Categories
Analytics Local Search Marketing Online Marketing Pay Per Click Random Thoughts Search Engine Optimization Social Media

March update

Hi Everyone,
It’s spring, which means it’s already been a full quarter since the year started! As always there is a lot of new digital marketing information to catch up on and hopefully implement into your strategy as we enter the next three months.

If you follow me on social media (Facebook / Twitter / Linkedin) you may have already seen some of the following articles, but I have also compiled some here so you may easily read through. Each month I sift through a variety of articles with topics you will find useful as you build an online marketing strategy for your business.

Enjoy and relax while you learn with the content I’ve shared, and if you have anything you want to discuss, drop me a line.
Andy Commons – Internet Marketing Consultant
Andy@andycommons.com
www.andycommons.com
406-962-5683

Search Engine Optimization
Google gives SEO tips on how to handle day-long site closures
Need to turn off your website for a period of time, but worry your Google rankings will drop? Here are some tips from Google’s John Mueller on how to handle it.

Blogs
Will my organic rankings suffer if I don’t have a blog?
A blog can be a major investment, but the SEO benefits can make it worth the effort. Columnist Stephanie LeVonne makes the case for why blogging works to improve search visibility.

The Best Words and Themes to Generate Featured Snippets
Featured snippets have proven to be a valuable source of organic traffic and increased click through rates. This post explores the effects of query modifiers, CPC, search volume, and query length on featured snippets. 

Social Media
Follow These Simple Steps To A Massive Social Following
By following a few simple rules, any business can begin building or expanding their current social media presence.

Categories
Online Marketing

Oct 15 News

 

October Internet Marketing Roundup

Hi Everyone!

First I want to welcome all my new subscribers who I met at the Montana Brewers Association meeting. I was honored to be asked to speak at their annual conference about Internet Marketing. I had a great time meeting everyone, and hope I was able to share some new ideas about attracting new business, and keeping current customers engaged.

Secondly, being with a bunch of breweries (and drinking a few too many Pumpkin Ales) inspired me to run an Oktoberfest special. Now through Halloween, if you sign up for my full SEO/Competitor audit, I’ll drop $100 from the regular price of $500. But you must act soon. This offer ends about the time we’re turning off all the lights and pretending to have gone to bed on the 31st.

It’s fall, and like the weather in Montana, the Internet marketing industry is ever changing. There have been a couple of big changes you’ll want to catch up on in the links below. You will also find some other great articles that I found in the last couple weeks that I thought were on point.

Let me know if you would like to talk about any of these articles more in depth!  Just drop me an email, or you can connect with me via social media below!

I hope these articles give you an edge and more knowledge on improving your online presence!

Andy

HOT:
Before we get to the rest of the list, this is just in. If you are a business trying to attract local customers, give this a read:
Moz Local Ranking Factors 2014 StudyHere are the other links I have for you this month:
image

New Panda Update Rolling Out, Google Takes Another St…

Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google UK, announced on Google+ last night that a new Panda update is rolling out. The update began rolling out ear
Preview by Yahoo

10 Tips on how to promote your blog posts after you hit publish (+ 6 links to another 159 tips!) | a…

How to promote your blog content and news articles Okay you’ve spent hours researching, crafting and polishing the perfect blog post and you’ve hit the publish button.
Preview by Yahoo
image

7 Elements of a Perfectly Optimized Social Media Account…

Want to up your game on social media? Check out the anatomy of a properly optimized social post.
Preview by Yahoo
image

How to Build an Instant Social Media Following For Your …

Social media can impact how and where we spend our money. More than three-quarters of US consumers, for instance, report that their friends’ social messages directl…
Preview by Yahoo
image

SEO 101: 9 SEO Practices When Building New Websites | …

The best time to start your SEO is before your website is even built. Here are the most important SEO considerations to think about during the build.
Preview by Yahoo

Facebook updates its algorithm (yet) again. Here’s what …

Facebook has tweaked its algorithm to surface more timely stories. Is the company trying to redeem itself from the Ferguson-Ice Bucket feed problem?
Preview by Yahoo

Find Out More

To find out more about Internet marketing you can check out my website blog or you can contact me! Just click the button Below to get to my website.  Or if you would like to follow me on Facebook and Twitter you can to via the buttons below!
Facebook
Facebook

Twitter
Twitter

Website
Website

 

Categories
Online Marketing Pay Per Click Search Engine Optimization Social Media

Internet Marketing 101 presentation

A few times each year I have the pleasure of speaking on the fascinating world of Internet Marketing.

Recently, I was invited to speak again at a group of young professionals, many of whom work in the non-profit area. The audience was attentive and asked great questions! (I’ll mention a few below).

I promised them I’d share some slides with them… and if you are a reader of this blog, or perhaps got my latest newsletter, you of course are welcome to review the slides as well.

Here is the link to my 2014 Internet Marketing presentation!

But if you haven’t clicked yet, hang on. I wanted to share a few of the questions (and answers) that were asked, and point out a few other resources on this site you may want to take advantage of.

 

Question 1

One student asked a great question about incoming links. They had someone who took a differing view from their blog post and then linked to it from their own site.  The result was even more ‘haters’ coming over to bash their blog post and leave nasty comments. They asked if they should take down the blog post, or somehow block that incoming traffic. I said No, and here’s why:  Just like there is no bad PR, in my humble opinion, there is no bad traffic or links… except for totally spammy links, which is a different story. In that case, I think the inbound link is doing more harm than good in terms of better search engine rankings. But in the student’s case, not only are the inbound links valuable, the student is getting people that disagree with them to take notice and engage. Now it might be hard or uncomfortable to engage with those who don’t agree with you, but it’s a good opportunity to at least try to reason with them to get them understand your side of the issue. You may not win them over, but how you treat them will say a lot about you and your blog. Do it well and you might gain some new fans.

Having said that, if the comments on your blog are downright nasty or hateful, then you have every right to remove that comment from your blog. It’s YOUR blog, and you can control the narrative. But just know that if you start removing everything that doesn’t agree with you, then you are not really engaging them, and they will likely take notice of all the deletes.

Question 2

We discussed directory listings and how important they can be.  On my homepage, I offer a free tool that will let you check your listings. PLEASE use my free Listing Checker found here. If you go directly to Yext and run their tool, you’ve just given a sales rep your company name, address and phone. You WILL get a sales call from someone. My tool however doesn’t send anyone (not even me) your info. So you can check out your rankings, and then if you are interested in learning more, you have to reach out to me.

 

Question 3

Finally, someone asked if posting content to a Google Plus business page is worth the effort. I can only say that I use a tool such as Hootsuite to automate posting to Google + at the same time I post to Facebook and LinkedIn. So it’s no more work, and there are rumors that a link from a Google + page is helpful in Search Rankings. So I say, why not!

 

So again, please enjoy my 2014 Internet Marketing presentation!

And if you know others who might benefit from this, please feel free to share this blog post.

Thanks.

Wishing you all the best and online marketing success….

-Andy

PS. If you are not on my newsletter list, please sign up. You won’t get too many emails, but when I do send one, they just might have a golden nugget you can use in your business.

Categories
Online Marketing Random Thoughts

Taking your site Mobile

As more people are moving to tablets for daily web surfing and ditching their old flip phone for a smart phone, it makes sense that more and more of your website traffic is going to be “mobile”. Depending on the site, mobile traffic can be well over 50% of all your traffic.

With this major shift in surfing behavior, business owners need to be sure their website looks good and treats those mobile users right.

A website that requires a smartphone user to “pinch-zoom” and scroll all over their website is going to see a drop in page views and engagement from those users. To improve the experience for mobile users, we need to offer up a website that is designed for them.

Picking a Mobile Strategy:

There are several ways to go when deciding how to “make your site mobile”.

a. Redo your site with “Responsive design”
b. Offer up a different ‘mobile version’ of your site
c. Create an “App”
d. Do nothing and let the mobile users suffer

Let’s look at each approach.

Responsive Design:

This may be the best way to go, but can also be the most expensive. A responsive site is designed to reformat itself depending on the size of the browser window. As the window goes from a huge desktop screen, down to tablet size and then to a smart phone, the design automatically adjusts to fit well and look good.

You can tell a site is responsive, even on your desktop, by grabbing the right hand border of your browser window and sliding it to the left. Instead of cutting off images and text, the site keeps adjusting itself as the browser window gets smaller. Here’s a good example from Capital One.

While it works great, there is going to be a high costs of development compared to some other solutions. So this solution would be recommended if, for instance, you have already been planning a website design overhaul. Be sure to insist your web-design team uses Responsive Design.

Mobile Version of your site:

A simple mobile site is a good step that you can take now.  It is fairly inexpensive to implement, and it gets you that mobile site you need. Your web team can either create mobile versions of your pages, or you can use a third party tool such as DudaMobile. (aff*)

With this approach, when someone visits your site with a mobile browser, your web-server redirects them to mobile versions of your pages.  Most of these systems will even update the mobile pages when you update your desktop site, so keeping things in sync is not an issue.

 

Create an APP:

There are compelling reasons to have an APP created for your content. For one thing, you can really offer some great features through an app, one of which is the ability to push out updates as alerts on a phone. I’m raising money for Movember.com this month (and trying to grow a moustache). (Donate here if you wish). They offered a cool app that lets me quickly check up-to-date donations, sends me a reminder once a week to update the sorry looking moustache photo, and allows me to post a quick update to my status page. 

If you have people that are passionate about your brand and interact with you on at least a weekly basis, then it might make sense to go the App route. But for the rest of us, the expense is probably not justified.

 

Do Nothing:

There is another choice of course.  That’s to do nothing and let your visitors suffer. Depending on your site’s traffic and the complexity level of your site, this may be the best choice. As with most things, there is no one answer that’s right for everyone.

If you’d like me to review YOUR mobile situation and give you my opinion, please feel free to contact me.

Thanks for visiting my site. I hope you will stick around and read more.

If you have any questions, feel free to drop me a line at andy@andycommons.com.

-Andy 406-962-5683

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories
Online Marketing Search Engine Optimization

Welcome Montana Public Radio Listeners

I’m proud to have become a sponsor of Montana Public Radio this year. Each day, I spend a little time catching up on the local and national news, plus enjoy many of their other programs.

Besides giving back to Public Radio, I’m also offering a discount on my Website SEO Audit package. For a limited time, if you mention MTPR, I’ll take 20% off my very comprehensive Search Engine Audit service.

Normally $500… yours for $400 when you mention MTPR.

You’ll get:

  • A detailed review of SEO Factors and how your site stacks up
  • Insights to the keywords you want to be ranking for
  • Analysis of your competition
  • A plan to help you compete for online visitors
  • A one hour phone call to go over the reports

Call or email me today to discuss how to get started.

Andy Commons
andy@andycommons.com
406-962-5683

Categories
Online Marketing Search Engine Optimization

Using Video can give you an edge both with customers and search engines

An article I saw today (http://mashable.com/2011/06/02/web-video-business/) talks about how creating and publishing a video can really help promote your business.

It makes a lot of great points. It’s so true that if you have a well tagged youtube video, it can also show up on the first page of Google search results now that Google is blending in video with regular results. And since many people would rather watch a video than read, what better way to leap frog your competition.

I recommend you read the mashable article, and consider how adding a simple video to your site could help you both attract more visitors, and even convert them to sales.

Categories
Online Marketing Random Thoughts Search Engine Optimization

SEO is no pun anymore. How Article Headlines are no longer funny thanks to SEO – in Missoula MT :-0

In this article for the Atlantic, David Wheeler talks about how SEO is affecting headlines. (go read it. I’ll wait right here). 🙂

I enjoyed the article, but had to grin when I went back to read the headline of the article itself. It’s a mix of both humorous and Keyword rich.

But, this actually makes the case for building a good online following and not just relying on Google. People who use online media site on a regular basis don’t need to find them via a search. They come to the home page and see what’s being offered (much like the catchy headlines in the paper or magazines). They get to enjoy the headline all the same. I will say that sometimes the puns can be so esoteric they leave me working too hard to figure out if I’m even interested in the content. When this happens, you do risk the chance of turning off your readers. Also, SEO is not all about the headline. It’s important, yes. But,  if the keywords are in the title tag and article body, it should still come up. And once it’s well liked and shared a bunch (linked to for real, by real people), even more so.

Perhaps headline writers of the future will just have to up their game and figure out how to write a headline that is both keyword rich AND entertaining. Thoughts? Leave me a comment… and be sure to submit this to your favorite bookmarking site, post it to facebook, tweet a link, and stumble it.  (But only if you really want to).

-Andy

Categories
Misc. News Online Marketing Pay Per Click Random Thoughts Search Engine Optimization Social Media

Small business workshop in Missoula Wednesday

Did you read hear about this? I’ll be there, and I would suggest you try to attend if you’re at all interested in the things I talk about here on my site.

Montana Senator John Tester will host a Small Business Opportunity Workshop in Missoula on Wednesday, February 23, 2011. The event focused on expanding small business opportunities, especially for young entrepreneurs.

The upcoming workshop will be held at the University Theater at the University Center on the campus of The University of Montana.

He’s bringing with him a top Microsoft executive who will deliver a keynote address on his experience working with the software giant, and several social media gurus who will give a presentation on how websites like Facebook and Google can help grow businesses.

The social media portion of the workshop will show attendees just how important a tool the medium can be for small businesses.

Sign up here http://tester.senate.gov/Resources/workshop.cfm