Small Business Owners need to understand the importance of local business listings. In the entire history of the internet, any business has been listed on thousands of directories, whether they want to or not. The reality is that much of that information is inaccurate. From phone numbers to addresses to hours of operation and web URLs. Not only is this a detriment to the business owner, but this inaccurate information actually hurts your Google SEO ranking. Google's algorithm crawls the local business directory sites and ranks websites with consistent information higher than those without consistent information (well, let's just say accurate and CONSISTENT information increases your business' chances of ranking high on Google. From Yelp, to FourSquare to Facebook to WAZE to Bing to many others, there are tools like Moz Local and Yext that "clean up" your local business listings via one time submissions. This isn't the whole puzzle, as Google My Business is still the biggest piece. But behind Google My Business, I highly recommend Small Business Owners and marketers with many local listings consider Yext or Moz local.

If your business wants to create a blog or news feed that users can subscribe to via email, this is the best way to do it. You'll need the following: 1. A WordPress Website 2. A Ton of Content (blogs/news articles) 3. A Mailchimp account Many WordPress RSS plug-ins aren't supported anymore, but all WordPress sites have an automatic built in RSS feed at domainname.com/feed Mailchimp has a special RSS to Email feature you can use to send updates to your lists automatically on your schedule after you make new posts to your WordPress site. Here's how.

Every business wants to run ads that work. Every marketer wants to generate sales or leads via ads. As such, my job is to constantly test and try various types of digital marketing tactics.  I've run just about every different type of Facebook Ad that exists, five times over in the last three years. Well, just when I start believing that, Facebook adds something new. Here is how to create a Facebook Ad (or boosted post - it works for either) with a Facebook Messenger objective (an ad geared towards getting Facebook users to send messages to your business) but with a Chat Bot reply that you can customize. In other words, you can have an automated conversation with a lead from within your ad, then come back to check it later to see if it's something you should follow up on. Here's how.

Why do star reviews show up in Google Search Engine Rankings? Not the ones on the right hand side of the page for Google My Business Profiles, but rather the ones in the main results. You may have noticed more often than not, star reviews show for Facebook Business Pages or for Yelp Pages, but not as often for the actual web URL of the business (primary domain / website). Why is this? And how can you get your reviews to show in the Search Engine Results pages under your website's hyperlink. There are four main things to do according to hitsearchlimited.com and they all sound right to me. I know about them, and I break them down in this video. 1. Encourage your customers to submit Google reviews 2. Sign up for a review site and start encouraging your customers and clients to review your services 3. Add the relevant schema to your website 4. Get busy improving the authority of your site by creating great content, outreaching this content and making sure your site is SEO technically tip top

I get asked to look at a lot of different kinds of blogs, especially blogs that use WordPress. Having built and managed content on close to 500 WordPress sites over the last 12 years, I've seen close to "it all" when it comes to WordPress Content Management. But one thing I seem to keep seeing lately is a lack of professionally displaying the author's name on posts. Specifically, I tend to see the WordPress username displayed as the author name. There is an easy way to fix this / change it globally. Go to your WordPress Admin and click "Users" on the left hand side nav menu. Then select the Author's name from the user list. Add a First Name and Last Name. Then update the user, then go back in and select "First Name Last Name" from the drop down that says "Display User Publicly As" --- and BOOM, you've fixed the problem globally.

I never know what clients are going to ask me about Search Engine Optimization, but inevitably, a couple times a year, someone asks me “what are those nicely tabbed six links to subpages under the homepage on Google Search Results?” The answer “Organic Sitelinks.” The inevitable follow up question: “can we control them?” The answer “No, with one exception.” The video explains, but here’s more from Google on Sitelinks: Sitelinks The links shown below some of Google’s search results, called sitelinks, are meant to help users navigate your site. Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they’re looking for. 1: The main search result 2: Sitelinks We only show sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks, or we don’t think that the sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, we won’t show them. At the moment, sitelinks are automated. We’re always working to improve our sitelinks algorithms, and we may incorporate webmaster input in the future. There are best practices you can follow, however, to improve the quality of your sitelinks. For example, for your site’s internal links, make sure you use anchor text and alt text that’s informative, compact, and avoids repetition.

The forgotten social media business platform, far and away, is Pinterest.  We've seen some amazing data ourselves from clients' Google Analytics accounts showing that Pinterest is a solid web traffic generation source for many different kinds of companies.  But there is even more data out there that not only supports that, but leads us to believe that Pinterest should become a MAJOR part of businesses' social media and overall content marketing strategies now more than ever.  Pinterest certainly seems to be the forgotten social media marketing platform for businesses, here's why:  70% of all pins saved on Pinterest come from businesses.  200 million people are now on Pinterest, as of September 2017. That’s a 40% increase from the previous year.  2 billion searches are made every month on Pinterest.  87% of pinners bought something because of Pinterest.

I get it, it's an "extra thing to do," or it's "in the way" or you feel like you have to "look good on camera" or you don't know what to say or you feel silly or don't know how to hold the phone, or whatever, but the proof is in the data - your business needs to get over the fears, hurdles obstacles and excuses and GO LIVE ON FACEBOOK!.  I also blog and talk about posting on Facebook 3-5 times per day on your business page, and going live not only helps you accomplish that, but Facebook Live videos get 2-3 times the amount of Reach and Engagement as normal posts or video posts.  Don't know how to get started going live on Facebook?  Here are a few suggestions.  1. A weekly Q and A show where you read and answer frequently asked questions about your industry  2. A weekly behind the scenes "did you know" piece about how something is done or made at your company  3. A weekly feature on an employee, co-worker or client where you simply have them say hello and explain what they do at the company Content like this makes your business relatable and humanizes it. These factors make people want to do business with you.  The proof is in the data. Going live on Facebook works as part of your overall content strategy, and you can rip down the whole video and edit it into smaller pieces for future posts!  So it's always time well spent.

Hi WordPress Content Managers! If you're a small business owner or member of a small marketing team that manages content on a WordPress website, than you're who I'm referring to when I say "WordPress Content Managers." Do you know about permalink settings in WordPress? These are the settings that make your URL or "slug" on all of your Posts. These settings are crucial yet often overlooked By default, when setting up a new site, WordPress adds the date to them, and sometimes, depending on the theme or hosting, they can get all muddied up with canonical data. What you need to do is clean them up by removing the date and simply making the URL display the post name.

I've blogged so much about Alexa For Business, Alexa Skills and Alexa Flash Briefing Skills lately - including How to Build Your Own Alexa Flash Briefing, that I sometimes forget the simple, simple basics, like helping Small Business Owners and Small Marketing Teams actually set up their Alexa Enabled Amazon Devices in the first place. I want you to be able to use Alexa and the Echo Dot device in your office to make you a more productive worker, and the first step is setting up your device. This video helps show you how.