Do you run a local business with one or more locations? Do you want customers that live nearby to find your business on Google easily? If the answer to these questions is yes, then you need a local SEO strategy. With a local SEO strategy, you can connect with people that live close by and are looking for your products or services. These kinds of searches on Google are twice as likely to be motivated customers. Studies have shown that when someone searches for a product in a particular place, they are ready to buy it right away.

NOT JUST SEO, LOCAL SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.  SEO is the process that business owners use to make their websites appear organically higher on a Google search result page. Most people that search for products never go to page two on the search results page. This is especially true on searches for local products and services. If you miss the opportunity to be on page one, it's almost like you're not on Google at all.

Local SEO is less competitive than regular SEO. When optimizing your website for a Google search, the competition for keywords (and consequently rankings) involves a lot fewer competitors. And below, there are some things you can do that will positively affect your local Google ranking that are impossible for national companies to achieve.

LOCAL SEO IS MORE URGENT

When people search for products and services that are local to them, they intend to buy. This kind of search is what makes their search more urgent. They are looking for someone that can meet their needs right now. Google knows that if someone is looking for an electrician in Amherst, Massachusetts, it won't do them any good to find electricians somewhere in Colorado. Local SEO allows Google to provide its customers (the search engine users) with the most useful results. And Google wants to make all their customers happy. 

If you optimize your website so that Google knows that you are local, you will see more visits of people that are ready to buy. Google's statistics tell us that over three-quarters of the people who perform local mobile searches will visit that business in the next 24 hours. These customers have already gone through all the initial buying stages and are ready to take out their credit cards.

GOOGLE AND LOCAL SEO

Google wants to provide the most relevant searches to its customers. That's why last year, they spent millions of dollars on upgrading their search algorithm. They wanted to include things that indicate that a business is local and that it is well-liked. To make sure this happens, Google considers three things above all other ranking factors. The three "Ranking Factors" are: 

Proximity - Is the business near the IP address of the searcher?

Relevancy - Does the company provide the product or service?

Distinction - How popular is the company online and in the local community?

Want to see how your website ranks compared to your competitors? Use our free compare vs competitors tool.

SEO/ORGANIC VS. PAID PLACEMENT

There are only two ways to get to the top of a Google search page. The easiest way (if you have a large budget) is to pay for the privilege of being at the top. This is called paid search results and is very popular with companies that are just starting out and can't get to the top of the first page organically. Let's cover some things you can do to get to the first page of the Google search results without having to pay for the privilege. 

But first analysis your website now with our free SEO audit tool to see where you stand.

MOBILE FRIENDLY WEBSITE

More than three-quarters of searches for local products and services are done on cell phones. So the first thing is to make sure that your website works on a cell phone. Get out your phone and go to your site. Is it easy to read and easy to navigate? Now you need to see what Google thinks about it. One way to do that is to use a free tool from Google called Google's Mobile-Friendly Test or use our free mobile friendly analysis tool. This test will scan your website and tell you ways that you can approve it for cell phones. And best of all it's free.

GOOGLE MY BUSINESS PAGE

You must list your business on Google My Business (GMB).  It's free and a necessary step. If you have multiple locations, list each one individually. Not only will this allow you to rank higher on the search engine pages, but it will enable you to get a pin on the Google Map during search results. Registering on GMB will also provide a place for people to put reviews of your business. Reviews of your business are one of the most reliable tools to get more people in the front door. Once you have your business listed with GMB, keep updating it for Google. Do this by interacting with your webpage by adding pictures, reviews, questions and answers, and other updates to keep it fresh. Google likes fresh content and will rank you higher in local search results because of it.

 BUSINESS ADDRESS IS ON YOUR SITE

Remember, the very first ranking factor is proximity. Google needs to know that you are close to the searcher. How Google learns this is by looking at the address that's on your website. So, it's essential to have your physical address on your website. And if you have multiple locations, make sure that each location has its own webpage with its own physical address. 

BACKLINKS - OTHER SITES HAVE YOUR BACK

Another powerful tool for helping pages list higher is to have other pages mention your site. These are called backlinks or citations, and they are evidence for Google that your website is popular and authentic.  The more popular your site is in Google's eyes, the higher it will rank it on its search results.  There are a few ways to get quality backlinks for your website. 

First, make sure that you are listed in all the directories that related to your industry. For instance, if you operate a hotel, make sure that you are listed in TripAdvisor. That is easily done by asking one of your guests to leave a good review on TripAdvisor. Also, make sure your website is listed in as many authentic directories as possible. Find regional and local directories that list your type of service and let them know that you exist.  And make sure that they contain your website URL.

FIND BACKLINK SITES

There are a few ways to find out where the backlink/citation sites are. One great method is by seeing what sites are linked to your competitors, even if they aren't local competitors. Enter the website URL of a competitor into https://ahrefs.com/backlink-checker. This service will provide you with a list of links that point back to your competitor. While they might not all be appropriate for your business, make sure the ones that are, learn about you. 

A WARNING ABOUT BACKLINKS

There's one way that you should not get backlinks. You should never pay for them. And definitely, do not join a backlink service. There are these services that agree to list each other's businesses in the hopes that they will trick Google into thinking they are popular.  That used to work years ago, but Google now penalizes this.

OPTIMIZE META TAGS

Meta tags are hidden text descriptions explicitly designed for search engines. They are hidden from regular eyes, but Google's search crawler can see them very well. The meta description is that little piece of text that you see in the search results for your web page. Make sure that they describe your location and your business category. Google loves good meta tags.

LOCAL KEYWORDS

Make sure the text on your website has all the local keywords that people might search for. If you are a plumber in Smithfield, include the phrase "local plumber in Smithfield" or "best plumber in Smithfield" or "emergency plumber in Smithfield" on your website. These "long-tail keywords" are effective at bringing in the customers when they are desperate for your products. 

Use our keyword rank checker tool to see where your key words rank.

REVIEWS ARE CRITICAL

Reviews are the new currency of the internet. One of the most important parts of local SEO is to have many positive reviews for your company. When you finish with a customer, ask them to leave you a review.  Have your employees give them a card with your website on it and ask them to provide you with a personal review. It is very effective on so many levels.

Here at The Click Depot, we can do a comprehensive audit of your website to make sure it performs well for local SEO.  We have created thousands of effective SEO websites, and we'll make sure that yours climbs to the top of the Google search results page.

To say that social media management is a new phenomenon would be a huge understatement. Consider the fact that 20 years ago, Facebook was virtually unheard of. The very concept of a "search engine" was new. And Google was still trying to decide what to call itself.  Back then, you couldn't even buy advertising on Facebook. And nobody was sure how to buy space on the Google search engine - or why.

But once it caught on, social media management has changed the entire business world. Now, if somebody wants to find out where they should buy a specific service or product, they Google it. The power that gives Google is extensive. But pair Google with various social platforms such as Facebook or LinkedIn, and you have an unbeatable combination.

Reaching out to prospective customers is different than it used to be. Marketing used to be primarily a guessing game, and you didn't know if you had succeeded until after you spent your marketing budget. Now, if businesses want to reach out to their prospective customers, they use social media to build brand awareness and create a solid digital presence. While at the same time effectively gaining new clients through strong Facebook ads programs. And the best part is you can adjust these program as you go along. Long gone are the days of mailing coupons to everybody or purchasing ad space in magazines or newspapers. A lot of these newspapers don't even exist anymore.

Because of this big change in the marketing world, we have also seen a change in the personality of the marketing professionals. The marketing professionals of the past consisted of people that owned printing presses and television stations. They were producers of magazine ads, mailings, and TV/radio time. Only basic projects could be left up to do-it-yourselfers, and the bulk of advertising was left up to well-funded advertising professionals. 

But what about today? Can do-it-yourselfers effectively produce social media management while at the same time maintaining and growing brand awareness? The answer to that question is not a simple yes or no. To answer it, we need to talk about how to produce social media ads and what it takes to do social media management.

DIFFERENT ONLINE PLATFORMS

Social media management is the promotion of services and products through different online media platforms. This will include Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, content on LinkedIn, Twitter advertising, and much more. Strictly speaking, Google is not a social media platform, but Google Ads is the number one advertising venue in the world. Google should always work hand-in-hand with any social media management program. Google Ads programs are not something we can ignore when we are talking about social media management.

Depending on your industry, you are usually working with the top five social media management platforms. They are Google (2 Billion users), Facebook (2.2 billion), Instagram (1 billion), LinkedIn (650 million), and Twitter (350 million). There are others, and some of them may be ideal for your industry. But for now, let's consider only these. And each one of these platforms has an entirely different type of user base and reaches out to its user base using different methods. 

GOOGLE ADS

This is the biggest- Google. And everybody knows Google from its insanely popular search engine. The Google search engine generates 94% of its revenue and is the world's most popular form of advertising. And here's an interesting fact, before Google delivers any search results, it takes into consideration 200 factors. And it does this in a fraction of a second.

For DIY advertisers, the process of buying Google ads for an ad program can be a challenge. This is because Google sells its advertising by auctioning different words or phrases. Participating in that auction takes some education and patience. As an advertiser, you will place bids on different words or phrases using online tools that Google provides. So, if I'm a chiropractor, and I wanted to appear at the top of the search page for "Chiropractors in Albany." I would need to go onto Google and place my order with a bid of, let's say, $1.00 per click. If I am the highest bidder, I will get that top position listing when someone searched for "Chiropractors in Albany," and every time someone clicked my ad, I would pay $1.00.

The actual process for purchasing Google Ads is more involved, but not extremely complex for someone bidding on a simple one-word auction. But when you add in the different options such as bidding on words vs phrases, targeting your prospect by the different targeting options, the timing of the ads, directing to a landing page, the analytics, and ROI, it then becomes very complicated to run Google Ad campaigns. It would even be much more complicated if this Google Ads purchase were part of a larger marketing program that included Facebook Ads, online reviews, and other ad spend. In this current business environment, you need a complete social media management program to compete.

FACEBOOK ADS

Facebook has a unique approach that matches the way they interact with their users. Because it uses a newsfeed for interacting with its users, the advertising method is to insert ads into different users' newsfeeds - and you get to designate the type of users. As you probably know, Facebook is free for regular users as well as for businesses. Anybody can get an account and post anything for their friends to see. And that's the catch - it's free to post as long as it's to "their friends." 

What Facebook Ads allow advertisers to do is to post on other people's newsfeed. With Facebook Ads, you are allowed to purchase space on other people's newsfeeds - and you get to decide what kind of people will see your ad. It's genius because Facebook knows everything about its users. Everything.

This is how you place a Facebook Ad. First, you create an ad that has video or pictures in the size that will fit on Facebook. Then, inside the Facebook Ads Manager, you target the type of customer you would like to see your ad. There are thousands of different options. For instance, if you wanted to show your ad to married couples that are between 50 and 60 years old, that live in Albany, NY, you can do that within the Facebook Ad Manager. Do you want to show your ad to horse lovers in New Hampshire? Not a problem. The Facebook Ads Manager can accommodate. In fact, when using Facebook Ads, there are many thousands of different specifications and characteristics you can choose from to finely tune who gets to see your ad. 

Another thing where Facebook Ads excels is allowing you to create different types of ad programs for different purposes or objectives. For example, there is an ad program that Facebook offers that is designed to bring visitors to your Facebook page. It's simple and effective. Then there are programs inside of Facebook Ad Manager, which are designed to collect information from the customer with a form for them to fill out. Instagram (owned by Facebook) has a similar approach, but the user base is very different, so some of the required formats of the ads are different. But basically, if you create the ad and if it falls within Facebook's ads guidelines, you can post it. And if your goal is very simple, so is the process. 

And the same goes for ads placed on LinkedIn. Used correctly, LinkedIn is incredibly effective for business-to-business marketing. However, if you want to run an effective business-to-business ad campaign on LinkedIn, it will probably include videos on YouTube and paid ads on Google. In today's market, running ads on a single platform just won't do it. 

So, what is the answer to our earlier question - can you do this yourself? The simple answer is yes, you can if your goals are very simple, and the ad program is very basic. Problems will arise if the ad program is complex or includes different social media platforms. 

When we run ad programs here at The Click Depot, we design the entire ad program with all the social platforms in mind before we place a single ad.  And because our ad programs include a combination of different social platforms as well as split-testing different ads creatives, the ROI is higher. We know that this is the only effective approach because it is the only one that covers the entire buying process. We have been very involved in social media management for years, and we are experts at it. Social media management is one of our specialties.

If you have decided that it is time for you to jump into the powerful world of social media management and you don't want to waste your time and money with false starts and ineffective campaigns, call one of our professionals at The Click Depot.

Starting last year and going into the next few years, Google is rolling out its new policy of Mobile-First-Indexing. Since Google is the company that determines our survival on the internet, it would make sense to follow their lead when it comes to designing our websites. This Mobile-First-Indexing is a change that Google made in response to the huge amount of mobile devices on the internet. Mobile devices, phones, and tablets comprise more than half of all internet usage.  So, moving forward, Google will be ranking your site on how your mobile site performs. If there is a difference between your mobile site and your desktop site, Google will defer to the mobile site.  And if you don't have a mobile site, and the site you do have does not work well on mobile devices, Google will penalize you and downgrade your ranking in its index. All this is to say that you need to make sure that your site is mobile-ready. Make sure that your site works great on a smartphone as well as on a desktop without a lot of scrolling or resizing.

Additionally, a well-designed website that works well on desktops and cellphones will increase conversion rates. Your visitors we'll have a more enjoyable experience and will stay longer. Visitors that stay longer on websites are more likely to go farther down the sales funnel, which ends in higher conversion rates. If your visitors run into frustrations with navigation or difficult to read websites, they will move on to another website. After all, there is an unlimited number of websites from which they can choose.

CHECK YOUR DESIGNS ON DIFFERENT DEVICES

A good way to make sure that you remain in Google's good graces and continue to rank high on its search result pages is to make sure that your website is responsive. Responsive web design allows a web page to automatically adapt to whatever screen it is on at the time. So, if it's on a computer, it should easily use the entire real estate with the graphic elements and the text for easy viewing. But when it's on a cell phone, it must be just as easy to access all the information, images, and menus. And even if you load the website onto a tablet, the content will readjust to accommodate the mid-size footprint of a tablet. One thing that's important to note is that Google will not penalize cellphone websites for hiding unnecessary titles and headlines. This policy is because they recognize that fitting all that information on a small screen is frequently impossible. 

DESIGNERS and DEVELOPERS WORK TOGETHER

The challenges to creating a design that works on a screen that's two inches wide just as well as it works on a screen that is 18 in wide are significant. These development efforts are going to require significant cooperation between the designers and the developers of websites. Gone are the days when a designer can sketch out an entire site and hand it off to the developer and forget about it. If you are in the process of designing or reworking your website to comply with Google's Mobile-First-Indexing approach, allow me to make a few suggestions that might help you in your website design process.

PLAN TWICE - DESIGN ONCE

The challenge for artistic designers in any industry is reigning in their creativity to meet with the harsh realities of the engineer's world. In the case of website development, the engineers are the web developers, and Google has handed them a strict rule book that is sometimes difficult to follow. My suggestion is for your first step, sit down, and discuss your ideas and concepts to the head of the development team. The development team will be in charge of turning your ideas into reality, so it's a good idea to clear out any obvious design obstacles before they get started. This discussion is key to discovering and eliminating problems before they bite you in the behind.

At this initial meeting, it is probably a good idea to establish workflow processes and communication and collaboration procedures. Good feedback procedures and frequent communications will be important in keeping the workflow moving, and it will help steer clear of any issues.

"FOCUS GROUP" YOUR WEBSITE IDEAS

When you come up with a web design feature that gives your web developers pause, consider making a workable prototype for that website feature and testing it on a focus group.  Based on their feedback, you can decide the importance of this website feature, and you can compare it to the difficulty of implementation. If it is a critical feature, you will need to work with the development team to make it a reality. If it's not possible to implement your design idea, it's better to know this at the beginning of the process rather than later on when other parts of the website are in place. 

CELL PHONES ARE KIND OF SMALL

Some computer screens are enormous, and some cell phone screens are tiny. Since you know this when you are going into the design phase, you should be prepared for the challenges ahead. One thing you need to remember is that Google has already told us that mobile devices take precedence. Mobile-First-Indexing is the law of the land.  If one of the two devices needs to suffer, let it be the desktop version of your website.

Another thing to keep in mind is that one of the criteria that Google uses to rank websites on how fast they load - graphics and all. Some graphic content is outside of the designers' control, such as content that is provided by partners or clients. But for the most part, you as the designer, will have control over the size and resolution of most of the graphical elements. 

Probably the smallest screen you will have to accommodate is an iPhone SE. The horizontal display on this phone is 320 pixels. When you are in the design process, remember this value because it will make all of your pages look great on most mobile and desktop devices.

RESPONSIVE WEBSITES RULE

Having a responsive website that automatically adjusts to the device of your visitor is the approach that is strongly recommended by Google. The other option is to have two different versions of your website - one for mobile and one for the desktop. The most common CMS platforms will allow you to develop a responsive site that will automatically adjust to the size of the device.  If you are using Wordpress as your design platform, check to make sure that the theme you are using is a responsive theme.  Most WordPress themes are responsive themes. Once you have reworked your website within the parameters of the responsive theme, you can check how it looks with our Mobile Friendly Analysis Tool and on Google's Mobile-Friendly Test tool.

PROFESSIONAL HELP IS HERE

Here at The Click Depot, we have made thousands of responsive themes, and we can work with you to develop a professional website. Call one of our website development consultants to learn what we can do for you.

The reasons that people visit websites are many and hard to control. But if you've noticed that your traffic has significantly decreased there is probably something you can do about it. Of course, the first thing you need to do is find out why you have a decrease in traffic.

At The Click Depot, we regularly get phone calls from people who are suffering from this very problem - a rapid drop in website traffic. It appears everything on their website was going fine, but then the bottom seemed to drop out. When we investigate a website problem like this, we evaluate the site and come up with a complete list of possibilities for the decreased traffic. And then, we separate the list into two parts.  One list would contain "normal" reasons that you could have expected. Things such as a seasonal drop, or a change in the popularity of a specific product. There are ways to address those types of problems, but they are usually outside of the control of the webmaster.  It's the other list we should be concerned about.

First, let's cover some of the normal reasons that you might see a drop in your website traffic.  One very common reason is the seasonality of the product. If someone operates a website that sells snow removal equipment, the traffic will experience a considerable drop-off in the summer. Other products experience seasonal drop-offs that aren't so obvious but still might be the reason for the problem. Another common reason for such a decline might be that a temporarily popular product has reached its peak and is now traveling down its natural downward slope in the marketplace - the other side of the bell curve. These kinds of issues might be legitimate reasons that your website traffic seems to be taking a nosedive. 

Then again, the reasons for these declines in visitors might be something totally outside of the control of a webmaster. It could be a change in a marketing campaign, and nobody thought to tell you. Or perhaps the marketing budget has been reduced for a particular product, and you didn't get the memo. We could come up with dozens of possibilities, but once we can determine if those issues exist, they might explain the drop-off of visitors. However, if you perform a thorough investigation and there are no issues outside of the "website venue," you will need to dig deeper. Sometimes you will even need to look outside of your organization for the answer.

But before you move your investigation off-campus, you need to review all the recent changes to the website. Has the site been moved to new servers? Has there been a redesign of the site structure that affected the responsiveness? Has the company changed ISPs? Major changes such as these are often the cause for a significant decline in web visitors. If that might be the case, you need to investigate from the backend for internal problems. Then you need to re-test the website for ease-of-use, broken links, and overall readiness. While doing your investigation, approach it from both an insider's perspective as well as from the perspective of a new visitor to your website. If your visitors are often from other countries, navigate your site virtually from their locations. 

And finally, one of the most alarming reasons you may have seen this decline in visitors is because you have inadvertently done something to offend the Google web crawler. This penalty from Google can occur if some of the changes you made to your website have crossed the somewhat fuzzy line that Google has drawn with its webmaster guidelines. Of course, if you discover that this is the reason, correct it. But continue your investigation even after the correction, because there may be more than one cause for the drop in visitors.

Webmasters regularly offend Google search crawlers without even knowing it. You can offend the crawler without making any changes to your website. These offenses are because Google is constantly changing its search algorithm, and that can cause you problems. Maybe your site was compliant with Google's rules until they changed their algorithm. Essentially, Google moved the goalpost. These abrupt changes can be extremely problematic if their new algorithm bumps you down the search results ranking. You might get moved from the first page down to page two. Like many people say, page two doesn't even exist for the average user.

It would be in your best interest to regularly consult industry experts to keep informed of the changes in Google's algorithm. It's not unusual for Google to announce changes in its algorithm; these industry experts perform a considerable amount of research and are not shy about getting the word out. It's very likely that if you become aware of the changes in the algorithm, you would be able to adjust your website to avoid the decline in visitors.  The issue might be something as simple as changing the file naming format. Or, on the other hand, it might be something substantial such as the change in focus Google put on mobile devices with their Mobile-First-Indexing policy. Surprisingly, the Mobile-First-Indexing change caught a lot of people by surprise even though Google had announced this huge change well in advance.

While there's nothing you can do about Google and its constantly changing secret algorithms, there are things that you can do to reduce the impact they could have on your website. One of the most effective strategies that companies use to insulate themselves from this kind of issue is to utilize multiple strategies https://theclickdepot.com/lead-nurturing-campaigns.html to bring customers to their websites. 

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Social media marketing provides a great addition to an SEO strategy. Social media marketing does not depend on SEO for its success. Quite the opposite, SEO is helped by a successful social media marketing campaign. With social media marketing, you get to use powerhouses such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter to drive customers to your website. And there are other advantages to social media marketing campaigns then detaching yourself from depending on SEO for all of your traffic. 

For instance, with Facebook, you have access to very deep targeting and powerful marketing tools for your marketing - and they reach out to the largest community in history. Not only that, Facebook knows about the users of its platform, more than any company has ever known about their customers. And Facebook makes this knowledge available to his advertisers so they can reach out and put ads in front of the people that are most likely to buy their product. And these are customers that they would probably never meet without using Facebook.

Instagram is the same way. Facebook owns Instagram and makes the same kind of information available to its advertisers. You can also use LinkedIn for business-to-business marketing. Microsoft is the owner of LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the largest business-to-business platform in the world and is a great marketing venue for millions of companies. 

Regardless of what social media platform you use, if you grow your local SEO strategy with social media marketing, you will insulate yourself from the possibility of visitor drop-off due to Google search engine changes. 

Sometimes you will run into a website problem that is too big to tackle alone. There are times when you need to call in the experts to hunt down an issue quickly. Or if you see the benefit of growing your current SEO campaign with a social media marketing campaign but don't have the experience to move forward with it, contact The Click Depot. We are experts at social media marketing campaigns. And we have been solving website traffic issues for as long as there have been websites. 

Ten years ago, if you were to say the words "social media," people would look at you like you were talking another language. Since then, we have seen one of the most revolutionary changes in the history of marketing. So, what exactly is social media marketing, and how can businesses use it to grow their companies?

Everyone is familiar with the big platforms on social media. Those platforms include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Pinterest.  Every one of these platforms has customers for your company, and every one of these platforms has a different form of engagement. And every one of them is a very powerful platform for marketing in today's economy. These social media platforms supply a marketing opportunity, the likes of which the world has never seen.

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING vs. TRADITIONAL MARKETING

At the very foundation, social media marketing requires the same basic components as traditional marketing. We need to identify our prospects and bring them through the primary phases of their sales journey. With social media marketing, it's common to hear people talk about a sales funnel as the "new method" of bringing a total stranger into your company and making them a loyal customer. While the phrase "sales funnel" might be new, the concept is as old as business itself. It describes the process of making your prospect aware of your company, and then leading them through the stages of interest and research and finally to the buying phase. Do all these things correctly, and you have a loyal customer who will use the power of social media to be an advocate for your company.

The most significant change that has happened in marketing is because of social media. It has given the customers the ability to join and even control the conversation and communication. With traditional marketing, companies controlled the narrative. As marketers, we got to decide when to talk, and we decided what to say. If we wanted to tell the marketplace that our product is the best product "since sliced bread," that's what the customers heard. They could listen to our advertisements, or they could turn off the television.

Because of the structure of social media, this is no longer the case. Our market has tremendous power because they can now enter and even control the narrative. This newfound power changes everything for marketers of companies, both large and small. As marketers, we must engage with our customers in a two-way conversation. This new requirement doesn't mean that we give up on marketing. It just means that we need to learn new ways of engaging our market to tell them why they should become our customers.

EARNING LEADS ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Companies have been using marketing for years to increase brand awareness, drive traffic to their brand, and realize higher sales and revenues. The biggest change in marketing now that we are working through social media is that we now can engage with our customers in a meaningful way. Now we can interact with our customers with a "non-salesy" approach without having to resort to the "hard sell." To effectively join in this type of sales through social media, here are a few things we need to get in order. 

CLAIM YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA BASE

Before you get started interacting with your potential customers on social media, you need to establish your social media base. By this, I mean your company's Facebook page, LinkedIn page, Instagram account, Twitter account, Google My Business account, as well as your local turf in any other social media platform in which you choose to participate.

While these platforms are free to use, you will need to invest resources into creating a well-thought-out profile and social presence. For example, a Facebook company page can be an excellent place to hold informative conversations about your products and services. A vibrant and lively Facebook company page will include interesting pictures and videos of your products, your staff, your office, and anything else that your viewers will find engaging and enjoyable. Facebook is a platform where people go to be entertained and to relax. Providing interesting and likable content will cause people to visit your page frequently. If you provide content that people will like and share with their friends, you will have created the base for a very productive marketing platform. 

You have this opportunity for all of the different social media platforms. But each of the social media platforms requires a different type of interaction, and they have a different type of customer. The users of the different social media platforms belong to that platform for different reasons. As I mentioned above, Facebook is a place where people go to be entertained and socialize. They want to go there to hang out and see what's new.

LinkedIn has a different structure entirely. The user base on the LinkedIn platform is there to do business. They are not on LinkedIn to be entertained or to socialize. To do effective marketing on the LinkedIn platform, an advertiser must provide useful content that pertains to getting business, doing your job well, or for getting a job. Facebook is a platform where you should create content that is funny or cute but placing content like that on LinkedIn would be disastrous. On the LinkedIn platform, you would do best by placing how-to content. Another type of content that does very well on LinkedIn is longer instructional or informational articles. Studies have shown that articles of 2,000+ words perform better on LinkedIn and get more "shares" than shorter articles.

While it takes some experience and know-how to engage the different platforms, with the right kind of content, the payoff is tremendous. What these social platforms have given to today's marketer, is a concentrated collection of easily targeted prospects. It has gathered them all in one place and has provided a way to access them. And these platforms are continually cataloging all of their users' activities. They also know their users' associates as well as their interests and buying habits. Never in the history of humanity has such a wealth of marketing information been available. 

HOW TO REACH OUT

As I mentioned before, one way to engage with your customers is to provide a venue for interesting conversation and interaction. But there is a much more proactive method of reaching your prospects. Each of these platforms offers paid advertising campaigns. Because they know so much about their users, we now can easily target the exact type of candidate that would be interested in our product. We can now run ad campaigns that will put our paid ads in front of our ideal customers on our customers' news feed. Let's say you are a marketer for a fishing equipment company on the coast of North Carolina.  On Facebook, you have the option of presenting your product to a very specific subset. For instance, you could target unmarried men between the ages of 25 and 50 years old, who live in specific zip codes around your company. You can even specify that they have particular hobbies or interests - such as fishing.

TESTING IS CHEAP

Another huge advantage that we have with social media marketing campaigns is that we get to test our advertising campaigns for almost nothing. For as little as $5 a day We can run a split-test marketing campaign. To do such a test, we would run a similar ad to the two different audiences and see which group responded best. Once we got a clear winner, we would scale up that ad to a larger winning audience with confidence because we had already tested the ad placement. Never in the history of marketing have we had so much power at our disposal. This type of market testing was not even remotely feasible with older, conventional marketing.

MOVING TARGET

The biggest challenge with social media marketing is that it creates a constantly changing landscape. A marketing program that performed very well only two years ago might completely fail today. For instance, video is extremely effective in advertisements today, but this is a relatively new development. Just two or three years ago, pictures in the ads were all the rage. And the ROI on those ads was very good. The Click Depot has been fully immersed in web development and social media marketing since Google was beginning to develop. When you are ready to test the very lucrative waters of social media marketing, contact the professionals at The Click Depot. We will design and run a full marketing campaign specifically designed for your company and your market.

Google uses three primary barometers to rank the websites for its index. One of the most potent and most exploited gauges is backlinks. By building backlinks, you generate a hyperlink on another site that points back to you. Google keeps track of how many backlinks exist for a particular website to determine a site's popularity. Because these backlinks are a popularity vote, the more you have, the higher Google ranks you in its index.

There are two kinds of backlinks. There are the "whitehat backlinks" that Google likes to see. When you have a lot of these, Google will reward you by granting you a higher position in its search results. Then there are "blackhat backlinks." Google doesn't like these at all. If you want to get Google angry and evaluate your website badly, this is how to do it. When (and it inevitably will) Google discovers blackhat backlinks, it dispenses judgment. That penalty can range anywhere from lowering your rank in the search results to delisting you from its index.

WHEN THE PROBLEM BEGAN

Way back at the beginning, people recognized the power of being listed at the top of Google's search results. And getting your site listed at the top of the search results was simply a matter of repeating keywords endlessly on your website and having loads of backlinks pointing to your site. It didn't matter where these you got backlinks. You could make up your sites, agree to swap with other people, or buy them from someone. There were plenty of people selling cheap backlinks by the boatload. Back then, Google was new at this, and the hackers were very talented, so it worked. But now, things have changed significantly in the search engine world, and Google is very good at spotting backlinks that don't follow their guidelines.

I NEVER USE BLACKHAT ANYTHING

Now, you might truthfully claim that you would never use black hat techniques. However, Google could still find you guilty of having blackhat backlinks, and you would never even know it. Google has a very aggressive approach to identifying blackhats. Sometimes they will flag backlinks that are innocent but are "close to the infraction line." We are going to cover Google's definition of backlinks, so you don't accidentally use them and get your site's ranking penalized. We will also include a few of the other types of typical blackhat techniques that people use to try to trick Google's crawler into ranking them higher, so you don't stray into that territory either.

The first thing we need to establish is what are whitehat links and how you can get them for your site. Technically, Whitehat SEO activities are methods used to promote your website that Google has sanctioned and that it approves of. They are mostly activities that make your site a better experience for Google users. Google has fashioned its criteria for defining a high-quality website based on the quality of the experience of its user. So, it rewards these quality components and activities with a higher ranking in its index. Included in these are things such as a fast loading site and easy to navigate the site, naturally occurring and placed keywords, high-quality content, and having a well-liked website. The last one on this list is what we are talking about today. The way Google learns if your site is popular is how many other sites mention you to their users. Whenever these other sites promote you by using a link to your website, that is a high-quality backlink. 

HOW TO GET WHITEHAT BACKLINKS

There are several legitimate methods for getting whitehat backlinks. Probably the easiest way is to make sure that you get listed on all of your industry listing sites. If you belong to a trade group association, they would probably have a list of all their members. Make sure that you are registered on that site as many times as they allow. If they allow you to have a listing in different categories, make sure that your website URL shows up there. Some sites list providers of various services and products which align with their services or products. Here is one effective method for discovering these "backlink discovery" sites. Check those backlinks that point to your competitors' websites. We can find this info out for you or there are several tools available to do this, such as backlink checker by Small SEO Tools. Once you discover these sites, contact the management to get your website listed.

THE BEST METHOD FOR BACKLINKS

The best method by far to get good backlinks that both your users and Google will like is by creating content - good content When you create a useful infographic, or write an engaging and helpful blog, or put out a great instructional video, you are on your way to getting the most potent backlinks that exist. When users see this great content, they are likely to share it on their sites. Not only will this bring people to your site that might never have heard of you before, it tells Google that this other site likes you. It's a reliable vote from another website on the internet. Getting such "popularity votes" is the best thing you can do to affect your ranking on Google's index. And you get the added benefit of providing outstanding content and improving your reputation in your industry. This method is absolutely a win-win situation.

REVIEWS ARE HOT

Probably equal in power are positive reviews from your customers (if they include your website URL). The reason reviews are so good is that they serve a double purpose. They're excellent for placement in the Google search engine because Google has recently upgraded its search algorithm to give much higher weight and importance to positive reviews. This method is especially useful for local SEO. But there is another reason reviews are an excellent source for improving your position on the internet. That is because reviews are the new currency of the internet. When a shopper learns that you exist and that you have what they need, they go and look at your reviews. If your reviews are good, they will buy from you. If your reviews are non-existent or even worse bad reviews, they will avoid you like a disease. 

THE WORST METHOD FOR BACKLINKS

As I mentioned earlier, don't ever buy backlinks, no matter how cheap. These cheap backlinks are produced by "backlink farms." These "farms" create thousands of websites whose only function is to house counterfeit backlinks. Using these kinds of backlinks will raise a huge red flag for Google, and you are sure to regret it.

If someone promoted their site like that, they would probably see excellent SEO results for a brief time. Their Google search ranking would shoot through the roof. They would be the person of the hour at their company. And then he or she would probably get fired because Google would delist their company's website. It has always been the case, and it remains today that the best way to get high-quality backlinks is to provide an excellent product or service for your website user.

An executive from Google did a very unusual thing recently. He announced an inside secret about how their super-secret algorithm evaluated websites. This announcement was so strange because Google never tells anybody anything about their algorithm. As it turns out, two top methods are relevancy and popularity. Relevancy has to do with your content, keywords, and consistency of presentation okay website. But it's the popularity criteria that is most interesting for our discussion because it has to do with backlinks. Google values backlinks very highly. That's why they reward you generously for high-quality backlinks, and they come down like a "ton of bricks" when they think you are cheating with backlinks. 

OTHER BAD SEO ACTIVITIES

Of course, there are other things that Google considers cheating or not playing fair when it comes to promoting your website to the search engine. Most of these have to do with keywords. As I mentioned before, the practice repeating keywords throughout your site used to be rewarded. But now, every way you could stuff more keywords into your website has already been tried. Google is on the lookout for it.

Keyword Stuffing - One such technique is called "Keyword Stuffing" And is the practice of inserting your keywords throughout your text in an unnatural and in a "not-normal speech" method.

Unrelated Keywords - Another method is using "Unrelated Keywords." Google wants to see content that is consistent throughout your website. Sticking in random keywords here and there to influence the web crawler is a huge red flag.

Duplicating Content - When Google crawls your site, it checks for duplicated content. If you have a paragraph on the home page that you like a lot, you spent a lot of time on it, and it is perfect. It cleverly lists all the keywords you want to promote, and it says it so nicely. Then you decide to copy that "world's best paragraph ever" to other pages on your website. After all, you created it - it's original content. If you copy it, you will have duplicated your content. That's a big No-No, and you will get penalized.

Spinning Content - Some people think that they can get away with duplicating their content if they run it through a Content Spinner. There are services on the internet that will take your text and jumble it somewhat, so the result is not the same as the original text. Once upon a time, content spinning was a strategy that worked but not anymore. It is one of the techniques that will earn you a severe punishment from Google. You check how Google views your website with our free SEO audit tool.

Promoting a website through proper search engine optimization is part science, part art, and then a large part of "old-fashioned experience." Here at The Click Depot, we have been the leaders in SEO services for years. Call today and talk to one of our SEO consultants about how we can improve your website ranking.

Back when Google was starting out, the only thing it considered in its ranking algorithm was the numbers. And one of the numbers that was very important to Google was the number of backlinks - how many other sites had your URL. If you wanted to make your website popular, you just got lots of backlinks. You could purchase them, swap them, or beg for them. It didn't matter what the quality of the backlinks was. It only mattered the amount.

But Google didn't stay young and naive for very long. Its algorithm developed and became more sophisticated. And how it viewed backlinks also developed considerably. Currently, with Google, the backlink quantity is not very important at all. It doesn't care how many you have. The quality of backlinks is the most important consideration now.

A high-quality backlink is one that is on a quality site. It also points to your site for a legitimate reason. A valid reason to point at your website is that you provide high-quality content that they want to tell their members about. Or it could be that you are a partner in some type of venture. Or you utilize some of their content or materials, and they point to you because of that.

What we know is that when evaluating a website, Google considers several different factors - one of which is backlinks. While they don't tell us exactly what value they place on these different factors, we do know that high-quality backlinks are one of the most critical factors.

WHAT IS A BACKLINK

A backlink sometimes called a citation, is when someone puts a link on their website pointing to your website. And when Google is crawling the web looking for new information, it will notice that you have a link pointed to your site. The crawler thinks of it as a vote for your website. Google, being a computer, keeps track of that type of thing. When it notices you have more and more links pointing to your site, its search algorithm will be more likely to recommend your site to its customers. Because of this, your website will rank higher, and that will cause it to get more traffic. In turn, more traffic will cause it to have more conversions, more customers. It's a win all around.

Having more backlinks and the marketing campaigns that create them are very important to succeeding in search engine optimization. So it's in your best interest to discover the best ways to earn quality backlinks for your site. We have a few suggestions about obtaining quality backlinks for your website.

GOOD CONTENT IS HIGHLY VALUABLE 

The clear winning method of getting backlinks is by creating high-quality content and having people point to it. High-quality content means interesting blogs, pictures, memes, or any useful and engaging multimedia. For instance, you could create an instructional video on how you do your job and post it on your website. Then publicize it through social media, email, and any other outlet that is available to you. When people read it, and if they like it, they will share it with other people by sending them a link. That link is a backlink. And it happens to be the best type of backlink in existence. When they share your link because of good content, Google takes notice and will reward you in their search ranking.

Different types of content are easier to produce than others, and some will be more appropriate for your purposes. Try out making content in different formats to see what agrees with you the best. The most common is written text, often in a blog format. And of these blogs, "How to" articles are 30% more likely to be shared than all other types of content. Infographics are another powerful format and one of the easiest to produce for the most significant impact. Infographics communicate a great deal of helpful data in a small package, and they are easy to share. Because of these, they often go viral.   When you create an interesting piece of content such as an infographic, make sure that you post it on all of your social media sites. 

Another relatively simple kind of content to produce is instructional videos. Not only can they provide you with many backlinks, but they also create social proof and help establish you as an expert in the subject matter. Other websites will often include your videos on their site because videos are easy to consume, entertaining, and answer many questions from their customers. And don't be afraid of being in front of a camera. Videos do not need to be studio quality to be valuable. Today people are looking for useful, actionable information. One of the most successful sales coaches on YouTube gives helpful tips two or three times a week using video. The format she uses is what we call a talking head. She simply stands in front of the camera, with a white wall behind her, and tells her advice. It takes all of two or three minutes, but it contains actionable quality information. She is rewarded by having hundreds of thousands of followers. 

KNOWLEDGEABLE AND TRUSTWORTHY

When you create high-quality content that is helpful to other people, you will get a reputation for being knowledgeable and trustworthy. It is this reputation paired with the content you create that is the motivation for people to share your content. When people share this kind of high-quality material, the backlinks that are created are precisely the kind that Google is searching for. Google loves quality content and will reward you with high placement on their search results page when you produce it. Also, Google's algorithm is incredibly complex and is very good at weeding out the impostors.

BACKLINK QUALITY

The quality of the backlink is the very thing that makes it valuable and useful. Think of these backlinks as references during a job interview. You would never put an ex-cons name on your list of references. In the same way, you should never have a low-quality site store a backlink for you. Backlinks on poor quality sites can actually hurt your search engine ranking. And Google is very good at deciding what a high-quality site is and what is garbage.

Alternatively, backlinks of very high-quality are extremely valuable. If you could get a backlink listed on a site that Google rates highly, that would go a long way to promoting your ranking. A website such as a national, well-known news site, or a Fortune 500 site will carry a lot of weight with Google. And if you can get citations from .gov sites or education sites (.edu), those will be very powerful with Google and will result in a higher ranking on their search results page.

AVOID BLACK-HAT BACKLINKS

Some services exist that promise to supply you with many backlinks. By participating in these kinds of activities, you'll be quickly flagged by Google. Google spends a lot of money making sure their algorithm catches cheaters. Buying backlinks, trading backlinks, or any other activity that goes against Google's Webmaster Guidelines won't help your ranking - and if you use these methods, you will probably be punished by Google. 

THE CLICK DEPOT AND BACKLINKS

Backlinks or citations - think of them as other websites giving you their votes. When it comes to whether Google will put you high on the search result page, they will count these votes. The Click Depot can give you a free SEO audit to first evaluate your website and then design an SEO program for you to get more quality backlinks. We have been creating powerful SEO programs since Google was young. We know the scene, and we know the technology. Call and talk to one of our SEO consultants, and we can create an SEO program specifically designed for your company.

Companies that want to get new customers need to pay attention to the Google search results. Your customers do their research using Google. Also, statistically speaking, customers that look for a particular product in a certain location (for example, "best dentist near me"), will make a purchase in the next 24 hours.  Years ago, Google had a big problem. While it was a great search engine and it had information about all sorts of things all over the world, they weren't serving their customers locally. That was a problem because most of their customers were local customers who were searching for local results. That's when they made the big change to become the "biggest local company in the world."

They decided that they would make a slightly different version of the Google search engine - that they would make a local version.  So today, we have a search engine that is very effective at leading customers to local businesses, with local reviews and local information. They were going to start gathering details on businesses in their customers' backyard.

SEARCH TODAY - BUY TODAY

This change to "local" gives small businesses an excellent opportunity to connect with customers that live near them. When these customers search for a local business, they always have some urgency to buy their product or service. Google's studies show that people who search for a product or service near to them end up making a purchase within 24 hours following their search. Meaning when someone searches for something like your product or service, they want to buy it immediately.  Your job is to make sure that you are at the top of the search page results. Getting to the top is accomplished through LOCAL SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  There are some free and simple things you can do to optimize your website, which will put you up at the top of Google Search results.

GOOGLE MY BUSINESS

The first and most important task. Google my business sounds like a command, but it's not. GOOGLE MY BUSINESS is the listing service that Google has created for local companies inside of Google's database. This is the easiest thing you can do to get on Google's good side. And it's free and easy to do. Go to GOOGLE MY BUSINESS and register your business. If you have more than one location, register each location. Complete all the information, and then Google will know you exist when people search about your product or service. 

Not only will this allow Google to list your website when people are searching for your product or service, but it will also allow you to be placed in the listings that are called "Google's local SEO 3-pack" at the top of the search results page. Companies in Google's SEO 3-pack will display relevant info such as your address, your website, telephone, and your hours. It will even show posts that you can change weekly 

Once you have a GOOGLE MY BUSINESS account, there are some easy ways to optimize it and get more benefits. You can post "Google Posts" in your account, and Google will display them when your site shows up as the result of a search. In this post, you can put information about sales and specials, and you can welcome a particular group of visitors, or even capitalize on the current holiday. Google posts are a great way to get free exposure and attention to your business.  And the good thing about Google Posts is that Google removes them after seven days. So, you can be putting fresh content up every week. You can go here (https://posts.withgoogle.com) to get verified and start posting right away.

In GOOGLE MY BUSINESS, there are some other exciting ways you can interact with your potential customers. There are appointment bookings, where customers can click on a button and make an appointment automatically with your company. And there's the Q&A feature. You can have a frequently asked questions (FAQ) section as part of your search results - all because of your listing in GOOGLE MY BUSINESS. It also will allow you to have a messaging service where you can chat with your customers when they search Google and discover your company. 

Registering in GOOGLE MY BUSINESS is not only free and easy to do, but it will make a huge difference in your local SEO. But surprisingly enough, only about half of the local businesses have taken the time to register their business there. When you do register your business, make sure that your Name, Address, and Phone number are consistent throughout the different places you appear on the web.

LOCAL BACKLINKS - CITATIONS

One of the ways that Google makes sure that your site is worthy of being on the first page is to determine how popular it is.  A very effective method to establish your popularity is through the use of local backlinks, also called citations. A local backlink/citation is where your website URL is included on someone else's website. And this is something you can promote. Start by making sure that different listing services and industry directories have your website address. If you belong to a trade group or some type of affiliate group, see if they have a members list. Another good way to find other listing sites is to do a backlink search on your competitors. You can easily discover their backlinks by entering the URL of a competitor into a backlink checker. Once you find out who they have their backlinks with, you can contact many of those sites and register your website as well.

REVIEWS

Probably the most powerful way to get backlinks is to ask your customers to leave reviews that include your website URL. Reviews are the "new currency" of the internet and go a long way to bringing in new customers. Good reviews will help you in so many ways, and having backlinks is one of them. When people search for your product or service in their local area, you will be listed alongside your competitors. The next thing they will do is search the review sites to see what other people have to say about you. So be prepared for them. Institute a system in your company that will systematically prompt your employees to ask your customers for reviews. Tell your employees that the reviews need to be personal and about them.  This is a very effective way of having a second-hand conversation with your prospects as well as providing powerful citations to Google for your local SEO.

KEYWORDS ARE KING 

Keywords are those words and phrases that people are likely to use when searching for your product or service. Huge companies spend millions of dollars promoting keywords for their industries. However, for you to promote local keywords is much simpler and can cost you nothing. The kind of keywords that you need to promote for local SEO are called "long-tail keywords." With regular keywords, you would see terms such as "retirement investments" or "life insurance." When it comes to local, long-tail keywords, the request is much more specific and has more words. Those keywords look something like "best insurance broker in Springfield" or "most qualified Raleigh chiropractor." To promote these keywords on your site, you should include them in your site body copy, META descriptions, and page titles. The reason that these are so effective is that when people search for local services, they tend to use more words in their search.

OPTIMIZE FOR MOBILE

There have been significant changes in Google's search algorithm in the last year or two.  Google made a big announcement some time ago that they were going to be paying more attention to sites that are optimized for mobile devices. And they will begin to ignore desktop sites in favor of mobile sites. This is because there is a trend of more and more people using mobile devices when searching Google. Surprisingly, almost two-thirds of online searches are done on cell phones. And it's even a higher percentage when it comes to local searches. So, if you want to rank high in the local search results, optimize your website for mobile devices. 

Use our free mobile friendly analysis tool to check if your website is mobile friendly. 

THE CLICK DEPOT

All this may sound complicated or a little intimidating, but this is where we come in. Here at The Click Depot, we have been helping local business owners optimize their websites for years. We understand the benefits of local SEO, and we also know how to get you ranked on Google's local search pages.  Call today and talk to one of our SEO Consultants about your website. 

Everybody knows that Google is the leader when it comes to the online world. Google drives traffic where it thinks it belongs. Therefore, changes that it makes in its search engine algorithms affect everybody that has a website. And recently, Google made one of the most significant changes in the way that it ranks websites. The change is called mobile-first indexing or mobile indexing. This is very important because it can significantly affect your website ranking. So, "What is mobile-first indexing, and how will it affect my search engine optimization?"

MEGA-TREND TO MOBILE USE

There is a mega-trend concerning web usage. People are abandoning laptops and desktop computers in favor of surfing the web using their cell phones. And this has been rapidly increasing over the last few years. Because of this change, Google will now start giving more importance to your mobile site than your desktop site. What this means is when Google's web crawler gets to your website, it will index the mobile site first. And if it encounters a difference between the desktop version of your site and the mobile site, it will penalize you. Google now puts more importance on a mobile site than it does on a desktop site.

Of course, this doesn't mean that it will ignore your desktop site. It only means that it will consider it less important than your mobile site. If you do not have a mobile version of your website, it will still index your site based on the desktop version. However, if you lack a mobile version for it to index, it will not rank your desktop site as high. Google is now putting more emphasis on creating a good experience for mobile users because the trend is going mobile.

So this turns things upside down for many people when they design their website. Up until now, Google treated the desktop version as the site to index. They considered things such as experience and ease of use, download times, backlinks, web forms on the desktop as the utmost importance. As such, most designers treated the desktop version as the primary website. But it's time to change your thinking because that's not the way Google thinks of it anymore. 

YOUR MOBILE SITE IS NOW THE PRIMARY

Google now thinks of the mobile version of your website as the primary and most important version. And the mobile site is the site to be indexed and considered for search results placements. The desktop version is now considered an alternate or secondary version. There is even discussion about Google completely ignoring the desktop versions in the future. Google has advised web designers to give the mobile versions URLs a special subdomain (m.domain.com) to trigger their switchboard tags. Google sees that the future of the web will be on cell phones and other small devices and has made no secret about its plans. So, in the future, if you want to perform well on Google search pages, make sure your mobile site is complete, easy to navigate, and SEO rich.

Because the entire history of web development has acted on the fact that the desktop version is the primary version, that's where we made sure that all of our content, META content, our backlinks and citations, and all the keywords ended up. The mobile version of the site was almost an afterthought for many of us. It had less content, we paid less attention to the structure, and for sure, it didn't get the backlinks and citations attention that the primary desktop site received. That practice has to change if we want our websites to be ranked at the top of the search results pages. Mobile is now the way to go.

DON'T PANIC

These changes are significant, and we need to act soon to maintain our good position in the search engines. But there is no need to panic. Google announced that it would enact this change slowly and over a few years. They are initially only making the changes on sites that they perceive as being ready for this change. Google has no interest in removing useful, helpful sites from the top of its search result pages. It wants to provide a good experience for its customers, the searchers. And if your current mobile version is well-designed and responsive but identical to desktop version in other ways (and you like your current search engine ranking), you might not have to change anything. But be aware, going forward Google will be weighing many different characteristics on your mobile website to decide where to place it on the results page.

MAKE SURE YOUR SITE IS EASY FOR MOBILE

The changes you need to make on your mobile site is not difficult to achieve, but they are slightly different than the desktop site. This is mostly because of the screen size and the lower bandwidth that mobile surfers are often using. Probably the most important thing is to make sure that your mobile pages are very efficient and lightweight. Make sure that the pages are optimized to load quickly and that the images and other graphic elements such as videos are lightweight and practical. Also understand, that on mobile sites, Google treats content that is hidden or collapsed under tabs no differently than visible content. This is a difference in the way Google treats mobile sites versus desktop sites and is also due to the reduced screen size/real estate.

MOBILE CONTENT VS. DESKTOP CONTENT

In the past, many web designers considered the mobile version of the website to be slightly less important, almost an afterthought. They made sure that all the important information, videos, and other ways of communicating were on the desktop site. That can no longer be the case if you want to rank positively in Google's search results.  You need to make sure that all the content is on the mobile site, all the backlinks point to your mobile site, your links are crawlable, and that the text is legible.

MOBILE STRUCTURE VS. DESKTOP STRUCTURE

When laying out your pages, make sure that the structure on the mobile site is the same as the desktop site's structure. The only difference is that the URLs inside the mobile pages should be the mobile version of the URL (m.domain.com).

METADATA FOR MOBILE VS. METADATA FOR DESKTOP

Google's official guide tells us that our metadata between the two sites needs to be equivalent (not identical but equivalent). This is because the reduced size of the mobile environment and the shorter titles due to lower character counts. But it's important to make sure that the information is basically the same and the keywords are still relevant.

DON'T HAVE A MOBILE SITE?

There is no reason to panic. Google will continue to index sites that only have a desktop version. The problem is that you probably won't be ranked as high without the mobile site. This is because Google is focusing on the experience of their mobile users. If you don't have a website that is optimized for people using cell phones, Google will be less likely to suggest somebody go to your site.  Google is giving you time to make these changes. But eventually, websites that don't work well with mobile users will be penalized with a lower ranking. 

HOW TO CHECK IF YOUR CHANGES HAVE WORKED

Designing websites that work on cell phones is a more complicated process than desktop versions. You can use our mobile friendly analysis tool to check if your website is mobile friendly. Google also understands the complications this may cause and has provided their own tool to help you move forward Google's Mobile-Friendly tool. Using both of these will give you a clear picture of how you can make your mobile site better.

SITE DESIGN IS MORE COMPLEX NOW

There is no question that website design has become more complicated since this change by Google. But there is no avoiding the future. Google has made it very clear that their emphasis is on mobile-friendly sites. Here at The Click Depot, we have been building websites for years and had been making mobile-friendly websites for our customers before Google even announced the changes. Contact us and speak with one of our SEO consultants about how to make sure your site is mobile-friendly and ready to rank at the top of the search results.

Social media marketing is like traditional marketing, except on steroids. With social media marketing, all of your prospective customers are concentrated in a few social media platforms. A social media strategy will help you effectively engage these potential customers and turn them into real paying customers - and even future advocates for your business. 

But in order to do this effectively, you will need to do more than post a few things on Facebook or Instagram. You are going to need an effective social media strategy that combines different tried-and-true social media tactics. These tactics include strategies such as local SEO for your website, Facebook Ads with videos or slide shows, or LinkedIn how-to articles with specific targeted keywords. It might even include a Pinterest marketing program using effective pictures of your product or an Instagram advertising campaign with funny or silly posts that use "influencers" to pump up your product. Simply posting occasionally on Facebook or LinkedIn won't hurt your business, but it probably won't bring new customers either.

POWERFUL TOOLS AND STRATEGIES

In order to turn these unknown and unidentified people into enthusiastic customers and later, advocates for your company, you must have an effective, well planned social media strategy. Fortunately, the tools that are available to help us identify and reach your ideal customers are extremely powerful and provided by these platforms themselves. In fact, when you understand these tools and tactics fully, you will see that they are simply mind-blowing. And, over the last couple of decades of social media evolution, there have been certain marketing approaches that have risen above the others for different types of industries and marketing goals.  

DIFFERENT PLATFORMS, DIFFERENT STRATEGIES

The strategies for Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn all radically differ from each other. For instance, with Facebook, the marketing approach needs to be leaning toward the entertainment side of things with videos, slide shows, and engaging personal stories. People who are on Facebook are there during their free time, and they are looking to be entertained. Creative social campaigns such as an emotional and entertaining approach with videos, funny or touching stories, or pictures is the key to success on Facebook. However, on LinkedIn, this approach would be disastrous. 

This is because people are on LinkedIn for a different reason than when they are on Facebook. They are there to do business. LinkedIn is a place to meet other business people or learn things about how to operate your business. Using pictures and videos of kittens and puppies on LinkedIn could actually hurt your brand and drive away customers. This is true even though you may be talking to the exact same person as you did on Facebook. And it's the same thing the other way around. On LinkedIn, instructional "How to" posts can be very effective, and the length of the article needs to be longer, not shorter. Statistics show that LinkedIn articles of 1,500 - 2,000 words are the most shared by a 2-1 margin. But posting an article of that length on Facebook would be a total failure. With a long article like that on Facebook, you wouldn't even get a second glance.

Because these different platforms cater to people that have different goals, the marketing strategies and approaches need to be appropriate for each platform. Fortunately, we can use the characteristics of the various platforms in coordination with each other. There are very effective strategies for using multiple platforms simultaneously in a digital marketing program. For example, we can identify your ideal customer on Facebook, and then "remarket" to them on LinkedIn. Or the other way around. Using approaches like this, we can leverage the strengths of each different platform for different parts of our campaign.

TAILORED-MADE PROGRAMS

We know that there are no two businesses that are exactly the same. Even businesses that offer the same products have different goals at different times. And so, it follows that no two social media marketing campaigns can be exactly the same. Fortunately, the variety and strength of the options that are available to us when using Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter are incredible in their reach and mind-boggling in the detailed knowledge of their user base. 

Here at The Click Depot, we begin the process by consulting with your company to discover things such as - what marketing you've done in the past, who is your ideal customer, what is your current advertising ROI, as well as learn all about your products and services. We will also look at your current website and social media presence to understand your existing client base.

With this information, we will sit down with you to discuss what your strategy should be moving forward.  As previously stated, we have several strong social media platforms from which we can launch a great variety of campaigns. Some of these platforms could be of great benefit to your company, while others would simply be a waste of time and money. Armed with this information, we can create a digital marketing program that will increase your customer base with an excellent return on investment (ROI).

FREE AND PAID CONTENT

Another thing we would need to consider is that all successful social marketing campaigns utilize both free content and paid ads. On all these social media platforms, you can post content for free. As a matter of fact, most users of these platforms don't even consider paid postings, and those people are probably your future customers. These social media paid programs combined with free content, are what we use to deliver a very effective marketing punch.

Google was born in 1998 and started selling their AdWords in the year 2000. Over the last 20 years, the marketing strategy using Google's ads has developed at an extremely rapid pace. And it is also a similar story with Facebook. This company started in 2004 and is now the largest social network in the world. The existing marketing strategies using Facebook's ads have developed into very powerful and effective tools for today's companies.  It's hard to believe that all of this change happened over the last 15 years.

With over 2.3 million searches per second, Google's advertising dollars are at $40 Billion per quarter - the biggest in all of history. Why is it so successful? Because the world's biggest online advertising vendor has so much information about their user base - which includes just about anyone with a computer. And the Facebook platform isn't too far behind.  

For most people, Google and Facebook appear to offer all their products for free. Free search engine, free maps, free Gmail, free online storage from Google. And from Facebook, they provide us with free access to talk with our friends and join groups of people just like us (for instance, look up "miniature horse clubs" or "mommy groups"). All of this for free. But it is this free engagement that allows them to collect so much useful marketing information.

WEALTH OF INFORMATION

As advertisers, we can see the marketing power of having this wealth of information available for our campaigns. We use this information to precisely target our customers with the offers that they will enthusiastically engage with. Then we have the ability to pull them off the social media platform into our website through carefully designed marketing campaigns that include things such as landing pages, web forms, webinars, and downloadable content. 

MORE SOPHISTICATED PROGRAMS AND TECHNOLOGIES

If you were going to start running social media advertising programs ten years ago, it was a simple matter of placing ads and seeing results. Because the industry was new, most people in business didn't recognize the power that was available to them through these platforms. Also, the customers were new to social media as well. Fast forward to today, and we can see how very powerful these platforms have become. They also have become very sophisticated, and the customers have become more sophisticated as well. And not only have the platforms developed over time, but there are new platforms that have joined the game. These platforms include names such as Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Instagram.  Each of these platforms are powerful in their own right. But using all these platforms in harmony can be extremely powerful.

At The Click Depot, we have years of experience designing and implementing social media marketing campaigns. We understand the strength of each platform, how to use them together, and which ones to avoid for particular industries.  Call us today and set up an appointment with one of our social media specialists to talk about our affordable social media marketing packages.  We will design a program that is tailored to your industry and your particular situation.