SEO – user's Blog!

March 27, 2017

How to Keep Your Employees’ Skills Fresh

Are your employees reaching their full potential? Is your office running at max capacity, using the latest tools and technology at your disposal?

Chances are, even in the most efficient and tech-savvy offices, there is still room for improvement. Chance are also, it’s not the fault of your employees!

Small business owners often require their staff to wear several different hats. They run on shoe-string budgets. Whether it’s a startup or a mom-and-pop company, time is precious. Employees need to be efficient, flexible and willing to roll with new tasks and challenges.

So the question is, as a small business owner, are you keeping your employee’s skills fresh? Are you giving them the opportunity to really shine? Are they using skills they are naturally suited for, and successfully tackling new technology?

No matter the industry there are a few ways you can keep your employee’s skills fresh and up-to-date.

1.Train them on SEO Basics

SEO–Search Engine Optimization is becoming a basic skill on the small business front. What it means in the simplest language is “wording content so Google can find your company’s site”.

There are many people out there who will offer to “optimize” your site, one-time for you for a big fee. While you might need some expertise and help to get started, having internal help going forward can save you time, energy and stress, especially if you’re regularly adding dynamic content to your website.

Google’s (and other search engines) web crawlers and search tactics are always adapting and changing. SEO isn’t a one-time fix. Content can be boosted by current events, by news, and as the face of business changes. Training your employees on the basics will help them keep your company’s content on the forefront of web-searches (and make sure your customers can find you!).

2. Foster Web Development Skills

Similar to SEO basics, web development skills can mean the difference between outsourcing simple updates and being able to quickly resolve things in-house. In the long run having some basic web-development skills will help your employees feel more ownership over your site and better connect with your customers. This is particularly important for eCommerce businesses.

Your employees don’t have to be fluent in HTML or know how to build a website from scratch, but giving them a chance to learn basic updating skills can help your company stay on top of concerns, troubleshoot and quickly create content when the need arises.

Many employees can quickly learn the basics with online-tutorials and classes. You can also find one-on-one trainers to spend a day of professional development training your office with the basics. As a small business owner, you should also have a handle on how to develop your web presence.

3. Encourage Social Media Savvy

Most employees are familiar with social media from a personal perspective, and it’s easy to become complacent or assume they already understand everything about social media for business (a different beast). Encourage your employees to read industry-specific publications, sign up for webinars and training and become familiar with social media best practices that apply to your office.

Social media is a way to connect with your customers and engage with potential customers and your community. It’s imperative that you present a professional front that’s in-line with your brand and voice. Having a rogue post on social media, or unprofessional posts can really frighten customers away and even offend them.

Encourage employees to follow a simple social media protocol when it comes to engaging with customers. Have strong branding guidelines, and a grasp of your target audience will help employees stay on the same page when it comes to updating your social media and connecting with customers and clients.

4. Familiarize them with Software

So you have a CRM, billing and invoicing software, communications tools like MailChimp, calendar programs, scheduling, project and task-management systems. Great! How many of your employees actually know how to use all of the software tools at their disposal?

Chance are, your employees aren’t using your software to full capacity, and you’re losing out on time and productivity in the process. You can learn more about your CRM by visiting Insightly Help Center for a full list of training videos and webinars. Many of your company’s software providers will offer support and assistance.

While training your employees on the full-range and capacity of your software programs seems like a time-consuming endeavor, it can really boost your office efficiency. Your employees will feel confident and may even come up with great new solution and ways to solve problems.

5. Make Training Fun and Relevant

We’ve all sat through training that was boring and less-than-inspiring. Rather than forcing employees to snooze through another training session, encourage them to get involved with hands-on-learning and find fun, and creative ways to make training exciting.

Webinars, and videos are often more engaging than lectures, and employees can learn at their own pace as it aligns with their schedule. If you have to do in-depth training, offer breaks, snacks, and chances for your employees to get up move around and have some fun.

Make up incentives and challenges to help your employees feel enthusiastic about their training. Give them a chance to share their knowledge with other employees and take ownership of their new found skills.

6. Help Them Find Their Niche

Not every person is good at learning every new skill. Your salespeople might be wonderful at connecting with customers, but learning about SEO and web design might bore them to tears. Analytic employees might love to build information and add tags, fields and categories in your CRM, but might not enjoy social media.

Find the natural aptitudes of your employee base. In a small office, you all might have to tackle some jobs that are challenging or uncomfortable, but you should be able find the best fit for every task.

Play on strengths and discover what your employees feel enthused about. Rather than trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, let your employees guide you toward the things they really enjoy and feel good doing. When they are working on tasks they enjoy, they will bring their best work to the table.

Even small business owners can find the time to build up skills and keep your employees’ skills fresh. You don’t have to have a huge training budget or massive amounts of time. Use the tools at your disposal and find ways to help your team shine!

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a variety of verticals. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

Share love, share Insightly: Refer Insightly, Receive a Reward.

March 15, 2017

Managing SEO: Internally or Through An Agency?

Forget the raging debate about whether SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is dead. It’s not, and it’s important. If you want to dominate your niche, you must get it right. It’s a complicated subject with a lot of different parts, and the rules of the game frequently change.

SEO is going to be an investment, whether you decide to handle it yourself or hire an expert. It’s not particularly difficult, just time consuming and hard to stay abreast of.

If you or an employee has the time to learn everything and a talent for analytics, it might be worth doing your SEO in-house.

What Makes SEO Complicated?

SEO components are on every page of your website, woven into your text, and part of your marketing strategy. SEO experts have a deep understanding of everything from page structure to how keywords shape your blog content. They are tasked with knowing everything there is to know, and understanding how each minute change to the Google algorithm will affect your rank.

SEO Basics

Before you can decide whether to outsource, you’ll need to know what you’re up against. Here’s a brief overview of what an effective SEO expert does.

High quality content – SEO professionals have an innate understanding of what constitutes high quality content. It’s important to know what defines quality. Without specific knowledge, you can pay for a whole lot of useless content.

Keyword research – The use of keywords has changed considerably, but are still a major component of SEO. They represent the words and phrases your customer searches for – how customers are likely to find your search.

Backlink profile– The backlinks leading to your website are important and tricky. If you offer the right kind of content, other sites will be happy to link to it. That will take quality and promotion. SEOs know what good backlinks are, and how to avoid bad links.

Analytics and tracking – SEO can take months to start producing results. If you aren’t moving the needle in 3 to 6 months, you may need a new strategy. A good SEO will be tracking the analytics to see how well the campaign is doing.

On-page SEO – HTML tags, including titles, headers, and descriptions are all important SEO values.

Web layout – The way your pages are arranged can affect your sales, signup, or donation rates. Your SEO will track what visitors do on your page – where they come from, how long they remain, and what they do after they land. This will help you refine your content to keep visitors happy, interested, and engaged.

Competitor research – How do you stack up against your competitors and why? An SEO expert will be able to tell you what your site lacks in a competitive landscape.

Integrate with marketing – Your marketing campaigns will be enhanced and aided by SEO strategy. Copy and specialized landing pages should be optimized along with everything on (and off) your site.

Cost Considerations

Now that you know what you’re up against, you should have an idea about what’s at stake and what the job entails.

Outsourcing can be pricey, and, if you don’t know what questions to ask, ineffective. To make sure you’re getting the most for your money, choose a well-respected company with plenty of references and a proven track record. Before you interview, familiarize yourself with the basic language, and ask the right questions.

While outsourcing may seem expensive, effective SEO can keep your traffic flowing at a fast-enough pace to make it more than worthwhile, and hiring a full-time employee will likely be more expensive. Glassdoor puts the national average salary for an SEO manager at $61,933.

You can outsource all or part of your SEO based on your budget. Some SEO companies offer full service strategy – from assessing your site to creating your content. Others will hand you a periodic report and walk away. Most do some hybrid. Make sure you know exactly what you’re getting and what your responsibilities are before you hire.

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a variety of verticals. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

Share love, share Insightly: Refer Insightly, Receive a Reward.

October 27, 2016

Why You Can’t Afford to Ignore Blogging—Insight

While you may think that all your content marketing strategies on social media and article submissions to various outlets have you covered and you don’t need to be blogging, think again. As an avid blogger who has built their personal brand and business on blogging, I can say that you really can’t afford to ignore it. Here’s why:

People enjoy reading blogs so you will find customers this way. Consumers and businesses seek out blogs to read because they know where they can find useful information that can help with a tough decision, provide solutions that save money or time, and offer advice about a particular issue or problem. If you have a blog and offer the type of beneficial information that businesses are seeking, then you will find more customers this way. Not only will they flock to your blog, but they will also tell others about it, further increasing your chances of more customers.

Your brand and company will gain more credibility. Because the information on blogs is viewed as so valuable and correct, you can gain more credibility with your audience and enhance your brand image while, at the same time, establishing yourself as an expert. This is as good as gold in the online world where trust generally tends to take a long time to develop between a company and their target audience. You will want to find whatever shortcuts you can to establish this trust and blogging is one of them.

Your SEO will improve. Since you need to have a lot of content in order to get search engines to index your website, a blog really helps to achieve that. Search engines will identify your website as a key resource that is providing valuable information that needs to be found. Typically, websites that have a blog have 434% more indexed pages (source).

You will get more leads and in a cost and time-effective way. Lead generation is a resource-intensive process, but blogging provides a way to reduce the use of time and money while increasing the number of leads. According to research, B2B marketers that rely on blogs get 67% more leads than those that do not use blogs (source).

Your website will receive more links. It’s incredibly valuable to have an authoritative website link to a blog post because it improves SEO results for you. Companies that blog tend to receive nearly 100% more links to their website than those that do not because the links are about connecting with high-quality blog content (source).

Your network will grow. By blogging, you will gain more contacts that are interested in what you have to say, including talent, investors, advisors and more that can really help take your business to the next level. This network also includes well-known people and influencers that can also share your blog content and convince others to buy what you are selling.

Your competition is most likely doing already this. This means they are reaping all these benefits that you aren’t by not having a blog. Your competition has better SEO, more leads, a wider network, a higher number of links, and most likely more customers than you do just because they have a blog and you don’t.

You will improve many skills. From technical skills to writing ability to marketing prowess, you will gain many valuable skills by blogging that are priceless. While you are learning on the job, this also means you are adding these skills on sweat equity rather than by paying out for specific training. This can elevate you and your company, providing a further competitive advantage. And, as I said before, if you are not doing it, your competition is already gaining these skills through their own business blogging.

You will gain insights into your target audience. There is a lot to be gained by having a blog where readers can post comments and feedback as well as subscribe. This will tell you what people are interested in, why they are there, and what they are looking for. You will also be able to build a database from subscribers and get to know them better. Without the blog, it would be difficult to gather this type of data.

You can be earning money you wouldn’t otherwise be making. Once a blog grows in terms of number of followers, there are various ways to monetize it and turn it into something that offers an additional revenue stream. While this does take time, the result of blogging can be extraordinarily lucrative. I’ve written and talked about seven-figure bloggers so it is possible.

I’ve personally experienced these types of benefits from having a blog, successfully growing my personal brand and drawing attention to the various companies that I have developed and managed. At the same time, I’ve also seen the consequences of those companies that decided to not bother with a blog. They’ve been left far behind others in their industry that have created and managed a regularly updated blog. It’s a pretty slam dunk decision when it comes to having a blog!

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a variety of verticals. Learn about Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

John Rampton is an entrepreneur, investor, online marketing guru and startup enthusiast. He is founder of the online invoicing company Due. John is best known as an entrepreneur and connector. He was recently named #3 on Top 50 Online Influencers in the World by Entrepreneur Magazine.

September 1, 2016

Beyond Keywords: How to Own Your Business’s Name on Google Searches

SEO is a venerable and often-discussed topic among SMB owners, and while SEO is still a critical endeavor, ranking for keywords alone is only part of the battle when it comes to managing your presence on search engines. That’s because while SEO is designed primarily to help your business’s web page rank highly for certain keywords related to your industry, it often does little when it comes to managing searches for the actual name of your business – or your personal name, if you don’t operate under a DBA.

If you think optimizing a term like “Bob’s Plumbing” doesn’t matter, you might be surprised. While the data vary from business to business, any enterprise is likely to find that a substantial portion of incoming traffic is based on searches for their actual business name. Consider for example the retail coffee business. Web searches for the term “coffee shop” are absolutely dwarfed by searches for “Starbucks.” Even though it is trivial for searchers to type “starbucks.com” into their browser, they frequently rely on sites like Google to shortcut things and make the process even easier. And why not? Google has maps, menus, reviews, and more, all at the ready, which give the search more context.

Starbucks is probably a lot bigger than your business, but the example is instructive for any SMB. While the company likely optimizes its websites to capture folks looking for “best brewed coffee,” it also has to manage what happens when people simply search for “Starbucks.” The ostensible goal not just that starbucks.com appears at the top of the results, but that the rest of the content on the search results page is relevant to Starbucks and paints the company in a positive light. Starbucks likely spends considerable effort and money ensuring that pages like this, which are completely relevant to a search for “Starbucks,” do not appear on that first page of search results. (This is part of the world of “online reputation management,” and there’s a sub-industry surrounding this that we’ll talk about later.)

Again, Starbucks is a big company that makes daily news, is publicly traded, and is part of the worldwide zeitgeist. What does a much smaller business, let’s say it’s a local plumber called Bob’s Plumbing, do to manage its search engine presence (again, outside of optimizing for terms like “Cleveland plumbing”)? As with the Starbucks example, if a user actively searches for “Bob’s Plumbing,” ideally the company’s website will be the first result. But all too often this is simply not the case. For smaller and newer brands, the real Bob’s Plumbing may not show up at all on the first page of search results, buried under a sea of competitive and/or irrelevant links. In cases like this, a customer will often simply go elsewhere.

SMBs that want to ensure they don’t lose these low-hanging customers who are actively trying to find them need to take a more holistic look at SEO than just optimizing for keywords. That requires leveraging both your website and social media sites to ensure that any search for your business’s name leads to not just the #1 search result on Google, but a flood of relevant results that dominate the entire first page.

Here are some tips on how to do that.

Start with Your Website…

For most businesses, this is the destination you’d ultimately like to appear as the top result for any search for your business’s name, and naturally it needs to be built with traditional SEO in mind, with appropriate keywords, lots of good content, high-quality images, and a responsive, mobile-friendly design. That’s all a given. Things get muddy when considering the title of the page, however. It’s become popular in recent years to pump everything into keywords, right down to the HTML title of the website (the title that Google uses when it figures out what to name a page in its search results). There are two schools of thought on this. In our Bob’s Plumbing example, he has two basic choices:

Name the site using SEO keywords: Something like “Cleveland plumbing plumber affordable 24-hour emergency service,” capturing the most critical of keyword searchers.
Name the site after his business: “Bob’s Plumbing,” so there’s no confusion as to what business the web searcher has found.

These two strategies serve different constituents, and while it would be foolish for Bob to ignore traditional SEO, the needs of people who actually want to find Bob easily should also be served. The optimal title for Bob arguably combines both strategies: “Bob’s Plumbing – Cleveland’s 24-hour Emergency Plumber,” or something of the sort.

Secondary content on the site (like how-tos or industry updates) should be written to include this same phrasing as liberally as possible – in headings, title tags, and body text.

…But Your Website Isn’t Enough

Optimizing your website is a great first step, but as I discussed above, that only serves to improve the quality of that first search result. If the next nine results are all editorials slamming Bob’s Plumbing and recommending other businesses, all of Bob’s optimization work will be for naught.

The catch is that Google only provides one search result per website, so, for example, you won’t get the top 10 spots on a Google search if you publish 10 blog posts. These are all rolled up into one result. How do you capture the rest of the results on the page? The easiest way is through leveraging social media. You surely know by now that there are dozens of social media networks on the web, and many of them rank highly on Google, even if they are only minimally maintained. As long as these networks are appropriately constructed and managed to some degree, they can provide an easy path to dominating that front page of search results.

Start with the big ones: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn are the critical networks. If your business is very small, or a one-man shop, build two profiles on each network (assuming you haven’t already): One for yourself, and one for your company. Company pages should be named identically to the name you use on your website. If you regularly go by Bob’s Plumbing LLC, then all your social media business pages should be named Bob’s Plumbing LLC. Use your personal pages to link to all of these in turn. Your personal Twitter handle should mention @bobsplumbingllc, and your personal LinkedIn page should link to the LinkedIn business page. Crucially, your business website should link to all of these pages as well. Include these social media links liberally on collateral material, including your email signature, business card, and anywhere else you can think of.

With the big four in hand, consider additional social media accounts that your business can own. Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and Tumblr are all viable networks that businesses can dominate today. Remember though that this industry changes very rapidly. Consider Vine and Periscope, for example, which offer increasingly interesting prospects for business marketing.

Again, when creating these accounts, keep the ultimate goal in mind: To ensure that when a user searches Google for your business name, that the results he receives are nothing but pages that are under your control.

Make Regular Updates

Creating social network accounts is easy. Keeping them updated is the tough part. You’ve heard this advice before, but I can’t make it any easier here. Your website needs to be kept up to date with a timely blog (at least two or three times a month), and your social media accounts all have to be regularly updated (preferably daily). The unfortunate truth is that the more regularly updated your accounts are, the more highly they will rank. At present, it’s especially important to keep Twitter up to date, as Google will surface your most recent tweets and embed them directly into its search results. The more you can tweet, the more you can own that first page of search results.

Naturally, a lot of this comes down to the amount of time you have available to update these social channels. Doing all of this is a full time job, but shortcuts abound, ranging from hiring a credible content marketing firm to help you with your company’s blog to using a tool like Hootsuite to automate your social messaging to as many platforms as you’d like. (I personally use it to manage a whopping 16 social accounts simultaneously.) Tools like the WordPress platform include systems that let you easily funnel new blog posts to your social channels when they are published, and Hootsuite’s “Suggestions” feature lets you discover other people’s content and automate posts based on keywords you specify. With this tool alone, you can create a week’s worth of social posts – all drawn from current content on the web – in about five minutes flat. Supplement this feed with occasional original posts and you should have your social bases covered.

Local Businesses: Leverage Local Search Results

For service businesses with a local or regional footprint (think plumbers, repairmen, auto shops, and restaurants), it’s also essential to “own” your presence when it comes to locally-oriented websites such as Yelp, Google Local, Foursquare, and even sites like YellowPages.com. These sites all rank particularly highly for searches for the name of a business. While these sites aren’t always free (Yelp in particular can be a pricey investment), in a competitive market they can be essential sources of referrals, and having a high-quality presence on these sites (along with positive reviews) can make or break you.

Advice here is in line with anything surrounding local review sites: Encourage friends and regular customers to write reviews and rate your business highly, respond to negative criticism thoughtfully and without anger or vengeance, and make sure all the information about your business is accurate and up to date, including your full and accurate business name, address, hours of operation, and phone number. Adding lots of (professional-grade) photographs will only increase its Google-worthiness.

Crosslink Social Accounts and Media Mentions

One of the key ways to make sure that your business owns its Google presence is to ensure that all of the above sites link to one another. Your business’s web page should have liberal links to “check you out” on Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, and every other site that you have a (positive) presence on. Use your corporate blog to link to each of these locations periodically, as new content is posted or, say, a particularly good review comes in.

Similarly, if you receive a good review or writeup from a local paper or web operation, link to it from all of your social accounts. This will give that piece of content higher marks in the eyes of Google, which will make it more likely to rank on the front page of search results. Think of content like this as an honorary part of your “first page ownership” – while it may not technically be under your management, it is still a worthwhile page to promote.

You can keep track of media mentions through a handful of web services. While Google Alerts isn’t nearly as effective as it once was, it’s free and can surface some new mentions of your business’s name. Also check out alternatives such a Mention or Talkwalker Alerts, which may be more effective.

Leverage Verification Systems

How do you let customers know certain pages are being managed by you? By using the verification systems that many of them now have built in. Twitter for example lets you verify your identity (or your business’s identity) through a simple process which adds a “verified” badge to your profile. Many local listings like those from Google Local and Yelp are simple to “claim” as well. Verifying your social presence may or may not impact your Google ranking (it’s impossible to know for sure since Google’s algorithm is secret), but anecdotally, verified listings and accounts seem to outperform those that are not verified, so it’s probably worth the minimal effort it takes to verify your account.

If Things Have Gone South

This plan isn’t foolproof. Competitors can wreak havoc with your listings by maliciously hijacking your company’s name or buying ads using your company name as a keyword. One particularly angry customer review can also cause a lot of trouble for you, particularly if the person has a vendetta and wages a sustained campaign against you on Twitter or Facebook. It’s important to remain calm in situations like this and attempt to resolve the problem offline, without involving your carefully groomed social networks. If the overall picture of your business is positive, potential customers may well ignore the rantings of another customer, but they’ll be much less likely to forgive you for a vindictive response.

If negative social networking problems develop that you don’t feel comfortable managing – or if they get worse – consider a professional online reputation management service such as Reputation.com or Reputation Defender to get you out of the jam.

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

About the Author: Christopher Null is an award-winning business and technology journalist. His work frequently appears on Wired, PC World, and TechBeacon. Follow him on Twitter @christophernull.