about supporting your SEO strategy by expanding your paid advertising budget, now may be the time to do so. Using Google AdWords test campaigns can go an incredibly long way towards finding valuable keywords that you can then optimize for as part of your SEO strategy.

But so far, we’ve only taken a look at the impacts on SEO. Let’s explore what this could mean for paid search.

Paid Search Perspective (by Nikki Powley)

We’ve covered the major impact this will have on organic search results, but now you’re asking—what does this mean for my paid search campaigns?

First, let’s time travel back to when we discussed the impact of Google’s announcement to remove right-rail ads. This major change limited advertisers to 4 ad positions at the top of search results and completely eliminated the ad space to the right of organic search results.

Suddenly top of the page ad space became an even hotter commodity. Especially when you factored in the local pack results pushing the ad space at the bottom of search results even further below the fold.

My initial advertiser response to ads in the local pack was—alright, we’re getting top of page ad space back!

However, I’m now debating more questions that we will have to ponder until Google releases a beta program or more detailed AdWords information.

1. How many (if any) lines of description text will be available for ads inside the local pack?

• Description lines are imperative to share additional business information and encourage clicks. If ads in the local pack do not include description lines, I may prefer my client’s ads to appear in an ad position where they will display description lines and all available ad extensions.

2. Will advertisers be able to control ad placement in the local pack? Will there be bid modifiers to place ads or not place ads in this space?

• In some cases, we have seen businesses receive higher value conversions in the 2nd ad position as the 1st position generates a high click volume, but not necessarily more valuable traffic. If ads in the local pack produce results similar to 1st position ads, it could increase a business’s ad spend, but not necessarily increase conversion value.

And finally here’s a real doozy of a question…

3. If a business’s ad is placed in the local pack, does it also have the potential to appear in another ad position on the page?

• This will basically all businesses to double dip in terms of ad position and, much like double dipping your chip in the salsa, that’s just not cool. Plus, it will make competition just a bit higher.

Pivot & Adapt

Google has noticed the shift to mobile devices and is doing everything they believe can benefit their business to in order adapt to user behavior. You should be doing the same and never expect things to remain the same throughout time. These changes to the local pack in Google search results have both their own set of challenges and opportunities that your local business can tackle for the better.

To get more information on this topic, contact us today for a free consultation or learn more about our status as a Google Premier Partner before you reach out.

The post New Google Local Pack Ads: What This Means for SEO & PPC appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

It does a thorough job of covering the must-do tasks for both on-page and off-site SEO (a.k.a. link building). And if you need help with the nuances of local SEO strategies, DOM is here to help.

Killer SEO Checklist [Infographic] by the Capsicum Mediaworks team

Of course, if you are interested in a professional SEO audit or want a firm already familiar with many of the Google ranking factors required to generate more traffic to your site, feel free to contact us.

The post SEO Checklist Of 75 Killer Steps To Success appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.