5 Easy Methods To Increase Your Business Email Security

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Email security can be tricky. Occasionally clients will come to us with questions about how best to use their email system, and how to prevent security breaches. We’ve gathered some of our best email security tips below, and we hope it helps you keep your business running smoothly.

Once you have your email system ironed out and you’re ready to start building your business with email, let us know.

1. Stop Spam & Phishing Emails In Their Tracks

The best way to stop spam and phishing emails is to educate yourself and your employees on what to look for.

Phishing and spam techniques relies on getting you to trust the sender. Usually they do this by using an email domain – the @examplecompany.com portion of the email address – which looks like a reputable company. Common examples might be: @amazon-z.com, @amazon.net, @ama-zon.com, amazononline@online.com, amazon@hotmail.com etc.

They’ll usually ask you to click on a link because they need to verify information on your account. The link usually takes you to a website which is a good copy of the company you’re expecting; similar color schemes, fonts, buttons and logos. Once you’re there, they expect you to put in your user name, password and/or account or social security number.

Your best bet is to notice these email address discrepancies and don’t click on anything in the email. Once you’ve arrived at their site, they may have already downloaded malware which can further compromise your system without you having to take a single action.

Instead, train your email filter to notice these things. Select the checkbox next to the message and choose whatever option your email provider gives you to identify the message as spam. In Gmail, this would be the “Report Spam” button. This helps your email provider realize the domain is a spam sender, and it will attempt to stop those in the future.

2. Check for Confidential Content

You might be the most careful person in the world, but are your employees? Make sure you have clear expectations in place about what can be transferred via email and what can’t.

Social security numbers, account information, banking information, usernames and passwords should never be sent via email. Also make sure your employees know that you and the companies or financial institutions you work with will never ask for this information via email, or via a phone number given to them via email. Always call an institution directly to a trusted number you’ve used in the past.

3. Create An Email Security Policy

Your employees might not know how best to handle a spam email, or not to send out certain confidential emails. That’s why you want to make sure you have a detailed email security policy in place. There are many sample policies out there you can go through and customize to your own needs, like this one from Tech Donut.

4. Block Certain Senders

Sometimes, your employee might try to send an email to a bunch of recipients at once with the To:, Cc: or Bcc: field. These types of emails can expose your clients to each other, which is something they may not want.

It can also accidentally expose confidential information, such as names, email addresses and other information to a wider audience, and can be constituted as spam in certain cases. Since you don’t want to cause spam yourself, you can request that your the company which controls your email server block anyone at your company from sending emails with more than 15 recipients or something similar.

As well, you can block senders coming into your system. Emails with attachments larger than 10MB can slow down your entire network, or not be delivered at all. Set a policy at your server level to block incoming and outgoing emails with attachments larger than 10MB, and to notify the sender and provide an alternate method of sending the file, such as Dropbox or Google Drive.

5. Archive Emails

Make sure that you keep a backup of your emails so if a disaster should occur you can still revert to your backup. Check if your server provides a backup, and if so how often. You can also create a backup yourself using an external hard drive and a backup schedule if you feel it’s necessary.

Hopefully these tips have helped you secure your business emails. When you’re confident enough to start advertising your business through email, contact us!

6 Best Practices For Your Email Marketing Efforts

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Email marketing can seem like an extremely tricky business, even though email has been around for decades now. And how do you even begin to approach building a list to start emailing to?

We’re sure you have a lot of questions, and hopefully this list helps you get started with your email marketing efforts. When you’re ready for the next stop, contact us!

1. Don’t Buy Email Lists

There are two ways to get an email list: buy it, or build it yourself. In reality, buying an email list is as good as buying nothing at all.

First, if you’re planning to use a reputable email marketing service – i.e. MailChimp, Constant Contact, etc. – they will not allow you to use a purchased list. That should be a huge flashing neon sign that buying an email list is a mistake, but there are more reasons.

Second, good email lists aren’t for sale. The only email lists which are for sale are those which are being sold to a bunch of different companies, and have likely been stolen or forgot to uncheck a box when subscribing for something else. That means the owners of the addresses are being inundated with emails from companies doing the same thing you are: looking for an easy sale.

Lastly – though there are many good reasons – your email deliverability and IP reputation can be seriously harmed. Purchased email lists tend to have a lot of blocked email addresses which bounce instead of delivering. If you email to a bunch of bouncing email addresses, the IP address of that target email may begin to identify you as a spammer. Once you’ve been identified as a spammer, it can take months or years to build up your company’s reputation again.

2. Only Market To Those Who Subscribe

How would you like to receive an email from a company you’ve never heard of before? You’d probably delete it without opening it, or take one look and hit unsubscribe. People who haven’t opted-in to receive your emails are going to react the same way.

That’s why you need to build an email marketing list organically, so people willingly give you their email address because they’re genuinely interested in what you have to say.

How To Get Subscribers

Do this by offering webinars, ebooks, templates and other content behind a ‘gate’, where if they want the content they need to offer you their name, email address and possibly some other identifying information.

If you’re a software company, you might build an online tool people can use, but request their information before their first use.

Also, be sure to include a “Forward To A Friend” link at the bottom of all of your marketing emails, as people who already subscribe may be your best way of getting new subscribers.

3. Use A Reputable Service

Remember earlier when we talked about Constant Contact and MailChimp? These reputable email marketing services make it easy to generate and send out creative, eye-catching emails to your entire list, and manage your list as well.

Companies like these provide expertise and knowledge for you to lean on in their “Help” or “Knowledge Base” sections, which can be a boon when trying to navigate the world of email marketing without the help of a digital marketing firm.

4. Make It Easy To Unsubscribe

This might seem counterintuitive, but it’s important to make it easy to unsubscribe from your emails. If you don’t provide an unsubscribe link somewhere easy to get to on your marketing emails, that person might end up reporting you as spam which can hurt your ability to do any email marketing at all.

It’s much better to let contacts come and go in peace. They may come back when you have something of more interest to them one day, and you don’t want to ruin that relationship.

5. Implement Re-engagement

Now, if you have someone on your list who hasn’t opened an email from you in a long time, but haven’t gone through the trouble of unsubscribing. Even if they don’t report you as spam, if someone just immediately deletes your email this also hurts your reputation.

What you need to do is re-engage those subscribers. Do so by emailing those specific subscribers with an email acknowledging that they haven’t opened or clicked on your emails in a long time, and asking if they would simply opt-in again if they’d like to stay subscribed. This provides them the opportunity to stay engaged, and those who don’t opt-in can be removed from your list.

6. Quality Over Quantity

Remember, in email marketing it’s all about quality over quantity. A highly-engaged, small group of subscribers is infinitely more effective for your marketing efforts than a thousands-strong list of people who never look at your creative marketing emails.

Hopefully these tips can help you in managing your email marketing efforts. When you need additional help advertising your business via email, contact us!

How To Leverage Social Media As A Blogger To Extend Your Reach

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This is a guest post by Ken Rhie, CEO of Trumpia. Trumpia is a complete SMS software solution with mass SMS messaging, smart targeting and automation.

There are always new ways to alter your marketing strategy in an effort to reach a wider audience. When you are focused on growing your business, you’ll have to do some investigating.

First you have to identify who your target audience is. After you have a strong understanding of who your followers are, you have to figure out where they are hanging out. There are a number of social media platforms to use, but matching the right platform to your target demographic takes some work.

To get started, you’ll need to learn about the various social media platforms and set up accounts on each to learn what will work for your business.

Set Up Your Social Media Accounts

When you want to leverage social media, you have to get started by setting up accounts. Three popular social media sites include Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Each site offers you ways to promote your business and to share news with your followers.

The younger crowd tends to be on Instagram, while the most popularly used social media website is Facebook. Set up an account on all three sites and focus on growing a following on each platform. Once you get your accounts set up, you can begin to see what works for your audience and which platform is more popular for you to use with your customers.

Evaluate What Is Working With Your Followers

Take the time to look at each social media account you have set up. Consider what your customers are reacting to. If they are commenting like crazy on your posts on Facebook, but you get no action on Instagram, it’s time to put more of your marketing efforts into Facebook.

Once you see where your customers are engaging with your business, you need to focus on that social media account for a while. Learn how to gain followers on your chosen platform, and become a master at creating engaging content. While you can continue to post to other platforms, focus on what is working now to grow your business.

Send Links to Your Favorite Posts Through Text Messages

You’ll have to create an opt-in campaign in order to build an audience for text messages.

Once this is done, you can invite customers to visit you on your social media sites by sending a marketing text message. When you have the ability to reach your customers through text messaging, you are opening up a whole new world for your marketing efforts.

You can get customers to sign up to receive text messages by sharing the information on your social media accounts, and you can get customers to visit you on social media through text messaging. The more ways you try to interact with customers, the easier it will be to discover what works.

When you have a blog that you want to share to your target demographic, you need to unleash the power of your social media presence. Through the use of text messaging and social media posts, you can get your message out to your audience.

How Google Grants Can Boost Your Online Presence By $10,000/Month

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Google Grants for Nonprofits is an amazing program for any 501(c)3 nonprofit to take advantage of. In fact, Google will give a qualifying nonprofit $10,000/month to be used in AdWords advertising! At Cohlab, we can help you access and manage this windfall for your organization.

$10,000/month!! How?

There is a series of steps you’ll need to go through. You can sign up through the Google Grants page, but we’d be happy to help you navigate the entire process; just send us an email.

What Google Grants Does

Google Grants allows nonprofits to access a $10,000/month ad spend on Google AdWords, empowering organizations to reach out to potential volunteers, donors and employees as well as spread brand awareness to those who may need your services.

This cash can really turn the tide for nonprofit organizations, and we’ve worked with a number of nonprofits who have benefitted from this program.

What Cohlab Does

On our end, we help guide you through the signup process. We take care of as much as we physically can on our end so your staff isn’t tied up in the administrative or operations tasks of this program. We even use an on staff writer to craft your application letter to Google to better your chances of acceptance!

Once you’ve been accepted to the program, we also take care of the day-to-day management of your ad campaigns, meaning you don’t need to have someone on staff trained in AdWords, and you don’t need to waste time trying to manage $10,000 worth of ads; we take care of all of it for you.

How You Benefit

Your organization, with our assistance and Google’s generosity, will likely benefit from an uptick in visitors to your website, increased response to ads for volunteers or employees as well as donations, and all without spending a dime on the ads themselves!

If you have any questions about how to get started on this process, let us know and we’ll be happy to walk you through it.

4 Ways Your Web Designer May Be Getting Images Wrong

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The proper use of images – while only one facet of web design – is something that’s often overlooked until it becomes a problem. Whether it’s causing people to bounce off of your page due to unattractive image use, leading to trouble with your SEO due to poor use of alt tags or getting you into legal trouble by stealing images, it’s important to pay attention.

If you need assistance with web design or want advice on the use of images, let us know. We’d be happy to chat!

Image Alt & Title

1. Organize Images On The Page

When browsing online, you might open a new page and see an image half above the bottom of your screen and half below. This means the designer didn’t take into account whether the photo made it above the fold or not. Even worse is when the photo is below the fold, because there isn’t anything visual for the website visitor to grab onto.

It’s best to make sure you have one chief image at or near the top of your page or blog post to capture attention, and it should be completely above the fold. You can check this by viewing the page on a few different screen sizes – also, with mobile devices it’s acceptable for the image to not be above the fold due to the narrowness of the screen.

Then a second image or third can be added below the fold as needed to illustrate the purpose of the page.

 

2. Use The Alt Tag

An alt tag is a piece of data you attach to the image. It helps search engines understand what the picture is (since they can’t see) and it’s also helpful for the blind and hard of sight as they utilize assistive technology which reads the page out loud to them. Without an alt tag, it’s as if the image isn’t there or relevant for search engines (which hurts your SEO) and for the blind and hard of sight (which eventually will be a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act).

An example of an alt tag would be “young-boy-rides-horse-in-meadow”.

If you leave the original name of the file – 51381238532351.jpg – or fail to describe the photo well – “boy-horse” – then you’ve gained nothing.

 

3. Use The Caption

A caption is a way of further explaining an image. While not always needed, particularly complex images which aren’t stock photos may need a caption. If the photo is of staff or a particular location, it’s important to identify the people or place properly.

The caption is also used to provide documentation of where a photo is from . . .

 

4. Source And Link Your Photos

Lastly, be sure source and link the photo back to it’s original photographer, unless you or someone you employ took the photo for your business.

If you take a photo off of the internet, you need to be sure it’s safe to use. Most photos out there belong to someone. You wouldn’t walk out and pick up a dog off the street to take home, because 99% of those dogs aren’t strays.

Certain websites will provide you with photos which are in the public domain, which means you can use them freely. It’s still important to note the web address of the source in the caption, and link back to it to cover yourself. The same goes for photos you may buy off of a service like Adobe Stock Images. While you own the photo, it’s still nice to make sure you’re covered incase anyone ever asks.

If you have any questions about designing your website or the proper use of images, we’d love to chat.

5 SEO Tips To Make Your Page Titles Pop

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Not everyone can be a search engine optimization master. SEO takes a long time to understand, and to top it off the best practices often change. Google and other search engines are always improving their algorithms to better serve the searcher, and web developers and business owners like you and I have to keep improving our sites to stay on top of search results for our chosen keywords.

We get quite a few questions every month about how to write page titles which conform to SEO standards and help a page rank for certain keywords. In light of that, let’s take a look at a few tips we’ve gathered and be sure to contact us with any questions of your own!

 

1. Understand Yourself and Your Searcher

 

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” – Sun Tzu

 

I think Sun Tzu, ancient Chinese military strategist, said it best. If you don’t know yourself and your enemy, it’s a lost cause, but if you truly understand, you’re well on your way to victory.

Now, I’m not saying searchers are the enemies of businesses and digital marketers, but it is important to really know the intent of the searcher when they are coming to your website, and to really know what benefits your service or product offers and not just the features.

Take for example the following page title examples:

 

Two Boots Pizza

Happy Pizza

 

When someone types ‘Pizza’ into a search engine, they’re probably not looking for a specific place, otherwise they would have just types the name of the business in. So general keywords like this are your opportunity to shine and grab a customer by the collar!

Two Boots Pizza really didn’t get the memo on this, as the page title simply states the name of the business and nothing further. But Happy’s Pizza at least tries to grab attention with “The Best Pizza In Town” immediately following the business name. While not necessarily the most well crafted tagline around, if the customer were given only these two page titles to choose from when ordering pizza, it’s no contest.

 

2. Make It Mechanically Sound

When I say you should make your title mechanically sound, I mean exactly that. When someone builds a boat, they need to make sure it floats before they spend time decorating it. The same goes for your page title.

Google and other search engines only show a certain amount of the title text in any given search result, whether on a computer, tablet or mobile. Generally, we suggest keeping a title length in between 40-65 characters (including spaces), as this gives wiggle room for when certain characters are a few pixels wider than others. Once you know how many characters you really have to work with, then you can start crafting your title.

 

3. Know Your Keywords

Next SEO tip: know your keywords. A digital marketing company like us can really help you out and make sure you’re using the best keywords for ranking your business, but if you don’t have access to someone like us or choose not to work with a digital marketing firm for some reason, a good way to start is to log into your Google Analytics account (I hope you have one, if not, you just need a Gmail address). From there, there are keyword tools which can help you determine what keywords might be best for your specific business. If you need help with this section, I do recommend you contact a digital marketing firm like ours for expert assistance.

 

4. When Appropriate, Make It Local

When it comes to page titles, certain pages have different functions than others. For instance, Happy’s Pizza may want to make a page to market specifically to their customers in Brooklyn, NY. My suggestion would be a page title like this:

Happy’s Pizza | Brooklyn Pizza Parlor | Original New York-Style Pizza

 

If Happy’s Pizza opened a location in Memphis, TN, they might want something more like this:

Happy’s Pizza | Memphis, TN Pizza | Authentic New York-Style Pizza

Each of these pages references the local city, and hits on what the searcher may be looking for. In Brooklyn, it may be a return to the original pizza of the area, while Memphis searchers may be looking for something different than they can find locally – an authentic, New York slice.

 

5. Execute

Finally, the most important SEO tip I can give is to execute. Do it. Make that page, because if it doesn’t get made, there is no way it can rank. This goes for your content, your ads, anything.

Make a decision and let it ride for a while and see how it goes. If after a month or two the title doesn’t seem to fit anymore or you’re having a hard time ranking or getting people to click on it, it may be time to change it up a bit.

The most important thing is to do it, and have fun. And let us know if you need any additional SEO help or tips, we’re always just a phone call or email away.

Digital Marketing Myths You’ve Internalized & Why They’re Wrong

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Digital marketing myths continuously pop up these days, from client meetings or on ‘digital marketing myths’ lists on sites across the web.

We’ve been scouring the web for digital marketing myth lists and comparing them against beliefs our clients hold, and discovered that many of these lists have ‘myths’ which aren’t even commonly held beliefs anymore. So we set out to display some myths here that we still find prevalent among our clients, friends and family so we can provide real value in our digital marketing myths list. Enjoy, and let us know if you have questions!

1. Negative Reviews/Comments Are Bad NewsSEM Spend

We have our own proprietary review management software, so when we’re pitching this to clients they’ll often say that they need it because they have a few bad reviews they want to get rid of. We reframe the conversation right there, because bad reviews are not inherently bad for business, and in fact can help! Here’s a few ways to make that negative review or comment a good thing:

A. Opportunity To Grow

A bad review of your business is an opportunity to grow. Take the complaints the person is making, decide which hold merit and see if there is a way to address those complaints so another bad review like that doesn’t happen.

B. Evens Out Your Rating

The bad review doesn’t necessarily doom your Google or Facebook star rating. One or two bad reviews actually helps even out your stars a bit, as people tend to think the perfect 5-star rated companies might be manufacturing reviews.

C. Good PR opportunity

Responding to the review is a great PR opportunity. Take the time to really listen to the customer, and respond in a way so as to either address the issue or open up discussion on how the issue can be address. Thank them for pointing out the flaw in your system or bad egg on the staff, and encourage all customers to provide you with critical feedback. Other customers will see how smoothly you handled the review and think better of you for it.

 

2. Message Personalization Isn’t Possible

This myth hits home for people using LinkedIn, Google AdWords and email marketing.

A. LinkedIn

On LinkedIn, if you’re using Sales Navigator or another tool, it can feel downright overwhelming to market your business and brand at a mass scale while trying to personalize the messages. One way of doing it is to spend hours on it each day. Another way is to use software, like our proprietary myProspector, to help you create templates to contact other users which are easily and quickly personalized on a mass scale, within LinkedIn’s guidelines.

B. AdWords

In AdWords, people who are just getting used to the system might only set up a few variations of a display campaign for different geographic areas or different income brackets. But in AdWords with display ads, your ads can be personalized down to an email address, zip code (or even down to a few blocks) and in other ways. This means you can really personalize messages to fit a specific person you may know, or someone who fits a certain profile.

C. Email Marketing

Another way to personalize is through email marketing. Most email marketing solutions now allow you to segment your email lists, and it’s something you should take advantage of. For instance, if you have a list of customers from your pizza store, you may want to segment them by people who mostly order online and those who mostly order in store, and tailor different deals to them.

 

3. Visitor Volume Is A Key Website Metric

Visits are great. It’s nice to have people looking at your website, but volume of visits alone doesn’t mean much. In Google Analytics and other software which helps organize your website and marketing data, what you really should be looking at are the following metrics:

A. New Users

New users is a way of tracking how many new visitors have navigated to your website within a timeframe. This allows you to see if the same people are coming time and time again or if you’re able to attract new potential customers with your AdWords, social media, email marketing or other strategy.

B. Pages/Session

This is the number of pages a visitor views per session. Typically more is better, and if you’re seeing your average drop down near 1 you know people are clicking on a link to your site and then heading back out without looking anywhere else. That’s not good.

C. Average Session Duration

This is how long a visitor stays on your site before navigating off. You want to see a good amount of time here, but it depends on your industry. Adding value to the page, like more engaging or informative content, a video, a download or other things can help bring this number up, with the goal of getting them to remember your brand and feel their time was spent wisely. If the average session duration is low, it means they probably didn’t find what they were looking for.

D. Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is a measure of how many visitors leave your site after viewing only 1 page. Anything less than 70% is typically considered a ‘good’ bounce rate, so if your bounce rate is already very low it means people are finding something of value in your website!

 

4. Social Only Works For Select Industries

This is a big one. People feel that lawyers offices or other ‘traditional’ or ‘boring’ industries have no options when it comes to social media. It simply isn’t true, you just have to find the channel that fits your brand, and craft your strategy to how people want to interact with your service.

For instance, with a law firm, LinkedIn is a clear winner for most law firms because it helps build your reputation among the business community, no matter what kind of lawyer you might be.

Facebook might not seem like a natural choice, but it may be that people don’t want to post directly on your wall or about you, they want to find your contact information quickly and easily or drop a quick note into Facebook Messenger to see if they really need to come in for a consultation or not.

There is always a channel or strategy that will work, it just takes some time to find the right fit.

 

5. Visitors Won’t Convert On Mobile Devices

If you aren’t able to convert visitors into customers or sales leads when they’re using mobile devices, it isn’t the visitor’s fault for using a mobile device – it’s the content’s fault.

You need to take a look at your interface and the way people actually use your site from a mobile-first website design standpoint, and find a way to simplify your process. From reducing the number of fields to fill out in a contact form, to one click downloads for ebooks, there is a way to do it, you just have to find it.

For help figuring out how digital marketing fits into your business, and to separate fact from fiction, drop us a line.

How To Improve Your Search Engine Ranking With Content Marketing

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When a new client approaches us for a website design, one of the most common issues with their current site is that it hasn’t been updated in months or years. Your web designer or a dedicated person on your team should be constantly crafting new content for your website to keep it fresh.

A decade or two ago, it was common thinking that a website should be set in stone and only updated very occasionally, like a brochure or business card. That’s simply not the case anymore.

The Online Experience Centers Around Contentcms-265127_1920

As can be seen by the popularity of sites like The Huffington Post, Reddit, HowStuffWorks and countless blogs, fresh, ever-changing content helps sites retain and grow a following and build their ranking in search engines. Sites which are constantly changing their content, being added to and improved are getting the most traffic.

However, each of those sites have a focus: news and opinion, cool and strange things from the internet, and explanations of how language, mechanics and other things work. Their content focuses on those things and their readers reward good content with clicks, time spent on the page and site, and sharing those articles on social media.

Therefore, your site should not only have new content, but it needs to be centered on topics which reinforce your business. This is the heart of content marketing.

Experimentation

Another great way content marketing can improve your search engine ranking is by experimenting with different types of content and different types of pages.

Do you have a blog currently? If not, that’s a great place to start, as blogs are a good way to create consistently new content based around a theme. Experiment with different formats of blog posts, like lists, ‘How Tos’ and others.

Also experiment with infographics and videos as well as text posts to see which perform better. Use your websites built-in analytics or sign up for Google Analytics to get a better idea of how each piece of content performs with your visitors, and don’t forget to promote it on social media!

For help with the whole gamut of content marketing, contact us today!

5 Misguided Myths About Social Media Marketing

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Social media marketing has been of interest to marketers and business people since at least 2007, but has been steadily popular since 2011 according to Google Trends. The need to fill your funnel from your fans and followers has grown, as has the mythology around the process of doing so.

Let’s take a look at some of the most misguided myths social media marketing manifests

1. Social Media Marketing Is Freehands-1167618_1920

Sure, signing yourself and your company up for a social media account is free, and you may think that since you aren’t paying to advertise on the platform you can get away with your marketing plan for free!

The truth is, no matter what you do on social media, your marketing is going to cost you either time, money or both.

Your team’s time and effort are valuable, and the more of it you pour into your social media marketing campaign the better ROI you will likely see. However, time and effort cost the business money, so just know that nothing is free.

2. Social Media ROI Can’t Be Measured

When most people first start utilizing social media for marketing, they focus on the metrics in front of them: likes, shares, comments, etc.

But it’s important to go beyond these metrics and focus on two things at the same time: building a community, then driving that community to your website/landing page. In order to know if you’re building a community, you focus on those likes, comments and shares. To know if you’re converting people from your social media page to your website or to a sale, you’ll need to utilize Google Analytics and build trackable links for your social media posts.

3. Every Social Media Platform Is Valuable

Depending on your industry and needs, you’ll need different social media platforms. The demographics who use the site, it’s functionality and purpose, as well as how it is accessed will all play into whether the platform is valuable to you and can be used to increase sales.

For instance, a consulting business will see a lot more ROI on investing in LinkedIn, while a restaurant will see better results through Facebook and Pinterest or Instagram. You may not have the resources to tackle multiple sites at once, so be sure you choose the right ones to concentrate on.

4. Social Media Marketing Is It’s Own Strategy

Truly, social media marketing is best done in conjunction with a series of other strategies, like content marketing, search engine optimization, reputation management and more.

Content marketing helps you build content on your website worth sharing, which then draws people through to your website and makes them more likely to convert.

Search engine optimization helps your website flow better and become easier to read and navigate while making it rank higher in search engines, meaning people are more likely to enjoy working with you and like or follow you.

Reputation management helps monitor and direct people to leave you positive reviews on sites like Facebook and Google, which are also social media sites. This means your social sites will pull more weight with people, making them easier to convert.

5. Making Social Posts Mobile-Friendly Isn’t Worth It

If you still believe mobile phones aren’t where people do most of their web browsing – as well as nearly all of their social networking – you are living in the past. Nearly 80% of social media time is spent on mobile devices these days, so it’s extremely important to make sure you’re optimizing your social media posts for mobile devices. You may be writing them on a computer at work, but that’s not how your followers are going to read them!

How Small Businesses Like Yours Are Leveraging Search Engine Optimization

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When it comes to trying to capture the attention of potential customers online, search engine optimization is key to your online success, especially for small, local businesses! In fact, in 2016, searches containing “near me” – i.e. auto repair near me, tacos near me, etc. – increase 34x since 2011!

This means customers near you are looking for your category of business, but the question is: are you appearing in the search results? Because a huge amount of the traffic from a search goes to the first three results on the first page of google. And very few people head to the second page of results.

Let’s look at how you as a small business can make search engine optimization (SEO) help build your business! And remember, we’re always available to talk.

The below statistics were supplied by The Google Mobile Playbook.

Producing High-Quality, Local ContentSearch Engine Optimization

One of the best things you can do to boost your SEO ranking is to create high-quality, engaging and local content. This content is what will help searchers convert into customers, giving them the information they need to make a decision and providing a link to the product or contact and location information so they can come to the store and make the purchase.

In regards to local, mobile searches, 51% of searchers will visit a store after completing the search; 48% of them will call the store; and, 29% of them will visit the store and complete the purchase quickly. This means local searches are extremely valuable, and creating content geared toward them is rewarding.

Employing An SEO Firm To Clean Up Data

Another way of boosting your SEO to get further up the rankings is to clean up the data behind your website.

It’s usually a good idea to hire an SEO firm like ours to go in and clean up these bits, such as page titles, descriptions, dead or misdirected links and organizing the sitemap. Everything needs to be geared toward your business and streamlined to give you the best ranking for the keywords your business needs.

Contact us anytime to learn more about how we can help you climb the rankings and capture more customers searching for your products or services locally!