Social Media Plays an Increasingly Visible Role

Social media has been a major player in the digital marketing landscape for the last few years. First we saw the rise of mega platforms like Facebook and Twitter. In the last couple of years, visual content from networks like Pinterest, Instagram, and various micro-video services haa swept through.

• Are we taking our social media seriously? Are we employing the pillars of strong profiles, good content, reciprocity, and engagement?
• Is easy social sharing enabled for all of our content?
• Does our content strategy include a dissemination phase that includes maximizing its potential for distribution through social networks?
• Are we active on the social networks that matter in our industry?
• Are we active on the social networks that matter to our customers?
• Are we active on the social networks that matter to the search engines? (See below for more thoughts on making that strategic investment).
• Does our social media marketing strategy stimulate the level of social signals required to achieve our goals?

Google Update for SEO

Google makes more than 100 updates to their algorithm annually—most never noticed by marketers and webmasters. But with the recent Hummingbird algorithm update, the biggest in 12 years, around 90% of searches across the globe have been be affected.

SEO is not yet again dead. In fact, Google’s saying there’s nothing new or different SEOs or publishers need to worry about. Guidance remains the same. It says: have original, high-quality content. Signals that have been important in the past remain important; Hummingbird just allows Google to process them in new and hopefully better ways.”

So what are these “new and hopefully better ways” for Google Hummingbird to process our questions? And does it change the way we approach SEO? Let’s take a look.

Three Local SEO Tips that Traditional SEOs May Not Take Into Account

There are many things that must be taken into consideration when performing local search engine optimization. Google actually takes different factors into consideration with local SEL, than they do with traditional search engine optimization. A few of the things taken into account you would not usually have to worry about when attempting to rank for general keywords include:
• Whether the website has a number of local business listings that point to it as further proof that it is a local company.
• The address and phone number listed on the website.
• Whether it is close to the central location keywords that they are attempting to rank for.
• Whether or not the company has any reviews listed for it.