You’re working on your website, updating title tags and meta descriptions, when all of a sudden you’re panicked at the thought of a truncated title tag! Sure, you kept it under 55 characters, but you know that doesn’t always work, because Google truncates to a pixel width, not a number of characters.

We all know that risking a low CTR is out of the question, and that it’s annoying to push a page live and have to go back and change it until you get it right.

There has to be a better way!

Now there is, Portent’s SERP Preview Tool!

Preview your title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs to see how they display in the SERPs before you push them live! Best of all, our tool is designed to measure title tags according to pixel length, just like the search engines do. No more fussing and fighting with your imagination or guesswork. Now, you can just enter your desired title tag, and presto a preview before your eyes!

Be our guest, try it out today!

The post Announcing Our SERP Preview Tool appeared first on Portent.

Our last stand against a tyrannical regime. Our last chance for our voices to be heard before the FCC screws it all up.

Yes, the FCC is at it again, and this time, it could cost all us site owners a lot of money.

First, a primer

Up to now, we’ve all lived in the happy world of Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality holds that the Internet should be a neutral channel of digital data where no single individual or business (same thing, thanks Supreme Court!) has an (dis)advantage. Right now, that’s not just theory. It’s how the internet is: My blog, Portent’s site, the NHL, and Walmart all enjoy the same digital pipeline with regard to cost and performance. Providers can’t mess with the series of tubes, as all sites are equal. It’s just like Thomas Jefferson wanted.

But, it’s probably going to change, and soon. The FCC has a proposal that would allow Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to create two levels of service for their clients: A faster tier, cleverly nicknamed the ‘internet fast lane’, and a slower tier (no clever nicknames yet). Opponents of this proposal say it’s the beginning of the end of Net Neutrality, as we’ll launch a ‘two class’ Internet access system.

So, why don’t you want the fast lane option?

A faster internet sounds great, until you realize a couple of things: For one, the fast lane could be the same speed we all have now, and the slow lane could be even slower than what you experience today. ISPs, after all, aren’t just sitting on 30GB bandwidth. Second, the fast lane will cost web site owners and other ‘downstream’ content providers. They’ll pass that cost along. Web site owners — that’s us — will see higher hosting costs. We lose.

So, the fast lane is awful for web site owners.

That’s the primer.

Now, here’s what you, the web site owner, can do about it:

Page Load Time

Assuming the FCC gets their way (which they will, because American politics) and the Fast Lane becomes a reality. You’re probably not Netflix or Oracle. Maybe you don’t even use Netflix (though really? Have you not seen House of Cards?). You don’t have the need for the “fast lane” nor the money to buy into it. This means your site is going to be noticeably slower when accessed by your users… but it doesn’t have to be. Tomorrow’s two-tiered Internet places an even higher importance on page load time. Having the fastest site money can’t buy will be your only chance to compete with the likes of big box retailers, giant corporations, or the wealthy entrepreneur. So let’s get your site running as fast as possible!

Go to http://www.webpagetest.org/ right now, and run a test on your site. You’ll be able to run a lot of different tests via the tool, like this waterfall report. It shows when each element of your page loads, and how much time each takes:

and this filmstrip view of your site loading, for better visualization of how slow things may be moving:

Similar to Google PageSpeed and YSlow, you’ll receive scores for your site so you know where to focus your efforts.

In fact, you can even view PageSpeed recommendations from your report. Focus on the red and yellow ones to make the biggest impact.

Get it Up to Speed!

So, now that you know where your site is lacking, it’s time to fix it. I would walk you through this, but we’ve written so many posts about page load time over the years, that I’d be beating a not quite dead horse. Instead, please read:

Improving Site Speed by Nick Bernard
31 Ways to Speed Up Your Site by Ian Lurie
How We Made eigene-homepage-erstellen.net Really Freakin’ Fast by Ian Lurie

As you can see, we’ve been on this bandwagon for years now. We’ve also seen quite a few success stories for our clients along the way. That being said, for a lot of folks, it’s easy to put off site speed changes because you assume that your users want whatever it is you’re offering.

That’s not really the case. So, if you need help convincing your dev team, your boss, or whomever to let you make changes, please read:

Site Speed is Hurting Everyone’s Revenue

Do it Today

Not only is your site’s future at stake if the FCC has its way, but its present is at stake as well. Site speed is crucial to online success. It impacts the user experience, conversion rate, sales and revenue, and even rankings.

Get a fast site today, and make money tomorrow.

The post The Death of Net Neutrality, or: How to Survive the Internet Slow Lane appeared first on Portent.

Transcript:

Shawn Besabella: Hello. Welcome to the Portent Webinar Series. My name is Shawn, and I’ll be today’s moderator for today’s webinar, which is SEO Tips for Small Businesses. Today’s webinar will be presented by Josh Patrice, an SEO Team Lead here at Portent. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming Josh. Hey, Josh.

Josh Patrice: Hello. Thanks for that, Shawn. As I said, today’s webinar is SEO Tips for Small Businesses, and you can see there Josh Patrice, and my Twitter handler here is @Syzlak, and then I also have my email there in case there are any questions that are a bit more in depth about some of the slides that you might see. You can write me at Josh@eigene-homepage-erstellen.net. We also have a Twitter hashtag free to use. If you wanted to tweet out anything, please use this hashtag; it’s #portentu, part of our learning series at Portent University. So if you have any questions that you want to go on Twitter with, you can use that. And we also have a link bundle for all the links that come up during the presentation today. You can go to Portent.co, and it’s co, not .com, /smbseowebinar.

And this is a chart we like to use at the beginning of every webinar that we do or presentation that we give where we talk about areas we are going to discuss today, and really today what we’re going to discuss in the realm of search marketing is this contact area, where we’re going to talk about SEO a lot, and then, of course, this retention area, which is going to talk about social and community and working those two together to have to increase conversion sales and visits. So let’s get started.

So this is you, that business right there. You’re a small business in a small town. The big city is off in the distance, and you’re the sunset, and what you’re really trying to do is to try and grow your brick and mortar and turn it into a more successful online business.

So this is where you want to be. You want to be a bigger business. You want to put the second, third, fourth stories on top of your shop. Maybe you want to open a few more shops; maybe you’re just online. Right? And you don’t have a brick and mortar, and maybe you just want to expand your site and expand offerings that you have for your site, and really what you want is more people coming through your door, your website, et cetera, and those people leaving happy. So how do you do it? That’s what we’re going to answer today.

One way we can do that is by leveraging our online entities, Google and Bing, which are search engines and provide local search, and then you have Yelp and Foursquare, which are business review oriented sites, and then you have Facebook and Twitter, which are social media oriented sites, and all these can really play a role in helping your brick and mortar site really succeed on the Internet, which as we all know is just a series of tubes.

So where do we start, and we’re going to start with the Internet, and as we all know, Al Gore invented the Internet. There he is installing it next to Bill Clinton. But what we really need to start with is your website, and I think it’s important nowadays to really stress the fact that – this kind of goes contrary to everything that I should be telling you – but nowadays you don’t actually need a website. Google Business Listings, Bing Business Listings, Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, LinkedIn, et cetera, the list of sites where your business can exist online is growing daily because everyone is trying to get hold of this local search market.

The reason why you should have a website and why we advise you to have a website, and why I would tell you that you’re foolish for not having a website, though, is because without the website all you are is that listing. All you are is a whole bunch of Yelp reviews, which may or may not be all that good. So to have a website where you can produce content, and you can build links, and you can build traffic, and you can have coupon giveaways or tell stories, et cetera, that’s really what you’re going to want to use your website for.

Now before we get too far, I just want to stress a few things about a website: If you’re going to have a website that’s just one paragraph and a phone number, that’s not that great of an experience. There’s not much content there. You’re not going to get too many people to be interested in that website, and it’s not going to go over that well, and what I would suggest you do is get a cell-hosted website, something like WordPress at Work, ‘cause it’s free software, and make sure that your URL isn’t something simple like businessname.wordpress.com. Don’t do that. You want something that speaks to what you are, and maybe even your locality, so that your business can have a strong URL and will be easily found and remembered by your users.

So let’s start by talking about after you have this website what the website is going to provide you, and how you’re going to make that website work for you, and how you’re going to do that is through SEO. There are only two things to know about SEO: There are onsite elements that you can edit, and there are offsite elements that you can edit.

The onsite elements, what we’re talking about here, is Navigation, so up there at the top, Navigation bar, you have Home, About, Book Now, Members Area and Services. You can tweak these to provide keywords that you really want to work with. So in this case it’s a fitness expert/personal training sort of thing, so Fitness Services, Personal Training Services might have been a good choice there . You can have keywords in here that would help your page rank, so by putting a couple keywords in, two to three on a page that are about the page, that’s really going to help.

You can optimize images for image search. You can change heading tags, which are H1, H2, H3, and those can have keywords that will help you rank. You can do this, which is page titles. Page Titles, actually at the top of your browser bar, that, but in this case I pointed to the title of the business just for reference. And then you can have content, and content, and content is really important. Here there are a couple of customer reviews, and then, of course, there’s the welcome and the fitness blog, and so there’s a decent amount of content on this small business page.

What does it mean to have offsite SEO? Offsite SEO is building links from other sites. Offsite SEO is working on your reviews and Yelp and Facebook, LinkedIn, et cetera; offsite’s working with your images to make sure that they rank well on image searches, which is kind of a hybrid of onsite and offsite, things that you can do, but it’s another aspect, and it’s getting anchor text pointed to your site that has your ideal keywords in it, so fitness instructor or fitness services, et cetera, pointing back to the site. And also it’s using social media like Twitter, and you see here the Twitter feed is incorporated into the site down at the bottom right.

So let’s talk about Google a little bit, and why all these things matter. So Google has like 200-plus ranking factors it uses to evaluate your site versus your competition so it’s important to be trying to update your site properly and update your site frequently enough that you’re not just another site on the web not paying attention to SEO, but you’re actually outperforming the other guys.

So then we get to this situation: We have a whole bunch of people wanting to come to the website. They find the website, and then they go to your business, but what information do we have about them? What’s next? What can you do with this?

So Google Analytics is important, and what’s also pretty cool, if we do say so, is this small business dashboard that we just released today. So in Google Analytics at the top of your account you can look at a dashboard that has your five, six, seven most important tools, reports for your company, and so what we did was put together a little small business dashboard that we’re inviting you to all to download. There’s a link here and, of course, the link bundle, which was mentioned earlier, and we’ll mention it again before we’re done, will provide this link for you as well, and you can download that link dashboard and it will give you insights into your visits, your percent new visits, your location of your visitors, what URLs they’re coming from so that you can tailor content, et cetera, and it’s a really great dashboard that you can have that will really help you out, and then there’s also a blog post that goes along with it, and that was posted about an hour ago, and it’s here at this URL, and this really defines everything that’s included in the dashboard and really allows you to understand what reports are customizable and what reports go over everything.

So when it comes down to analytics for the small business, I like to stress these three things: I like to stress visits, pages, and referrals, and really the reason why is that I’m stressing when you’re a small business your site’s traffic volume is really going to be very important to you. It’s important to every small business; it’s important to large businesses as well, but a lot of times with a small business you are trying to grow your brand, and the main way you’re going to do that is by growing visits to your site. The visits reports are available in Google Analytics are also very helpful because they can allow insight into not only your traffic, but your site’s visibility, performance, usability, page views, and through all that data you can better assess how your visitors are using your site and why they’re coming to your site and allowing you to make your content even better.

And speaking of content, the next thing that I would refer you to is Pages Report, and using the All Pages Report you can retrieve information that will help you understand where your users are going on their way to either converting on your site or leaving your site, and that’s very important as well. You can also find out which landing pages users are coming to, and you can then try and leverage that for your social media efforts.

The last thing is referrals. Referrals are very important because they provide an opportunity for your small business to reach out and find out where your visitors have come from, because referrals is essentially the links that your website is getting, and for anyone who doesn’t know or isn’t familiar with Google Analytics, and just a quick explanation, referrals is the traffic referral so it will say something like “Facebook.com,” or it can go even as in depth as the actual URL that directed traffic to your site. And so the reason I say that that’s important is it’s a way to do link building – oh, that’s Linc from the Mod Squad – so we want to build links based on the content that’s already working for you; i.e., the pages, and we also want to build links based on referrals that are already pointing to. So if a lot of your traffic is coming from Twitter, and it’s pointing to one of your services pages, well, then you should get more active on Twitter and try and direct those people to convert for your business or to come into your shop or to read more about your services and not just the one.

So ways to build some links: One thing is to build internal links in, and this is something that a lot of people tend to forget about, especially in small businesses and people who are writing blogs for their home business, et cetera. Internal links are very important because they allow you to link from your top level content, so your homepage, your services page, About page, et cetera, and it allows you to link deeper to maybe like a blog post that’s ten layers deep or a particular testimonial or something like that. And the reason that’s important is you’re sharing the authority and strength of one page with pages that are deeper into your site, and ways you can do that is through your navigation to content with an anchor text that you might want to rank for, and through testimonials is another way you can do that.

External links are, of course, the more coveted link that exists out there, and they’re a little bit harder to get, and when you do get them you want to make sure that you’re not just pointing them at your own page, but you’re also pointing them to, let’s say, your blog or to some of your online social entities, and to deep pages on the site because what you want to do is you want to build links to all the pages throughout your site because then your entire site grows in health, and not just one page.

So I talk about external links and where to get them. Well, the thing you need to do is you need to ask for links from different blogs that might be relevant to your situation, different ecommerce sites that are you partners or your providers if you happen to work with other businesses. The other thing you can do is you could work with your friends; you’re probably friends with other local businesses. Maybe your friends happen to be in a similar industry and it would make sense if they linked to you. So that’s a good place to go ahead and ask for a link here and there.

And then the final one is through social, and you can also leverage social entities out there to build links for yourself, and that’s the next session we’re going to go into, is how to build links through social.

Okay. So the next section – Social and Building Links. So the first thing that we can do, we can have Twitter come to the rescue. Twitter is a great way to build some links. First thing that I would suggest is to follow your peers and your competition. You probably know who is your competition out there. If you don’t, do a couple searches based on your service and the city that you’re working in, and you’ll quickly find out who’s out there and who you should be aware of.

The peers, follow people who you admire in the space. Follow people who offer the same services, but don’t offer them in your region, and see what they’re doing, and maybe you can learn some tactics that might have worked for them. Maybe you can get in a conversation with them, and who knows, some of their audience might be closer to where you’re located.

In terms of competition, you can always get in a friendly debate with them, and maybe you convince a few people that you might know more about the topic than they do. Additionally, follow local news, businesses, and chambers of commerce, and this, I think, is very important because you have to remember that you’re not just a business with a goal. You’re also a member of your community, and so if something is going on on the street that you’re located and people can’t get to you, let them know that there’s a traffic mishap and to come around a different way or give them a little conversational post that’s just talking about the weather or something that happened in the news or your local sports team, et cetera. Those sort of things will build interaction with your audience, and then by them interacting with you, you’ll get seen by more people.

Also, just as before, know some local businesses. They don’t even have to be in your niche or your business type. They can be completely different businesses that you just happen to like. Maybe there’s a restaurant that you like, and you can converse with them. Maybe someday down the road they’ll give you a shout out just as you have given them.

So that’s kind of the basic ones. Some more advanced ones, here we have following hashtag PR requests. It’s important to follow this if you want to really get your name in print a few more times. There are a few other PR types of hashtags out there, but what PR Requests does is it allows people to see what journalists or press release crafters are looking for when they’re looking for a quote. It allows you to see if they’re looking for a quote in your category, and then you can go and say, “Yes, I’m an expert in this. Let me help you out. I can provide you a quote and a link to a blog post that talks about this specifically,” and then boom, your name is in print and being shared around on the press release.

The other thing is HARO, which is Help A Reporter Out, and it’s Twitter.com/helpareporter. Again, that’s in the building bundle that we build for you, and this is another one where reports come out, and it can be a local reporter, it can be a national reporter, it can be an international reporter, and they might say something along the lines of, “Writing a post on diet tips. Want a fitness instructor’s opinion,” or something like that. If you’re following those types of Twitter accounts and Twitter hashtags, you’re going to be able to build some links and really draw attention to yourself as an authority in your field.

Next is Facebook. Everyone has Facebook, but there are a lot of things you can do on Facebook that I see a lot of times aren’t even handled and paid attention to that are quick and easy wins for your business. So here’s the aforementioned McCracken Fitness with its 12 friends and no information. This is their place page and, really, it needs to be built out a little bit because a place page can look like this. This is Portent’s place page. It’s got the timeline view; it’s got the huge picture at the top; it’s got a logo; underneath that logo you can see the location information right here, as well as hours, and then you can also see our latest blog post, which is that one, and then here’s our webinar information, which is what you’re listening to now. And then, of course, there’s information just throughout of posts that we’re putting up there, information that we’re sharing with you, and having a local place on Facebook is going to really help you engage your audience and build your Likes and build visits back to your website.

The next thing is to have Facebook posts, and here’s my Facebook post that I shared to just kind of push people to go sign up a few days back. It’s not the greatest post in the world, clearly, but what it did do is it got four Likes, six comments and two shares. That’s okay, but those two shares each had five Likes and another share, and so on and so forth until it actually reached, Like, 45, 50 people just with me saying, “Who hasn’t signed up yet?” And if you post interesting, relevant content, and especially with pictures, you’re going to find out that you get a lot of attention through your posts, and then you can go and use those posts to drive traffic back to your site or to drive traffic to an offer that you might have right now, a coupon, et cetera.

Basically, it’s important to think of it like this: posts will lead to Likes; Likes will lead to shares; and shares is going to lead to visits back to your page.

Facebook ads is another channel you can go down, and I don’t want to talk too much about this one because this can be rather complicated very quickly, but it allows you to target an audience by demographics, location, specific interests, and then you can target down to the nitty-gritty and get people who are really specifically interested in like one thing you that you happen to offer, and show them an ad every time they’re on Facebook, and it’s a really powerful tool, and it’s also relatively cheap, like you can get ads for $.50 or so. The thing is, though, it’s really easy to kind of set it up in a way that it might kind of blow up on you. So this is why I don’t want to get too much into it, but we can cover it a little bit. I’m happy to answer questions about it. Feel free to continue asking through the webinar, but here’s an example of what I’m talking about.

So this is an ad I made for my brother’s political blog to reach out to people who work at publishing companies for political sites. So here we targeted 2,800 users who are 18 and older, who like John Stewart, because my brother writes a political mockery-type blog, who also happen to work at National Public Radio, Newsweek and The New Yorker, and whose politics are liberal, and then the suggested bid you’ll see there – which is right here – it’s averaging out to about, like, $.85, $.90 as the suggested bid. So that means we can get clicks for under $1.00 with this specified of a target.

This is just scraping the surface of Facebook targeting. You can go really, really deep and really, really thorough with what you can target, and again, I definitely encourage you to try it, but I would also say keep a tight rein on your purse strings when you’re doing that.

LinkedIn. Everyone knows LinkedIn as the professional version of Facebook, but there are other things you can do with LinkedIn. For one, you can add a link back to your website, and you’ll see there Internet marketing company is on my profile. That links back to Portent. Also my Twitter handle is there that links back to Twitter. The other thing is you can build your profile page, and as you see here, that links to the Portent profile page, and then in there as well there’s a link to the eigene-homepage-erstellen.net website. So that’s building yet more links back to your site. And then you can also set up products and services, so here in Products we talk about our SEO and PPC and social products that we happen to offer. You can also put in services there if you offer something that’s a little bit more nebulous than this specific product, and this really allows you to have, first off, yet another listing in search results, and yet another site that’s linking back to you, but it also allows you to reach people who might be looking on LinkedIn for information about local businesses they want to work with.

Next is Foursquare. So when I asked what social media advice I could give you, Foursquare was the answer that I got back from our team, and I said why? And Bryden said, “Because I said so,” and that’s Bryden there. His quote was this, “Even small businesses in Peru are on Foursquare,” and I thought that was pretty important, and it’s not to belittle Peru in any way, but it’s just to say that Foursquare is moving beyond being a game that you play with your friends in New York when you go out to bars and stuff. It’s not about just checking in and scoring points as much as it used to be.

So Foursquare outreach is going to get talked about because Bryden said so, and it’s because you get an online profile just the same way as you did with LinkedIn and Facebook and everything else. You see there it has a map; it has your location, and it has your industry. Nowadays you can even do Likes. Up here on the top right you can see there’s a Like and a Bookmark option. You can also share photos and tips just like you could with Yelp and with Google Places, and it automatically links back to your Facebook and Twitter. So you’re getting two links back to other sites that you have online, and it’s really working its way to being the local search research engine. If you go to Foursquare.com today, you’ll see that you’re greeted with a map and you’re asked to find stuff around you, as opposed to in the past where it was sign in and start playing with your friends – so friends, the mayor. They’re really starting to focus on being a local search.

Next up are some review sites. We have Kudzu, which you might not know of, but you probably know Yelp and CitySearch, and they’re mostly just review sites. You see here Yelp reviews are powering Bing. It also powers Apple maps’ reviews, and it’s important to know a couple bad reviews can really do major damage to your business online. You’ll see here there are a lot of three-star reviews. Most of them are pretty positive, but it’s not hard to get one or two one-star reviews and really tarnish your business online. So it’s very important that you’re always paying attention to your reviews, and you’re always trying to keep them as positive as you can.

CitySearch and Kudzu are tied with Google. So if you look and you do the same search in Google you’ll see 34 reviews on the listing, and then if you actually go to the listing you’ll see all these reviews from Google places, people, but then at the bottom it says, “Reviews from around the Web,” and it says, “Kudzu, CitySearch, and Judy’s Book,” and that’s because they link out and share reviews through them as well. So having reviews throughout all these sites that are positive for your business is really going to help your business’s reputation online.

Now it’s time to talk about Google Plus, and we’ll talk about Google Plus by talking about Pictures for Authors and then we’ll start with a quick conversation my brother and I had over Chat where he wondered why Google mattered, and he doesn’t understand no one is on Google Plus, and I said, “No. Google Plus matters a whole bunch, and it matters because you get up this picture – there’s a picture; that’s Ian. He wrote this post. You get a picture next to the post that you put on your blog by tying your author account to your Google Plus page. And that’s important because people click on those results with pictures 35 percent more often than they did when they click on the other listings next to them. So it’s a quick way to steal some traffic from your competition if you’re being proactive and synching up your Google Plus with your website.”

So then he said, “Fine, but I can’t have a Google Plus page for anything but my personal identity,” and then I said, “No.” If you actually look here, that same post that Ian had in the last slide, Facebook political update debate spam, et cetera, here it’s being indexed as a plus.google.com page, and it’s pointing to our Portent Google place.

So why is this important? Google Plus has more or less become local now. Here’s a search for Portent. You can see here the 11 reviews and the More Info, and the 11 reviews over here. You click any one of those, it takes you to this, which is our Google Business page, but it’s actually a Google Plus page. All of Google Business moved to Google Plus sometime in late June. We happened to experience it at an ever so wonderful time when we were moving from our old office to our new office now in the Smith Tower in Seattle, and so we had to really scramble and rework everything because we were in the middle of a move, and then they switched listing providers on us by putting it in Google Plus as opposed to Google Business listings, but it’s very important that you recognize that Google Plus is becoming more than just Google’s failed experiment at social media. In fact, it’s their succeeding experiment into Google Local Business, and it’s big on pictures and sharing and authorship, which is the picture next to your listings, and it’s really become a lot more important than we’d all originally thought. Google Plus is local now.

All right. So let’s go and dig a little bit more into Local. So Local Search is pretty tough a lot of times because it can be a bit overwhelming ‘cause there’s all these sides. You’ve got Google Plus; you’ve got Bing; you got the Yelp, Kudzu, CitySearch, and it can be kind of daunting to try and control all of your listings and to manage everything, and that’s why I suggest that everyone go out and check out getlisted.org. They’re a great site, and what they do is they help you manage where your listings are set up and owned.

So if you go in there and you enter your business name, you put in your ZIP code, it’ll come back and say, “Here’s the 24 or so sites that do a local search on the net,” and it’ll say, “This business listing is verified,” “This business listing hasn’t yet been verified,” et cetera, and then you can go and click a link and go and take care of verifying your listing and making sure that you’re in all these local services.

On top of that they also provide some great local SEO tips in their learning center and their blog, and through their local university educational series, which is just kind of like a conference series that’s just for local businesses. So you can go to those and learn a whole bunch in a day. They’re a great little service, and we use them all the time and they reciprocate by listing us as a local search optimization company in their site. Great people, easy to work with, and a really easy service that helps you just really quickly figure everything out.

Next I was going to talk about directories, but Google Penguin, there’s a lot of buzz right now about why directories are bad, and directories for the most part, they are bad. Link directories, as was asked earlier by Stan, are pretty much frowned upon throughout the universe right now, but I like to think the local still kind of needs directories, and the directories that it needs, though, are these for best of the web, the Better Business Bureau, Local.com and Avvo or AVVO; I don’t know if it’s supposed to be pronounced or not. It’s an expert advice site mostly for health professionals, doctors, lawyers, et cetera. It actually started out with lawyers. So it’s a decent place where you can go ahead and get your businesses listed.

And the reason that directories are still important for local is that unlike big businesses that will get links from partners and news and other sites, and do press releases all the time, it’s a little bit harder for a local business to earn links the way the big guys can, and so Google and Bing and everybody kind of noted that and determined that citations or mentioning your business name can count kind of like a link when it comes to local businesses.

So what it comes down to is best of the web, Better Business Journal, Local, et cetera, these are places that you can list your business. They’re not scrutinized by Google as being spammy directories, and it gets you some citations, as well as it gets you a link back to your site so it’s a good easy win for you to get a handful of links in one easy swipe.

The next thing that’s important to know about local are data providers. Data providers are really, really important. There are three major providers for everything, basically, in Local Search, and those are Localeze, Axiom and InfoGroup.

For example, Google pulls data from both Localeze and InfoGroup to provide all the listings that they use throughout all their properties, whether online, on your phone, et cetera. Axiom happens to provide data for Apple’s new Apple Maps, which, obviously, will grow over time; hopefully get a lot better than what they launched with, but you’re not going to see these free data providers dwindle in importance anytime soon for Local, and from David Mim, one of the owners and founders of Get Listed, if your business information is incorrect at any of those major providers, you’re not going to rank as well in the search engines. So it’s important to go to those service providers and see how your business is being listed, and see what your NAP is there, and no, it’s not a nap; you’re going to wake up. NAP’ing is name, address and phone number.

So the name that your business has is important, and that’s obvious to a lot of people, but far too often you’ll see that the AAA, as it were, of local business, which is acronyms, ampersands and apostrophes, are inconsistent across multiple sites so you’ve got to figure out if you’re an LLC or an Inc. or neither, or if you’re an ampersand or an un-apostrophe or and. If you want to have an apostrophe in Mama’s or if you want to be just Mamas, et cetera, you have to decide on this before you start listing your site across the Internet because if you’re inconsistent anywhere, then Google and Bing and everybody is not going to know which one to rank higher.

It’s not like having duplicate content and using rel=canonical. We can’t just say, “No. This one is right. Never mind.” The inconsistencies, especially with local businesses, who can literally have like a letter off from each other and be two different types of restaurants, like Shakey’s and the Shakeys. It’s important to make sure that you’re consistent.

Additionally, address. Address is a really, really important one. This can kind of be a stickler at times, and a great example of this is actually my family’s personal address is number, number, number Cabernet Street, but on every piece of mail we’ve ever sent out and received we put down Cabernet Drive because that’s what everyone says it is, but the post office knows it’s Cabernet Street, and also around the corner there’s Cabernet Court. So it’s important to know what your actual address is, and by actual address I mean the address that Google thinks you work out of.

So go online. Go to Google. Type in your address and hit Go, and when if it tries to correct you, and you find the address that it corrected you for, go ahead and click on that one, and then that’s now your address that you’re going to use on everything online because that’s the one that all these sites are pulling the data from.

And also phone number. If you have multiple phone numbers, pick one and stick to that one for all your online listings so that your NAP, your NAP is consistent across all your sites.

So here, Name, McCracken Fitness, Phone Number, there it is, but it needs an address. The address needs to go down there, probably in the footer, and then the site would have a consistent NAP.

Content is king is often said across the Internet for websites, but really in Local, consistency is king. Make sure that you have your NAP consistent across everything, but what if you’ve been inconsistent? Hope is not lost. I have a secret for you. You can go and you can use Google Mapmaker, and Google Mapmaker is this little device here.

So here’s an example of a company called Mr. Gyros Seattle, and if you see up there that there was a search, it was My Gyros Seattle, and so what was going on is I’m making believe right now. I don’t know who these people are, but was going on just that one of their listings said “My Gyros Seattle,” instead of “Mr. Gyros,” and so you can go through Google Mapmaker and you can edit this, and then those updates are reviewed and approved by humans at Google, and then there’s a history to all the changes that have been done to a listing so you can see if there’s ever been an error or something and go back and fix it.

And that’s really important because if anyone’s on the line here or just from personal experience, if you’ve ever tried to go and fix things through the normal channels, as it were – contacting Google, filing a ticket, dealing with support or just going into the local business center and trying to edit things on your own, you’ll find that it doesn’t happen to work because it’ll be like a three-week or more delay in getting any sort of communication, and sometimes the changes never take, and you can see in the changes were made, and it wasn’t ever re-indexed. So MapMaker is a pretty powerful tool and really allows you to fix what might be going wrong with a listing if you haven’t been consistent. So go out there and fix your listings, and then you can go and you can build your followers, optimize your site, and then we’ll grow your business with you.

So that’s it for us. These are the links one more time: Portent.co/smbSEOwebinar, and the smbSEOwebinar, that is case-matched for some reason so make sure that the SEO is capitalized.

The post SEO Tips for Small Businesses [VIDEO WEBINAR] appeared first on Portent.

Danny Sullivan announced that Google is actively moving towards 100% encrypted search results. This should come as no surprise to anyone in the industry. When Google introduced secure search back in 2011, we saw the writing on the wall. As Google increased their number of users, the number of (not provided) results would increase as well. The percentage of (not provided) traffic grew from 3% to 5% overnight, and upwards to 10% by the first quarter of 2012.

We’ve been able to get by for the past two years. We’ve explained to our clients what (not provided) means, why it exists, everything.

and though the news was rather sad…

Though it might not be tomorrow, next month, or even this year, soon enough 100% of Google’s organic traffic will be unknown to us. Sure, there will be a number of hacks we can use to infer data, or we can just lean heavily on AdWords (shut up and take my money!) to provide the information, but the truth is keyword-based marketing as we have known it is dead. We will no longer know what keyword drove that visit that drove that sale. It won’t exist. Not in Google Analytics, not in Site Catalyst, not in your log files, nowhere.

This has led to quite a bit of panic.

People are assuming that we’ll have to spend thousands of dollars on AdWords just to see what terms are working, and to find what terms we need to build a strategy around. Some are claiming that all the data Google collects is going to go away eventually, and that we’re heading to a paid-only world.

There’s even talk that we’ll have to start tracking keyword rankings like a hawk. That the only metric to determine keyword effectiveness will be ranking, and that we’ll map each page of a site to just a set of unique terms and we’ll weigh how much traffic those pages generate by how successful we are.

I just had to laugh…

At the end of the day, this really changes nothing.

While it has been very useful to have that data over the years, and I know we’ve all been able to glean new ideas for pages, blog posts, etc., it’s not crucial. That’s because, when you take a step back, everything we do is still just a part of Web marketing. In fact, we view SEO as a result of proper marketing.

If your site has a thorough hierarchy, uses clear architecture, is well designed, provides a good user experience, is fast, and has proper title tags, headings, well-crafted content, etc. then it’ll likely do just fine. It will get links and visits and will rank for whatever term you like. Write content that speaks to what you’re selling whether it’s a product, a service, or just an idea. We’re afforded a great opportunity as Web marketers; our audience already knows that they want something akin to what we’re offering. All we have to do is close the deal.

Seal the Deal

I know that I’m not going to start relying solely on rank tracking to convey keyword success. There are a lot of tactics we can use to get granular about how profitable traffic may be related to a specific search, and none of them involve heavy scrutiny of keyword ranking. Rankings shuffle all the time for various keywords. You could rank in position 3 for your most profitable term today, and rank number 8 tomorrow. It’s just not a part of a strong long-term strategy.

If anything, this is good news for all of us who have been in a meeting where a client says, “more sales are great, but we’re not number 1 for ‘widget keyword that doesn’t convert’.” Or think of it this way, imagine you sold umbrellas, and one day you found that 5% of your visitors came to your site using the term “parasols for rain.” Would you revamp your entire site? Of course not. A little traffic or a bump in search rankings doesn’t affect your bottom line as much as a sale does. So why not talk about site performance from that standpoint instead?

This is perhaps the best outcome of all. We can focus on how organic traffic and site performance influence unique visitors, conversions, sales, revenue, etc. If you haven’t done so already, now is the time to shift your conversation towards meaningful KPIs and away from silly things like ranking and traffic.

So, in the end, thank you (not provided) for our industry’s evolution away from outdated “metrics” and toward meaningful results.

The post A Day in the Life or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love (not provided) appeared first on Portent.

“I know a little SEO, we should be fine”

No you don’t.

I understand that quite a few folks learn the basics of on-site optimization. I understand that quite a few folks read SEO blogs, or read marketing blogs that talk about SEO in passing. I understand that quite a few folks learn a lot from the SEO that used to work at the company.

That is not the same as being a full time SEO professional.

Knowing a little bit about SEO is a good way to be dangerous to your marketing department. Without thorough SEO knowledge, it is easy to do substantial damage to your web rankings. Whether you’re optimizing for the wrong keywords, accidentally using some black hat techniques, or spending all your time on spammy link building, you’re doing more harm than good.

“SEO was already done to the old site, we won’t need that for the new one”

Good point! SEO clearly adheres to the transitive property, so we’re good here…
First of all, this isn’t even the transitive property, so you can throw that reference out. Secondly, huh?

You spent a bunch of money to optimize your current site. You saw results, you improved in the rankings, you increased traffic, etc. Now it’s time to look at rebuilding your site to improve bounce rate, time on site, user interactions and conversions. Why on Earth are you discontinuing SEO?

This is the time when SEO can be the most crucial part of your marketing strategy. Changing your site means massive changes in the search engine’s indexes. If you get rid of a page, it needs to be redirected and the links to the page throughout the site need to be updated. If you change a URL, the old URL needs to be redirected to the new. Image sources will need to be updated. Page titles need to change. Content will be adjusted or removed—will your keywords and pages still be optimized?

Don’t change horses mid-stream. SEO leads to daily changes when your site isn’t going through a major overhaul, why would you shut it down when it is?

“We got everything SEO’d back in May”

Oh right. SEO is a one time deal. Somehow forgot about that while doing hours of work everyday.

SEO is an ongoing process. I like to relate it to an ad campaign: your site is the ad, and SEO is what delivers your ad to the world. You wouldn’t create a great ad and then never publish it, so don’t do the same with your website.

Leverage your SEO to get your website in front of more people.

“Our meta tags are up to date”

OK… what does this mean?

Pages can have dozens of meta tags of various types (description, author, charset, refresh, name, http-equiv, content, robots, googlebot, google, google-site-verification, content-type, keywords). Far too often, “meta tags” means stuffing numerous broad single term keywords into the meta name=”keywords” field. Problem is, this technique went the way of buffalo back in the early part of the century.

Do yourself a favor and remove your meta keywords.

“We made a link contest”

Oy vey. Do you want to be kicked from Google? Do you hate revenue?

Link contests (see also: link schemes, link building plans, reciprocal link abuse, etc.) seem like a sure-fire way to speed things up, when all it does is slow your site down. The idea here is based around gaming the old PageRank algorithm in order to gain massive amounts of links to your site as fast and painlessly as possible. The problem is, Google doesn’t much care for it. In fact, they downright forbid it in their Webmaster Guidelines.

Want more links? Do it the old fashioned way—write content people want to share, sell something people want to have, inform people of something they need.

If all else fails, post pictures of kittens.

“SEO best practices”

This one is near and dear to my bitter blackened heart.
What’s a “best practice?” Who defines “best practices?” To me, this is account speak.

From what I’ve gathered, it seems like this means all pages have a title tag (not necessarily properly formatted, nor optimized), a meta description, meta keywords (again, not used in SEO), and maybe (if you’re lucky) proper header tags throughout the site. Google measures 200 some odd elements to determine search rankings. If that’s the case, how are 4 on-site elements the crux of “best practices?”

SEO isn’t this simple. It’s complex and is beyond learning a few “best practices.”

“We’re going to add the SEO after it goes live”

NO.
NO.
NO.

So much is wrong with this one. Much of what I discussed referring to continuing SEO after updating your site can be applied here as well. However, there are a few differences here. With a new site, you’re preemptively killing its potential by launching it without any attention paid to SEO.
The first signals Google gets from your site are going to influence the next few months of your rankings – don’t launch without SEO…even if it is just “best practices.” ;)

Ever heard any of these in your agency? Got any to add?

The post 7 Cringe-Worthy SEO Phrases You Never Want to Hear in a Marketing Meeting appeared first on Portent.

Don’t worry, we can help.

What’s Important in Google Analytics?

For a small business, the most complex reports aren’t going to matter as much as the bread and butter basic reporting features. Focus on what matters to your business. Most likely, this is going to be visits, pages, and referrals.

Visits

Find out your site’s traffic volume by looking into your visits. This report will be important to any small business, but especially those that are growing their brand. The visits report provides insight into your site’s visibility, performance, usability, and pageviews.

Pages

You need to know which page on your site is driving the most traffic and/or conversions. Using the “All Pages” report, you can see this information as well as helpful data regarding pageviews, time on page, and bounce rate. This data can be used to evaluate your landing pages as well as determine potential areas for new content.

Referrals

Where are your website’s visitors coming from? Did you know that most small businesses get nearly half their traffic from Social Media. You can see how your referral traffic is coming from in GA.

Referrals are especially important for small businesses as they provide an opportunity for small businesses to reach out and embrace their primary audience: the community.

Providing content that is targeted at your local community is a good way to build traffic, brand awareness, and potential customers. The Referrals report will help you find your most active audience—then it’s up to you to reach out to them!

A Better Way to Monitor Google Analytics

Viewing this data regularly in Google Analytics is important. And since that process would be a lot easier if someone would just hand you the keys to a reporting system that you didn’t have to think about, I have done just that.

Here at Portent, we love small businesses so much, we decided to create a Small Business Dashboard for Google Analytics that you can download for free.

Install the dashboard in your Google Analytics profile.

Google Analytics Small Business Dashboard

Let’s go over a couple features of the Small Business Dashboard. First, it includes data for Visits and % New Visits. We chose to provide % New Visits because as a small business, new customers are going to be far more important than visitor retention and returning customers. You want people learning your name and coming into your store—you need new visitors.

Next, we included stats for Social Visits, Referral Visits, and Visits from Mobile Devices. We’ve covered Social and Referrals, but Mobile reporting is also becoming very important, as it accounts for at least 40% of local searches (Remember the last time you looked for a restaurant while driving down the freeway?).

We also have a tally for Goal Conversion Rate and a pie chart for Visits by Location. These are both customizable for your needs. Simply click the gear in the top right of these widgets and set them to the data you want to track. For now, Goal Conversion Rate is tracking all goals (you might just want one specific goal tracked) and Visits by Location is set to City (instead of Region if you’re in multiple states). Set these up however you’d like in order to get the most of the Small Business Dashboard.

My Free Webinar: SEO Tips for Small Businesses

If you’d like to learn more ways you can improve your small business’ SEO and Analytics, you can join me for a free webinar on Thursday, October 25th at 11am PST.

Sign up here. Even if you can’t make it, I’ll still send you the recording and you can watch it later.

You can view the slides for the presentation below. You can also check out the link bundle of resources I mention.

The post Google Analytics Tips for Small Businesses appeared first on Portent.

Here are our tips for using the new Google Disavowinator™:

Don’t disavow links unless you’ve carefully researched them

What does that mean? Well, it’s not just looking at domain names, domain authority, or whatever else you use to get a rough understanding of the quality of said site. Thoroughly researching your links is much more complicated and will take time. However, you’ll be better off in the end for having done it.

Building a database of your current backlinks is your first step… and then there are about 19 other steps after that. Follow Ian’s master list – he’s a good man, and thorough.

Don’t use this as a short cut

The disavowal tool is not a magic shortcut. Only submit links that you’ve already tried to remove.
As you read the rest of this article, you’ll see Google makes it clear that this isn’t a 100% guaranteed way to get links removed from your profile. Nor is it there to make life ‘easier’ so much as it’s there to tip the balance of power away from spammers and back towards webmasters. Treat it as such.

Don’t disavow an entire domain unless you’re 100% sure every link on that domain is garbage

This applies to the odd industry blog, news site, content site, etc. Yeah, they look like garbage. Yeah, they smell like garbage. And yes, they likely are 90% garbage…but that 10%. When the website got that link from Microsoft, or Yahoo, or CNN – before they let their site go to hell. That link still matters, that piece of content still matters, and your link from them might still matter.

If the domain is filled with spammy content and other forms of web crap, go ahead. To quote Ian, “If not, think. Use your brain.” (Seriously, he says this all the time)

Don’t assume that all rankings issues can be fixed by disavowing links

There are a lot of reasons your site may have dropped in the rankings. In fact, your site’s drop in the rankings on the same day as the last Penguin update might just be a coincidence. Yes, it’s true! Your site might not be all that good. That’s OK. You can make it better, but disavowing a bunch of questionable links is not going to turn it around in a heartbeat.

Be smart. Disavow the links you know to be spam and that you’ve already tried to remove. Then re-evaluate your site, and see where you can improve.

Don’t file a re-inclusion request until you’ve uploaded a disavowal file

Oh man, this would be a classic FAIL.

We saw quite a few examples of sites filing for re-inclusion before they’d even done any link cleanup after the first Penguin release. You know what that does? If the request is answered, it will likely keep you out of Google even longer because it may trigger additional review of your site by Google.

Before you file for re-inclusion, make sure you’ve done your research. Leave no stone unturned, and be sure to clean up the rest of your site as well.

Don’t become a serial uploader

Find a bunch of lousy links. Submit them. Then wait.

Don’t sit there submitting every 3 hours and then wondering why you’re not back in the rankings. This is a new, fairly advanced tool. It’s best to proceed with caution. Google agrees.

Do party like it’s 1999

We got the power to filter out spammy links. This is pretty huge. Enjoy it for a day. Then, get to work.

Do properly fill out your file of links to be disavowed

All you need is a plain text file with one URL per line. Simple, I know, but someone will screw that up. Google also gives us a few commands

• Lines that begin with a hash # are considered comments.
• Lines that start “domain:” allow you to disavow all links from a particular domain

Your file will look something like this:

Do use Webmaster Tools: Links to Your Site

Don’t be ridiculous, go to the source to find the easy links first. Webmaster Tools is your insight into Google’s view of your site. Grab the links they’re reporting first, and filter through those.

This is also a helpful reminder for any site that doesn’t have access to SEOmoz or MajesticSEO, or ahrefs – you can still find links pointing to your site. While the database might not be as grand, it’s still going to help you fix your site’s backlink issues.

Do think of this like rel=”canonical”

Google is equating this tool to rel=”canonical” in that it’s more of a strong suggestion than a directive. Think about it, they’re not going to give us the keys to the kingdom just because we all complained about the power the spammers gained from Penguin.

It’s important to note that, just like rel=”canonical,” this is meant to be used when necessary. We’re still expected to clean up as many links as possible on our own, request that webmasters be taken down, etc. Then we can use the disavow tool.

Do give it time

You won’t see anything change overnight. Google says:

We need to recrawl and reindex the URLs you disavowed before your disavowals go into effect, which can take multiple weeks.

I wouldn’t expect to see positive results for a month. Have you checked out the Disavow Links tool yet? Let us know in the comments.

The post The Dos and Don’ts for Google’s New Disavow Links Tool appeared first on Portent.

This was really an invaluable experience for me, as I was able to look at both my former job and my current job in a different light. I got to be removed from my instincts as an SEO, while simultaneously questioning the foundations of UX.

What I learned in the end was that SEO & UX must work together in order for a site to be successful:

• The myths about SEO & UX are false – it’s not impossible to coexist, and neither hinders the other.
• Poor UX will lead to poor SEO. Plain and simple, and the reverse is also true
• SEO should live within and be a part of the user experience

Myth: SEO & UX are like Oil & Water

SEO Myths

Myth 1: All SEOs focus on is traffic, ranking, revenue, and web presence

Well sure, to a degree. SEO is highly focused on generating traffic for your website. SEO helps you rank well, generate revenue and be visible on search engine results pages (SERPs). None of these things are that terrible. In fact, they are good things for websites that advertise online.

However, this isn’t the only focus for SEO. SEO is also concerned with quality content, page load times, and other tasks that affect the user experience (UX).

Myth 2: SEO is just getting links any way you can

This is true, back in 2009 maybe. After 2011’s Panda updates, a site’s sheer number of links isn’t nearly as important as it once was. Today, SEO focuses on superb content in order to obtain quality links over quantity links. Finding 1,000 links on poor quality sites isn’t going to cut it in a post-Panda world.

UX Myths

Myth 1: Everything is about what’s on the site

User experience is definitely focused on your user’s interactions, feelings, and opinions about your website. That being said, keeping your user engaged all depends on why and how they found your site. UX is involved in this process through site designs catered to many users. The site’s content can then be based on the criteria the user used to get to the site and what the user was looking for on the site.

Myth 2: UX is so focused on the on-site experience that it ignores that the first step for many users is a search engine

This isn’t entirely true, but it’s definitely been the case in the past. A lot of UX can be based on best practices, industry standards, and common sense, but UX shouldn’t end there. From creating a landing page tailored to users’ search queries, to conducting user testing – there should be more to your website’s UX project than just the design and layout of your pages.

Examples of Poor UX

Amazon – Busy sites can confuse your user

Tons of actions

• Drop down shopping list on the left
• Promos for the Kindle Fire
• Spring’s Most Wanted
• Camera & Photo shop
• On page ad
• Deal of the Day

Amazon has long been a staple of how to do things right, but of late, they’ve become the opposite example of user experience. Amazon has become a product seller itself with the Kindle line of products, and there lies the problem. Because of this shift in philosophy, Amazon’s site has started to push their products first and foremost. However, they still try to be the online one stop shopping experience for everything and everyone. This creates a very busy homepage, full of roadblocks preventing quality user interaction with your site.

On this page, there are a lot of actions that the user is shown, from the drop down shopping list on the left, to the promos for the Kindle Fire, Spring’s Most Wanted, the Camera & Photo shop, the on page ad, the Deal of the Day, and the various other options that await the user.

All of these are roadblocks to user interaction with your site.

Marc Ecko – Flash, full image sites, and too much interaction

Problematic Interactions

• Site that is difficult to use
• Difficult to see
• Offers no real direction
• Way too much interaction for a user to really take in
• Site doesn’t retain visitors
  • Some users don’t have Flash, some users get overwhelmed, etc.

While the example here isn’t the worst for the site’s demographic, it’s a good example of a site that is difficult to use, difficult to see, offers no action path, and way features way too much interaction for a user to really take in. The site ends up being more like a collage of imagery and interactions which never really draws a user in.

Many sites opt for the big visuals, to really draw their users’ eyes. However, more often than not, these sites don’t retain visitors for multiple reasons – some users don’t have Flash, some users get overwhelmed, etc.

Examples of Good UX

Groupon – Clean & Clear

Groupon is killing it right now, and it’s not just because of everyday amazing deals. They have made smart, eloquent copy a high priority for their daily listings, and designed a simple, clean, and clear website and interface.

Make it easy for users to interact with your site, through an easy-to-use navigation, an obvious reminder to where the user is on the site (current page is highlighted in the top navigation), and a clear call to action.

The proper use of white space, imagery, and buttons goes a long way towards getting users to interact with your site the way you want them to.

Hubspan – Options without the Confusion

In the world of B2B, sometimes you cater to multiple user types. It’s not easy to figure out what a new customer, current customer, or potential partner want to see first when they visit your site.

In this example, all 3 are catered to without experiencing alienation in the design.

SEO within UX

So how can you make SEO and UX work together?

Focus the design using principles of SEO

• Create content for the user and the search engines
• Push for H1 & H2 tags
• Work to improve link equity, menu functionality, and menu names
• Create clear navigation labels
• Use focused product descriptions and names

Personas & User Paths

Personas should be based on the online activities the user is going to take. They shouldn’t follow the old standard persona formula based on demographics, personality, or gender unless those characteristics are inherently important to the website.

User paths through the website should then be created for each persona in order to best suit that user’s needs. Hubspan’s site in the example above was able to cater to 3 different personas by designing different user paths for each.

Creating different experiences for different users opens up different keywords, content, and links for SEO.

Action Items

Calls to action have long been staples of web design and conversion optimization. They are also very important for SEO & UX. Buttons or links with calls to action like “Buy now,” “download,” or “learn more” should lead the user to content and page elements designed for SEO.

Additionally, these can be combined with product names or offers to create highly optimized calls to action, like the one seen below:

Order [product name] Today!

Search Engines Taking Cues from UX

In addition to the importance of SEO & UX working together for the greater good of your website, Google has been slowly shifting focus away from links and keywords for the last few years. While these are still the main ranking factors, they have found some new areas of focus that provide a more full view of a site’s quality.

What’s included in “quality?”

• Page speed
• Ease of navigation
• Internal link structure
• No duplicate content
• Relevant and descriptive content
• Page layout

What Your Website Should Be

Useable

Employ a clean and clear design, with little interference in terms of excess imagery, erroneous functionality, or filler content.

Understandable

Action items and user paths help you develop a site that makes sense. The user needs to understand how to reach their goals when visiting a site. When you build a site around information silos, action items, and user paths, you build a site that is designed for the functionality of the user.

Conversion oriented

Developing personas and using calls to action are a clear way to tell your users what you’d like them to do. Don’t be afraid to tell the user to buy, download, or sign up for something. On the internet, we all respond to calls to action much more directly than in our day to day lives.

Ranking well

There’s no point in having a great site that can’t be found. Content & keyword research will always be the cornerstone of your website’s online presence. Despite Google’s decreasing importance placed on links, links are still important as well. Work to find quality links and your site will rank well.

Generating revenue/conversions

Be sure your site is capitalizing on all the work you’ve put into it. That means focusing on conversion optimization through SEO and UX.

Following these guidelines will be a major first step in the process of developing your site or redesigning a site that needs to focus more on user experience. Similarly, in light of Google’s new focus on quality sites, user experience, and page speed, maybe it’s time you look at the UX from an SEO’s perspective. You’d be surprised what a difference this activity can have on your site.

The post SEO & UX – Working together to make your site better appeared first on Portent.

If so, you’re hopefully working hard on your website and web presence.

That’s great! We love local businesses at Portent, and we’d like to help you out. Here are 3 quick and easy steps that you can take to update your website, and grow your web presence.

Put Your Address & Phone Number on Your Site

This is, to many, a no-brainer. You run a local business; you likely have your address or phone number on your site, right?

Sadly, not always.

Many sites have the company address listed, but it’s often hidden away on the Contact or About Us page. Sometimes the number is on the main page, but it’s in an image, and is thus invisible to the search engines. Once in a blue moon, I’ll see a site that flat out doesn’t put their address or phone number anywhere. I’m still confused at how a local business expects to succeed without their address on their site, but I digress.

The easiest and quickest solution is to put your address and phone number in either the header or footer of your site in search-engine readable HTML text. This way, your information is on every page of your site, and you don’t have to work it into the site content nor images.

Update Page Titles with Address, City, or Phone Number

Many local business’ sites are designed and developed cheaply, by people that don’t know enough about designing and developing. I know this from experience – before I came to Portent, I designed and developed some pretty mediocre local sites. But the one thing I did do was make sure that all my client’s pages had locally targeted page titles (the text within <title> in your html) featuring the business’ address, city, and/or phone number.

What we see a lot from local sites, is that the entire site shares the same page <title>s and sometimes never includes anything local.

The solution?

If your business relies on phone calls for appointments, orders, etc. then you should consider the following approach:

[service/product] – [biz name] [phone number] – [city]

Alternately, if it makes sense to target your locality first (home services like plumbers, landscapers, etc.) then I suggest this:

[city] [service/product] – [biz name]

When I write <title>s, I like to call out the business with a superlative, such as Houston’s Favorite Pizza, Atlanta’s Best Tapas, or Minot’s Only Acupuncturist. This will get the attention of your potential customers in the search results by helping you stand out from the competition – who wants to go to the local pizza joint, when you’re Houston’s Favorite?

Claim Your Local Search Engine Listings

Do you own your own place listing on the major search engines? Do you even know whether you have listings on the major search engines?

If not, you should. They’re the most important tools to your local business’ success.

It’s an easy process – it only takes about 30 seconds (depending on your typing speed). Each of these will have a step by step process that is very easy to follow. At the end of the process, the site you have submitted to will call you, mail you, or email you a PIN number to confirm you as the business owner. Enter that PIN, and your listing will be claimed. Submit your listing to the following sites:

• Google Places: http://www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter?gl=us&hl=en-US
• Bing Local: https://ssl.bing.com/listings/ListingCenter.aspx
• Yahoo: http://listings.local.yahoo.com/

Google Local Listing Signup Process

Conclusion

For many of you, your local business is your life. For the rest, local SEO is the key to getting a leg up on the competition. We have a lot of experience in local SEO, and if you’d like a full review of what can be done to improve your local SEO efforts, we can help!

If you have any questions or comments, please add them below. We’d love to let you know what you can do to improve your local SEO.

The post 3 Easy Local SEO Tactics That Will Raise Your Rankings Today appeared first on Portent.

On my most recent attempt, I used Agencyland. It was very well organized, tracked my progress, and has a few bells & whistles that the other options don’t. However, in the end, I also felt prepared for my first 2 exams when I went through Google’s Help Center material.

The real tip here is to study. Do not think that you’ll be able to pass the test without learning (or writing down) a few of the finer details about AdWords. Even if you’ve used AdWords since the beginning, there are things that you probably don’t know. Write them down.

2. Be clear on Settings structure and Account Access Levels

This was a lifesaver for me. When studying, these topics couldn’t sound/be more mundane. However, when you’re 50 questions into the test and feeling like a star, they hit you with a question like “At which level can you set the language?” Well, if you’re like me, you either always work on English accounts, or find the setting on instinct.

Same goes for Account Access Levels. What can a standard user do? What’s a standard user? How many user types are there? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, learn them. Then – write them down.

3. Don’t skip the Mobile Ad section

Questions on Google’smobile ad policies will show up. Not once, but a few times; and, if you don’t know the various acceptable sizes, networks, link languages (WAP, HTML, CHTML, WML, XHTML), how ads get ranked, etc. you’ll get burned. Write them down.

4. Optimizing in AdWords

Google asks a lot of questions about how to optimize your account for different strategies (CTR, ROI, Traffic, Branding). These then get hidden in vague questions like “Placing keywords in the ad copy will help with what?” or “Calls to action and Unique Selling Points are ways to optimize for ___.” Knowing which actions apply to which strategies, makes answering these questions a breeze.

5. Which tab does what

This one burned me. The next time I logged into AdWords I realized that I’d marked the wrong answer. Study where certain reports, settings, functions, etc. are in relation to the tabs – and that means both AdWords’ tabs and your account’s tabs.

I never use the Account Snapshot, so I never knew it was under the Home tab. Well, apparently that would’ve helped me get a higher score, and it might help some of you pass the test.
In the end, being an experienced AdWords user isn’t enough, but it will be a tremendous help. For a lot of the questions, you’ll be able to rely on your experience; but, there will likely be a few questions that are outside of your knowledge base. Hopefully, these tips will help you out. If you have more, throw ’em in the comments!

A Note about Agencyland

If you have an AgencyLand login and you are signed in on a company MCC, the testing center will assign you a candidate ID (12 digit number) based on that company MCC. This ID is assigned to the MCC email address, not your Agencyland one. So if you pass, the MCC email will show as a Associated Individual…not yours.

However, if you login with AgencyLand, are not signed in to the MCC, you’ll receive a unique candidate ID and then go to the testing site. You’ll have to link your profile to your company, but your score will be on your own email.
The first scenario is exactly what happened to me :(

Since we don’t want that to happen to you, we talked to Google and got these simple instructions:

How To Take The Exam

1. Create and log into your Google Advertising Professionals Individual account at https://adwords.google.com/professionals/

2. If you are employed by an agency that has already created a company profile, don’t create your own company account in the My Company page. Instead, ask your company GAP administrator to link your individual profile to the existing company profile by inviting you as a Professional using your personal email address.

3. Navigate to the My Exams page and locate your 12-digit candidate ID – you’ll need this to take the exam.

4. Visit the Google Testing Center site by clicking on “Take this exam” next to the appropriate exam title or go to http://google.starttest.com

5. Enter your voucher code in the field entitled ‘Have you been provided a voucher code?’ and click ‘Submit’

6. You”ll then be taken through the signup process and create a unique login (this is separate from any Google- or AdWords-associated login you may have)

7. Remember you must enter your Candidate ID in the Google Testing Center profile in order to get credit for passing the exams.

8. On the next screen, select the exam you wish to take by clicking on ‘Start Online’

9. You’ll then be asked to download a secure browser where you will take the test

10. Launch the secure browser, log into the Google Testing Center site, and select the exam you wish to take by clicking on ‘Start Online’ You then have 120 minutes to take the test.

We also found out why you’ll want to use your own personal email address to take the test. In the past, this was a bit more of a gray area, but with new changes to the GAP program, the score will be portable. So if you ever leaves your company, you can remove access to the company qualification and carry it with you. Again, more details from Google:

Why You Need To Sign In With Your Personal Email

Since the individual holds the knowledge, but the agency owns accounts, the MCC and spend information is associated with the company, but the individuals own the exams.

Impact on individual:
Exam passes recorded at individual level rather than against MCC. Employees can leave at any time and take their exam pass with them.

Impact on company:
Employers get credit at Company level for an employees pass by inviting them to join the company account. If an individual leaves (by unlinking their individual account from the company account) their pass no longer contributes to company’s certification. If the individual joins a new company (by accepting an invitation from the administrator of the new Company account), their qualification will count towards the new organization’s certification.

It is possible to have done this through Agencyland, but it’s probably easier to just follow the steps above. It’s important to pay attention to Step 2 and be sure to “ask your company GAP administrator to link your individual profile to the existing company profile by inviting you as a Professional using your personal email address.”

Step 6 is also an important. This login is only for the test you’re about to take, not for any other Google related accounts or activities.
Again, study hard, follow the instructions, and good luck!

The post 5 Strategies to Pass the Google Exam appeared first on Portent.