Everyone wishes there was a simple answer to this complicated question. Small business owners want to be able to buy SEO like they buy a POS system. At the end of the day, there is a cost, it is a known cost. You pay it and it is done. You’ve added the SEO module to you website and now you no longer have to thing about it. Sadly, that is not the case.
Read More »How Much Does SEO Cost for a Small Business?
The original intent of this blog post was to provide a One Stop Shop for all those digital marketing statistics you find in case studies… Read More »Can You Trust Those Digital Marketing Statistics?
Whether your website is new or been around for awhile, it needs SEO (search engine optimization). Looking for an SEO to work on your website can be a challenge, just wading through all the different types of SEO is a bit nightmarish.
Then you have to look at the service offerings and attempt to decipher if they are appropriate for your website and if they will give you the types of results you need for your business.
Before you hire someone, here are twelve actions you can take on your own to improve your site. These actions do not require a lot of technical knowledge. At the very least, you will need to be able to access the backend of you website to complete all of these tasks.
Read More »12 Ways You Can Improve Your Site Without Hiring an SEO Specialist
COVID-19, like any natural disaster, caused a major disruption to small businesses. These businesses forced them to close up shop and wait out the quarantine period. For some retailers, the spring of 2020 has been a time of dabbling with selling goods online. With reports of COVID-19 resurging in the fall, now is the time to prepare your small business to withstand more social distancing and quarantines orders.
Read More »Setting Up Your Store Online: Your First Steps in Ecommerce
This blog post was originally published in 2015 on my personal blog it has been updated slightly for relevance.
Each summer I go to the Renaissance Faire in Bristol, Wisconsin. Yes, I’m one of those people, luckily this particular tale does not end in a sword fight in defense of my honor. Instead it is a story about a subtle bit of marketing done by one of the entertainers at the fair that I’ve applied to some of my social media marketing efforts.
The entertainer, a very talented and nimble man who goes by the name Moonie the Magnificent, barely speaks during his show of tightrope walking, juggling, and antics. During his performance, he communicates mostly through whistles and pantomime. I’ve seen his show dozens of times and it barely changes. The predictability of it is part of what makes it so fun to watch and see how others who are seeing the performance for the first time react.
The subtle bit of marketing I want to discuss occurs at the end of the show. Moonie the Magnificent comes out into the audience with his hat so those who appreciated the show can show their appreciation by dropping a dollar or two into his hat.
As I’ve mentioned, I’ve seen Moonie the Magnificent perform dozens of times (okay probably a few dozen times, but who’s counting?) and each time I have a dollar or two ready to drop into his hat. Each time I walk up and give him the money, Moonie the Magnificent says in a very soft voice, “You were the best one.”
When you begin doing digital marketing and touch upon search engine optimization (SEO), you quickly come across mentions of doing SEO campaigns. If you work for an agency sometimes your SEO efforts are classified as a campaign. When you look at what is considered a campaign in other areas of marketing and compare it to the actions related to SEO, there seems to be a distinct difference.
Marketing campaigns usually are about targeting a specific market segment with messaging and visuals to either improve sales, improve brand recognition, or improve reputation. This is not a definitive guide on marketing campaigns but I wanted to provide a few examples that hopefully you will recognize.
Every year search engine optimization (SEO) faces unique challenges. Challenges in how the search engines crawl, parse, and index sites. Challenges in how competition engages in SEO. Challenges in the resources necessary to produce results in organic search. And the ultimate challenge in calculating whether the return on investment of those resources is worth it. SEO in 2020 will face its own set of unique challenges. We are looking into these challenges and determining the best ways to face them in 2020.
While every industry has some unique SEO challenges, they share many of the same challenge. Any business reliant on organic search to reach new customers faces these challenges.
The five challenges discussed in this blog post are:
Over the course of seven years I’ve worked on hundreds of projects that involved coordination of several hundred of separate tasks. During this time I’ve worked with pretty much every free project management software available. Podio, Wrike, Bitrix24, Toggl, and Trello to name a handful. I’ve even created and used systems built out of Google Forms and Google Sheets.
Every time I start a new project that requires some level of coordination of multiple tasks, I instinctively reach for Trello as my go to task management app.
Read More »Trello Remains the Best Free Project Management App for Me No Fields Found.
