online-marketing Archives

KonMari Your Digital Presence

Friday March 29, 2019

Reading Time: 10 minutes

It’s nearly April, which can mean only one thing: spring cleaning is on the horizon. In today’s world of KonMari madness (thanks, Netflix), it’s never been more en vogue to tidy up. Once your house is spic and span, be sure to turn your attention to old social accounts that are gathering dust – they can have serious impact on your digital marketing.

Why Digital Matters

It goes without saying that digital presence is everything in 2019. 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine, and 81% of people perform some sort of online research before making a large purchase. We’ve covered everything from the importance of mobile first website crawling to the weight of compelling blog content on the blog before, if you’d like a refresher.

These days, a Google search could be the difference between new clientele and fading business. Great companies suffer each year because of poor rankings, and even more receive customer complaints about barren social profiles. For example, 93% of people view menus online prior to dining out. When polled, many said they wouldn’t go to a restaurant that didn’t list their menu online. The same applies to people shopping for goods and services – just about everyone wants to see ratings and descriptions online. That’s digital in a nutshell.

In the spirit of tidying up, here are our top tips for cleaning your digital presence this spring.

Inventory

First, make sure you’re addressing all your accounts. In the KonMari method, you pile all similar items (clothes, books, you name it) together to go through them. The same principle applies here. Make a list of every Facebook, Twitter, or Xanga account you can remember, then delete unused or unnecessary social media profiles. (If you read our recent post on Google+, you know that it’s probably best to go ahead and delete that one before Google does.) This keeps potential customers from stumbling across information you no longer curate or endorse.

Privacy and Security

Now’s a great time to get into the nitty-gritty of your socials. Yes, we’re talking about security… cybersecurity. While often overlooked, weak passwords and vulnerable accounts can snowball into something much more serious than off-brand Facebook statuses. If your password is the same across different platforms, including your online banking system or business email, you’re making the company’s assets vulnerable to multiple account breaches. This information may be scraped by someone online, but it’s also possible that former employees may retain access to your social media.

To combat any rogue login attempts, get into the habit of regularly creating strong passwords. Avoid using any personal information relevant to you, such as birthdays, names, or addresses. As a best practice, you should change out passwords on a regular basis.

Updating Information

One of the most common issues customers complain about is conflicting information online. Is your old office still listed as your primary location on Google My Business? Ancient phone numbers still in your website’s footer? It’s more important than ever to make sure your data is up to date; no one’s checking the Yellow Pages these days. NAP Consistency – short for Name, Address, Phone – has become a key factor in local search. Google has outlined that if those items aren’t identical internet-wide, you could become invisible to the search engine and its users.

Be sure to go through your contact and location information with a fine-toothed comb to avoid customer headaches. Many companies forget to update their About section with current news; as a result, outdated promises of new locations and product releases can detract from your social media presence.

This is also a great time to keep your socials active by updating your profile pictures and cover photos. Have you had any company photoshoots recently? Gotten new branding and logos done? Are you sick of the winter-themed posts cluttering your profile? Even something as simple as refreshing your imagery can create a little buzz around your business and keep you relevant.

Digital Networking and Groups

Whether you’re looking at your company’s LinkedIn or Facebook account, your feed is probably full of old connections and personal friends. While it’s important to network, everyone could benefit from intentionality in their online presence. Remove yourself from groups that don’t relate to your business connections, and seek out new ones you’re more interested in.

Consider pruning your “following” list in pursuit of the ideal ratio – avoid following more people than follow you. Make sure to remove spam accounts, those who never post, and those who post content that doesn’t align with your philosophy. Once you’ve freed up that space, update your profile with any conferences or industry events you’ve attended, any honors or awards received, or any indicators of growth from the past year. Your social accounts should be as good at networking as you are.

Go Google Yourself

Or Bing it. Run your company’s name through every search engine in the book: Google, Bing, YouTube (did you know YouTube is one of the top-ranked search engines? Fun facts). If you’re not ranking where you’d like to, we recommend troubleshooting with our checklist of 2019’s top SEO strategies. Better yet, give us a call at 949.701.4714.

Need Help Scrubbing Those Accounts? Let’s Talk.

You only get one chance at a (digital) first impression, so let’s get it right. Our team of experts will run through your social media profiles and website content to craft your cohesive, refreshed brand presence. You can reach one of our managing partners by calling 949.701.4714 or filling out this form. We look forward to chatting with you.

Reading Time: 8 minutes

So here we are with another one of those 40th anniversary Saturdays. Were you at Woodstock 1969? I am going to save you a lot of reading time. I was not at Woodstock 1969, but you all know I am old enough to have been there. It so happens that Woodstock took place in Bethel, New York, and at that time I lived in San Diego, California. I couldn’t travel to New York; I had to go to work every day for Wells Fargo Bank. But all this aside I would like to take just a few minutes today to honor the memory of Woodstock and, yes, I do have a friend who was at Woodstock and indeed performed at Woodstock!

We all either knew about the music festival or soon learned about it when 500,000 people showed up and the media decided to pay attention, most of us could not really appreciate the magnitude of this festival until the Academy Award Winning documentary “Woodstock”* was released March 26, 1970 (this film has been remastered and re-released in June 2009 to celebrate the 40th anniversary). Keep in mind the average 20 year old could not easily travel to New York State for a three day festival. There was no way to purchase tickets on-line or even by phone, in fact according to Wikipedia, the “ticket sales were limited to record stores in the greater New York City area, or by mail via a Post Office Box at the Radio City Station Post Office located in Midtown Manhattan.”

Over the years I have often thought back to that weekend. I remember sitting in the clubhouse of my apartment complex in the Hollywood Hills. It was then 1977 and in walked Richie Havens and he sat down next to me and introduced himself. Wow! Who will forget Richie Havens singing “Freedom”? But much later, actually around 2002, I had the pleasure of meeting Dallas Taylor. You might remember Dallas. He was the drummer for Crosby, Stills and Nash (CSN) and yes, he played at Woodstock. Dallas authored a book Prisoner of Woodstock. As mentioned on Amazon, Taylor provided the backbeat for some of the brightest stars of the Sixties and Seventies, most notably Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, with whom he performed at Woodstock. For more than 25 years Dallas has spent his time helping others find recovery. Last summer, Dennis and I enjoyed seeing Crosby, Stills and Nash on their Summer 2008 tour. It was quite the evening sitting in an open air arena with our oldest son, Aaron, enjoying great music and memories.

Prisoner tells two tales: one of Taylor’s successes and failures in the rock music business, and the other of his struggle with drug addiction.” Dallas has been our friend and client for many years and now with almost 25 years of sobriety Dallas continues to work with the music industry with Music Cares.

I have one more anecdote about Woodstock. I opened this blog by telling you I was not there, but I actually knew someone who was there; however, I also know someone who lived in New York City at the time, was 20 years old, had tickets to Woodstock, started the drive to Bethel and when he got stuck in traffic he decided to turn around and go home! (Of course, this may be an urban legend, but this person is Dennis’ first cousin.)

Sit back, take a break, rent the movie or in the meantime I invite you to watch a YouTube video of CSN Woodstock 1969

If you are having trouble viewing the video, you can see it here.

*Roger Ebert once said: “Woodstock is a beautiful, moving, ultimately great film. It seemed to signal the beginning of something. Maybe it signaled the end. Somebody told me the other day that the 1960s has “failed.” Failed at what? They certainly didn’t fail at being the 1960s. Now that the period is described as a far-ago time like “the 1920s” or “the 1930s,” how touching it is in this film to see the full flower of its moment, of its youth and hope. The decade began with the election of John F. Kennedy and ended as the last bedraggled citizens of Woodstock Nation slogged off the muddy field and thumbed a ride into a future that would seem, to many of them, mostly downhill.”

Any thoughts?

Reading Time: 3 minutes

I have recently come into contact with a Phishing scheme where an owner of a Yahoo Search Marketing sponsored search account was emailed falsely as Yahoo. The account owner then logged into this fake page giving the phishing thieves access to that account. The thief then hijacks the account using someone else’s money to pay for advertising until the fraud is captured and stopped by Yahoo themselves. Whats more is that the thieves even leave the previous advertising campaign active and running so that the owner will not notice any difference until logging in to the account itself.

Similar fraudulent tactics have been widely publicized with eBay. Again, this is not Yahoo or eBay’s doing and that parent company does give all stolen funds back to the rightful owner. But the best case scenario is a major headache and time wasted researching the issue and dollars lost/refunded.

In conclusion, do not ever log-in to any account of any type using a hyper-link from an email. Always go to your normal log in page to enter in private information. I promise you will not notice a difference in the fake and real log in pages- these guys are pro’s. Save the irritation and time. It can happen to anyone not paying attention.

Here is Yahoo’s company line on the matter- http://www.ysmblog.com/blog/2008/12/12/no-phishing-here/

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Google AdWords does provide a way internally to get suggestions for keywords in your marketplace, its called the Keyword Tool. This tool is found when drilling into the account at the ‘keyword’ level. This means you have clicked past both the Campaign and Ad Group levels to display your keywords and ads.

This tool is free to AdWords users, so great right. Well in the past not as much because depending on what you gave the tool as a starting term for more suggestions, the tool spit out those suggestions from most general (least useful) to specific. Furthermore, the only information associated with these suggestions was 2 simple horizontal bar graphs detailing, ‘advertiser competition’ and ‘search volume’. So hopefully your are following me in that no numeric data was given whatsoever.

Now Google has expanded the tool to return suggestions with ‘approximate search volume’ for the last month and ‘approximate average search volume’ with an actual value. Practically speaking, your campaign has only to spend a predetermined amount any way, so its not as if one regularly finds him or herself adding up search volumes, but it is nice to quantify what Google used to shove into a half inch blue bar.

When it comes down to it, we need to have all the necessary keywords in the PPC account regardless of search volume because we need to target what it is we have deemed necessary in achieving our projected goals. That is, we do the best we can with what we can in the given market with a given budget for a certain business model. But I can say it is significant that Google’s Keyword tool is a bit more useful, and frankly it is nice to see Google sharing any real data with us at all. I’m sure tired of getting email replies that might as well have been some fraction of a bar graph. But Google must be listening to the people to some extent in changes as little as this one.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Microsoft and Yahoo have yet to work out a deal for Microsoft to takeover Yahoo via a stock bid in the $30 range. We at Webconsuls are not noting this in the slight chance that you hold Yahoo stock or in my case stock options. It is significant to note the impact of re-merger of the 2 giants in the search results category.

That is, Yahoo and MSN used to have a search marketing partnership which ended about 2 years ago. With Google the clear market share majority player, it would be nice to see Yahoo beef up its partners, especially for MSN who since the split from Yahoo has yet to be a formidable opponent.

In a perfect world, Yahoo Sponsored Search would give us the option of eliminating the partner network with the exception of MSN, should a merger ever be completed.

We’ll keep you updated.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

What is Pay Per Click ‘Quality Score’ and how is it calculated?
Quality Score is a dynamic variable assigned to each of your keywords. It’s calculated using a variety of factors and measures how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user’s search query, according to Google.

About Quality Score

Quality Score influences your ads’ position on Google. It also partly determines your keywords’ minimum bids. In general, the higher your Quality Score, the better your ad position and the lower your minimum bids.

Quality Score helps ensure that only the most relevant ads appear to users on Google and the Google Network. The AdWords system works best for everybody—advertisers, users, publishers, and Google too—when the ads we display match our users’ needs as closely as possible. Relevant ads tend to earn more clicks, appear in a higher position, and bring you the most success.
For calculating a keyword’s minimum bid (PPC only, not content network or content targeted ads):

The keyword’s historical click-through rate on Google
The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
The quality of your landing page
Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
Other relevance factors***

Unfortunately, that is all Google will tell us, partly to avoid people gaming the system and partly to be less accountable. The ability to control earnings this way (in my estimation) will keep Google (and Yahoo in their shadow) from ever completely erasing the veil.

All we can do is play by the rules and put ourselves in the best position to pay the least for the desired position. This includes rotating ads, writing the most direct ad, and having the site back both of those points us with our “call to action”, or what we are looking to have the user/searcher do. This must be done clearly, easily and within the top fold of the landing page.

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Why downloading Firefox is like getting into college, (From Seth’s Blog)

A quick glimpse at just about any profession shows you that the vast majority of people who succeed professionally also went to college.

This could be because college teaches you a lot.

Or it could be because the kind of person that puts the effort into getting into and completing college is also the kind of person who succeeds at other things.

Firefox is similar.

Example: 25% of the visitors we track at Squidoo use Firefox, which is not surprising. But 50% of the people who actually build pages on the site are Firefox users. Twice as many.

This is true of bloggers, of Twitter users, of Flickr users… everywhere you look, if someone is using Firefox, they’re way more likely to be using other power tools online. The reasoning: In order to use Firefox, you need to be confident enough to download and use a browser that wasn’t the default when you first turned on your computer.

That’s an empowering thing to do. It isolates you as a different kind of web user.

If I ran Firefox, I’d be hard at work promoting extensions and power tools (I love the search add-ons) and all manner of online interactions. Think of all the things colleges do to amplify the original choice of their students and to increase their impact as alumni.

And if I ran your site, I’d treat Firefox visitors as a totally different group of people than everyone else. They’re a self-selected group of clickers and sneezers and power users.

In the lingo of Nancy Reagan, Firefox is a gateway drug. -Seth Godin

Reading Time: < 1 minute

This is a fine example of what is going on in the marketplace.

Are you having a conversation with your customers?

Reading Time: 2 minutes

The following linked article from The Register accuses Google’s AdWords, namely the ‘automatic matching’ feature to be untargeted and an outright waste of funds in most instances.

In short, automatic matching weakens the parameters and rules of defining ‘targeted’ in PPC terms. If I sell Adidas shoes, the articles explains, I don’t want to come up for a search on slippers. That would simply be a waste of money. I would go as far to add that in today’s world of short attention spans, anything not directly or literally an Adidas shoe is not targeted enough- let alone slippers.

Pay per click is too reliant on the ‘conversions to dollars spent’ ratio to allow for any more leniency than exactly what I typed in. Again, attentions spans generally don’t allow for it. Additionally, if the search term in question is on the general side where this rule may not directly apply, then the traffic itself will be of the browsing type not the converting (purchasing, buying, targeted lead) type. So in this case my clients probably aren’t interested in the 1st place.

But that is a whole different argument in itself.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/18/when_google_does_evil/page2.html

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