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Data Driven Daily Tip 249. Small Business Owners are some of the hardest working people I've ever met. Which is why it confuses me why some get so mad when I tell them the best way to get to the top of Google is to blog every day. Nobody knows their business like a Small Business Owner, right? They eat, sleep and drink their business. Their business is their child, beyond a shadow of a doubt. A Small Business Owner's blog should be their place to brag about their child, and document their child's challenges, growth, struggles and victories. The second thing that makes Small Business Owners eyes roll is when I tell them that after blogging, repurposing their blog posts into 3-5 social media posts per day is the next best thing for their digital presence, SEO and net new customer acquisition. Up first, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn and Medium. And in the next wave, YouTube, Podcasting and Google My Business. If you're writing a blog for SEO purposes, you might as well go straight to the number one search engine in the world (where websites still get more than 95% of their organic traffic), and use it's social media platform (Google My Business) to post about your business. Your posts get a ton of visibility when people search for your business name, and posting daily increases your business' chances of showing on Google Maps search results for non-branded phrases related to your products and services. This video shows you how to make posts on Google My Business, from simply telling people what's new, to posting events, offers, and promoting products. The data shows that when you do this, you generate a ton of SEO value for your company. So come on Small Business Owners, start (or keep) putting the same effort into your digital strategy that you do into your daily grind.

WordPress Has Great Plug-ins To Add Schema.org Structured Data to your website. Our favorite, for many reasons, is WP SEO Structured Data Schema Pro. The main reason we like it is because it adds Schema options to each page at the bottom, similar to Yoast SEO.  It also adds it to each post. Adding Schema is important for your website's search engine optimization (SEO), because it tells Google and other search engines what each page/post is about.  For example, this allows you to optimize your website by simply selecting any of the following tabs, and filling out the accompanying fields - Blog Posting, Aggregate Ratings, Article, Book, Course, Event, Job Posting, Local Business, Movie, Music, News Article, Product, Recipe, Restaurant, Review, Service, TVEpisode, Video, QAPage.  The fields that can be filled out are customized to each category and the WP SEO Structured Data Schema plug-in acts as a guide to implement the proper Schema for each page and post to enhance your SEO.  However, we noticed recently that Schema was missing on some of our websites' custom post types, things like Events pages (location was missing) for example. So, this audio covers how to add Schema to custom post types via upgrading to the Pro version of the WP SEO Structured Data Schema Plug-in, configuring it, and submitting it to Google Search Console.

Data Driven Daily Tip 247 - How To Tell If A Location Has A Google My Business Listing and How To Link To It. Remember Google Places? Remember Google Local? Google Plus? Google Maps? They're now all the same thing, thank God. If you've heard the term "Google My Business," it's actually a really good thing for your business. Your Business' Google My Business listing gets a ton of SEO real estate on Google's search engine results page when users are searching for your business name, address, phone number or even keywords related to your business that do not include your business name. For example, "coffee shops in rochester hills, mi" triggers maps results first. These Maps results are triggered by and tied to optimized Google My Business listings. I've blogged at length about Google My Business, but also have created this video for those of you small business owners or marketers of emerging brands who may not have any idea the status of your business listings as it relates to Google My Business. If you have one location or 500+ or anywhere in between, here's how to find out the status of each of your locations' Google My Business Listing.

WordPress and Search Engine Optimization Help Is your WordPress Website getting totally spammed with comments? Are your blog posts seeing any kind of legit comments from real readers? If your answer to the first question is yes, and your answer to the second question is no, then you can and should definitely turn off comments in WordPress. Here's how. 1. Go to your WP Admin 2. Go to Settings > Discussion in the left hand menu 3. Uncheck - "Allow people to post comments on new articles" 4. Save Changes

Top Forms WordPress Plug-Ins One of our favorite WordPress Plug-ins is Gravity Forms. It not only allows simple form building, but it has great styling capabilities, and the ability to extend into many integrations with CRMs and Email Marketing Platforms. It is great for not only lead generation, but also submission routing based on conditional logic, and allows for multiple if / than scenarios. It also extends into WooCommerce and other plug-ins. One of the most simple things you can do in Gravity Forms that provides the most value is downloading form submissions into a CSV file for safe keeping and tracking. This video shows you how. Or read here: 1. Log into your WordPress Admin 2. Go to "Forms" on the left hand side of the page - hover 3. Select "Import/Export" 4. Select your form from the dropdown 5. Check the "Select All" checkbox 6. Click the blue "Export" button 7. BOOM! You're all set.

Have you ever searched for a website, hopefully not your website, and seen a "THIS SITE MAY BE HACKED" message on the Google Search Results page? If it's your site, it can be devastating, but it's actually pretty easy to fix. This podcast tells you how. Here's what you'll need: 1. FTP Access to your website. 2. A Google Search Console Account. 3. A web developer that can clean up malicious files and scripts. Here's what to do to Fix the SITE MAY BE HACKED message on Google Search Engine Results: 1. Register and verify your site in Google’s Search Console 2. Sign in to Search Console and check the "Security Issues" section to see details of sample URLs that might be hacked. Fix the security issue that allowed your website to be infected. Otherwise, your site is likely to be reinfected. 3. Read our resources for hacked sites for detailed information on how to fix your website. 4. Request a review in the Security Issues section in Search Console when your entire website is clean and secure. After we check that your site is fixed, we'll remove the "This site may be hacked" message. 5. For a comprehensive list of what you can do if your site was compromised, please refer to the Google Hacked! guide. 6. Use Fetch as Google after fixing your site, and verify that the page appears the same to Google as it does to a user. If it doesn't, that is considered cloaking, which is a violation of our guidelines. 7. When you're sure that your site is no longer compromised, select Request Review on the Manual Actions report. 8. After you’ve submitted a reconsideration request, be patient and watch for review status messages in your Search Console account — we’ll let you know when we’ve reviewed your site. If we determine your site no longer contains problematic content, Google will remove the compromised warning from our search results.

ECommerce Marketers and Small Business Owners, this one is for you.  Facebook Ads is a super-robust platform with the ability to do a lot of custom audience targeting to people who fit the exact audience profile likely to be interested in your product, as well as buy your product. And if you have a product or a suite of products that lends itself to repeat purchases, the Facebook Purchase Objective Ad is perfect for you.  This video teaches you how to run a Facebook Ad to the most likely people to buy from you - those who have already bought from you in the past. Here's how to follow along if you'd rather read instructions: Step 1: Log into business.facebook.com Step 2: Select your Ad Account Step 3: Click the green button with the plus mark that says "CREATE." Step 4: Select "Conversions" from the ad objective column. Step 5: Select "Purchase" from the Objective at the top of the ad. This will run your Facebook Ad to people that have already purchased items from you. Keep in mind you can also customize your Facebook Tracking Pixel to run ads to people who have purchased a specific product. Like socks that go with shoes, or jeans that go with a t-shirt, or a skin care product that goes with a supplement. Or, a refill of a supplement that you know they'll need more of after a certain time period. :)

One of the many things we love about WordPress is the extension of free functionality via useful plug-ins, for example, the Smart App Banner. Oh you! I said Smart App, not Smart Ass. :) What is a smart app banner? You know those things you see at the top of some website when you're "surfing the web" on your mobile phone? Come on! Yes do you! These things... It's a website's way of saying, "look dude, you're on your mobile device, so we want to let you know you can have a WAY BETTER EXPERIENCE on your phone if you download our mobile app instead of using the browser version of our website. Of course, you'll only see these Smart App Banners in the Safari (Apple-owned) Browser on iOS (Apple-owned) devices, because you know, Apple. So, while we don't really have much data on how Smart App Banners do, we can only assume that they really help increase app downloads. And there is a super easy way for Wordpress Designers and Wordpress Developers to implement a smart app banner to try and see how well it works. The Smart App Banner Plug-In is one we've used for a client recently that has a mobile app and their main business goal is to generate downloads. If you're NOT using a WordPress Website to promote your mobile application, Branch.io has a great article here about how to implement a Smart App Banner.

Hola mis amigos de negocios! Translation: Hello, my business friends. It's true I've talked and written a lot about the data showing that Facebook Ads have a better CPM and Cost Per Click than LinkedIn for B2B Advertising. However, it's important for your business to have a consistent LinkedIn presence, and even to take a look at advertising on LinkedIn, especially since the B2B targeting is so strong. So with LinkedIn having changed their Campaign Manager recently, now is as good a time as any to dive in and show you some of the basics. Let's get started. 1. How to find LinkedIn Campaign Manager. Open LinkedIn.com and log in. In a separate browser tab, open https://www.linkedin.com/ad-beta/account. This will take you to LinkedIn Campaign Manager. The first screen you see will generally look something like this... 2. Link Your Campaign Manager Account To Your LinkedIn Company Page This is not something that LinkedIn does automatically for you. Here's how to do it: Go to the top right hand corner of your campaign manager and click the gear icon, then "Edit Account Details." Click, Associate Company Page with your Account, then type in the company page's LinkedIn URL. 3. Can you Manage Multiple LinkedIn Company Page Ad Accounts? Absolutely. Here's what that looks like: 4. Here's how to add admin privileges to other users to your LinkedIn Ads Account. First, add them as an admin to your LinkedIn Page Do this by going to your LinkedIn Page, in my case - https://www.linkedin.com/company/data-driven-design-llc/, and clicking the white button with blue font that says "Manage Page" Then, go up to the top right of the next page, click "Admin Tools," then "Page Admins" from the dropdown. Then, type in the new admin's name in the box, click them, and click "Save Changes." 5. Now, you can finally add these admins to your Campaign Manager / Ad Account. Go back to your ad account - https://www.linkedin.com/ad-beta/accounts, and click the gear icon again, then "Manage Access," then, "Edit," then "+ User Permissions," then type in or PASTE in the URL of the person you want to add as an admin. Whew. 6. Now You Can Begin To Run A Campaign by clicking "Create Campaign," "Create Campaign Group," filling out your timeline and budget, then clicking on the "Ads" Tab, and assigning an Ad to a Campaign Group and running either a Text Ad (which is like the equivalent of a Google Adwords Ad except on LinkedIn), Sponsored Content (which is like the equivalent of a boosted Facebook Post / Ad), or Sponsored InMail (which we don't recommend). After following all of these steps, you and your entire team will be able to have the proper visibility into the performance of the ads, the ability to review the data, see what's working and make adjustments.

Smart businesspeople will use their WordPress website as a true sales tool, NOT JUST a lead generation tool. When most people think of "Return On Investment" related to their new website redesign project, they think of "how much net new web traffic is this site going to give me." That's fine, but the reality is that's probably only 10% of the value you could actually be getting out of your website redesign project if you're thinking of it in the right way. Case in point, advanced functionality in terms of a sales tool exists. And not the kind of sales tool that brings in new customers, but the kind that actually helps you close the deals with your current prospective customers - perhaps far more important than the former. :) I'd like to introduce you to two WordPress plug-ins that are essentially extensions to the Form plug-in that we use on all of our website projects, Gravity Forms. Recently a client asked if we could help them create "fillable PDFs" on their website that could be submitted via their website from the user. Enter Gravity PDF.