Miriam Ellis says, “Right now, a customer is trying to find your local business. How quickly are you delivering the NAP, directions and other details he needs, on the go? Volumes of excellent free advice have been written for small businesses about creating quality, optimized local landing pages, but today, I’d like to talk about a topic that has received much less attention: helping customers discover locations when you’ve got a ton of them. This article is for the medium-to-large business with 20, 100, 500 physical locations and a pressing goal to have each one be found by the customers... [...]

Barry Levine says, “Small and medium-sized businesses have more free ways to present their stories to customers, with Adobe’s recent announcement of its Spark suite of tools. They are intended for the creation of visually based marketing material for the Web and social networks, provided as four applications. Three of them are rebranded, existing iOS apps, and one is new. In addition to web pages and social posts, the tools enable the creation of company event announcements, newsletters, lessons, flyers, brochures, small catalogs and explainer videos”. Adobe unveils Spark tool suite... [...]

Christi Olson says, “If you haven’t done it already, now would be a great time to take a fresh look — or even a first look — at how data feeds can reinvigorate your online marketing strategy and prepare your business for an undeniable shift in the search space. Structured data feeds are the silent drivers behind a new search experience centered around more conversational, localized and personalized search engagements. Engines are moving away from the “traditional” customer journey, where users search for a keyword, sort through text PPC search results and click onto a new website.... [...]

Tom Anthony says, “App search is growing and changing, and there’s more opportunity than ever to both draw customers in at the top of the funnel and retain them at the bottom. In today’s special British Whiteboard Friday, Tom Anthony and Will Critchlow of Distilled dig into everything app search and highlight a future where Google may have some competition as the search engine giant. Video Transcription Tom: Howdy, and welcome to another British Whiteboard Friday. I’m Tom Anthony, head of the R&D Department here at Distilled. This is Will Critchlow, founder and CEO.... [...]

Daniel Faggella says, “Generating a consistent source of website traffic is the foundation of every online business. If you don’t have visitors coming to your website, it’s impossible to convert them into prospects and loyal, long-term customers. When you establish yourself as an authority through the lens of Google, it will increase your visibility in search engine queries. But what happens after you’ve earned yourself a top spot in Google search results pages? Contrary to popular belief, ranking for particular keywords is only half the battle. The core tenets of SEO are constantly... [...]

Laura Lippay says, “Markup on a page helps both search engines and assisitive technologies (AT) like screen readers to understand what elements are in a page. For SEO, different elements like title tags, headings, or some schema markup can have more weight or value than other markup. People using assistive technologies are reliant on these structural elements to navigate through the page without being able to see it or without being able to use a mouse. We’ll start with some easy SEO + accessibility overlaps: structural elements that you might deal with in your every day coding or optimization.... [...]

AJ Agrawal says, “Organic-search traffic is the only search traffic you should be interested in. This is the traffic you get without any direct action on your part. It’s not something you can achieve with ease, though. The statistics say that 83 percent of organic clicks go to the first four results under most categories on search engines. So, to see your site attain that status, lay the foundations well in advance for the traffic you want. Here are four strategies you can use to bring in organic search traffic and increase your ranking on Google. 1. Understand why content is king. Google... [...]

Corey Barnett says, “When it comes to local content marketing, too many businesses fall into the trap of self-promotion, writing solely or primarily about their products and services. Or worse, their blog is rarely updated, or it’s full of filler content that only serves to boost search rankings. Rarely does this approach translate into engaged visitors or traction on social media. Instead, it’s worth writing about what your audience cares about: your local community! Where you sell and who you sell to are more important than what you’re selling. The local long-tail opportunity Here’s... [...]

Aleyda Solis says, “I know you would never change a URL without identifying where to 301-redirect it and making sure that the links, XML sitemaps, and/or canonical tags are also updated. But if you’ve been doing SEO for a while, I bet you’ve also had a few clients — even big ones — coming to you after they’ve tried to do structural web changes or migrations of any type without taking SEO best practices into consideration. Whenever this happens, your new client comes to you for help in an “emergency” type of situation in which there are two characteristics... [...]

Andrew Raso says, “Eighty percent of sales are executed by just 8 percent of salespeople. This doesn’t mean that there are some killer sales reps out there who are simply better wired at bringing home the bacon, it means most sales teams are failing to execute because we officially live in a new hyper connected, fast paced and digital-first world. A connected world means there are a myriad of channels for businesses to connect with their customers. In opening the floodgates, many mistake a wide sweep as an effective lead generation strategy. Unfortunately, the bulk are wrong and navigating... [...]