Using Social Media to endorse Your Local Business

Too often local businesses set up social media accounts and then leave them empty. I'd more or less rather a business owner not even have a Facebook page than create one and walk away from it. Social media marketing is a incredible way to promote your local business, connect with current and potential customers, and drive foot traffic through your doors but you only get out what you put in! Social media is not a set it and forget it platform, so be sure you are actively inviting and encouraging your customers to get involved. Ask questions, post pictures, promote specials--give them a reason to connect with you! The more times you can interrelate with someone online the better chance you have of ultimately drawing them into your store.

Here are 3 ways local businesses can use social media marketing to drive physical foot traffic and grow their online occurrence:

1. Connect with local bloggers and online personalities in your industry.

Most cities have their fair share of local bloggers and online personalities and these are the kind of online authorities you can unite with via social media to help promote your local business. For instance, a vegetarian restaurant could reach out to vegetarian food bloggers in their area, local food growers and suppliers, the organizers of farmer's markets and so forth. While these online personalities might not have a huge national presence chances are they have a strong foothold in the local community, which is precisely where your foot traffic is coming from! Invite them to check out your local business, ask them to review your products, form business partnerships and cross-promotions and so forth. They can promote your business using their own social media accounts to a wider audience and help draw new customers in.

2. Continue involved with other community events.

It's dangerous to be overly self-promotional. Yes, you have every right to endorse your events and sales on social media but you have to remember that social networking sites are not just another soapbox for you to stand out and talk about how awesome you are. You are a local business so get involved in the community and stay involved with related local events! For example, a book store could sponsor and help promote the library's summer reading program. Or a pet store might volunteer at the local shelter's adoption day and promote a "pet of the week" on their social profiles to help animals find new families. When you help promote other local businesses you also get the chance to introduce your brand to their customers/social followers, which might drive more foot traffic your way in the end.

3. Reward your social media followers with a special offer.

In addition to special discounts and sales for your best customers, local SEO expert Chris Silver Smith had an outstanding idea for your social media followers. He suggested that local businesses "have a night where your store is empty and social media can be a great option for filling the place up with more customers and more sales!" For example, a local clothing store could host a fashion night in for their best customers and give them the first chance to buy new pieces. A restaurant could hold a wine tasting or create a special pre-fixe meal that is just for their social media followers. Turn a slow night into a huge success for your local business and foster some good will with your best customers! At the event be sure to give confidence your social followers to take and post pictures, check-in on Facebook, use an event hashtag on Twitter and so forth.

In my opinion, just about every local business can influence social media in some way to not only augment their SEO and online presence, but also help drive foot traffic. The key is to keep finding new ways to give your social followers a reason to interrelate with your brand. Sales and promotions are great, but what else can you do to attract attention, both online and in-store?

78% of a Brand’s Facebook Fans Are Already Customers

Social intelligence company Syncapse set out to answer why people become Facebook fans in its latest study and what the value of a fan is to a brand. The research originate 78 percent of a brand’s Facebook fans have already engaged with the brand's product or services.

"Since being a brand user is typically a prerequisite to becoming a Fan in consumer goods categories, marketers should prioritize their Fan acquisition investments on converting existing customers," Syncapse said in its report. "Not only is acquisition cost and conversion friction lower, but the investment in a higher quality Fan base will reap rewards down the line, and this is true for both lower-cost and higher-cost consumer brands."

But there are other motivators for people becoming fans of a brand on Facebook, including wanting coupons or discounts or sharing personal experiences and interests with others.

But Syncapse warns that acquiring fans through discount offers often lead to a lower value in general for the brand.

"Many brands, particularly retailers and lower-cost brands with high purchase frequencies often resort to rewards and direct-response incentives for driving Fan membership. However, these tactics are often blindly targeted to brand-promiscuous deal hunters, resulting in a lower-quality, fickle Fan membership (and waste of scarce marketing dollars)."

So just how much is the value of a Facebook fan?

Syncapse took into account several factors in its study including spending, loyalty, and propensity to recommend, earned media value, acquisition cost and brand affinity when answering this question. The total value of a fan based on these factors is estimated to be $174 – a 28 percent increase since 2010.

But the true value in a fan, Syncapse argued, is measured by the motivation behind becoming a fan in the first place. While discounts and contests may drive a brand’s fan base up quickly, many of those Fans aren't likely to have staying power.

"After understanding the composition of social membership, it becomes critical for marketers to understand the reasons consumers become Fans of brands in the first place," Syncapse said. "Marketers must compare actual reasons for becoming a Fan, and the hard tactics (and often expensive investments) they often deploy to acquire Fans – sometimes they match up, sometimes they don't. There may be more effective and efficient strategies to acquire more of the right types of Fans."

Keyword Research Tips to improve Your Online Traffic

Are you having a hard time finding out which keywords to target for your SEO and PPC campaigns?

Let me show you 5 Keyword Research Tips that will end your Keyword research problems.

1. Swipe your Competitor’s Keyword Research

Why not let your “established” and “authority” competitors do the keyword research for you?

You can ethically “swipe” your competitor’s keywords by using these Google’s Free Keyword Tool.

Use Google Keyword Tool

Here’s what you need to do.

List at least 5 top competitors that are ranking in the top results for your targeted terms or niche.

Let me use “Keyword Research Tips” as an example of a keyword/keyword theme that I would like to target.

I will then Paste the Top 5 URLs that are ranking for this term in Google Keyword Tool’s Website Box

Change your location and language based on your targeted demographic. Choose Global and English if you are targeting a worldwide audience.

Choose exact match or phrase match as keyword match types. I prefer to use phrase matches because it can help me find “hidden long tail keywords” later on.

The great thing about this strategy is that you’ll immediately see the search volumes for the keywords you’ve chosen.

Select keywords that you think will be relevant to your niche and group them together to create tightly themed set of keywords.

2. Find hidden long tail keywords in the phrase-match/exact match difference

This strategy can help you uncover hidden long tail keywords that might be less competitive than most keywords.

The secret here is the difference between Phrase Match and Exact Match Search volumes.

Google Keyword Tool usually shows the Phrase match and Exact match search volumes, but they seldom release related long tail keywords to target for your SEO and PPC campaigns.

Basically, you’ll need to find the phrase match and exact match search volume of a particular keyword.

If there’s a huge difference between the search volumes, then you have a winning keyword.

Try to find the “missing long tail keywords” through Google instant searches or try some PPC advertising to drive some impressions and clicks which will help you identify these “hidden keyword opportunities”.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

 SEO Tools (in Google Global Search)

“seo tools” (phrase match) = 90,500

[seo tools] (exact match) = 33,100

“SEO Tools” Phrase Match/Exact Match Difference = 57,400

SEO Services (in Google Global Search)

“seo services” (phrase match) = 246,000

[seo services] (exact match) = 49,500

“SEO Services” Phrase Match/Exact Match Difference = 196,500

Obviously the bigger opportunity lies in optimizing for the term “SEO Services” since it has 196,500 hidden long tail keywords.

These hidden long tail keywords includes:

“seo services canada”

“seo services toronto”

and more

The idea here is to find keywords that have huge differences between the search volumes of the phrase and exact match and create content around those keywords.

3. Blog on upcoming events and product launches

Monitor competitor product releases, industry updates and industry news.

If you can rank and optimize for keywords that are not being searched today, but will be highly searched in the future, then you’re in a great position to generate tons of traffic for that search term.

Here are just a few examples:

Date Based Searches

Black Friday 2013

Boxing Day 2013

Product launches

[Product name] launch

[Product name] review

[Product name] information

Basically, this strategy relies on anticipating keywords that will be highly searched in the future. These keywords are easier to rank in the search engines because no one is still optimizing for these terms.

4. Add geo-targeted search terms to your Keywords for Local Search

If you are promoting a local business, or you offer products and services to a local demographic, adding geo-location keywords for search can help you rank a lot faster than regular keywords.

Here’s another example.

If you want to optimize for “Seo Services” it might take you several months, or even years to outrank your competition.

Instead try adding geo locations to your keywords:

 “Seo services Canada”

“Seo services Toronto”

These keywords might have less search volumes, but they are highly targeted and more likely to convert than the Fat Head keywords.

5. Mine your existing Google Analytics Data for Long Tail Keywords that you might have missed

Do you know that you can find tons of keyword research data from your existing Google Analytics data? Of course this will only work for old websites with some organic or paid search traffic before. Using Google Analytics Regular Filters you can create a list of long tail keywords.

You can filter keywords with 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 or more keywords in the search phrase. This will help you find content ideas, keywords opportunities that you might want to include in your next blog post.

 I’ve created a Google Analytics Dashboard to help you find these keywords quickly. Make sure you’re signed in to Google Analytics and Click here to Copy my SEO Dashboard. And there you have it, 5 Unconventional Keyword Research Tips that can help solve your Keyword research problems.

5 Google Analytics features for Business Owners

It is wiser for small and midsize businesses to have a website and use digital marketing as a mean of gaining visibility in the eye of targeted audience. Usually business owners are busy running their business and cannot get into the details of marketing. Thus, they know very less about how traffic is reacting on their website, what is going good and what is needed to be changed in order to increase the overall revenue.

Business owners frequently hire companies or consultants that offer digital marketing services and work with them so that they can get better visibility against the targeted key phrases in Google and other search engines. Aside from the progress report provided by marketing team, I believe business owners should be well-known with the analytics of how their website is performing in search engines and what he should do in order to amplify business visibility and to get noticed by the targeted audience.

 Google Analytics is the strongest tool that offers tons and tons of data for business owners to look in to the details and take business decisions accordingly. Google Analytics contains every small detail of a website, how REAL people are reacting to the website and this overloaded information sometimes confuses business owners.

So today I decided to talk about few of the simple yet significant features in Google Analytics that can give business owners a strong indication of how audience is reacting to their business, what needs to be changed.

Business Conversions

Conversion tab is one of the most significant areas for business owners as this will tell business owners about how many people are reaching to the contact form and exact number of leads and conversions.

This tab also indicates the amount of sales that you have generated in the current month and comparing option can tell you the variation of sales rate from the previous dates.

The reason why this option is so important for business owners is because a continuous increase in sales is something what they are really looking for at the end of the day. This is also significant because usually business owners make future business strategy keeping their current sales ratio in mind.

This is the 2nd most important option for business owners as it gives them a strong indication of where to invest in the next phase. Traffic sources in Google Analytics let business owners to see what channels are most powerful and allowing most targeted traffic to land on their website.

This feature also tells them about correct proportions of traffic coming through varied sources such as search engines, referral websites or directly so that one can have complete stats in hand to make decisions about further dividing their marketing budget for different online marketing channels.

Similar to Traffic sources, traffic location in Google Analytics is quite necessary for a business person to plan his business and marketing strategies for the upcoming months.

Traffic Location at one end tells about where the traffic is coming from and which area is bringing in some solid leads and sales. On the other end it indicates potential locations that you can invest in future.

For instance, if you are getting good amount of traffic from United Kingdom however, you might be getting less visitors from United States but more sales and leads. Then it indicates business that United States is the sweet post for their business and investing in US locations will increase their traffic as well as would have a positive effect on leads and sales as compared to UK which tend to have more traffic but less leads.

This is one of their features that most businesses either miss or do not believe as important and in any case they are avoiding one of the significant features that can help them take smart business decisions.

The idea is to see what technology that traffic is driving through your website, which can be various browsers like firefox, chrome, safari or mobile devices like iphone, android and others.

Check your website in every browser as well as dissimilar devices and see if it is well-matched to all the devices and browsers in case it is not make sure website is friendly to all.

If most of your power visitors are coming from mobile devices like iPhone or Android, it is smart to think about creating a mobile app that will help business to boost its revenue.

This feature is usually handled by webmasters but business owners should keep a keen look on it as this feature contains some essential business information that they can find within.

The idea is to list down the pages from where most people are leaving the website and then see if there is any service page (or any other important page) that is listing in the top most exit pages. In case of yes, business owner can make a decision if they need to invest in revamping pages or find an alternative of it.

In the era where Internet and online platforms has become necessary for businesses, business owners should need to look in to these above given matrices and data in order to get better insight of their investment and take smart business decisions instead of only relying on assumptions.

Google Advice on When to Submit Reconsideration Request & How to Clean Your Link Profile

Google posted a new article today answering common questions about submitting reconsideration requests and managing your backlink profile.

Google Search Quality representatives, Kaspar Szymanski and Uli Lutz, co-authored the article, going through the more common questions on this topic.

Google says you should really only submit a reconsideration request when you receive a manual penalty but if you are uncertain if you have a manual or algorithmic penalty, submitting the request “is fine,” Google said.

Other tips include:

Only submit the reconsideration request after you take action to fix the issues with your site.

Use Google’s “links to your site” report within Webmaster Tools to examine bad links pointing to your site.

Remove bad links by disavowing them, nofollowing them and having them completely removed.

When submitting a reconsideration request, provide a detailed explanation of what you changed and why.

Responses for reconsideration request can take a few days but may take much longer depending on the site and current workload.

Googlers review each reconsideration request manually.

How to create Your Content More Fascinating to Your Audience

As the web gets flooded with content creators, attention has become scarce, and as a result far more precious than it’s ever been. It’s also tougher to get then it’s ever been. You have no choice but to tug at the heart strings of your audience, capture and lead their imagination and take them on a journey to a destination. According to Sally Hogshead we must attract the people who come in contact with us, or we risk losing their attention.

So how do you fascinate people?

1. Provoke an emotional response

No one tunes in for tame opinions. – Sally Hogshead

Do you write in a method that provokes an emotional response? An emotional response doesn't necessarily have to be positive. You can make people laugh, cry, or even make them angry.  One of the easiest ways to provoke an emotional response from people with your content is to have a strong opinion.  Of course when you have an opinion you’re going to make some people angry, but the people who you resonate with will become even more fascinated with you.

My friend Paul Jarvis doesn't care at all about SEO. Imagine what kind of a response that would produce if it had been published here at Search Engine Journal, where many of the long time readers have made their living doing SEO work.  It would certainly cause quite a conversation.

In order for this to be effective you can’t just provoke people for no reason. The goal is not to be a digital train wreck.  You have to be provocative with a purpose.

2. Create Advocates and Cause a Conversation

Are people talking about your blog, brand or business with each other? In any community that is truly thriving, there is just as much, if not more conversation taking place between the community members as much as there is the community leaders.

By creating an event like the World Domination Summit, Chris Guillebeau has turned The Art of Non-Conformity into a full blown movement. 3000 people are estimated to attend this year, and it’s a conversation that takes place around his brand by advocates of the brand.

3. Cultivate Mystique

If you look at the Facebook page or Instagram feed of author Danielle Laporte, you’ll see that she’s always talking about what she’s working on. But she does it in a way that makes the people who follow her continually wonder what’s coming next. She shares wire frames, design sketches, and other teasers of her next project. At the moment she’s launching a magazine and for the last several months she’s been teasing the audience, leaving them anticipating the day it comes out. This cultivates mystique.

I recently announced my very first conference, The Instigator Experience. The page doesn’t tell you much other than that it will be in the spring of 2014. The lack of too many details has been intriguing to some people and as a result even people who may not attend have signed up just out of curiosity.

Some basic things you can do to cultivate mystique:

Give people a preview of something you’re working on. Hollywood does this constantly with their movie trailers. When we see a trailer we start to expect what’s coming

Share a book cover

Share a paragraph from a book

Put a picture of a wireframe on Instagram

Tease your audience, make them want more, and keep them wondering what’s coming next.

4.  Incorporate Prestige

For anybody who is an aspiring or even well knows public speaker, speaking at TED is one of the pinnacles of achievement. It’s an exclusive group and to be chosen is a prestigious accomplishment. I jokingly say that I’m working on curing cancer so that I can be invited to speak at TED.

The Summit Series is another event that taps into prestige. The hefty price tag and a crowd that includes the who’s who of the world we live in today make it one of the premier events of the year.

You’re not going to become the next TED and you may not have the deep pockets required to make the summit series. So how do you incorporate prestige into what you do online?

Create exclusive invite only experiences for your readers. If you’re launching a product or releasing a book, reach out to a group of 20 early readers.

Have an Invite only Forum/Community: If you’re familiar with Skull and Bones, you know that it’s an invite only secret society. Former presidents and elite members of society are all rumored to members. As you can see they've combined mystique and prestige. Build an exclusive mastermind group of your peers.

Make People Jump through Hoops to Work with You: While this might seem a bit counterintuitive, we tend to value things that are harder to obtain.

If you have a conference, incorporate an application process. This will not only raise the prestige of what you’re doing, but you’ll get rid of anybody who would bring down your prestige.

So now you have to ask yourself, are you prestigious? Are you Walmart or Nordstrom when it comes to your online brand?

5. Build Trust

Trust is one of the most tricky ways to create a fascinating brand, but also one of the most rewarding. The internet is littered with false promises of easy money making formulas and shortcuts to success. In a world this noisy, honesty is what we trust. But to cultivate that kind of trust takes a long time and long term vision is one of the pillars of a thriving community. The team at Buffer has taken trust to a entire new level. If you work at Buffer, you know the salaries of every other employee. That kind of transparency, while radical results in an incredible level of trust.

The key to cultivating trust is to be honest to a fault. Nothing will cause you to lose trust faster than pretending to be something you’re not.  If you’re not skilled to accomplish something be upfront about it.  If you've failed at something, don’t be afraid to let the world know.  In a world with so much noise, honesty and imperfection is the only thing that people truly trust.

So now you have some questions to ask yourself? Are you fascinating to your readers or customers?  Or are you boring them to death. If it’s latter, then maybe you need to pick up a copy of Sally’s book and make some changes.

Use Local SEO to Become a Leader in Your Local Market

At present there are two types of businesses which are running successfully, one is globally/nationally targeted business and the other one is local market targeted businesses.  In this article I am going to talk about the local market targeted business, as most of the people are now focusing on their local market compare to nationally/globally. Google is also doing some changes regarding the local market searches. In mobile search results the local business will be shown before the ones that are not targeted locally.

What do you need to do to become a leader in your local market? Below you’ll find some suggestions which will in fact help you in local branding, and achieving top ranking in local searches.

1)       Local Community Participation

Many business owners are not doing this kind of thing, as they think that by doing some seo or link building, they will get the top ranking and will stay at the top forever. Times have changed. Google is more clever than you think. It is possible that by doing seo or link building that you will not get the top ranking, or that you will stay at the top forever.

Once Google updates their algorithm and you get hit, then you may never get improved from that. Take control of your business before Google does! It’s time for you to be one step ahead of Google and show them that you are doing well and you’re not afraid of any update. You can do this by doing some local community participation.

If you see that someone is organizing a business fair or a trade show, then go there and participate in those activities. Show your quality services to the people in your local market. Tell them why you are good and what good you can do for them. Share all these activities on every social media profile of yours.

Another thing you can do is put in order a small show for your customers. By doing these things, you will increase your local branding and people will be familiar with you locally.

2)      Offline Marketing

It is a really good idea to support your business through offline marketing; this will help your online marketing campaign as well. In offline marketing you can promote your business though local newspapers, local business guides, street banner advertisements, and etc. Don’t forget that you should comprise your website URL and social media profiles in every offline marketing campaign.  These kinds of things will boost your online presences and strengthen your brand.

3)      Local Site Submission

There are many local sites online where you can submit your business site. These sites will help you to get local ranking in Google searches. These sites take in Yelp, City Search, and Manta. This will give you leads for your business because customers can share their experience with your business by putting up their reviews. The more positive review you have on your profile, the more business leads you will get.

4)      Partner Links

It is similar to paid linking, but it is not the same. In this you have to find some sites which are connected to your business. Approach them and ask them if they can give you a link in their support section or partner section. This not only increases your area, but also gives you the benefits in search results. Remember; don’t take a backlink from sites which have too many partner links on their partner link page. It looks spammy and unnatural.

5)      Content Marketing

One of the best techniques we are using today is guest blogging for content marketing. If you have a local business, then you be supposed to do some guest blogging on local blogs. For example, if you have a business in Florida then you’ll want to search blogs which are also in Florida. Don’t forget about relevancy, but try your best to get a backlink.  These links will give you more search engine benefits than other links. Make sure you use your local keyword term in your content and optimize it to get the most results!

I hope that these five techniques will help you achieve top ranking in your local market. Always remember to be genuine and show the quality of service that you can offer.

Google: Improve Your Site's Rank by Building High-Quality Sites, Not Links

For years webmasters have been following one of SEO’s golden rules: get lots of quality backlinks in order to help your site get top rankings on Google. And over the past couple years this has become a lot trickier as Google began penalizing sites with poor quality backlinks.

As a consequence, many webmasters have shifted a lot of their work from link building to creating quality content that visitors want to share, and now Google has updated their Ranking help article to reflect accurately this.

First spotted by Erik Baemlisberger, the article now states:

In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by creating high-quality sites that users will want to use and share.

Previously, the article stated:

In general, webmasters can look up the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.

For those who despise link building, and the negative SEO aspect of competitors pointing bad links to websites, the fact that Google is putting greater importance on sites that users want to use and share will be good news to many webmasters.

It also isn't surprising that Google wants to put that emphasis on the sharing feature as well, particularly with Google+ and how it interacts with searchers who are logged into their Google account. I believe aspects of this will be given greater weight in the search algorithm, at least until the spammers figure out how to develop it on a large scale.

Google's Matt Cutts not long ago signalled this shift, when he mentioned that putting too great of an emphasis on link building is one of the top 5 basic SEO mistakes.

"I wouldn't put too much of a tunnel vision focus on just links," Cutts said. "I would try to think instead about what I can do to market my website to make it better known within my community, or more broadly, without only thinking about search engines."

New in AdWords: Add Descriptions to Sitelinks

Google AdWords is introducing an additional new feature to encourage advertisers to exchange their campaigns to enhanced campaigns. Google is now allowing advertisers to suggest specific text that will display for their sitelink descriptions within their ads.

Back in February 2012, Google began showing sitelinks displaying additional detail on some Google AdWords advertisements. This was pulled from other ads in the count or for those advertisers who created sitelink information within their My Client Center.

Now, Google’s allowing advertisers to identify, or nominate, the specific text advertisers would like to appear for their sitelink descriptions. This gives advertisers much more control over what is appearing on their improved advertisements and to be specific about what text they would like to appear.

For example, here's how the new sitelink details look on a search for [ses san francisco]:

This is pretty significant for advertisers to consider, since Google has found that click-through rates on ads that appear with sitelinks with further detail are much higher than traditional AdWords ads. They also states that the sitelinks offer additional detail that searchers frequently find more useful and relevant.

If you haven’t upgraded to improve campaigns, the option will not be active until those campaigns have been upgraded. All upgraded campaigns will now find a new description field when creating or editing a sitelink.

It is worth noting that not all advertisers will see sitelink extensions due to a variety of reasons such as quality score, positioning, landing page quality, and other ad extensions within the same campaign, search terms used, and the significance of competitor's ads on the same page.

With all campaigns being upgraded to improve campaigns on July 22, it is worthwhile to start upgrading accounts now and take advantage of the new sitelinks before all advertisers have it enabled and competition for those sitelinks being displayed becomes much greater.

Seo Tips and Tricks for Optimizing Time Sensitive Pages

When it comes to content, you always have to worry about something being time responsive. Writing evergreen content, or content that will stay significant throughout time, is a great way to help keep your website solid and applicable to users searching the web. However, time sensitive content is just as significant. This type of content is a great way to keep your blog fresh and give readers what they want. It shows that you’re on top of the news and you’re ready and willing to write something that can be used instantly. It’s more specific and will help your website gain lots of instant clicks.

The question with time sensitive content, however, points back to SEO. Small businesses have to ask themselves: If something is only going to be relevant for a short period of time, what are the correct optimization tactics?

SEO for Time Sensitive Pages: How to Make Sure You’re Content Isn’t Being Wasted

It seems that the majority of companies utilize the same SEO efforts for both evergreen and time sensitive pages. While this isn’t a bad thing, and in some cases it will work just fine, understanding how time sensitive pages differ in terms of SEO is a great way to make sure your website is as successful as possible. Below are a few tips and tricks:

Be Quick. You don’t want to wait until a specific event or announcement gets too close to ramp up SEO efforts and link building (especially if you’re working in a competitive niche). You want to start building links and optimizing right away so that when the story really does go big, you’re already at the top ready to go. It’s also significant to realize that Google bots aren’t going to check out your site every single day, so if you start optimizing right way you might not even see results until the big event.

Always Keep Optimizing. Some companies get rid of an article or even a time responsive website once that time is over; however, in doing so the company loses any SEO value that page earned during that time. Even if you think a holiday season is over or a big announcement is no longer appropriate, keep the page intact in case it ever becomes relevant again. There are also ways that you can slightly change your content to become more evergreen in the future, so be sure to always keep the page optimized so you can pass on that SEO juice if you ever need it.

Anticipate. This is an overlap of the first point. You not only want to be quick when the time sensitive information does occur—you want to be ready for it even before it happens. If you know that something time sensitive is about to happen, whether it be a holiday or a potential Google algorithm update you want to write about, start your link building early. Get an idea of what keywords you may want to use and start to dabble in those when guest blogging and writing content on your own site that you may want to use as an internal link.

Know When to Change Emphasis. This works in the much the same way as anticipating an event. If you know that you have two events you want to cover, know when to focus on one and when to focus on the other. The best example here has to do with sports. As soon as the World Series gets underway, start optimizing your pages for your NFL playoff articles. Once the NFL playoffs get underway, start optimizing for baseball season.

Do you optimize your time sensitive pages differently than your other pages? What are some of the optimization tricks you use to make sure you’re getting the most from that content? Let us know your story and your thoughts in the comments below.

Google Officially Launches Local Results Carousel

The Google Local Carousel beta test that we saw last month is now rolling out to all U.S. users, Google announced. While the carousel has been used on tablet devices since December 2012, the carousel style results being accessible on a desktop is a much newer change.

With the new style of carousel listings, when a user searches for a local results, such as a restaurant or hotel, instead of the traditional vertical listings most users connect with Google search, there is now a horizontal carousel which features thumbnails, ratings, as well as the number of Google+ reviews. Users can then scroll sideways through the listings to see more results.

One of the positive things to this new carousel style for local results is that businesses who might not rank in the top two or three required to see the results above the fold, can now see their business featured very importantly, complete with an image. However, there is no guarantee that your business will be one of the ones chosen to show in the carousel. Google search ranking algorithms also apply to the listings in Google Maps in determining which businesses are featured in the carousel.

This will also mean it is that much more significant for a local business to make certain that the thumbnail used for their local business listing is one that not only represents their business, but is eye-catching enough to draw searchers to their listing. Interestingly, Google’s algorithms will also make a decision which photo is used, although exactly what algorithms are used as unknown at this time, but they do suggest using high quality images on your Google business listing.

Google's local carousel is only obtainable in limited verticals at this time, with hotels, restaurants, and bars being amongst the verticals included. They do say that they are looking to enlarge this by experimenting with different designs and interfaces.

This is currently being rolled out in the U.S. only at this time and is only available in English.

Expand Your Sitelinks

Google has released an update to Adwords, more specially sitelink extensions. There is now the opportunity to express your sitelinks with an extra 70 characters. It’s essentially like having ads within an ad.

What Does It Look Like

This is what sitelinks are going to look like from now on and I must say it is certainly a step in the right direction, there is much more information and as a user, I can click on a page that is most applicable to me. As an advertiser, it gives me the opportunity to list more USPs and help reduce unrelated clicks.

Tech Specs

As before, the link name remains at 25 characters. What has now been introduced is description line 1 and 2, both allowing up to 35 characters. This means that we can now use up to 95 characters per sitelink extension.

Besides the added characters, there are still a few rules that we must abide by, luckily, Google hasn’t added any more rules to sitelink extensions but they are as follows: Sitelinks cannot violate the duplicate sitelink URL policy, Sitelink text cannot use DKIs, Sitelink text cannot be the same as other sitelinks in the same ad group/campaign or the main ad that’s serving.

Why Is This Happening?

Firstly, this feature is only obtainable when you upgrade your campaigns from legacy to improved, a gentle push from Google to jump on the band wagon. Google also seem to be bringing out a lot of extensions to get better Adwords ads, such as image extensions and even call extensions. This is more than likely an attempt to attract more and more people to utilize PPC over SEO.

What I find interesting is that they have added 70 characters to sitelink extensions, not that I am complaining. However, I do recall Google reducing the sitelink name from 35 characters to 25. Their reasoning for this was that they had data to establish that sitelinks of a shorter length received a higher click through rate, so why are they undoing this? Perhaps Google was wrong about reducing the character length, although it may have resulted in a higher CTR, the bounce rate may have increased. In this case, I think it is likely that Google want to offer its users with more information to enlist pre click confidence. This will help to enlarge the quality of traffic that advertisers receive.

How to Use It

We can now use up to 4 sitelinks within a text ad. So essentially, we have 5 text ads in 1 that we can display to our potential customers. There are a few dissimilar ways you can make the most of this feature and this will depend on your type of business and what goals you hope to attain.

Since Google love examples of pizza, it would seem fitting to go after the trend. As previously explained by Google’s wonderful video explaining enhanced campaigns, for pizza there are 2 types of customers. On the move collection customers, and stay at home delivery customers. You can use one sitelink to display information like wait times and deliveries times. Another idea would be to display offers and deals that are for collection and delivery. You can actually get inventive with your descriptions and give the user 5 reasons to choose our company instead of others.

What Can We Expect

If we make the most of these extensions then we can more than likely wait for a higher CTR but what I would really count on is a higher quality of traffic from your Adwords campaign which will hopefully translate into an increase in conversions.

Facebook Just Hit 1 Million Plus Advertisers!

When I heard the news, I wasn’t one bit surprised. Facebook advertising is not only a plan that I love, but it’s a cakewalk when compared to other advertising mediums: Google PPC & Bing Ads. (In terms of overcoming the learning curve.) In case you’re wondering, Google reached this statistic way back in 2007. It’s estimated that it might be above or around the figure of 2.5 million advertisers.

Despite being a bit easier for the little guy to learn, you should know that people do not primarily come to Facebook to buy, but rather to meet people and communicate with friends and family. Additionally, the majority of print and TV channels are using the platform to build brand awareness rather than getting a sale right away. Quite a difference I might add!

You’ll find that more and more small businesses are flocking to this advertising medium. Local business owners like the interest targeting which allows them to aim and target very precise audiences or groups of people. In an effort to draw even more advertisers to the platform, Facebook just released their new Facebook for business, Success Stories page. If you’ve got a success story or you want some advertising tips, check it out.

Do you use facebook advertising in your business? Please share your experiences below :)