The Complete Comprehensive Local Marketing Tactics 2015

Here are the lists of local marketing tactics that will help your local businesses visible in local search results.

Website Marketing Tips for 2015

1. Compelling Layout Design
Your website is your “digital first impression” to the world; and the first thing people take notice of is the design and layout. A professional design coupled with the effective use of colors, bullets, spacing, and typography are key to keeping visitors around.
2. Have Great Content
Content is king in the world of online marketing; without it, every online strategy will fail –including your website. Make sure your content is focused around topics that your audience WANTS to read, as opposed to being all about your company.
3. Keep Your Content Concise and Easy to Read
Your website visitors are not usually looking to read a book. Use shorter pieces of content to help them consume the information faster and easier. Cut out any unnecessary information and get to the point by using bullets and ample whitespace.
4. Use Keyword-Rich Headings
Using keywords in your content is great for helping it get picked up by search engines. However, this is also a great way to break up longer pieces of content by sending viewers directly to the information they may be looking for.
5. Use Visual Content
Pictures are worth a thousand words, so you can relay a lot of information in an image, graph, infographic, video, or photo. Visual content is becoming extremely popular today as a way to support textual content because they can grab and hold attention.
6. Make Navigation Effortless
The last thing a visitor wants to do is get lost when landing on your website. If this happens, most will leave right away. Make sure your navigation is smooth, simple, and easy to follow in order to boost conversions.
7. Capture Leads
Once a visitor leaves your website, there is a big chance that they will never return. Therefore, you should have a way to establish a connection with them, such as an email capture form and social media “join us” calls to actions.
8. Make Sure Everything Works
Nothing can turn a visitor off more than broken links, slow loading times, or forms that don’t work. Check periodically to make sure that all aspects of your site are working as they should to avoid losing visitors.
9. Mobilize Your Website
Traditional websites are not built for viewing on mobile devices. Millions of people today are using their smartphones to surf the web. So you should have a mobile-friendly website to avoid losing potential leads and customers.
10. Don’t Forget Your Calls to Action
Every page of your website should include a call to action that tells visitors what you want them to do. Your call to action should be short, clear, and to-the-point. Want them to call you, visit you, or email you? Boost conversions by telling them to do it.

Email Marketing Tips for 2015

1. Develop an Email Marketing Plan First
Before you start an email marketing campaign, create a plan that details your goals, what type of emails you will send, and who your target audience is. Otherwise, you could get started on the wrong foot.
2. Build a Targeted List of Subscribers
Email marketing is only as effective as the quality of your list. When building your list, target people who are already doing business with your brand –or at least those who have shown interest in what you have to offer.
3. Use Accurate Subject Lines
One big mistake is to hook people into opening your email with a subject line that is totally irrelevant to your email content. This is a big turn-off to most subscribers and can cause many of them to opt-out of your list.
4. Keep Your Content Relevant
Avoid going “off-topic” when it comes to your email content. Only talk about things your subscribers would be interested in hearing. If there are times when you want to talk about unrelated topics, keep it to a minimum and keep it professional.
5. Write Your Messages to ONE Person
Personalizing email messages can boost conversions. One way to do so is to address subscribers by their first names. Another way is to use terms such as “you” instead of “you all” or “you guys.” Make them feel like you’re only talking to them.
6. Make Sure Your Emails are Mobile-Friendly
As more and more people read email on their mobile devices, it is crucial that your emails can be read on them comfortably. Otherwise, you will miss out on potential buyers who may have taken you up on your offer.
7. Keep Your Emails Short & Sweet
Due to low attention spans, most people are not up for reading really long and drawn out emails. Instead, only include the important points in your email. If you have more content to share on the topic, direct them to a website or blog post.
8. Mix Up Your Messages
The main goal of email marketing is to boost revenue. However, this does not mean that every message you send out should be promotional. Mix it up by giving your audience great tips, how-to, or other types of information that they would appreciate.
9. Test Your Campaigns
Your goal is to consistently improve your email performance. The only way to do so is to test how well it’s working for you. Based on this information, you will be able to improve going forward.
10. Make it Easy for Them to Unsubscribe
This may seem like it defeats the purpose, but the fact is… you really do not want anyone on your list who doesn’t want to be there. So make sure there’s a link to unsubscribe in all of your emails.

Reputation Management Tips for 2015

1. Develop a Crisis Plan
A company’s worst nightmare is to discover that there are negative mentions about them floating around on the web. Be proactive by setting up a plan that details critical information about how you will deal with this situation if it should occur.
2. Put Customer Service FIRST
The basis for a positive reputation is to have a great business with excellent customer service. If not, you are giving people a reason to post negative content about you on the internet.
3. Find Out What People Are Saying
The internet is a huge field for people to discuss products, services, and businesses. Therefore, be sure to consistently monitor social media, blogs, and customer review sites for comments about your business.
4. Face the Negative Issues
Many of your unsatisfied customers may go to social media, review sites, or blogs to air their feelings about your brand. Whenever you see this, respond to them promptly and try to remedy the situation to show that customer service is a top-priority.
5. Develop and Distribute Great Content Consistently
Publishing relevant, useful keyword optimized content on a consistent basis will help your business get more “positive” search engine exposure. This leaves less room for negative mentions to show up, which are usually out of your control.
6. Build Loyalty and Trust
Building a social media community can go a long way in helping your online image. Social followers tend to be loyal and post “positive” feelings about businesses they enjoy. Leverage this fact by engaging with your social audience regularly.
7. Ask Happy Customers for Reviews
Simply asking your satisfied customers for reviews –without bribing or giving incentives –is a great way to build a positive online reputation. In most cases, if you don’t ask, you won’t receive.
8. Post Positive Reviews on Your Website
Your website is your internet “home.” This is where many consumers go to learn more about your company. So having positive reviews posted on your website is a great way to put potential customers at ease when it comes to doing business with you.
9. Be Careful with Your Online Comments
One way to damage your reputation is by commenting on controversial issues, trash talking, or talking about unprofessional details of your private life. There is a lot you can say online that is related to your industry and will help your target audience –so stick to these types of posts and comments.
10. Work to Repair Any Damage
If your company is suffering due to damaging online information, whether it’s true or not, take immediate steps to address it. This may involve the services of a professional, but if you do not handle it, it is definitely hurting your ability to generate new customers.

Social Media Marketing Tips for 2015

1. Develop a Plan First
Before jumping into social media marketing, it is important to decide who you want to target, what type of content you want to provide, and which social networks you will use to get the job done.
2. Listen to Your Audience
A crucial part of social media success is being able to listen to what your audience is saying. So pay attention to posts made on your pages and be sure to respond quickly and appropriately.
3. Don’t Over-Share
While it is important to communicate with your fans and followers, posting too often can be a turn-off. Create a posting schedule that is consistent, but not too over-bearing.
4. Provide Valuable Tips & Information
When speaking to your social media network, go further than just promotions. Share information that they will appreciate in regards to your industry; this will build trust and credibility for your business.
5. Keep it Short
It’s tempting to make long posts on topics, but when it comes to social media, short posts receive higher engagement. People today have short attention spans; so break your content up and dish it out in small, easy-to-digest pieces.
6. Encourage Sharing
Social media content can reach a massive number of people without any additional effort on your part. Ask your audience to share it with their networks and make it easy for them to do so.
7. Share Other People’s Content
While your audience wants to hear what you have to say, they would also appreciate when you share relevant content from others. This is a win-win situation because it also cuts down on the amount of content that you have to personally create.
8. Test the Best
Getting the most out of your content can be tricky; as far as when to publish, what to publish, types of content, and good calls to action. The best way to figure this out is to test, measure, and track different strategies.
9. Follow Your Competitors
In any form of marketing, it’s important to see what your competition is doing; the same applies for social media. While you don’t want to copy exactly what they do, it is in your best interest to study how they interact with their fans and followers.
10. Choose Your Social Media Platforms Carefully
It may be tempting to join a bunch of different social media sites. But start with just a few –the ones where your target audience likely has a strong presence –and master those before moving to others.

Video Marketing Tips for 2015

1. Balance Your Video Content
Don’t make the mistake of “only” making videos that promote your products and services. Create videos that are related to the needs and interests of your audience for the best results.
2. Think Evergreen
Focus on creating videos that contain useful, engaging content that your audience will always find useful. This way, they will help you generate new leads in the long-term.
3. Use YouTube
YouTube is the 2ndlargest search engine online. So create a channel and upload your videos there so they can be found when people search for information related to your industry.
4. Localize & Optimize
Optimize your YouTube videos and channels with local keyword terms and search phrases that your target market would use. Also include your local address, local phone number, and website address in the description box.
5. Create Video Content Often
Keep your viewers coming back by consistently creating videos that they will want to watch. Video marketing is not a one-off thing; creating fresh video content should be a part of your overall marketing strategy.
6. Capture Emotions
Up-Front. You only have a few seconds to capture the attention of your audience, so be sure to give them a reason to keep watching. Tap into their pain points, needs, or wants right away.
7. Don’t Go Overboard
Online videos do not require over-the-top production; nor do they need to be long and drawn out. In fact, short, simple videos are proven to work best when it comes to online video marketing.
8. Brand All of Your Videos
Branding is important in all of your online marketing methods; including your videos. It can be as simple as including your company logo at the beginning to help boost brand awareness.
9. Encourage Social Media Sharing
Videos are often shared on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Be sure to encourage your fans and followers to share your videos with their networks for ultimate exposure.
10. Use a Strong, Compelling Call-to-Action
At the end of every video, tell viewers what you want them to do; otherwise, most will simply close out and move to the next video. Want them to call you, visit your establishment, or email you? Tell them to do it.

How to Stop Spam Bots from Ruining Your Analytics Referral Data

A few months back, my agency started seeing a referral traffic spike in our Google Analytics account. At first, I got excited. Someone is linking to us and people are clicking. Hooray!

Wrong! How very, very wrong. As I dug deeper, I saw that most of this referral traffic was sent from spammers, and mostly from one spammer named Vitaly Popov (or, as I like to call him, “the most recent pain in my ass”). The domains he owns have been giving our company’s site and most of our clients’ sites a few hundred sessions per month, enough to throw off the analytics data in many cases.

His sites aren’t the only ones I’ll cover in this how-to, but his spam network has been the biggest nuisance lately. If you’re getting spam referrers in your analytics, you should be able to follow the same steps to stop these data-skewing nimcompoops from spoiling your data, too. Why do I need to worry about blocking and filtering these sites?

There are two main reasons I’m motivated to block these on all sites that I work with. First: corrupt analytics data. A few hundred hits a month on a site like Moz.com isn’t going to move the needle when compared to the sheer volume of sessions they have daily. However, on a small site for a local plumber, 30 sessions per day is likely going to be 70% spam referral traffic, suffocating the remaining legitimate traffic and making marketing analysis a frustrating endeavor.

Second: server load and security. I didn’t ask them to crawl or visit my site. Their visits are using my server resources for something that I don’t want or need. An overloaded server means slower load times, which translate to higher bounce rates and lower rankings. On top of that, who knows what else they’re doing on my site while they’re there. They could easily be looking for WordPress, plugin and server vulnerabilities.
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Social Media for Local Business

Social Media or PPC?

When it comes to driving website traffic, local business has typically gravitated more readily toward buying traffic, primarily using PPC (pay per click) advertising, over tapping into social media and learning how to harness social media marketing.

The tendency for local business to favor PPC over Social Media is understandable. Local business operators look for quick results, and usually don’t have the bandwidth to focus their efforts on mastering online marketing. They tend to have limited marketing budgets and often favor the “do-it-yourself” online marketing approach rather than spend precious budget on outsourcing their electronic marketing to a qualified professional or online marketing company.

At first glance, social marketing looks promising to the “do-it-yourself” local business owner. Social media marketing seems to be all the rage, and the outlay of dollars to conduct social marketing campaigns can be minimal. But actually generating successful results with social media is elusive and local businesses quickly discover how time consuming social marketing can be. Frequently, with nothing to show for the countless hours invested.

Hence, the favor toward PPC. Buying paid traffic has generally worked reliably enough. Traditionally, the ability to achieve page one placement for PPC advertising in the search engines (Google Adwords), has been reasonably attainable for many local businesses in most local and regional markets. However, this trend may be starting to shift. PPC competition, even for local business, has become much stiffer. The prospect of beating the competition at PPC advertising by paying higher and higher bid rates continues to push PPC into a more expensive proposition for local business.

The shift to social media from paid search starting to accelerate for local business

Typically, local businesses have been more comfortable with the fast and scalable results from paid search. The biggest frustration with social media has been the time.

Social media focuses on building relationships and interacting with your market which can be very time consuming. This is difficult for businesses to grasp since they have been used to more immediate and scalable results with paid search.

However, a recent survey conducted by Roost finds local businesses beginning to prefer social media marketing over paid search.

This study reveals that more than 71 percent of the small businesses surveyed believe social media is more effective than paid search. And only 15 percent of those surveyed continue to hang on to paid search as their most effective means of online marketing.

Which social media platforms do local businesses rank as the most popular?

Of the respondents surveyed, 84 percent of local businesses find Facebook to be the most effective marketing channel. LinkedIn was ranked second with 8 percent followed by Twitter at 7 percent. And only 0.5 percent of the local businesses surveyed did not find social marketing effective at all.

Economics and cost savings seems to be the key driver behind the rising trend toward social marketing for local business. Roughly 45 percent of businesses surveyed claim they use social media because it “saves money. Local businesses also suggest they actually enjoy using social media as a “fun way to interact with people”. And a third reason with 44 percent of the votes is that social media helps keep the local business ”top of mind” with consumers.

If you have a local business and you’re not leveraging social media marketing, you should start to think about how to get started.  Social media works and it’s not a passing fad, it’s not going away. Most important, social media is becoming the consumer choice for interacting with local businesses and brands.

Yes, social media takes time and has its challenges, but it’s effective if you learn how to do it right. And as social marketing continues to evolve and mature, it may make the most sense for your business to leverage the help of a social marketing professional.

Search Engine Marketing News | Tips for Facebook Marketing

If you have spent any time building content or looking into organic search engine marketing tactics, you undoubtedly have come across Facebook as a possible platform. Since Facebook started as a personal social site, you might have some reservations about building Facebook into a search engine marketing blog for your business. As we dive into this topic, you will hopefully find your niche in this rich marketing soil as well as come to understand a little more about content marketing in general.

As with any professional search engine marketing you do, you’ll want to consider the value that you’re providing to your clients and search engine bots. Your content should contain at least one of the 3 E‘s. Provideeducational information, empower your audience with the tools to succeed or simply entertain them. Do any one of these things–or several of them if you’re up for it–and your readers (both real and robot) will boost your ratings, driving better traffic to your site. This is one of the reasons we talk all day long about quality content here.

An extra little trick that Facebook adds to your usual SEO playbook is engagement ratings.  Employing the three E’s is a great way to get your audience to LIKE your posts, leave comments of their own and interact with other elements of your site. This interaction is called engagement. Better content = better engagement.

The better your engagement score on FB, the higher and more often you end up in the NewsFeed. Here’s an insider tip: Before you do something significant in your business, get your engagement up on FB a week or two before. Be sure to ask questions and tell your fans to LIKE the post if they agree. By the time the metrics have run their course, your site will be riding a high wave of engagement right as you release the news about your significant move.

With high engagement you can further seduce the robots scanning your search engine marketing blog for signs of life. But there are some other gems that make FB your friend when doing any kind of professional search engine marketing. FB can be a great hub wherein you collate your online presence. It is the perfect bluejeans and blazer combo. FB can be perfectly dressed for any occasion. Professional or personal. By linking your other social media sites to your fan page you are, in a sense, humanizing your online business. This is a great way to capitalize on the personal element that might have been off-putting.

Another trick to make the most of your Facebook search engine marketing blog is to exploit the ability to use images. Insert your images with a call to action. If you are small, get in the habit of shooting your own images with your smart phone and keeping a library of them. You can even slap a few words on the image to make a stronger point. This will give the bots something to chew on and the low-tech quality of your shots can give the feeling of a “back door” look at your business.

You can also take a screen capture of your actual blog post and embed that into your Facebook post. This mixes up the content to give it a more interesting flair. But by embedding a post you had on another site, you can extend the life of your content without sending red flags to the search engines.

Another thingabout FB images is that they have recently been upgraded. These new ginormous picture capabilities can skyrocket your engagement. There is a lot of luck with selecting imagery to make the search engine marketing news, but you can narrow down the guesswork by reading our take on using visuals in content marketing.

For some real visual pop you can also add some video to your Facebook page. People are more likely to click on your post if there is video in it. Videos are a great opportunity to communicate your more difficult messages. Use videos sparingly, however, since you don’t want end up in a competition with YouTube.

Remember that most people are on FB to have fun, not to do business. So keep your messages simple and  relevant with an element of entertainment or some light-hearted thought-provoking. The more curious or eye-catching you can make it, the better it will be received by your fans when it is sandwiched between searching for old college sweethearts and their nephews soccer pictures. Or, if you are really struggling with the fun/business balance maybe you can use your Facebook page to just tell a story.