This past week I had the honor of being one of the sponsors at the Local, Search and Social Summit, an event put together by Rocks Digital for SMBs to learn the latest and greatest in areas of local, search and social media. If your business isn’t doing online RIGHT you better fix that RIGHT now!

These are my top takeaways to help SMBs. Get started by continuing to read …

Dominating Local Search

Bernadette Coleman, CEO of Advice Interactive Group, presented on “How to Dominate Local Search Online”. Here are some of the stats she shared to emphasize the importance of local search:

• 50% of mobile searches are trying to locate a business
• 61% of these searches result in a purchase
• 50% of mobile users visit a store within a day of searching

If these don’t wake you up, I don’t know what will. But she didn’t leave us with that thought, instead she moved into 5 practical tips to how to use local search to dominate your industry.

1. Perform an audit on your current local search visibility
2. Optimize the behavioral signals of your target client by reading what they say in reviews and social media
3. Use barnacle SEO which means latching on to other sites about your business
4. Use only good links when link building – it is better to have fewer high quality links than a lot of low quality ones
5. Make sure all your business listings are consistent and that there aren’t any duplicates out there

Following these tips may take some time and effort but it will definitely help put your Local SEO in a dominant position above your competition. (You can learn more about citation building with this eBook.)

Google My Business Workshop
After learning how to dominate our local SEO, the next session, moved into practical application when Justin Liles walked us through putting our business listing up on Google My Business which is one of the most important directories for local search. This session started with logging into Google My Business and going through each step of setting up a business profile while we either watched the Justin do it on the screen or we had the option of actually putting our business listing up during the session itself.

Optimizing your listing on Google is an important way to improve your business’s online visibility.

Creating a Social Media Plan
Continuing with the practical application at this one day conference, Lissa Duty led a session that put together a Social Media Plan including ideas on how to implement it. A worksheet was supplied to each attendee with questions to lead us through the planning process. For example: Why are you using social media?

Each question you answered completed another part of your social media plan so that by the end of the session you had a good start on an individualized social media plan and some ideas on how to implement that plan.

Website Best Practices and Content Planning
As with all these sessions, this one led by Natalie Gould and Rachel Morgan was packed with information on best practices you should be following with your website as well as with your content. Since the Google “map pack” has recently gone from 7 listings down to only 3, optimizing both your website and content is even more important so that Google will place your business high enough in the search results to be in those top 3.

This again, goes back to your business listings. It is imperative that you check, double check, and continue to monitor your business listings on each site, like the Google My Business listing many set up in the earlier session. The speakers went on to say that after Google My Business, the next major site you needed to either list your business on or verify your listing is Bing Places. It was stressed that it is important for your business profile be complete and then they went through the items that made up a complete profile.

After website best practices we moved on to content. With the amount of content you need to generate for SEO it is difficult to do it all yourself and finding a writing resource (or a few) is important. Then, once the content is written, you need to be sure that you set up Google Analytics on your site and use it.

Google’s “Micro-Moments”
The final session of the Summit was the keynote given by Ben Killmer of Google. This was an interesting look at what Google refers to as “micro-moments” and what these mean to your business. Micro-moments are intense moments when people are searching and are ready to take action. Your business needs to be in front of your customers when they have one of these moments.

Micro-moments are broken down into 4 categories:

• Know – to satisfy a curiosity
• Go – Looking for the location or phone number of a business
• Do – Looking for activities, how to do something, or tasks (car repair, makeup application, etc.)
• Buy – Looking to buy something and checking reviews and pricing

Being in front of your customer when they have a micro-moment means you have to know your target customer and what they will be searching for. You then have to ensure that your business’s local SEO matches that.

As you can tell from just these brief summaries of the sessions, there was a lot of information packed into one day at the Local, Search and Social Summit and I was glad to be a part of such an amazing event. If any of this peaked your interest and makes you want to learn more about these topics, you are in luck, just click within the session descriptions above and read the live blogs.

#SmallBiz Are You Doing #Online RIGHT? Top Takeaways by @PattyFarmer #RocksDigital #SEO
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How is your business’s local visibility? Let’s talk about it!

The post SMBs Are You Doing Online The RIGHT Way? Local, Search and Social Top Takeaways appeared first on Rocks Digital.

Website Best Practices

Rachel started off with a discussion on local SEO, what it is and why it matters.  Her short explanation was –> Local SEO is the process of optimizing your web presence to increase your local visibility. Google has reduced their “local pack” in search from 7 listings to 3, which means optimizing your presence to be in that top 3 “pack” is more important than ever.

• Be sure to optimize and verify your Google My Business Page, how fortuitous that Justin told us how to do that earlier!
• Be sure to use proper category associations with your Google My Business listing.
• Optimize and verify your Bing Places Profile.
• Optimize and verify your Yahoo Local Page.
• Then move on to submitting your business to the top directories like Yelp, Manta, Citysquares, etc.
• And don’t forget the data aggregators (organizations that collect and compile data and then syndicate it out to citation sources) these include Infogroup, Acxiom, Localeze and Factual. There are companies that can help you with this. For example, Local Site Submit does this for clients.

Don’t forget your local Chamber of Commerce and the Better Business Bureau, both are good for building trust, as well.

Optimizing Your Social Media Profiles

Next, claim and optimize social media profiles. Even if there are social media platforms you don’t use, you can still claim the profile and then set it to “private” so it can’t be seen but it is there in case you want to use it in the future. Top networks are: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest.

Remember that there are ranking factors that are out of your control, such as:

• Physical address in city of search
• Proximity of physical location to the point of search
• Proximity of address to centroid

If this all seems overwhelming, you can always get help from Advice Interactive Group!

Planning Your Content

Now that you have yourself optimized and verified, you’ll need to work on content! But, why is content important?

• It makes your website more relevant
• Links
• Keyword, traffic and ranking opportunities
• Helps with your Google ranking

Where do I get content?

• Write it yourself (or, if you have staff, have staff write it). Do your keyword research with Google Trends, Google Autosuggest, Google Keyword Planner. Don’t forget competitor research to help get ideas for what to write about.
• Hire freelancers (textbroker, constantcontent or writerAccess, for example) – remember, you get what you pay for so be prepared to pay for quality, well-researched content!
• Repurpose previously created content (use blog post excerpts as Facebook post material, for example).

Other possible sources of ideas:

• Google Analytics – what content do you currently have that already does well?
• Research top things in your industry or city (Top Local Social Conferences in Addison, for example)
• Research Popular How-Tos (How To Write Great Content, perhaps)

Ok, so now you have some great content, what do you do with it? 

You can use a content calendar to help you plan what to post, plus where and when to post it.

• Post it in a blog
• Use Hootsuite, Buffer or Sprout Social to schedule posts
• Use the native scheduler in Facebook for maximum newsfeed reach
• Setup through RSS feeds. Learn how to do that here.
• Use IFTTT  (If This, Then That) recipes

Social Media Best Practices:

• The 70/20/10 Rule – 70% business & brand-building/20% shared from other sources/10% self-promoting
• Real-Time Responses – Respond to questions, comments and complaints within an hour
• Find Your Voice – Make it approachable and conversational, but also authoritative

Now you know the “how”, “why”, “where” and the “when”  for your local SEO and your content – now you can make a plan and implement it and see what happens!

#Website Best Practices & #Content Planning. Live blog by @LauraDarkstar #RocksDigital
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How is your current Local SEO or Content strategy working? Share your success stories.

The post Website Best Practices and Content Planning presented at LSS15 appeared first on Rocks Digital.

Opportunity Waits For You in Moments

The future is limitless. There are TRILLIONS of opportunities to meet with potential clients every day. But how do you find those moments to connect?  You need to understand what people search for when they’re searching.

So, what do people search for?

• Science
• Inspiration
• Love
• Entertainment
• Greatness
• We search to make sense of things
• We search to remember

Mobile and The Opportunity It Brings Your Business

• 3.2 devices per US adult (on average)
• Mobile searches now exceed desktop searches in the US
• We don’t GO online anymore… we LIVE online. 8 of 10 Americans access the internet at least once a day and, on average, we’re accessing the internet 150 times a day…each of us… EVERY DAY!
• In fact, we are so attached to our devices that we have new words related to our devices and interaction with them, like Nomophobia – a fear of being without a mobile device, power source or service area.
• 75% admit to even bringing their device into the restroom on occasion (and, on a perhaps related note, 25% of survey respondents are not always completely honest when answering surveys)!

Google Micro-Moments

15% of daily Google searches are unique. These create moments…. micro-moments in which you have the opportunity to connect.

What kind of moments?

• I-want-to-know moments – which relate to satisfying curiosity (checking a fact during a conversation, for instance).
• I-want-to-go-moments – which relate to looking to go somewhere and looking for more information on where you’re going and how to get there. 2x jump in “near-me” searches in 2014!
• I-want-to-do-moments – these relate to looking up information on how to do things. How to do repairs, how to recreate that awesome hairstyle, how to write awesome blog content, etc. 100 million hours of “how-to” content is now on the Internet with more being added daily.
• I-want-to-buy-moments – these moments relate to making actual purchasing decisions. Something broke or they need something new. These moments even happen in stores looking at reviews, pricing, etc.

Micro-moments have changed the consumer journey.

They’ve brought:

• Immediacy of action
• High expectations
• Unscripted decisions

Potential clients are more need-focused than brand-focused, so if you can provide what they need, you have the opportunity to connect.

65% of decisions start on mobile and end somewhere else –people start a search online and then make a purchase in a store.

Online marketing is a fast evolving industry. Agencies not only manage the execution, they also stay on top of industry news and are key players in turning tools into successful strategies. Make the most of the micro-moments of connection and take your business to the next level.

Big Opportunity in The Small Moments says Ben Killmer of @Google Tks @LauraDarkstar #RocksDigital
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Have you seized the opportunity of a micro-moment in you business? Tell us about it!

The post Our Biggest Opportunity is The Smallest Moments: Micro-Moments presented by #Google at LSS15 appeared first on Rocks Digital.

Questions To Create Your Social Media Plan

Why are you using social media? This should be beyond “getting more clients” or “making more sales”.

Why do you feel social media is important? Not just “because everyone else is doing it”. Why are you passionate about social media? (What do you mean you aren’t passionate about social media? If you aren’t enthusiastic, it will show in your content).

Why is this important to your potential customer? How is your social media content benefiting the customer? Think in terms of benefits not what you do.

What do you want others to know about you/your brand? What sets you apart? What’s your unique selling proposition?

What types of content can you share to generate interest? Video? Memes? Periscope?

What makes your product/service unique? What do you do differently or better than your competition? How can your uniqueness benefit your customer?

Where is your future customer visiting? Where are your clients looking? Are they on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram?

Where is the best platform to market your product/service? Don’t just do what is the easiest. Go to the platform and use it directly (for instance, Facebook gives less newsfeed preference to third party generated content, like posts via Hootsuite). Re-purpose the material you’ve already got.

Where is the close (the sale) going to take place? Make sure you are doing tests to make sure your plug-ins and forms work correctly. Confirm that landing page you are taking the customer to for the purchase looks good, works properly and is easy to use.

How are you going to get the word out? Be specific – types of content & topics.

What day/time will you set aside each week to write your social media updates? Set aside an hour and write your content for the week. Don’t just post because you feel like you SHOULD. Put some thought into it and do some planning.

Assign themes to each day of the week – Motivation Monday – Wild Wednesday – Feature Friday… You don’t have to tell anyone you have a theme, this is just to help you and to motivate you when you’re writing. It is easier to write if you have an idea of where to start.

What times will you do social media maintenance? Check in 3 times a day – about 15 minutes at a time. It can take some discipline, but you CAN do social media without “going down the rabbit hole”! (See the next tip)

What are your goals when you log into your social media accounts? Go in to do retweets or to look for items on Facebook you need to respond to. Thank people for sharing. Comment in groups. Interact. Be intentional when you are in social media.

How often are you going to post on on social media? What are the best times to post on social media?

• Twitter – Have 100 ‘evergreen” tweets in reserve.  22 tweets a day (but that includes retweets and interactions).
• 5 or 6 images a day on Instagram
• Facebook AT LEAST once a day
• Pinterest optimization – 735 pixels wide for images
• LinkedIn – once per day (at least)
• RSS feeds can be used on LinkedIn and Twitter
• Google+ – post every day because it can help your visibility in search. Don’t worry if no one is clicking +1 or commenting. Those that do login are seeing your posts and it gives your more search visibility.

Want more? Download our eBook, An Introduction to Social Media Marketing: A Guide for Small Businesses.

#SocialMedia Planning Session with @LissaDuty Tks @LauraDarkstar #RocksDigital #Marketing
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Remember – social media is not a “set it and forget it” thing! Building relationships is key! Where do you need to focus more in your Social Media Plan?

The post Create A Social Media Plan & Implement It as featured at LSS15 appeared first on Rocks Digital.

After Bernadette got us in the mind-frame of needing to be prepared to interface with the mobile marketplace, Justin Liles, SVP of Local Search at Advice Interactive Group (who has been in the local search industry since before they had a name for it – so he knows what he’s talking about) walked us through claiming and optimizing our Google My Business listing.

Why You Need to Be On Google My Business

Bottom line = Want to rank in search? You cannot ignore your Google My Business Listing.

Why does it matter? Having a Google My Business Listing is important because it will help you rank better locally, which will drive traffic to you.

This is especially important if you have a business that sells products or services to a local/community client base. Below are the steps you can take to help you get through the verfication process.

How To Get Your Business On Google My Business

Preparation – Below are the steps you can take to help you get through the verification process. He also gave a list of all of the materials you will need to properly fill in your listing information.

Items needed to complete your listing:

• Images – Justin recommends having AT LEAST 10 images ready.
• Your Name
• Your Business Name (do not add location-specific information. For instance, Rocks Digital would be fine. Rocks Digital – Addison would be something you want to avoid).  This is especially important when you have multiple locations.
• Business Address – Make sure this matches what’s on your website and also what is on your Articles of Incorporation. Don’t ever add your suite number to the 1^st address line and don’t use the word Suite or Apartment, just use # sign (#1010)
• Phone number – be sure this is your BUSINESS line, not a cell number or a toll-free number.
• Website URL
• List of Keywords
• Email account set up in Google

Advice when completing your listing:

• Better to use ZIP codes than a radius when selecting the areas your business serves.
• Don’t have overlapping service areas on the map.
• Better to put “call for appointment” if you don’t keep standard hours or work from home.

When completing the description area about your business:

• Use bold for the brand name and services, but use sparingly.
• Use bullet points and not comma separated lists.
• Link to specific product pages within the description, not just your website.

Make sure you keep your information up to date and consistent across the Internet for the best results in getting and keeping your Google My Business listing verified!

#Google My Business Workshop with @GetPlacedLocal Tks @LauraDarkstar #RocksDigital #SEO
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This session was a great way to get started on listing and verifying your business if you weren’t sure how to do it. Have you verified your business on Google My Business?

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Why You Need To Dominate Local Search On Mobile

Why is mobile important?

• 50% of mobile searches are trying to find a local business
• 61% of local searches result in a purchase
• 50% of mobile users visit a store within a day of performing a related search
• 68% of smartphone users use their phones to get directions

Voice search is really important – you have to make sure that your keywords are things that mobile searchers will look for/find.

So, how do you compete in a mobile world?

Make sure you have the tools to market in a mobile world – it’s all about relationship management.

You can target your audience based on their data:

• Trust = Convenience
• Reading reviews, listening to what others say/what is being said about your brand is important
• Ignores ads, seeks authenticity…. Are you an expert/authority?
• Opinionated and shares opinions
• Social media has a 100% higher lead to close rate than outbound marketing
• Make sure you are engaging – be proactive instead of reactive
• The potential clients are value conscious
• Doesn’t want to waste time – instant gratification

Local Mobile SEO Now:

• 62% of organic searches show differently on Mobile
• You don’t want to be behind the 8-ball, you want to be ahead of the curve!
• Make sure your site is mobile optimized
• Search engines give preference to mobile friendly sites

How to Start Dominating Local Search

Optimize for local and local search – people are searching for what they’re looking for that’s close.

Start with an audit: Audit = Learning Opportunity

• Optimize behavioral signals – see how they are behaving and you can react to them
• Use real, local photos
• Optimize title tags to help click-though rates
• Optimize meta description – this is what search engines pick up on
• Don’t ignore schema reviews – review your schema markup
• Don’t ignore barnacle SEO – if you’re trying to rank on the first page of Google you will find that you might have, for instance, some Yelp reviews – make sure your profiles on those sites are optimized
• Earn some good links – fewer high quality links are better than ton of low quality links

Have Consistent Citations and Remove Duplicates

• Make sure that they are correct, not duplicated
• Only focus on the Top 50 citations and data aggregators. Ignore low quality cites.
• Citation = name, address, phone number
• Make sure your data aggregator data is cleaned up and accurate
• Make sure you have social signal enhancement
• Use videos to help with conversions

How To Create Local Content?

LISTS!!

List = Hook + reward

Numbered lists = Traffic – give them what they want in a short time

Lists help you:

• Collect
• Manage/Organize
• Rank

Use Lists to answer questions and Add local content to your lists.

View the Slides

Bernadette packed a lot of information into the first session of the Local, Search and Social Summit and these were the highlights.

How To Dominate Local #Search Online from @BernieColeman Tks @LauraDarkstar #RocksDigital #SEO
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Are you dominating local search? What one thing have you seen makes a difference for your business in Local Search?

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