78 Marketing Tasks You Should Outsource Immediately

If you’re like me, you stay busy.

Running a business is a tall order in and of itself. When you throw marketing into the mix, things can quickly become overwhelming.

If you haven’t felt this way yet, you’re going to feel it soon: There just aren’t enough hours in the day!

Here is one thing I learned early on in my business: outsourcing will save your life.

I speak from personal experience. There’s no way I could have done what I’ve done without strategically and carefully outsourcing a lot of the day-to-day marketing tasks that took up my time and kept me from focusing on other goals. 

Why I’m a fan of outsourcing

Outsourcing has tons of benefits.

Most businesses rely on outsourcing because they want to “focus on the core.” That’s another way of saying “we want to do what we do best.”

For you, the reasons may be different. You might have 29 things you have to do for a client, but you only have time to do 18 of them. You can outsource the rest.

I’m a major proponent of outsourcing a lot of the day-to-day tasks that are laborious and only hold me back from focusing on more pressing matters.

I’m probably different from other business owners, though. While some people have a top-down or hands-off approach to running their companies, I prefer to be in the thick of it.

You’ll see me personally interacting on Facebook, jumping into blog comments, and working on blog articles.

I like to be involved in these aspects of my business because I feel like they are one of my important business tasks—connecting with and learning from other marketers.

That’s one of the great things about outsourcing. You can be as involved as you want or as hands-off as you want. It’s up to you.

A lot of people I talk with are concerned about the cost of outsourcing. “But doesn’t it cost a lot to outsource these tasks?” they ask.

The answer is yes and no.

Yes, you have to pay for quality work.

But no, it doesn’t cost a lot because of the time you’re saving. If your time is worth, say, $50/hr, doesn’t it make sense to pay someone $35/hr to post to Facebook, create a video, proofread an article, or respond to blog comments?

If you can be doing your $50/hr work while your outsourcer is doing their $35/hr work, it’s a win-win-win. You win. They win. Your client wins.

And it’s not just time you’re saving. You’re also creating efficiency and increasing your quality. So maybe it’s a win-win-win-win-win.

Are there risks to outsourcing?

Sure, there are risks to anything.

I’ll admit that outsourcing has its fair share of risks. You can risk hiring the wrong person. You risk an outsourcer going AWOL. You run the risk of poor work standards. You even risk your brand being tarnished when an outsourced worker gets shoddy with their work.

There’s a flip side to this.

Most entrepreneurs and marketers are concerned they’ll get low quality work if they outsource.

What I’ve discovered is that you can actually improve the quality of work if you outsource.

Let’s say you need to create an explainer video for a new product. You can do it yourself with your iPhone and feeble editing skills.

Or you can outsource it to an explainer video professional.

If you outsource it, the quality will be a million times better than the quality you’d get if you’d tried to do it yourself.

See what I mean?

Besides, you don’t always need perfection when it comes to marketing. Although I tend to be a perfectionist, I’ve realized that done is better than perfect.

But I believe the rewards are greater than the risks. Besides, part of being a good marketer is being a good manager to other marketers.

The great thing is that there is a wide array of virtual assistants and marketing professionals available who will ensure that your campaign runs like a well-oiled machine without you having to hold their hand every step of the way.

Here are some specific tasks you should outsource right away.

Blogging

I always strive to maintain high quality standards on both NeilPatel.com and Quick Sprout. I’ve found I’m consistently able to do so without it devouring my time by outsourcing.

And I’m not alone. In fact, 64% of B2B marketers outsource their writing in some capacity.

Here are some of the ways you can improve your blog quality through outsourcing:

1. Moderating blog comments and filtering spam
2. Responding to the comments your readers leave
3. Performing research for upcoming blog posts
4. Generating new ideas and pitches for blog posts
5. Scheduling blog posts
6. Finding images and videos for blog posts
7. Adding meta descriptions, tags, and images to blog posts
8. Finding statistics to incorporate into posts
9. Proofreading for spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and awkward phrasing
10. Making adjustments to older blog posts as new data is unveiled
11. Creating internal links to existing posts
12. Keeping an inventory of posts and the keywords used
13. Corresponding with your team of freelance writers
14. Hunting down guest blog opportunities
15. Coming up with pitches for guest posts
16. Reaching out to influencers in your industry

Social Media

In my opinion, social media may be pound-for-pound the easiest area of marketing to outsource.

One of the biggest challenges of social media is curating the content you plan to share. It can take an enormous amount of time simply to find good, relevant articles that your audience will benefit from. Outsourcing this task is an instant way to free up several hours a week!

Think about the importance of visuals in your social media content too. Adding images to individual posts is a massive time drain…unless you outsource it!

A lot of tasks don’t require an immense amount of experience. Most virtual assistants are fully capable of handling them with minimal supervision:

17. Managing and approving friend or follow requests
18. Inviting followers to attend events
19. Sending out personalized birthday greetings to key contacts
20. Sharing your blog content across social networks
21. Finding and editing images to use in posts
22. Curating quality content from relevant sources
23. Scheduling posts across all social platforms
24. Keeping track of brand mentions
25. Uploading new videos to YouTube
26. Creating questionnaires and surveys
27. Engaging with friends and followers
28. Ensuring all profiles are updated on a consistent basis
29. Sending out thank-yous to new followers
30. Commenting, retweeting, and interacting with interesting content
31. Designing and occasionally redesigning profiles

SEO

While you don’t want just anyone handling the more complex aspects of SEO, there are several elements of SEO that virtual assistants are fully capable of looking after. Many freelancers have the skill to perform keyword research, create a 301 map, or generate a thorough sitemap.

If you’re looking for someone to deal with the nuts and bolts of SEO, you’ll want to go with a highly qualified SEO firm who has a track record of success.

This post from Kissmetrics discusses what to look for in an SEO firm and how to tell if they’re helping or hurting you.

These are some of the SEO tasks that can be outsourced:

33. Performing keyword research
34. Creating catchy headlines
35. Setting up a sitemap
36. Building and editing landing pages
37. Performing off-site optimization such as commenting on other blogs
38. Analyzing the SEO campaigns of competitors
39. Tracking the position of your content in search engines
40. Researching cutting edge SEO trends
41. Submitting content to directories
42. Handling social bookmarking
43. Monitoring site speed
44. Performing an occasional SEO audit
45. Keeping up with Google algorithm updates

Content marketing

Did you know that 72% of large organizations and 33% of small companies outsource their content creation?

Content marketing is my jam. I love it. I do it. And I’ve experienced incredible success with it.

As experienced as I am, I feel completely comfortable outsourcing numerous aspects of content marketing.

Let’s face it: content marketing takes serious time. As content marketing grows, you’ll discover there are more and more tasks you need to—but don’t have time to—do.

You’re left with a single choice: outsource or drown.

Here is what you can outsource:

46. Creating offsite content that links back to your website and blog
47. Interviewing sources
48. Finding statistics to add
49. Repurposing content, using a variety of mediums such as infographics, videos, slideshows and webinars
50. Creating and managing your editorial calendar
51. Establishing deadlines for content
52. Building spreadsheets for your editorial calendar
53. Backing up content in the Cloud
54. Finding and editing photos
55. Converting files
56. Working on increasing post engagement
57. Keeping track of your content marketing budget
58. Ensuring all content is mobile-friendly

You can learn more about the process of outsourcing content marketing on one of my previous posts. In it, I discuss some important questions to ask to ensure you get the most bang for your buck.

Analytics

Every good marketer makes decisions based on analytics.

But analytics can be tricky. You have to set up your analytics, configure the analytics, generate reports from your analytics, monitor these analytics, analyze the analytics, determine takeaways from the analytics, and then make strategic marketing decisions in light of these analytics.

Thankfully, there are parts of the analytics maze you can outsource:

59. Monitoring trends with traffic, acquisition, conversions, etc.
60. Spotting long-term patterns
61. Generating daily, weekly, and monthly reports
62. Analyzing engagement
63. Determining how cost-effective your marketing techniques are

Reputation Management

Knowing what the public perception of your business is at all times has never been more important than it is today. In fact, 97% of consumers say they read reviews about local businesses.

Due to the fact that reputation management can be inherently time-consuming, I’ve found outsourcing it to be a smart move:

64. Handling social listening across the web
65. Monitoring reviews on sites such as Yelp and Angie’s List
66. Getting consumer feedback
67. Paying attention to negative press
68. Responding to negative comments
69. Managing trolls

Email marketing

Email marketing matters more today than ever before.

As old-school as it sounds, email marketing is one of the best methods of attracting and retaining high-value leads for your B2B or B2C.

But, as with any area of marketing, things can get tricky here too. Why? Because it takes a lot of time to set up email, integrate it, create updates, format newsletters, and take care of the nitty-gritty of mailing lists and scheduling.

It’s one of the first things you should consider outsourcing:

70. Creating newsletters
71. Proofreading and editing emails
72. Sending out bulk emails
73. Responding to questions

WordPress

WordPress could be considered the universal blogging and publishing platform.

In fact, 26% of all websites on the planet use WordPress. If you run your site on it, you can make your life a lot simpler by outsourcing a few key tasks:

74. Monitoring and managing plugins
75. Installing new plugins
76. Providing WP support
77. Tweaking templates
78. Handling coding

Conclusion

We’re living in a globalized, digitized world with a surplus of professionals who can handle nearly every aspect of your marketing campaigns.

As a result, outsourcing many marketing tasks makes complete sense and has never been easier to do.

I’ve had a lot of success with outsourcing, and I know I’m not alone. Many of my industry colleagues and clients have told me the same thing. If it weren’t for outsourcing, they wouldn’t be in business!

Once you start outsourcing, amazing things will happen to your business.

You suddenly find yourself with more time to focus on high-level strategy. Instantly, you encounter new opportunities for growth and expansion. Your vision becomes clearer. You open up new channels of engagement. Things simply improve.

Outsourcing is a small move that starts the cascade of great benefits.

If you haven’t been taking advantage of outsourcing, I would recommend first identifying which tasks are hurting your efficiency and then hiring others to handle them.

Here’s my challenge: This week, outsource just one marketing task. That’s it!

Use Fiverr, Upwork, or Craigslist. Find someone who’s skilled. Give them a task. See what happens.

Have you outsourced any other areas of your marketing efforts that I didn’t cover?

from http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Quicksprout/~3/1UMFgICVxUs/

source http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/148195548669

How to optimise your videos for better ranking on YouTube

With more than a billion users, and billions of daily video views, gaining user attention on YouTube may seem a daunting prospect. 

However, the sheer size of the audience (a third of all web users) means that the rewards are there if you get it right.

In this post, I’ll look at some of the factors which determine YouTube video rankings, some tips to help improve visibility, and some of the factors behind how Google chooses to show videos in its search results pages.

On-site YouTube ranking factors

I’ve split this into visible and invisible factors, i.e. those that can be seen by general users and those used for internal purposes.

Thanks to PI Datametrics for their help in compiling these ranking factors.

Invisible ranking signals

• Video file name. This is used when attempting to categorise the content, so be sure to label it using target keywords.
• View density. We can all see how many views videos attract over time but view density matters to YouTube. If your video receives a lot of views in a short space of time, it’s more likely to be pushed up the rankings. This can be visible, but most brands don’t show this. John Lewis does, and here are the stats for the last Christmas ad.
• Meta tags. YouTube’s spiders rely on tags to interpret a video’s content. This is thought to be a big factor in determining the positions a video is able to achieve in YouTube. When you upload a video to YouTube you can tag it with your keywords. 6-8 tags are thought to be the ideal amount. Look at the most popular/top tags on YouTube for your topics, and learn from them.

• Watch time. YouTube used to use view counts and comment volumes as factors, but changed this to watch time in 2012 as the previous factors could be gamed relatively easily.
• Flags / reports. These are negative factors which could harm your video’s visibility.

Visible ranking signals

• Title. The maximum character limit is 100 characters. Use them well, place keywords towards the front of the title. As with a writing a good headline, titles need to be descriptive and compelling. The video should also deliver on the headline. If you over-promise, people won’t spend time with the video, share it etc.
• Description. There are 5,000 characters to play with here, but only the first (roughly) 150 will be visible to people when they land on your page, so these have to work well. This is also an opportunity to add a link back to your site or target landing page.
• YouTube subtitles, closed captions and transcripts. These make the videos accessible to a wider audience.
• HD videos. HD quality videos are preferred to lower picture quality ones, though this does not mean that lower quality homemade videos don’t work at all.
• In-video annotations/YouTube cards: Annotations allow you to add linkable text to a video; including notes, calls to action, and links to related video assets. This serves to build greater authority and encourages CTR, views and shares. YouTube developed ‘annotations’ in 2015 to include ‘Cards‘ which are better looking version of annotations. The big difference is they work better across screens, and especially on mobile.

• Thumbnails. Not a ranking factor, but a well-chosen thumbnail should help to improve click through rates and increase views. The ideal size = 640 x 360 pixels minimum, 16:9 aspect ratio.
• Likes and dislikes. These provide an indication of the engagement around a video.
• Comments. These provide a way for YouTube to gauge the authority and relevance of videos. Not as significant a factor as before, perhaps because the comments on many YouTube videos are likely to test your faith in humanity.
• View counts. Again, not as influential a factor as in the past, but still an important indication of popularity.

YouTube channel factors

A distinct YouTube channel can help give brands (or anyone) a longer term and more effective YouTube presence. There are some useful tips on this from YouTube.

• Focus on content. Content needs to match the brand and give customers a clear indication of what to expect from your channel.
• Keep it simple. Branding should communicate the message behind your channels, so make sure videos, channel trailers etc align with this.
• Make it discoverable. Your branding should help people to find your videos and channel. This means consistent titles, tagging, descriptions and themes.
• Channel views. As with video views, the channel stats will contribute towards your rankings.
• Vanity URLs. Not a ranking factor, but something that should help improve other ranking signals by making your channel more easily discoverable.For example, Sainsbury’s has https://www.youtube.com/user/Sainsburys. This helps to give the brand nice and neat results in Google:
• Subscribes. If people have subscribed to your channel after watching your video, this indicates to YouTube as well as to Google that your video is authoritative.
• Bookmarks. Another factor is the number of people who add your video to their ‘watch later” list.

• Social shares. This is another factor which indicates the quality and engagement around your video.
• Backlinks. Links back to your channel or embeds of your video carry weight, and are a further ranking factor.

Branding example: Sainsbury’s

Though John Lewis is better known for its Christmas ads, rival retailer Sainsbury’s manages to out-perform it in terms of YouTube visibility.

This detailed post from PI Datametrics explains in more detail, but Sainsbury’s is more consistent with branding, produces more content, and seems to work harder to optimise it.

Tips for improving YouTube performance

Learning from the ranking factors listed above will do a lot, but here’s a few more tips:

• Promote videos through your own channels. Using your YouTube videos in emails, promoting on social sites, and embedding on your own website will all help to build momentum around your video content.eSpares is a great example of this. It creates videos around fixing DIY problems, posts them to its YouTube channel and uses them onsite by embedding them. This way it gets full value from its video content.
• Create video content which addresses user needs. Think about the questions customers will have around your product and service. Do some keyword research to find out the relative popularity of these terms.This is what eSpares and others do, this helps them attract views from target audiences, and a side bonus is that videos will often appear in the SERPs.
• Encourage comments. As comments contribute to your ranking, it’s a good idea to do as much as you can to encourage a discussion underneath your videos. This could be by creating content which is likely to attract comments, or simply by asking people to comment.
• Use YouTube analytics. Data is your friend, so use it to see how your videos are performing, which are performing better than others, which attract most comments / likes etc.

All this data can help you to learn from what does and doesn’t work, and to improve the effectiveness of your video content.

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/07/29/how-to-optimise-your-videos-for-better-ranking-on-youtube/

source http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/148166297799

Google’s power of censorship: who controls the controllers of the internet?

Imagine a world where Google has no secrets, where all search engines play fair, and where SEO doesn’t have to be synonymous with “page one.” Sound like a fairy tale?

The Internet is often cast as the great democratizer, and Google its noble gate-keeper. There’s no doubt that search engines help us easily navigate the web, but we have to remember that Google is a corporation, not a public service.

Our faith in its wisdom and guidance is based on little more than a carefully planned PR scheme. Behind that curtain, few of us really have any idea what’s going on. That kind of blind trust may be dangerous for content creators and consumers alike, both in terms of what we see and what we get.

In a recent column for U.S. News & World Report, artificial intelligence expert Dr. Robert Epstein detailed 10 different ways Google uses blacklists to censor the Internet. Some of them seem perfectly within reason – noble, even: banning weapons sales through its shopping service, for instance, or blocking payday loan sharks from AdWords.

Few are going to argue with these measures. In fact, it’s nice to see a little corporate responsibility every once in awhile.

At the same time, though, how can we know when and where to draw the line? At what point does “corporate responsibility” become a catch-all phrase for “Google does what Google wants”?

The point Epstein makes is that with virtually every case of good Samaritan censorship practiced by the “do no evil” company, similar tactics have been used to justify some pretty blatant power grabs or downright bullying.

When media sources in Spain began demanding that aggregators pay fees for content, for example, Google News simply pulled out of the country altogether, and Spanish-based digital news sources have taken a serious hit since.

Consider too, the case of E-Ventures Worldwide, an SEO service website that had all 365 pages of its site blacklisted from search engine results because Google deemed them “pure spam.”

True, these revelations are not shocking for people who deal in SEO. Our line of work more or less entails tracking and following every algorithm-scented footprint or bit of guano we can find that might lead us to the keys of Google’s ranking systems, even while we live in constant fear of punishment from its all-knowing servers.

It comes as no surprise that Google harbors a tremendous power to influence, say, the results of a certain upcoming political election, or even to sway public opinion on the latest Taylor Swift/Kanye West escapade. The question is – and it’s a contentious one – where does it all end?

At what point (and sooner or later, there must come a point) will the authorities and powers-that-be have to reign in Google’s master controls over internet content and searchability?

After all, the FCC’s net neutrality ruling last year made internet service practically a public utility – in regulation, if not in name. And after broadband service providers, no one has more influence and control over the flow of the web than Google does.

“If Google were just another mom-and-pop shop with a sign saying ‘we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone’, that would be one thing,” Epstein writes. “But as the golden gateway to all knowledge, Google has rapidly become an essential in people’s lives – nearly as essential as air or water. We don’t let public utilities make arbitrary and secretive decisions about denying people services; we shouldn’t let Google do so either.”

The day of reckoning for Google may come sooner than you might think.

Despite a long line of similar cases that have, without exception, ruled in Google’s favor – giving them free range to rank and rate content in whatever way they please – the E-Ventures case in Florida is actually making some headway.

Back in May, the federal judge on the case ruled that Google had “anti-competitive, economic” motives for blacklisting E-Ventures’ pages: the better SEO companies are at their jobs, after all, the less businesses need to pay for AdWords, which is how the search engine makes most of their revenue. It’s not, as Google argues, simply a matter of “free speech” anymore.

On a larger scale, the European Union is also trying to crack down on Google’s Internet monopoly.

Google claims 90% of the search engine market across the continent (compared to just 64% in the US), and while there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, the European Commission’s competition chief, Margrethe Vestager, says the company is unfairly using that leverage to promote its own advertising materials over that of the competition’s.

This is the third shot the EU has fired at Google in less than two years. Previously, Vestager & co. have filed antitrust complaints against the company over their search engine dominance and over the mandatory Google apps that come pre-loaded with every Android phone. “Google’s magnificent innovations don’t give it the right to deny competitors the chance to innovate,” Vestager says.

All three charges will likely come to a head before the summer’s through. So far, Google has, of course, denied any wrongdoing. But if the Commission succeeds in making a case, Google may have to pay as much as 10% of its revenue (i.e., in the neighborhood of $7 billion per annum) to the European Union to foster a more open, inclusive market.

It all begs the question: what would an SEO world look like where Google wasn’t necessarily the prime target of our efforts? Furthermore, what would happen to SEO analytics if Google’s criteria was for page rankings were completely transparent?

Experts have been saying for years that SEO strategies should be thinking outside the Google search box, but few other engines have been able to make so much as a dent in the web.

Bing, by comparison, is still only a tiny blip on the radar, with 14 billion indexed pages to Google’s 45 billion. The fastest-growing search engine on the scene is DuckDuckGo, a service that brags enhanced privacy and security.

While they manage to pull in 100 million visits every month, it’s still not much compared to Google’s 100 billion. Meanwhile, social media is trafficking more content than ever, and other search services like Yelp and Flickr have cornered markets where Google lags behind.

If the European Union has its way, more competing search engines might be able to increase their power, size, and scope – and forever change the internet landscape as we know it.

The bottom line: There is a world outside of Google. But will we know what to do with it once we’re there?

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/07/29/googles-power-of-censorship-who-controls-the-controllers-of-the-internet/

source http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/148166297384

Eight most interesting search marketing news stories of the week

Facebook image cheat sheet: maximum photo sizes for your branded page and ads

Our previously published guide to Facebook image sizes is well over two years-old and therefore long overdue for an update, and SO much has happened to the world’s most popular social network (for now) since then…

• Brands and publishers have seen their organic reach repeatedly annihilated due to changes in Facebook’s algorithm to favour friends’ posts only.
• Facebook has introduced sooooo many new ad formats and targeting options that it’s impossible to keep up with them all.
• Plus Facebook is becoming extra helpful in allowing regular users to cut through the Newsfeed noise.

However, as Larry Kim taught us this week in his post on how to improve organic Facebook reach, it is still possible to find your audience without having to break the bank.

This guide is designed to ensure that when Facebook users do see and interact with your brand, that you’re all scrubbed up and as presentable as you possibly can be.

These are the correct dimensions, resolutions and features you need for optimising your Facebook channel, without the need of an overzealous parent spitting in a handkerchief and scrubbing your face till it’s red.

In order to do this as accurately and up-to-date as possible (seeing as Facebook only just recently changed the layout of branded pages again) I’ll be using examples from the FB Pages Sizes and Dimensions page from Yoconda. It’s worth giving them a like to keep up-to-date. And I’ll be using the helpful advice from Miranda Miller in her original guide.

Facebook page

The top of your Facebook page as of July 2016 will now look something like this…

Let’s break down the measurements…

Facebook header image

The optimal image size for your header image is 851 x 315 pixels. Any less and you’ll lose resolution. Start with a canvas of double that size – 1702 x 630 – for sharp, crisp images; Facebook will resize it and you’ll have the right dimensions.

The mobile safe area is 563 x 315 pixels.

Follow these dos and don’ts of header images:

• Do use a unique image to represent your page.
• Do experiment with different images to see which gets the best response.
• Do change up your image to highlight special events, seasonal trends, or other types of campaigns.
• Don’t include any content that may be deceptive, misleading, infringe on anyone else’s copyright, or violate Facebook’s Pages Terms.
• Don’t encourage people to upload your cover image to their personal Timeline.
• Don’t make more than 20% of your cover image text.
• To get the fastest load times for your Page, upload an sRGB JPG file that’s less than 100 kilobytes.
• For images with your logo or text content, you may get a higher quality result by using a PNG file.

Facebook profile picture

Your profile picture will be displayed at 160 x 160 pixels but must be at least 180 x 180 pixels to upload.

Pictures of different dimensions can be cropped upon uploading.

Also note that the profile picture no longer partially obscures the header image like it used to, so you can no longer do those ‘fun and amusing’ combinations

Your profile picture appears around Facebook wherever you interact with users and in their Newsfeed at 90 x 90 pixels so your profile picture must be legible at this resolution.

Shared link image

The image that’s automatically pulled in from a link you’ve shared, or the one you’v uploaded an alternative image from your desktop will appear on your timeline and in the Newsfeed as 476 x 249 pixels.

Facebook ads

According to the Facebook business help page, different ad objectives recommend different Facebook ad sizes. If you’d like your Facebook ads to be eligible to show in all of the different formats, including desktop News Feed, mobile News Feed and the right column, then you should use the recommended ad image sizes:

Also note that if your image is larger or smaller than the dimensions specified it willl be automatically resized to fit in the ad. Animated or flash images aren’t supported.

Facebook Ads images also have their own set of rules:

• Must be relevant and appropriate to the advertised product.
• May not exploit political, sexual or other sensitive issues.
• May not be overly sexual, imply nudity, show excessive amounts of skin or cleavage, or focus unnecessarily on body parts.
• May not portray nonexistent functionality, including but not limited to play buttons that suggest video capability and close buttons that do not close.
• May not contain QR codes.
• May not use Facebook brand images without permission, including but not limited to logos, icons and alert notification graphics.
• Images targeted to users under 18 must be appropriate for that age group.
• May not include images made up of more than 20% text, including logos and slogans. Note: this does not apply to pictures of products that include text on the actual product. Photos of products in real situations or photos of products with a background are acceptable. Images that are zoomed in on logos or images with text overlay are not allowed.

Facebook photo albums

Photo album cover thumbnails appear as 175 x 175 pixels.

When you click into an album, the image previews are 201 x 201 pixels.

Full size images are 660 x 440 pixels. However the maximum image size for uploading to your company albums or timeline is 2048 x 2048 pixels.

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/07/28/facebook-image-cheat-sheet-maximum-photo-sizes-for-your-branded-page-and-ads/

source http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/148100529254

Social media: look before you leap

Social media puts your message in front of your audience instantly. With millions of active users and real time engagement, social is a great tool to distribute, engage and communicate.

But it comes at a cost.

If updates are misconstrued or perceived to be negative, you have very little control over the knock-on effects. There have already been some laughable social media fails which have gone viral for all the wrong reasons.

In this post we cover how you can mitigate this risk and ensure your audience get the most out of social media to make it work for you.

The common blunders

Every company’s social media account is in the public eye, it’s one of the first places people will go to investigate you as an individual and as a corporate brand, and first impressions here are everything. From your profile to your posts, new visitors will investigate your social media footprint.

These are some common mistakes on social media that are easily avoidable:

• Hashtag fails: using the wrong hashtag can be a mistake, but jumping on trends without context will confuse or even offend other social media users.
• Broken links: we’re all guilty of this one, but getting a 404 after clicking on a link on social media is incredibly annoying. Sometimes when scheduling a post, a space gets left out between the link and the text surrounding it which will break the link, so watch out.
• Competitor content: this seem like a no brainer, but it happens all the time. Promoting competitors content positions them as thought leaders, not you – so go lightly on the retweets or shares.
• Poor profile: sounds simple. Make your profile killer with a top quality image, header and description.

All of these negatives aside, social media is still a fantastic place for your company (and your team) to make connections and identify prospects.

Plan, process, professionalism

Social media works most effectively when there is a detailed process followed meticulously behind the scenes. The process should document responsibilities for scheduled content, responses to conversations and ensure that all content is proofread before it is shared.

Individuals understandably want control over their own accounts. By giving the right social media training and process your team can start to make social work for them. This also gives you the chance to effectively communicate the business’s social media expectations.

After all, if they’re tweeting or sharing from their personal accounts, they’re still representing your company.

Un-Automate

Don’t get me wrong I love automation, heck I’m a lazy millennial. To truly engage we need to step away from automation. This puts the power back in your hands to have conversations and build relationships with people that matter, automated trash will move away from that.

With automation you can schedule posts weeks or even months in advanced. This can be incredibly dangerous as content may not be appropriate or relevant then and could end up offending people. Some large organisations have seen the effects of this with Tesco tweeting about hitting the hay in the middle of the horsemeat scandal.

Even outside of social media automation fails happen daily, this email from Ryanair was put live after the referendum result which was clearly hoping for a different result!

Automation is incredibly handy, but scheduled messages need to be checked before they go live. A documented social media process will also prevent such mistakes happening to you.

Audience research

I may be the first person you’ve heard say this, but social media isn’t for everyone, and to keep all the plates spinning takes a lot of time and effort for any marketing team.

Focus your attention on the platforms that bring you the most reward and research how to be as effective as possible through these channels. This can be one or two key social networks to start with, and if you need to expand to other social networks you can.

Think about where your audience are most active, how easy the implementation will be and what sort of content and engagement you need. This will lead on to key digital metrics within social media to measure ongoing to prove success.

Social media is a great place for you and your team to spend time. With the right research, strategy and processes in place you will build the foundations of a clean social footprint and ultimately make the right first impression as well as deliver the results you’re looking for.

Have you had any interactions with companies you’ve been impressed by? I’d love to hear from you.

You can tweet Jason @jj_stockwell or connect with him on LinkedIn.

This article was originally published on the Modern blog and and is reprinted with permission.

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/07/28/social-media-look-before-you-leap/

source http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/148100528279

Why your brand needs a style guide

Brands need content. It’s at the heart of the ‘brand as publisher’ concept.

They need to use the power of words to reach out to their audience and deliver the product or service they need.

As Zazzle’s MD Simon Penson put it in a post for Moz, the idea here is: “that you’re able to build an engaged, loyal audience of value for your brand… an audience you can then monetize later.”

Yet it’s one thing realising that you need words to deliver this for you, but quite another to know how to deliver them. Luckily for me, that’s where writers come in.

Having made the jump from journalism to marketing, it’s great to see that there’s a demand for people to help brands sail these waters.

George Orwell’s content rules are still relevant today

Sometimes a company may find themselves pondering how they should write. The first port of call should be George Orwell’s ‘six elementary rules’.

The 1984 and Animal Farm writer might have written these rules in 1946, but they’re just as relevant in a world of social media and online content that would have been alien to him.

• The rules are as follows:
• Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print
• Never use a long word where a short one will do
• If it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out
• Never use the passive where you can use the active
• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent
• Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous

With apologies to Orwell, we might summarise those rules in the following way:

• Don’t waffle
• Don’t confuse the reader
• Don’t try to show how clever you are (it’s about the reader, not you)

But that’s Orwell and good (sorry, couldn’t resist the pun, it’s a journalism thing) but brands need to consider the words they choose and not just the way they construct them.

If brands are to become publishers then they need to start behaving like publishers and adopting some of the working practices they have perfected.

Orwell’s rules need to be implemented on top of some sound foundations and that’s where a content style guide comes in.

Tellingly, in fact, those rules appear at the very top of the style guide of The Economist, introducing the important rights and wrongs that follow.

Style guide: the newsroom bible your brand needs

The style guide is the bible of the newsroom. Its yellowing pages are thrown in your direction as a rookie reporter and it’s this that you’re beaten over the head with – metaphorically and, depending on the aggression of your news editor, literally.

In a newsroom this will help you understand the correct way to write out military ranks or religious roles – the sorts of things that will inevitably lead to complaints if you get them wrong.

That’s the important thing to bear in mind when it comes to a style guide and, in particular, a brand’s style guide. Errors with this are distracting and damaging.

We can all appreciate this when it comes to typos, for example. A bad typo will be captured in a screen shot and sent around the corners of the internet – on platforms where your embarrassment is a source of great mirth. It certainly happened to me as a journalist.

Here are a few examples. Poor old ‘Jermy Corbyn’ doesn’t took too happy to have his name spelled incorrectly on the front of the Independent:

How about this one? The National Council for the Training of Journalists will be red faced at its inability to spell ‘journalism’:

Then there’s this from a Digiday interview with Piers Morgan – with an incorrect lower case ‘jack’, awful spelling of ‘England’ and confusing sentence structure:

These errors show that it happens to the best of us. I love the content produced by the Independent and Digiday and benefitted from the training of the NCTJ. These are not bedroom bloggers scrawling out nonsense. They are highly respected bodies with high standards and they still make mistakes.

There is no silver bullet to eliminate typos, you just need to find the best proofreader you can get your hands on and put your faith in their expert eyes.

The reason why it’s important to flag up typos in this piece, however, is that brands need to realise that style errors can, in my opinion, be more toxic that a typo.

That’s where the Digiday example comes in handy. Try reading that sentence aloud and you won’t sound very coherent. These are not just errors made from a misplaced keystroke.

Why is style important and what do issues look like?

Style issues leave a similar stain on the material they are contained within. By ‘style issues’ we mean things like:

• Slipping Americanism into your text – there’s no ‘defense’ for that
• Not knowing the difference between complementary and complimentary – which one is a freebie and which a nice word?
• Switching between E-mail, email, e-mail – it’s the written equivalent of the person who cannot settle on a radio station for two minutes
• Popping apostrophe’s in the wrong place (like that one, grrr!)

So, why are these such a problem?

Firstly, like typos, they are distracting for the reader. This means that they’re likely to focus on these points rather than what you actually want to say. That undermines your text and all the efforts you have put into writing it.

Secondly, they paint your brand in a bad light. There’s an association in the reader’s head between content accuracy and professionalism.

If a business doesn’t know where to plonk an apostrophe in a word, can it seriously be trusted to handle your custom? Does it pay such a lack of attention to the products and services it delivers?

That might seem grossly unfair but, you know, life’s not fair.

As a publisher you gain the trust of your readers by producing valuable content. Text that is littered with errors will not gain or retain any trust. Readers will also, rightly or wrongly, expect you to adhere to the same standards as publishers. Bloggers might be forgiven for clumsy text, brands won’t.

Four great style guides to look at for inspiration

Fancy a read of some of the best content style guides in the business? Here are four that we enjoy – and turn to from time to time:

The BBC

The Economist

The Guardian and Observer

The Telegraph

Why you need your own content style guide

These publishers have made their style guides available online but in the era of ‘brand as publisher’ I think it’s increasingly important to consider a ‘brand-friendly’ content style guide rather than try to wade through those.

There’s a need to strip away journalistic terms and add in a few basics that will help people who aren’t writers ‘by trade’. Then, depending on your industry, you can replace the journalese with the terminology that is relevant to your business – the equivalent of the military ranks and religious roles that could leave you red faced.

That’s why we’ve decided to step up to the task. Zazzle’s content team, which has experience in a variety of roles ‘on the other side of the fence’, has produced a content style guide (registration required) that you can download and adopt right away. It covers about 40 essential pointers that can help you to develop a solid ‘style’ that can run throughout your written content.

It forms the basis on which you could take Orwell’s writing rules forward. If you’ve not got a content style guide then you’re not ready for the world of ‘brand as publisher’. With this, we can get you up to speed. Remember too that this isn’t about punishing the people who don’t know these rules.

Not everyone knows every rule off the top of their head. That’s precisely why the guide is there. It’s a vital resource and something to fall back on when it comes to those things you always find tricky or that you just can’t quite put your finger on in the heat of the moment.

No-one has a monopoly on wisdom but we’re pretty proud of our guide. Please download it, use it and let us know what you think.

How to adapt our style guide for your business

Brands who want to take their role as publisher seriously will need to use our style guide as a starting point. So, after you’ve downloaded it, what do you do next?

Here’s our step by step guide:

• Download the Zazzle template and save it somewhere where everyone can get access – we like a shared GDoc, you might prefer something else
• Have a brainstorm session in which you list all of the terminology relevant to your business
• Agree a ‘preferred style’ – whether that be a spelling or whether or not you’ll use a hyphen or capital letter
• Add all of these to our guide template
• Leave the guide open to edit so that any new terms you come across can be added in
• Send it out to any third party writing content on your behalf, everyone needs to be singing from the same hymn sheet and this is your hymn sheet.

That should all be fairly straightforward – although get in touch if you have in questions and we’d be happy to talk through any content style dilemmas you have. We’re like that…

Tom Smith is a Search and Data Consultant at Zazzle Media.

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/07/28/why-your-brand-needs-a-style-guide/

source http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/148100528719

Should you use a hamburger icon on your mobile menu?

The three-line ‘hamburger’ menu icon receives a lot of vitriol. It is variously described as “controversial”, “notorious” etc. but it is rapidly becoming the de facto symbol to open a navigational menu on a mobile website.

So perhaps it is time to learn to live with it and make it better.

The hamburger was created in 1980 by Norm Cox, for the Xerox “Star” personal workstation, the world’s first graphical user interface.

Norm Cox, principal of interaction/experience design consultancy, Cox&Hall, tells ClickZ:

“Since someone “discovered”, a few years ago, that I had designed the hamburger menu, I’ve had countless questions, speaking invitations, interviews and inquiries… and read numerous articles and blogs regarding the (somewhat fabricated) controversy over its use.

In a way, I find it amusing that a simple widget like this has gotten so much attention, generated so much discussion, and gotten so many “experts” bloviating about the reasoning for its good/bad or right/wrong attributes.

I will simply say this about the hamburger widget. It is merely another widget in a designer’s arsenal of tools that s/he can use… well… or poorly. It has no inherent goodness/badness, or rightness/wrongness, except in the context of how it’s applied by the designer.”

This column will look at mobile menu best practice, including:

• How to make the hamburger icon more recognizable, e.g. by adding or substituting the word MENU.
• Supplementing, or replacing the hamburger menu, with visible navigational tabs and buttons.
• Research that suggests what works better.
• Importance of doing your own user testing and A/B testing.

The subsequent column will look more closely at the design and user experience (UX) aspects, including:

• Making the menu and navigational buttons standout. Type, size, color and placement of buttons.
• Navigational discipline; taking a logical approach to size, number and names of menu items.
• Different types of mobile menu, such as off-canvas and overlay.

The image below shows the mobile sites for top six search results for “hamburger icon” on the world’s most popular search engine. Five out of six of these headlines appear on sites that use a site-wide hamburger icon.

Three stories are negative. Two of negative stories: the BBC’s “Three lines mystify most people” and TechCrunch’s “Kill the hamburger button” sit, somewhat embarrassingly, below a hamburger.

Not only have the TechCrunch/AOL developers ignored the recommendations of its writers on the “devil” hamburger on mobile web (and app) they have also introduced a second unlabeled icon – a rocket – to denote a hidden menu of ‘most popular’ stories.

Menu/hamburger on mobile web, iOS apps and Android apps is different.

Critics of the hamburger icon report (and re-report) a number of internal studies by companies that noticed a deterioration in use of the menu when they switched the menu style used by their apps or website to a hamburger icon and vice versa when switching away.

Only one of these studies is mobile web:

• James Foster (2014) discovered through A/B testing on found that 20% more mobile visitors to Caffeineinformer.com  would click the “MENU”, over “hamburger icon”.
• However, on closer inspection, the menu click-through rates on Caffeineinformer seem unusually low (see Moovweb stats below for benchmarks). The click-through rates of 1.2% for “MENU” and 1% for the “hamburger icon”. This suggests that the test should be hidden menu v visible navigational links, e.g. search database, rather than the nomenclature of the menu button itself.
• Today, Caffeineinformer.com doesn’t use MENU or Hamburger on the homepage, just search and the call to action: Explore Caffeine Database. On all other pages it uses MENU and a search icon.

The other studies commonly cited are for native apps (maybe just iOS): Zeebox (2014); Polar (2015), and Redbooth (2015). These studies suggested that menus hidden behind a hamburger icon received less engagement than visible navigational tabs.

Notably, Redbooth was an iOS app study; Zeebox and Polar may also have been, but neither app exists anymore.

So while these native app studies appear to be compelling, it does not follow that the behavior of iOS app users is applicable to mobile web. Nor does it follow that it applies to Android apps either.

As Redbooth notes: “Apple discourages [the hamburger’s] use”, and Zeebox notes: “The side menu has become fashionable on Android but not yet taken off on iPhone”.

The importance of doing your own tests

However compelling other people’s findings about their own sites/apps appear, they should not dictate how you design/redesign you website.

As demonstrated below in the Moovweb research, engagement levels of the hamburger/menu vary massively by industry.

The key lesson to learn is not that the hamburger is good or bad, or that hidden menus are good or bad, but that it is important to run your own tests.

• Conduct user tests: onsite and remote.
• Use A/B testing – show two different groups of web visitors different versions of your menu e.g. hamburger v MENU. (The beauty of web over apps, is that you don’t need anyone’s permission to test and modify).
• Use heatmaps – to study how people interact with menus and navigation.

Learn more about mobile user testing.

The truth about Facebook and the hamburger icon.

Critics of the hamburger also like to cite Facebook’s 2013 decision to drop the hamburger icon in favor of a bottom tab bar as vindication.

Reality:

• This change only happened on the iOS app.
• The hamburger is still present on the iOS app on the bottom tab bar, albeit embellished with a MORE label.
• Three years later the m.facebook.com and the Facebook Android app still proudly sport the unlabeled hamburger icon.
• What does that tell you? a) Native iOS is different to mobile web and native Android; or b) The results of the changes on iOS didn’t encourage Facebook to follow up with either mobile web or Android.

Proper research

Despite the immense importance of navigation on the mobile/responsive web, lack of conformity and the bitter debate that the hamburger encourages among design/UX professionals, it is amazing that there haven’t been more studies of menu use across multiple sites.

While not massive, there are two studies that are essential reading:

• Moovweb (April 2015) – studied interaction with the hamburger-based menu.
• Nielsen Norman Group/WhatUsersDo (June 2016) – studied user the different interaction rates between part-visible and hidden menus on web and mobile web.

Good burger/bad burger

Moovweb studied 50 sites that used its mobile/responsive commerce platform and made two interesting findings:

1. 20% of mobile site users interact with the hamburger menu, making it the fourth most tapped button on site, behind select product (30%); homepage navigational menu (30%); and search (27%).
2. Hamburger menu engagement varied massively by vertical: apparel and accessories (26%); jewelry (21%); home & garden (21%); auto & construction (7%); content (2%).

Then working with one unnamed mobile travel site, Moovweb ran a test to compare engagement rate with an unlabeled hamburger icon and one that was labeled.

The results were striking. The engagement rate for the unlabeled menu icon was 10.8%; while labeled one received 17.3%; which is a 61% improvement.

Hamburger + MENU or MENU – hamburger?

While adding a MENU is the most common label to enhance the hamburger, there are variations, as seen above the BBC uses a SECTIONS label, while Facebook (only on the iOS app) uses MORE.

The question is: if you are going to add MENU to your hamburger icon, then why bother with the hamburger at all?

Jason Grigsby, co-founder, of Portland, Oregon-based mobile web development agency, Cloud Four, tells ClickZ.

“When people criticize the hamburger, e.g.Luke Wroblewski, they’re referring to the fact that the icon itself doesn’t convey enough meaning. People get confused by it.

So the argument is to avoid using the hamburger icon and instead use the word ‘menu’ or similar so people know what the hell you’re going on about.”

The new design of the Cloud Four site uses a MENU button, with a menu that slides down from the top.

The navigation menu, as Grigsby points out, is a whole different matter… and one we will be dealing with in detail in the next column.

Hidden menus: nice clean design or “out of sight, out of mind”?

To hamburger or not to hamburger… is only part of the question.

The other side of this debate concerns the whole nature of the menu, the fact that all the options are invisible unless the user taps the hamburger icon/menu button.

The clever thing that Luke Wroblewski pointed out is “out of sight, out of mind. This has become a rallying cry again the hidden menu and the poor old hamburger icon that has come to symbolize the hidden menu.

To date evidence to prove this theory is largely anecdotal, and based on apps such as Zeebox, Redbooth and Polar, (Wroblewski being one of these developers).

That’s what makes the recent Nielsen Norman Group/WhatUsersDo research so welcome: it’s web based, spread over six sites, with real users (179 of them), and its real research conducted by expert UX testers.

The research asked people to complete a task on the various responsive sites on desktop and mobile and studied whether people engaged better with/found it easy with:

• Hidden navigation – where they had to tap a hamburger or equivalent)
• Combo navigation – combination of hidden menu a visible navigational buttons, when required to.
• Visible navigation – only desktop sites; no mobile sites with visible navigation (only) were tested, which is a shame.

The key findings for mobile users were:

• People used menus considerably more on mobile than desktops
• People were 1.5 times more likely to use combo navigation (86%) than hidden (57%).
• More found it easier to discover content that interested them with combo (85%) than hidden (64%)
• Task took longer with hidden (70 seconds), than combo (61 seconds).

Nielsen Norman makes the following recommendations for mobile sites:

• If your site has four or fewer top-level navigation links, display them as visible links.
• If your site has more than four top-level navigation links, the only reasonable solution is to hide some of these [behind a menu button].
• Support the hamburger with methods such as in-page links to important information on your site.

Combo approach

Returning to the image above of the top six top ranking sites for “hamburger icon”. Three out of five that use a hamburger, use the unlabeled icon alone for navigation and one (TechCrunch) even uses an additional unlabeled rocket.

The BBC is the only one that adopts a combo approach to navigation. It has visible tabs for NEWS, SPORT and MORE (which is a menu) in addition to the Hamburger/Sections button.

Interestingly on older/smaller smartphone these three options are reduced to one MENU button.

A great example of the combo is Summit Metro Parks, which uses a labelled hamburger menu and four labelled buttons for key activities.

Mike D’Agruma, lead front-end developer, Evolve Creative Group, a web design agency in Akron, OH, USA, explains why he likes the Summit Metro Parks site.

“The hamburger/menu icon is at the top of the home screen. It has clear visual separation via color, size and treatment from surrounding content. Not only does it use of iconography, but includes a text descriptions. There is no assumption about that the user will recognize and know how to use the icon.

There are additional types of navigation competing for attention on the page. As well as the hamburger/MENU, there is a rotator/carousel with a clear call-to-action on each slide to help funnel users where the site wants them to go. Then there is a second-tier page navigation of highly visible and labelled buttons.”

The science of navigation

A really useful way to think about menus and navigation is to stop worrying about them and start thinking about what users actually want to do and make it really easy for people to do it.

If people are on a certain page there is a strong probability that they will want to do a finite number of things next. If these are not on the page, put them on visible call-to-action buttons, image links, text links etc.

Things that people might want to do, but are lower down the hierarchy of probable tasks can be placed in the menu.

The expert on this is Steven Hoober, president of 4ourth Mobile, who is recognized for his work on mobile touch-screen interfaces. He explains:

“The important thing is to stop thinking about navigation and site structure and think about what the user wants to do. They have priorities, which I call primary, secondary and tertiary actions:

• The primary actions should be addressed by the content in the center section of the page.
• The secondary actions are the thing that the user is most likely to want to do next. These should be addressed by visible and easily reached call-to-action buttons on the periphery of the page on the top navigation or adjacent to the primary content.
• The tertiary actions are the other things that users might want, but are less likely to be priorities. This is where your hamburger menu comes in.”

Hoober’s article on Why it’s totally okay to use a hamburger icon  is essential reading.

The hamburger and the hamburger debate is here to stay.

Some people will continue to hate it. This from Nick Babich, editor of UX planet: https://uxplanet.org/

“To my mind, Hamburger is a bad option both for mobile and for desktop.”

And some will defend it. Phil Reay, head of insights, SessionCam, a tool for monitoring web customer behavior:

“Until a better solution to the hamburger menu is designed, our experience suggests that this catch all approach provides the best user experience for customers.”

The next column will look more closely at the design and user experience (UX) aspects of menus and navigation.

Read the report here: DNA of a Great M-Commerce Site Part 1: Planning

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/07/27/should-the-hamburger-icon-be-on-your-mobile-menu/

source http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/148100527664

Five ways to use local SEO even when you don’t have a physical premise

How can a business stand out in local SEO with no physical premise? Is it even possible?

Local search is very competitive and it becomes even more of a challenge to compete with other businesses when yours has no physical premise.

Sam Nemzer from Distilled shared with us some useful tips at MozTalk on how to use local SEO for a business with no local pack.

Here are the five tactics that Sam Nemzer suggests:

1) Put user-focused content on category pages

A category page should focus on content and the more you add, the better for the SERPs. In order to add content, you can:

• Pull in third party data to immediately gain access to useful and relevant content (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Wikipedia, Google Maps, Ticketmaster, TripAdvisor, etc)
• Use proprietary data that may be helpful for your business (this also makes it easier to obtain featured snippets)
• Find questions to answer. Sam Nemzer suggested the tool “Answer the Public”, a free visual keyword research that allows you to find the right questions for the specific keywords you want to use.

By the time you’ve found the answers from the particular keywords, it’s time to answer different questions on your own:

“How can you use this content on your site?”

“Is this still relevant to your business?”

“Have I relied too much on auto-generated content?

Remember, Google is not keen on pages that focus on automatically generated content, so make sure you don’t overuse it.

2) Get the level of granularity right

It’s important to start by researching your analytics data, to understand what gets traffic and how you can increase the content on your site.

Have a closer look at the keywords and see what people search in your industry.

Not every site needs the same details and the example below shows how property listings differentiate from job sites.

Finally, it may be useful to analyse your keyword data and ask yourself: “Do you need location pages at all?”

How can your business benefit from them? By the time you’re able to answer this question, you’re ready to continue to more practical tips.

3) Sidestep local packs by targeting high in the funnel

In order to avoid the high competition, it may be useful to avoid focusing on the most popular local packs and find the right content gaps to exploit.

How about aiming for different targeting where there’s less competition and more opportunities to stand out?

Retargeting may be useful to reduce CPC, but this also means that the conversion may not be immediate, although this also means that you can build recognition and serve as a knowledge provider in your industry.

4) Use structured data to stand out

Structured data refers to the type of data that provides information through a database and structured data markup may associate a description with its property.

Whether it’s a recipe, an article, a video, or an event, markup helps search engines crawl the content to display it appropriately to the users.

This may massively improve the ranking in SERPs and you can test your structured data with Google’s Data Structure Testing Tool.

5) Make the most of Intelligent Personal Assistants

If local packs don’t seem to be effective for your business, there’s the option of having people come straight to your app and personal assistants can be really useful in this case.

Siri, Cortana and Google Now are changing the way people search  through their mobile devices and this may be the right time to focus on this field in order to beat the competition in the most relevant context.

For example, Google Now allows any app to be integrated and Apple also announced that it will follow this direction, which brings an exciting opportunity for a business looking to be displayed in the right search results.

Key tips

Sam Nemzer sums up his talk with the following useful tips:

1. Find API data to pull into category pages
2. Find out how people are searching by location
3. Find content gaps to exploit
4. Add structured data
5. Integrate your app (or start the process of building one)

This was a useful reminder on how local SEO can help any business and most importantly, how a business can go beyond local SEO and think outside the box in order to reach the right audience.

Keep these tips handy next time you’re ready to analyse your audiences and seek for the best ways to reach higher on the SERPs to promote your business.

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/07/28/five-ways-to-use-local-seo-even-when-you-dont-have-a-physical-premise/

source http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/148100527979