Youtech.

[youtechagency]

Step Up Your LinkedIn Game Hey guys, it’s Mike! I’ve got Trent here with me and today, we’re going to talk to you a little bit about LinkedIn. Trent has been doing some great stuff on LinkedIn lately and we’re going to disprove some rumors and teach you some tips. Mike: The first of which people tell us all theRead more

Step Up Your LinkedIn Game

Hey guys, it’s Mike! I’ve got Trent here with me and today, we’re going to talk to you a little bit about LinkedIn. Trent has been doing some great stuff on LinkedIn lately and we’re going to disprove some rumors and teach you some tips.

Mike: The first of which people tell us all the time: my customers are not on LinkedIn. People say that way too often. Trent, what’s your take?

The Facts

Trent: It’s blatantly false. I actually just made a LinkedIn update earlier last week. It’s just not true. There are 260 million LinkedIn users logging in each month. There are over 100 million logging in each day. So 60 million users are senior-level influencers, basically people that would buy products, services, goods, whatever it might be, and 40 million of them are in “decision-maker positions.” So, when we’re talking 60 million plus 40 million, that’s over 100 million people that are actually going to be in a place to buy whatever it is you’re selling.

There are 87 million millennial users of LinkedIn, as well. I know there’s a lot of rumors about millennials, that they’re lazy pieces of crap, whatever…

Mike: No!

Trent: No, not us, of course, everyone else though. But really the important part of millennials is that they’re making purchasing decisions now. And they’re going to be making purchasing decisions over the next five, 10, 15 years. So, as much as you might detest the smartphone generation, if you will, they’re going to be your customers and now is the perfect time to reach them, especially on a platform like LinkedIn.

Of that 87 million that we talked about, 11 million are already in decision-making positions. That’s probably going to double and then triple over the next five to 10 years. Google actually did a research study along with Forrester identifying that nearly half of all B2B researchers for decision-making purposes are millennials already. So again, that’s a place you have to hit.

So now you might be thinking, “Okay, that’s great. LinkedIn is awesome. But tactically, why am I supposed to use LinkedIn?” Besides the fact that your target market might be there, the idea behind LinkedIn is it’s a place to build trust and authority. People don’t buy things from strangers. There’s a reason why only about one percent of cold calls are insert, and of those, it takes eight to 10, sometimes 12, touch points, in order to get your target buyer on the phone.

Mike: I’m guilty of that.

Trent: Absolutely. I mean, I’m guilty of that and I sell for a living. LinkedIn is great because you can see the person’s face, you can see their expertise, you can see what company they work for, and you can see some of their career highlights, if you will. What’s even better than that, though, is it’s a platform for content. And, since the Microsoft acquisition of LinkedIn, they’ve made it a marketer’s dream, a salesperson’s dream, to produce and write content that’s going to resonate with target audiences.

[youtechagency]

Mike: Sup, guys!? This is #WeBuildWednesdays episode 19: How Google Thinks About SEO. For today’s episode, I brought in Eric, our Director of Search Marketing. I kind of need an expert for this one because we’re getting a little bit ingrained with the SEO stuff and Eric knows it a little bit better than I do. How Google Thinks AboutRead more

Mike: Sup, guys!? This is #WeBuildWednesdays episode 19: How Google Thinks About SEO. For today’s episode, I brought in Eric, our Director of Search Marketing. I kind of need an expert for this one because we’re getting a little bit ingrained with the SEO stuff and Eric knows it a little bit better than I do.

How Google Thinks About SEO

Mike: You’ve probably heard agencies say all the time that they’re Google Premier Partners. We are and we’re very proud of that, don’t get me wrong. But a lot of times, there’s a little bit of compensation that comes along with being a Partner. There’s an assumption that you know what’s going to happen with SEO prior to it actually happening and that’s a little bit of a misconception. So, I’m going to turn it over to Eric here and he’s going to go over that with us.

Eric: Yes, that’s what a lot of companies will do. They’ll say they’re Premier Partners and people automatically think they have the inside scoop. But the issue with that is they don’t share anything about organic SEO. You’re kind of in the dark when it comes to that. Even when they release updates, they’re still not telling us what those updates are about.

It’s important to know that the only time we know exactly what’s happening is if you follow Think with Google, follow their search leads on Twitter, and follow some of their knowledge bars online. And that’s really the only time you’re actually getting the inside scoop, which means basically anyone can get that information.

Mike: Yeah, and with that, Google recently released a blog post on Think with Google, and the title was something along the lines of “What Google Thinks About SEO.” We’re going to break it down for you.

So, number one on that list is that for big results, you want to start small. Eric, what does that mean for us?

Start Small for Big Results

Eric: When you go into a website, you don’t need to be changing everything instantly. Start small and see what happens as you make those changes. So, there are four things that Google focuses on. First is Fast. Make sure your site is responsive and as fast as possible. Next one is Integrate. You want to make sure that when a user comes to your site, their experience is great. They won’t have trouble trying to find out how to contact you. Next is being Reliable. Make sure that your site is loading right away. You don’t have any 404 errors or website issues. And make sure you don’t get that downosaur. For those who don’t know, the downosaur is as soon as you go to a website and you see a downosaur instead of a website, that’s the game. So, no, as fun as that is, it’s not great for a reliable experience for the consumer. The last one is Engagement. You want to have something on your site that stands out from the rest that keeps people coming back. It’s beautifully designed, easy to navigate, and the experience feels natural.

Mike: All right, number two, don’t be scared of changes; embrace them. What does that mean, Eric?

Embrace Changes

Eric: When a search engine comes out and they say, “Hey you have these errors in your site,” you have to go into your search console and make sure that your Honeybuns rules and a lot of people walk and they may use no SCM reps or H reps. Those tools are great but you’re not focusing on the biggest one of them all, which is Google Search Console. They are telling you what’s wrong with your site and they’re crawling your site, giving you all the information that you need, so you really want to focus on this. Some of the big things they tell you to focus on is when a search console says, “Hey, you have these 404 errors and these AMP issues,” go in and fix them! As you fix these, it starts to have a giant increase in your SEO. Just like Google said in their blog, they even went in and updated some of their AMP pages and they saw a two-percent increase just in mobile traffic. That’s huge since about 80-percent of all traffic to your site typically comes through mobile.

[youtechagency]

#WeBuildWednesdays Episode 18: Lead Gen With Wilbur You

Generate Leads Via LinkedIn What’s going on, guys!? This is #WeBuildWednesdays episode 18. I’m your host, Michael Norris. This time, we have a special VIP guest. I’m in the Arizona office for the first time. This is Wilbur You, our fearless leader, and today, we’re here to talk to you about LinkedIn Lead Gen. Build a Network, Identify Prospects Michael:Read more

Generate Leads Via LinkedIn

What’s going on, guys!? This is #WeBuildWednesdays episode 18. I’m your host, Michael Norris. This time, we have a special VIP guest. I’m in the Arizona office for the first time. This is Wilbur You, our fearless leader, and today, we’re here to talk to you about LinkedIn Lead Gen.

Build a Network, Identify Prospects

Michael: So, Wilbur actually has been killing it on LinkedIn lately. He’s been posting about our rebrand and all kinds of stuff. As we’ve mentioned in some past episodes, LinkedIn is one of the few places left where you can really get some good organic reach and because of that, we’re capitalizing on it right now while we can. So, I’m going to turn it over to Wilbur just to talk a little bit about LinkedIn and what he’s been doing and then we’re going to talk a little bit about our solutions and what we can do to help you.

Wilbur: Thanks, Norris. Well, just to kind of give you a little background, I’ve used LinkedIn my entire career. I put all kinds of different jobs up and all that stuff, but I never really used it for leads or for selling anything, just for getting the name out there. And recently, Norris came to me and was like, “Hey, you need to use LinkedIn because it has the best organic reach.” So I was like, “Alright, we’ll let’s put together a game plan.”

So we did, and I started posting on it on a daily basis. And I can tell you, just from my network alone, I probably get five leads a day, so it’s been a huge impact. It might not be just, “Here, we need a website. Build it for me.” It’s more of like, “Hey, I have someone that owns a company that needs marketing.” And then it’s a soft reach into that company.

We get a lot of opportunities also. And yes, I do get a lot of sales pitches and things like that, but we do get a lot of insight from people that are doing the latest trends or whatever, so we can kind of keep up with the trends that way. And then we’ve also got a lot of publicity reach with it. So, a lot of people are hearing more about us, but they’re also reaching out, saying, “Hey, we can do a feature with you?” or “Hey, can we get you on this podcast?” or whatever it is, so it’s been really great.

Since I’ve been starting to test it, I started having some of our sales reps test it, as well, and it’s working really well. So, I know recently—and this is not a sales pitch—we just started offering LinkedIn lead gen packages for businesses and business leaders in their respective industries and it really does work. And it’s not something where you have to spend 10 grand a month to get leads, which can be great, but if you don’t have that type of budget, using your organic network is huge and LinkedIn lets you do that.

We used to do a lot of Facebook advertising. I used to post a lot of things on Facebook or Instagram or whatever it was, but that’s really more for your friends or family and things to see. On the LinkedIn network, during the day, everyone is checking LinkedIn, and seeing what’s new and what’s going on, and if you can stay at the top of their head, I mean, it’s huge.

Michael: Yeah, and it’s funny. I mean, you mention it. If we were to suggest this to people a couple of years ago, they probably would have looked at us like we were crazy. I mean, we wouldn’t have suggested a couple of years ago, you know? The game has changed and Facebook’s crazy oversaturated and you can build your personal brand on LinkedIn if nothing else.

Wilbur: It’s the only market where it’s not pay to play. I don’t even have the upgraded version of LinkedIn. I’m not even paying on a monthly basis and even that is only $60 a month, but just organically, I’m getting four or five leads a day. It’s unbelievable.

You always forget about the people that are in your network that might not be in the same industry as you, but they also have a network with someone that you could probably utilize or sell to or help. It works, and truthfully, we do a lot of marketing with Facebook and Instagram, and it’s all great, but it’s all pay to play at this point. You just don’t get the same reach that you used to on Facebook on a company page, where you would post and all of your followers would see it. Now, Facebook is more like, “Hey, we want to feed that advertising out and we kind of want to cater it to your friends or what your likes and interests are.” But LinkedIn is the one that you can do it organically and for free.

[youtechagency]

#WeBuildWednesdays Episode 15: HubSpot Changes Its Stance on Ads

‘Sup, guys! This is #WeBuildWednesdays episode 15: HubSpot changes its stance on ads. Before we begin, I’m filming this one a little bit later today. I’ve turned off my light back here and I’m hoping that this camera angle is okay. I know my face looks a little extra shiny today. I’m not too worried about it and IRead more

‘Sup, guys! This is #WeBuildWednesdays episode 15: HubSpot changes its stance on ads. Before we begin, I’m filming this one a little bit later today. I’ve turned off my light back here and I’m hoping that this camera angle is okay. I know my face looks a little extra shiny today. I’m not too worried about it and I hope you’re not either. Just so you’re aware, I’m wearing my Kris Bryant shirt today, but I am actually a White Sox fan, so don’t judge me.

HubSpot Changes Its Stance On Ads

HubSpot has come out with an article that essentially says that they’ve changed their stance on ads, which is crazy news for anyone who knows HubSpot. I’ll give you some background information.

Inbound Marketing No More

HubSpot started about 10 years ago and had originally come out with the theory of inbound marketing, or they’ve at least coined that term since the theory was around before that. Essentially, inbound marketing is where you attract people to your brand, you engage them with your content, and in that sense, you’re going to get more business for cheaper—HubSpot would say—than what’s known as outbound marketing or advertising, which is what traditional advertising used to be.

Traditional advertising, for the most part, was where you just put everything in everyone’s faces: here’s my classified ad, here’s my ad in a magazine, here’s this really intrusive thing on the side of a bus, here’s a billboard, boom, boom, boom. The idea is that if people see your stuff everywhere, they’re going to buy it from you eventually because your name is just so ingrained in their heads. Here’s a pop-up ad on the internet, that kind of stuff.

So what HubSpot did is they said, “Why don’t you make some blog posts? Why don’t you do some webinars? Why don’t you make some premium content, downloadable content, for people in your field where they can take a look at this stuff and learn things on their own?” So, if you essentially teach them how to do minor challenges in your field on their own so that they look to you as a source of information, that builds trust with them so that they’re more likely to buy from you in the future. You become a trusted brand name and that’s the whole concept behind inbound marketing.

[youtechagency]

What’s up, guys!? Happy Wednesday and welcome to episode 14 of #WeBuildWednesdays. This week’s episode is “Why is my website traffic not converting?” Why Is My Website Traffic Not Converting? Well, let me give you three reasons why your website traffic might not be converting. I’m going to take you through two different examples: one is a pretty goodRead more

What’s up, guys!? Happy Wednesday and welcome to episode 14 of #WeBuildWednesdays. This week’s episode is “Why is my website traffic not converting?”

Why Is My Website Traffic Not Converting?

Well, let me give you three reasons why your website traffic might not be converting. I’m going to take you through two different examples: one is a pretty good website and the other one is not so good. You’ll be able to tell which is which, trust me. I will say I’m a little bit sick today, so if my voice sounds off or if my voice cracks or anything, just don’t make fun of me in the comments…

Bad Content

First up: one reason why your website traffic might not be converting could be bad content. Content is very important and there are way too many websites out there where it’s kind of unclear what they do. Maybe they offer data management services or they have a knowledge center or something like that. But people don’t necessarily know what that means unless they dig into it, and guess what: we have limited time. We’re not trying to dig into stuff to figure you out. So, be clear. Be crystal clear about what you’re saying, tell people exactly what it is that you offer, and quit trying to get fancy and cute with the terms you use. It’s bad for SEO if your page title is like that. No one is searching for that kind of stuff and no one knows what you mean.

Bad CTAs

A second reason why your website traffic might not be converting is because you might have bad CTAs or have no CTAs at all. CTA stands for “Call to Action” and it’s a button on a page that stands out. You can see this especially in the “Request a Quote” button right here. They also have a phone number at the top. Those are good CTAs. They stand out, have a contrasting color from the background, and they’re not red, which is the international sign for “no” or “stop.” CTAs like that are very important and you’re going to need them to be big enough that they stand out from the background.

No Social Proof

The last thing would be bad design or no social proof. Social proof is super important. It’s basically a review of some sort, a testimonial of companies that you’ve worked with in the past. It’s something that tells people that you’re actually legit and you’re not just some website out there that is just trying to take people’s money. Bad design, I think, speaks for itself and I’ll show you a really good example of that in a second.

[youtechagency]

What’s up, guys? It’s Mike Norris, and this is #WeBuildWednesdays. Before we even get started, I have a confession for you. Normally, I knock these out with one take, super-smooth sailing, very easy… I’m on take six right now. Clearly, I am having a rough morning and I don’t know what it is. I think I might have hadRead more

What’s up, guys? It’s Mike Norris, and this is #WeBuildWednesdays.

Before we even get started, I have a confession for you. Normally, I knock these out with one take, super-smooth sailing, very easy… I’m on take six right now. Clearly, I am having a rough morning and I don’t know what it is. I think I might have had too much caffeine. I don’t really know, but I am here for you and we’re going to knock it out. This is episode 8 and today’s question is, “Why is my blog underperforming?”

Why is My Blog Underperforming?

This is a common question. Generally speaking, everyone kind of has an idea of what blogging is, as it’s been around for a while. There are some misconceptions that are out there and some outdated tactics, but for the most part, the biggest thing is that there’s a lot more competition today. A lot more people are blogging. It’s the same with SEO: there are a lot more people doing it than who used to be doing it, so it becomes more difficult and you need to find additional ways to stand out from the crowd.

I have for you three “do’s” and three “don’ts”. We’re going to go through those today, and we’ll start with the “do’s”.

The “Do’s”Do Stick With It

The first “do” is to stick with it and that’s the biggest thing. You’re not going to see results overnight and you’re not going to see results right away. Sometimes, you can take two or three years before you really start seeing any traction with your blog, so that’s really something that you have to stick with. It’s really something you have to keep on doing. You can’t give up quickly because if you do and come back with a new strategy, revamp everything from the ground up again, you’re probably going to end up starting from scratch and it’s never going to work for you. Stick with it and stay on it.

Do Provide Value

The second thing is to always provide value. This is, by far, the number-one thing that you have to do to stand out in today’s world: provide value. Do not just blog to blog. Do not blog because you need to get a blog out every Monday, Wednesday, Friday and that’s the way you’ve been doing it. Do not blog just to put something out there. Blog to give someone actual, real value that they can take home and do something with because, guess what, no one wants to read your blog if you’re regurgitating information from a half-assed version that already exists somewhere else online. You need to actually combine new ideas together or take old ideas and combine them in a new way and provide some actual, real value to people if you want to stand out.

Do Multimedia, If Possible

Number three in the “do” column: multimedia, if possible. I know sometimes it takes longer, but people consume their media in a lot of different ways today. It’s not that nobody wants to sit down and read just huge blocks of long-form content and really comb through that. Some people like to watch videos. Some people like to listen to podcasts because they learn better auditorily. The more different types of media you can provide to people, the more people you’re going to appeal to because then they come to your blog, they see you have a video, and that’s what they like to watch. Then they see that you have an audio attached to it, and if that’s what they like to do, then they listen to that. If they like to read your blogs, they have that option too. For example, to get a little meta on you, these #WeBuildWednesday blog videos that we do, I make sure to provide the video and the text. I’m still working on the audio, don’t have that yet, but in case anyone wants to watch the video, they’re able to. It’s a lot quicker than sitting down and reading it in some cases unless you read really fast. Whatever floats your boat.

[youtechagency]

How Do I Know Who To Target With My Marketing? Alright, guys, welcome to #WeBuildWednesdays! This is episode seven and the question we’re going to answer is, “Who should I be targeting?” Big Businesses: Who Should I Target? This seems like a very simple question, seems like you already know the answer, but there’s some additional information youRead more

[youtechagency]

How Do I Get More New Business? Boring #WeBuildWednesdays Intro What’s up, guys? It’s Michael Norris, back with episode six of #webuildwednesdays. Can’t believe it’s round 6 already. This thing is going fast. The Buying Cycle Today, I want to talk to you about generating new business, which is something that we all want to do, I’mRead more

How Do I Get More New Business?

Boring #WeBuildWednesdays Intro

What’s up, guys? It’s Michael Norris, back with episode six of #webuildwednesdays. Can’t believe it’s round 6 already. This thing is going fast.

The Buying Cycle

Today, I want to talk to you about generating new business, which is something that we all want to do, I’m sure. But before we really get into that, I want to back up just a second and talk about the buying cycle. So, for those of you who aren’t familiar—HubSpot’s got some really good resources on this, if you’re interested in digging in—the buying cycle essentially has three stages. Of course, there could be more, depending on your industry, where you’re at, and what source you’re reading.

Awareness, Consideration, Conversion

HubSpot breaks it down with you more, but essentially, there are three statuses, the first being awareness. After awareness comes consideration, after consideration comes conversion. Obviously, conversion’s where we all want to get. A lot of advertising strategies will focus mainly on this conversion part right here. Google search ads do this a lot. You’re catching people in the moment who are looking to make a purchase at that exact time and that’s a great strategy if you have more of a limited budget. With a limited budget, you don’t really have too much spend to focus on during that awareness stage, but this is really what drives that growth over a long period of time.

Generating Awareness

So how do we generate awareness? What is the awareness stage? Well, to put it simply, it’s pretty much just people figuring out who you are, that you even exist, and that they have a problem. It’s making them become aware that you’re out there and you have a solution to this potential issue that they’re having. Whatever it is, whatever you sell, whatever your service it is that you want them to know about. That’s awareness.

Traditional

Now, how do you go about making them aware? You need to get yourself out there and in any place possible, especially where your potential consumers are. There are a few really good sources for doing this. Obviously, you can go the traditional route, which includes billboards and radio. Those are going to reach a lot of people and get a ton of impressions. Streaming audio is another good way to do this, too.

Google’s Solutions

But as far as the solutions that we really like to see here, Google has rolled out some amazing new features with YouTube and Google Display. You can even combine those with your Google search ads so that when people who have previously seen your display ads search for things on Google, they will then also see your search ads. You can put them in the same audience and then determine if they clicked on your search ad because they originally saw your display ad or your YouTube ad. Conversely, you can make it so that people who have searched for a particular term on Google are then put in a custom audience segment, and those are the people that see your YouTube ad.

Focusing On Impressions

Something to note is that these are not really looking at click-through rates. You’re not really checking your cost per click; those are gonna be very low, but those really aren’t the KPIs you should focus on. You should focus on impressions. It’s important to make sure that those impressions are going to the right people because, let’s put it simply: not all impressions are created equal. Obviously, it’s good that everyone knows who you are, but you really want your target market to know who you are more than anything else.

So, what I recommend is that if you’re really trying to get your new business in the door, the first step, and really the number one thing you need to do, is generate that awareness.

Summary

Use Google Display. Programmatic is another great one. Try it on YouTube, and geofence conferences where people are at. That’s another strategy we’ve been employing from which we’ve seen some amazing results. But really, just get your ads out there. Really cheap, simple ads that get in people’s faces and make them remember you.

Boring #WeBuildWednesdays Outro

And I’m out. This was episode six of #webuildwednesdays and I’m Michael Norris.

[youtechagency]

What’s going on guys? This is Michael Norris and I’m back with episode 4 of #webuildwednesdays. Today’s episode: Google Analytics for business. Do you need it? What’s it for? What can it do for you? Do You Need Google Analytics? Let’s start by talking about what Google Analytics is not. Google Analytics will not tell you individual userRead more

What’s going on guys? This is Michael Norris and I’m back with episode 4 of #webuildwednesdays. Today’s episode: Google Analytics for business. Do you need it? What’s it for? What can it do for you?

Do You Need Google Analytics?

Let’s start by talking about what Google Analytics is not. Google Analytics will not tell you individual user data of the people on your website, which means you cannot find out that John Smith is on a particular page of your website right now. You don’t know if John Smith completed a form, you don’t know if John Smith purchased something, you don’t know any of that. You don’t know where John Smith is. You cannot tell individual user data at all, mainly due to privacy laws. That’s just kind of how it is today. What you can do, however, is track users anonymously, and you can track them in various ways. You can track them by the channel that they came from, you can track what pages they’re on right now (but you don’t know their names) and you can track how they interact with various pages on your site. So let’s dive into this a little bit. What you’re seeing on my screen right here is a real-time overview of the Youtech & Associates site. On here, you can see right now we’ve got three users actively on the site. They are all on a desktop – you can see the total page views per minute and that ticks away just about every minute. Top active pages, these are the pages that people are on; these look like a search, this looks like a search page, this looks like someone working in the backend of WordPress, and this looks like someone checking out an image file. You can also see different locations – where people are visiting, where people are viewing from – so you’ll see you around the Chicagoland area we’ve got a few here. There’s one out here it looks like in India, and that’s gonna happen occasionally, you’re gonna see some traffic like that too. Keywords, if any, are provided from someone who searched something, so right now the person just landed on the home page.

How Google Analytics Can Benefit Your Business

It looks like they came from Google search traffic, so let’s move through this a little bit and I’ll show you how this can help your business and identify things about your user base so that you can leverage that into new marketing today going forward. The first screen I want to show you here would be the home screen. So looking at this, it’s showing us the last seven days of data, and I can sort this in various ways right here if I wanted to get a little bit more granular or look at Y periods of time too. But basically, these are my total number of users who visited in the last seven days. These are how many sessions our site hits, how many times they visited the site. This is their bounce rate. So a bounce is bad, you want that number to be lower. Seventy percent isn’t too bad, but we probably don’t want it to be any higher than that. A bounce means that someone came to your website, didn’t click on anything, and didn’t go through to any more pages. They looked at one page and they got out of there.

Session duration is exactly what you think it is, that’s how long the average user is spending on your website. Generally speaking, longer is better; that means they’re finding your content valuable, or they might be completing a sale on your site and staying longer. Those kinds of things are good. If you see your session duration dip under about a minute, that’s probably not a good thing. Here you can also see, this is basically a whole dashboard look. You can also see active users on your site right now, here you can see what pages they’re on; now, this isn’t as in-depth, that’s another page I was showing you, but it is good. This is sort of a new thing that Google is doing: you can expand this card over here and it tells you different things about different types of traffic based on what Google is seeing, and it’s really awesome. It’s different things that you might not catch on your own, and it’s different things that you kind of have to dig into the data to really find out. But, it just tells you various statistics. So, it looks like Facebook referral traffic – which should be categorized under social media, but occasionally it shows up as a referral – it’s performing worse on key metrics

and as opposed to other types of referral traffic. So that’s something for us to know. If all of our Facebook traffic, let’s say was coming in through this channel, and it was all performing worse, we need to identify why that’s happening and then we can get to the root cause and we can fix that.

[youtechagency]

Boring #webuildwednesdays Intro What’s going on, it’s Mike Norris, back with episode number two of #webuildwednesdays, our weekly video blog at Youtech. Last week we talked about SEO, and I had a super long boring intro for you. But this week I’m not going to do that. We’re going to cut to the chase and we’re going to getRead more

Boring #webuildwednesdays Intro

What’s going on, it’s Mike Norris, back with episode number two of #webuildwednesdays, our weekly video blog at Youtech. Last week we talked about SEO, and I had a super long boring intro for you. But this week I’m not going to do that. We’re going to cut to the chase and we’re going to get to the meat and potatoes of this whole thing, and that discussion is:

What Content Management System (or CMS) should I use?

Now, you might be wondering what a CMS is. Basically, it’s the backend dashboard of your website (what your website is built in). The four we’re going to cover today are Wix,Weebly, Squarespace, and WordPress.

Right off the bat Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace are much more simplistic. If you’re someone who’s just starting out and you don’t really know what you’re doing, you’ll want one of those three. You’re not going to want WordPress unless you’re having someone else build it for you. If you’re building it yourself, those drag-and-drop sites like with Weebly and Squarespace are much better suited for you. You don’t need to know HTML, CSS, or anything like that. You can really just go through the steps and do them yourself.

Weebly

Out of all those, I would say the easiest to set up is probably Weebly. There aren’t too many different templates available. Right off the bat, you choose if you’re going to set up a blog, an online store, or a website. Out of that, you get templates and colors. You customize those, and everything is drag and drop. It’s very basic, and it’s straightforward to use.

A significant downside to this is that it’s not customizable at all, so your site’s going to look like a lot of other people’s websites, which isn’t that great for SEO. There are a variety of different issues which I won’t get into here, but it’s just not the best for SEO.

[youtechagency]

Local SEO Guide

Table of Contents Your Local SEO HackWhat Are the Top Local SEO Ranking Signals?1. Google My Business2. Google My Business Categories3. Photos on Google My Business Page4. Bing Places for Business5. Online Aggregator Directories6. Listings on Review Sites7. Positive Reviews8. Reviews with Keywords & Location9. Reviews with Responses10. Update NAP on Your Website11. Structured Data Markup12. Mobile Friendly Website13. TitleRead more

Your Local SEO Hack

Getting your local business to rank in search results has never been more difficult and is continuously becoming a more tedious task. Because of this, you need to have a Local SEO Guide to help guide your site to the top of search rankings.

Google consistently releases local SEO updates that are changing the way that search results appear. Currently, one of the most important local factors for businesses is showing up in Google’s Local Pack. These are the results that show up at the top section in Google search and that highlight three local businesses related to a search.

As shown in the screenshot, the local pack includes three local businesses and, occasionally, one ad at the top.

This will show up in both desktop and mobile views but can be especially useful for mobile users. This feature allows users to quickly find a local business while identifying open hours, phone number, reviews, location, etc.

Ranking for Local SEO means more than just having a good website and organic content; it means you need to have your site hit many different local SEO ranking signals.

What Are the Top Local SEO Ranking Signals?

Below, we have broken out the most critical local SEO ranking signals:

Google My Business

Google My Business Categories

Photos on Google My Business Page

Bing Places for Business

Online Aggregator Directories

Listings on Review Sites

Positive Reviews

Reviews with Keywords & Location

Reviews with Responses

Update NAP on Your Website

Structured Data Markup

Mobile Friendly Website

Title + Meta Description

1. Google My Business

One of the easiest Local SEO Guide tactics to start with is your Google My Business page. You can quickly claim your Google My Business and start the verification process. This is one of the simplest and most effective ways to start improving your Local SEO.

In most cases, people will find your Google My Business for the first time because of your My Business listing and decide then whether to become a customer.

Claiming your account is easy and fast.

Claim your account

Verify your listing

Add your business information

Once the account is created and your business information is added, it will look similar to this:

Company Profile

2. Google My Business Categories

Google My Business categories are used to describe what your business is and connect you to customers searching for the services you offer.

For example, Youtech’s primary category is “Marketing Agency.” Google may show your business in local search results to people who search for terms related to “Marketing Agency in their area.”

While your category is just one of many factors that can affect your local ranking on Google, it’s extremely important that you enter a Primary category and as many additional categories that your site falls under. Get more information on Google Categories.

3. Photos on Google My Business Page

You can add your own photos and videos help to your Google My Business account to help you showcase your business, products, services, portfolio, and more. These photos and videos are used to help people find your business across Google, including in Search and Maps.

There are a few types of photos you can add:

Logo: Help your customers recognize your business on Google.

Cover photo: Showcase your page’s personality. Adding a cover photo automatically sets it as your listing’s preferred photo. This action doesn’t guarantee that it will populate as the first image for your business, but it does tell Google you prefer to display this photo.

Additional photos: Add different photos to spotlight features of your business that customers consider when making purchasing decisions. Learn more about business photos.

4. Bing Places for Business

Google is the most talked-about search engine, but Bing still claims a decent market share (somewhere around 33%, depending on who you ask.

Make sure you take the time to claim your Bing Places for Business account.

Start Ranking Your Site now!

5. Online Aggregator Directories

Data Aggregators are huge when it comes to your local SEO. These directories supply your data to a wide network of directories and mapping services to reach thousands of customer touch points. These include:

Neustar Localeze

InfoUSA

Acxiom

Factual

6. Listings on Review Sites

Reviews are still a massive ranking factor when it comes to local SEO. Consumers are always looking at company ratings to know whether or not they want to pursue working with, buying, or doing business with you. Some of these review sites include:

Yelp

Glassdoor

Angie’s List

BBB

Google My Business

There are also review sites dedicated to just company categories. For example, Youtech is listed on marketing & design agency directories like:

Clutch

DesignRush

7. Positive Reviews

Getting positive reviews of your company can drastically improve your business’s visibility, according to Google.

Remember, never ask your clients or customers to review you, since this is against Google’s review policies to ask for reviews in exchange for something or set up review stations. You can see all their review policies here.

8. Reviews with Keywords & Location

Believe it or not, the language used by your reviewers actually matters, according to a Local SEO Guide study.

When reviewers use your city or certain keywords in their reviews, it sends signals to Google that you are a trusted local business. This also goes for products and other terms for which you want to rank.

9. Reviews with Responses

Local SEO Guide also mentioned that the number of reviews with a response also contributed to local SEO rankings.

This was verified again by Darren Shaw of Whitespark when he released the findings from his annual Google Local Rankings Survey.

In Shaw’s findings, he stated that reviews accounted for 15.44% of how Google ranks as a local business. This is up almost 5% from 2015 when Google only valued reviews at 10.8% of how they rank a business.

10. Update NAP on Your Website

NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone number. You need to make sure that the NAP information on your Google My Business account exactly matches the information on your website.

You can accomplish this by putting the NAP in your footer of a website or you can make a dedicated contact page for the location.

11. Structured Data Markup

Schema markup is code that you put on your website to help the search engines return more informative results for users. This information goes on every page of your site and is customized depending on what the intended page is about.

There is a handful of ways you can use Schema Data for local SEO, including:

Multiple departments

Hours

Address

Menu

Website

Phone number

You can add this markup on your site by using Google’s guide.

Depending on what you use to build your site with, you may also be able to use a plugin to do this. If you are using WordPress, you can easily add this using the plugin called WP SEO Structured Data Schema.

12. Mobile Friendly Website

Since 2015, when the Google algorithm update Mobilegeddon came out, there has been a massive push for Google’s mobile-friendly sites.

You can use this Google tool to test if your site meets Google’s mobile-friendly standards to make sure your website displays correctly on mobile devices.

If your website doesn’t pass the test, you should consider a website re-design or update to make sure it is properly set up.

Read more about mobile-friendly websites here.

13. Title + Meta Description

Credit: Stephanie Mahnken

Direct Online Marketing

More Than A Map: How Titles And Meta Descriptions Help Local SEO

One of the most overlooked local SEO tactics that we see local businesses failing to take advantage of is optimizing the meta title and description of their most important web pages. This is one tactic that provides a good amount of local SEO value as they describe the content of your web page. If done correctly for local SEO, they usually have a geographic focus. While these two HTML elements are not seen directly on the web page, they can have a big impact since the content is included in search engine results pages (SERPs), as displayed in the image below.

Obviously, Roto-Rooter is a major brand with a footprint nationally, but taking a look at their title tag and meta description can teach a lot to small business owners or regional franchises. The team behind Roto-Rooter clearly conducted keyword research to determine that “Plumber in Pittsburgh, PA,” and “Emergency Plumber Pittsburgh,” followed by their brand name, were all popular keywords to target for their Pennsylvania locations page. A title tag written like the one above will perform better for searches specifically about or related to these terms. In addition to that, it will also increase visibility for searchers who are located near Pittsburgh, PA, and search for only “Emergency Plumber” or even “Plumber Near Me.” Using the geographical modifier “Pittsburgh, PA,” will help this page rank for terms that include the city and state, but they will also help the page rank for keyword phrases searched by residents and business owners in and around the city.

Awesome bonus!

How To Determine The Best Keywords To Use For Your Title Tags And Meta Descriptions

While you, as the business owner, are the expert at knowing what products or services you offer, you actually don’t have to guess what people are searching for! So how could the team at Roto-Rooter find the data they needed to make their title tag and meta description decisions? The first place I always suggest is Google Search Console (GSC), Google’s webmaster tools platform, which is completely free to use and actually provides a wealth of information.

Don’t already have a GSC account to monitor the health and coverage of your website? You might want to push a rush on getting one, as it is a great place to start, even if you are just dipping your toe into local SEO!

When you setup GSC, Google will show you a sampling of what search queries (terms that users type into the search bar when looking for your business) drive the most impressions and clicks to specific pages of your website.

For example, let’s take a look at the Performance Report within GSC for a lawn care company providing services to VA Beach and the surrounding areas within Virginia.

I blocked out the click data for privacy purposes, but you will have access to this data as the site owner of your own GSC.

When sorted by impressions, you can see how many times the most popular queries are clicked on and, when sorted by clicks, you can determine which queries are the most common.

From the above data, we can see that the main VA Beach lawn care location page is being associated with many of the services offered by this company. Beyond that, we can also quickly gather that not only does Google know that they service VA Beach, but that they also service the Norfolk, VA, area as well.  This site owner now has the data to create awesome titles based on how users are most commonly searching for them with no guessing involved!

They may want to consider a title similar to:

Organic Lawn Care Virginia Beach – Natural Pest Control Norfolk, VA

and a description similar to:

Need organic lawn care or natural pest and mosquito control in the Virginia Beach & Norfolk, VA areas? Call {company name} at {local company number} for a free quote!

Best Practices For Writing Title Tags And Descriptions For Local SEO Campaigns

Now that you know where to get the data, it’s also important to know that best practice includes character limits, which can sometimes be challenging.  Titles tend to do best when they are close to 72 characters or 580 pixels, and descriptions do best when they are no longer than 115 characters or 930 pixels. Finally, if you are going to dive in, remember that it is best to have a unique title and description for every page.

While all of the above sounds as if it could be a daunting task, think of it as that many “free” advertising opportunities for your business!

There really is no one way to create meta titles and descriptions and you will most likely need to test a few versions to determine what works best for you. Once you are armed with the data, most modern content management systems (like WordPress) make it super easy to update these important areas of your website.

So dig in, get creative, and start testing what titles and descriptions best help your local pages. Oh, and remember that SEO takes time! Be patient, and give your work ample time before you get results and do additional tests.

Get started on  your Local SEO

[youtechagency]

Use Google Trends to Capitalize on Changing Queries What’s up, guys? Mike Norris here. I’m going to talk to you today about Google Trends. Google Trends is a really great tool if you’re looking for seasonality, opportunities in popularity, things like that. The data can go back quite a few years. You can look at different regions and subregions acrossRead more

Use Google Trends to Capitalize on Changing Queries

What’s up, guys? Mike Norris here. I’m going to talk to you today about Google Trends.

Google Trends is a really great tool if you’re looking for seasonality, opportunities in popularity, things like that. The data can go back quite a few years. You can look at different regions and subregions across the world, and you can see trends and topics. It’s a little bit easier to explain as we dive into it, so let’s just get right to it, shall we?

Trending Topics v. Popular Topics

I’m going to start by searching for Kacey Musgraves. For those of you who don’t know, Kacey just won best album at the Grammys, so right now, she is definitely trending. But, before this, she was… let’s just say she wasn’t trending. I wouldn’t say she’s small-time. She’s kind of well-known, but not super well-known. So, I’m expecting, when I look at Kacey’s trend, it’s going to be like this more recently.

The cool thing about this tool is that we’re going to be able to see Kacey’s popularity over time, her search volume over time, and we’re going to be able to compare that to that of someone else. We could probably compare it to another celebrity most likely. We can do Taylor Swift or someone like that. But we’ll get to that in a second.

Google Trends Tools

Here is interest over time. As you can see, if you look back, this is scored on a zero to 100 basis. Most recently, with her Grammy win, Kacey’s at 100. So she’s killing it right now. This is the peak of her career. In the past twelve months in the United States, which is what we’re looking at, Casey was as low as a two about a year ago. So, you can see, by region, where the most interest is, which is another great thing if you’re thinking about launching a business on a national level. Let’s say that business has something to do with country music. Obviously, Tennessee is huge for this kind of stuff. She’s blowing up in Tennessee, and you can see the other areas where she’s blowing up as well. You can also see related queries. This is actually the tool that Uber used to determine which cities it should launch in based on search volume for particular terms like “taxis” and things like that. So it’s really great.

It’s a Popularity Contest

Let’s compare Kacey’s data to someone like Taylor Swift. I don’t think Taylor won any Grammys this year. I don’t know if she released an album this year, so she probably wasn’t qualified, but I would expect Taylor’s line to be more up here and then Kacey’s going to top her more recently with her win. So let’s look at that. Yep, alright. Taylor’s average is a thirty-nine and Kacey’s average is a five, but more recently, Kacey’s got her beat with a 75-31. You just see the popularity there, along with what’s trending over time. This point right here, this was when Taylor hit 100 and Casey hit a three. This was probably the release of Taylor’s last album, something like that or some other reason she was in the news because Taylor hit a full 100 on this and that’s the high point in the past year.

[youtechagency]

Benefits of Choosing WordPress as Your CMS What’s going on, guys!? Mike Norris here again for another episode of #WeBuildWednesdays. Today I’m going to talk to you about why WordPress is the best CMS but, before I do that, I’m going to introduce you to Lauren, our COO. Now you’re probably wondering why I chose the COO to talk toRead more

Benefits of Choosing WordPress as Your CMS

What’s going on, guys!? Mike Norris here again for another episode of #WeBuildWednesdays. Today I’m going to talk to you about why WordPress is the best CMS but, before I do that, I’m going to introduce you to Lauren, our COO.

Now you’re probably wondering why I chose the COO to talk to you about WordPress because that seems like a weird topic. But we actually have a pretty good reason.

Lauren: I actually started at Youtech as a Graphic Designer and I was a Creative Director for about three years before moving into this job so a lot of what I did was WordPress design and development. So yeah, I’m excited to talk about it.

Mike: One of the first things I think we should probably talk about is that WordPress kind of has a built-in blog!

Lauren: Yeah, WordPress actually started off as a blog. That’s what it was for. A lot of bloggers would set up their account and it was a super easy admin panel that you would log into and really all you could do is blog posts. Since then it’s kind of evolved into something bigger than that and you can actually build out full websites now. So the built-in blog feature is really great.

Mike: Do you think we should touch more on the admin panel? Because I think we’ve seen it evolve so much and now it’s so robust that I think there’s a lot more that people can do with it.

Lauren: That’s fine, yeah. I mean there’s a ton that people can do and let’s be honest: WordPress is not the only CMS out there. But WordPress is absolutely the easiest admin panel for someone who’s not a developer to use. One thing that we really like is that after we build a WordPress website, we can actually provide our clients with login credentials so they can go in, they can make easy text image edits, even change out buttons, without really having to know any code at all. So it’s actually really beneficial post-launch of the project, as well, for all of our clients.

Mike: And I can use it so it’s definitely incredible.

What about e-commerce, though? I know people think of Shopify, Magento… I know Magento is really complicated but what are your thoughts on that?

Lauren: Yeah, Shopify and Magento are great e-commerce choices but the difference with them is they are really focused on the store aspect. That’s what they’re there for. What’s really cool about WordPress is that you can build out a full website with just one small page for a shop if you’re selling something simple like gift cards, for example, by using the WooCommerce plugin. So it’s a lot easier to build off the site as a whole and have the small shopping component as opposed to a Shopify where everything is really product-focused.

Mike: Sure, yeah, and then you’re kind of trying to wedge in all your other pages. What about integrations? Because I know we use a lot of different plugins here, we use a lot of different integrations… can you touch on some of that stuff?

Lauren: Yeah, I mean the most common thing that we use integrations for here is tracking leads. We have clients where we’ve set up maybe a landing page or even something as simple as a contact form and they want to be able to see those leads all the way through. Our solution for that is a plugin called Gravity Forms and it works really well with WordPress. It has a really robust offering and it integrates with essentially everything that you would need, like MailChimp and HubSpot. Those are really the big ones that we’re integrating with, so as soon as someone fills out that form, they’re being filtered into MailChimp into your mailing list or in your HubSpot CRM.

Mike: That’s perfect. One more thing I want to touch on just from the marketing side would be CallRail. It’s the system that we use to track calls, so we switch out a dynamic number in place of your phone number and then every call that comes through there, we have the ability to record it. We can see whether it came from paid search, organic search, direct traffic, social media, whatever it is. So yeah, CallRail is another big one here.

I do have one last bonus question for Lauren while she’s here, since this is the first time she’s been on the show. For those who don’t know, Lauren has an ampersand tattooed on her. She loves ampersands and we used to be called Youtech & Associates with a nice little ampersand in there. We’ve since removed that ampersand. How do you feel about that?

Lauren: Yes, you know, about that, to be able to lose the associates part of the name, I say it’s worth it. Youtech Agency has a much better ring to it for a URL. I’ll live. I’ll get through it.

Mike: This way, people can spell our email address, which is good.

Lauren: I’d say it was a step up.

Mike: Okay, well, thank you!

Lauren: Thank you!

Mike: Happy Wednesday, guys.

Need help getting your CMS up and running? Let Youtech help.

[youtechagency]

What’s up!? Happy Wednesday. Mike Norris here. Today, I’m going to talk to you guys a little bit about chatbots. Recently, we’ve been hearing a lot of chatter about chatbots. We actually partnered up with a company called Drift that I’ll tell you about it a little bit. Saving the Marketing World One Chatbot at a Time If you’re lookingRead more

What’s up!? Happy Wednesday. Mike Norris here. Today, I’m going to talk to you guys a little bit about chatbots. Recently,  we’ve been hearing a lot of chatter about chatbots. We actually partnered up with a company called Drift that I’ll tell you about it a little bit.

Saving the Marketing World One Chatbot at a Time

If you’re looking at someone’s website, and really the only ways of getting in contact with them are to pick up the phone or fill out a form on the site, that’s kind of the equivalent of going into the App Store, let’s say, and having to make an appointment to speak with someone. Or if you call and talk to someone but they’re like, “Well, you have to make an appointment to talk to me.”

A chatbot, on the other hand, is a little bit different. That’s like going into a store, someone comes up to you right away, and says, “Hey, can I help you? Now what can I help you with? What are you looking for?” You can walk them through it. At any point, you can pop in, you can take control of the conversation. So chatbots are really great. They’re nice and automated. They’re almost like an automated salesperson on your website that’s working on the leads that come in and 80 percent of people have recently said that they’re in favor of chatbots. A lot of people think that chatbots might need some work and that people need to improve the quality of their chatbots, but that’s easily done.

Conversational Marketing Partner: Drift LeadBot to the Rescue

So what I wanted to talk to you about today was a chatbot called Drift and it’s more than just a chatbot. I feel bad calling it that because they don’t call themselves that. They see themselves as a “conversational marketing partner” but they’ve got a portion of Drift that’s known as LeadBot and that’s what you’re seeing on my screen right here. So people can come in, they can route the conversations for you if you wanted to route it to a salesperson. It’ll put your salesperson’s calendar in there. They can pick up a meeting on your salesperson’s calendar and will also qualify the lead for you, all that kind of great stuff.

I wanted to show you what it looks like in action because I think that’s probably the biggest decision maker here. So, looking at the Youtech site down here on the bottom, that would be Drift. Here’s my nice little image; I hope you like that. So I click on Drift and boom: here comes Youtech Helper. You always want to name it something like that, not Youtech Helper, but you want to name it so that people know it’s a bot. You want them to know they’re not talking to an actual, real person because that just changes their expectations. So that’s the best practice.

[youtechagency]

Search Engine Optimization & How it Works What’s going on, guys!? Mike Norris here with Youtech. Happy Wednesday! Glad you all survived April Fool’s Day. Today, we’ll be talking to you about SEO. More specifically: what is SEO? I mean, everyone asks that question. It’s probably our most common service that we do here and yet many clients still don’tRead more

Search Engine Optimization & How it Works

What’s going on, guys!? Mike Norris here with Youtech. Happy Wednesday! Glad you all survived April Fool’s Day.

Today, we’ll be talking to you about SEO. More specifically: what is SEO?

I mean, everyone asks that question. It’s probably our most common service that we do here and yet many clients still don’t really know what it is.

To a lot of people, it’s smoke and mirrors or it’s all this behind-the-scenes work. You don’t really know what you’re getting. You don’t know what the deliverables are. If you hire an agency to do SEO for you, all you know is it involves Google and keyword rankings and stuff.

SEO Misconceptions

I want to start out by talking about a common misconception with SEO and that would be pay-per-click advertising or PPC.

A lot of people come in looking for marketing help and say, “Well, I don’t want to do SEO because I have to pay for the keywords for my business and I know the keywords cost a lot of money for my business and I don’t want to do that.”

Good news! That’s not SEO. That would be pay-per-click, so that’s advertising that goes after specific keywords that people would be typing in and it’s very possible that, in your industry, you have a lot of terms that maybe do a really high cost per click.

That might be the case, but SEO is completely different. You’re not bidding on any individual keywords or anything like that. You don’t have a budget, there’s no advertising money that goes into it, and all you do is you pay for the service of someone to perform SEO on your website for you, which will then, in turn, help you rank for a lot of different keywords, not just one or two specific ones.

So, What Is SEO?

So let’s dive in a little bit.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which essentially means we’re trying to make your website look better in the eyes of search engines. I like to describe SEO as the art of making the search engine’s job easier, so think of it that way.

If you’re making the search engine’s job easier and they know that they can trust you as a valid source of information and you’re not going to provide scarce content to the user when they click on your particularly link, they’ll rank you higher.

So, how do search engines do that? How do they determine that you’re a trustworthy source? How do they determine that you know you’re a really good place for this information?

That’s SEO, my friends.

It really breaks down into three main factors. It’s actually quite a bit more than that—there are hundreds of ranking factors—but there are three main ones of which you should be aware.

[youtechagency]

Get Your Tweet On Happy Wednesday, guys! Mike Norris talking to you today about Twitter, or, more specifically, should you be on Twitter? A lot of people think that just because they’re on Facebook, they should be on Twitter. Just because they’re on Instagram or LinkedIn, they should be on Twitter. If they’re doing social media, they should be onRead more

Get Your Tweet On

Happy Wednesday, guys! Mike Norris talking to you today about Twitter, or, more specifically, should you be on Twitter?

A lot of people think that just because they’re on Facebook, they should be on Twitter. Just because they’re on Instagram or LinkedIn, they should be on Twitter. If they’re doing social media, they should be on all social media channels. They should be on Pinterest, they should be on, I don’t even know what else is out there. They should be on almost everything, Snapchat…

It’s not really the case all the time.

What is Twitter?

So, Twitter. This actually comes from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who was recently on the Joe Rogan podcast. He talked at length, probably about two hours, about what Twitter is and what they’re trying to do at Twitter.

It’s all about the conversation, the conversation that’s happening right now between everyone in the entire world.

It’s the platform they can go on and they can voice what’s happening up to 280 characters—I believe they’ve extended it to that—and you could talk about things.

You can talk about the new Game of Thrones episode that’s out (I know I did).

You can talk about SEO or topics that interest you. There is actually a great SEO community on Twitter.

There are a lot of other great communities on Twitter but it’s up to you to find out if those communities that you want to be a part of are on Twitter and if there is a conversation happening.

Is Your Community on Twitter?

So, for example, Game of Thrones. That’s an easy one, right? You know there’s a new episode on, so there’s obviously a conversation around it.

Sports are another super easy one. News, very easy.

With things like marketing and SEO, it’s a little bit different. I do follow people who are really on the pulse of what’s happening and they’re telling the community, “Okay, there’s a brand new SEO update or Google update that just happened. Here’s what we’re seeing so far.” And they’ve got their results and then everyone’s chiming in, “Here’s what I’m seeing with my side.” or “My rankings have dropped off completely. What do I do?”

On the PPC side, you get people who are saying, “Here’s a new feature from Google as how you can advertise.” or “Here’s a new feature that came out over here with MailChimp.”

So, within the marketing world, there are a whole lot of different conversations going on and it’s a great place to be for someone in marketing services like myself.

But, in your particular industry, you should look and see if there are conversations going on that pertain to that industry.

For instance, I think another good one would be legal. Obviously, if there are big profile cases in the particular branch of law that you practice, you’re going to be able to jump in on those conversations and give your take.

Now that probably only works well if you’re working on a more national level. If you’re looking for something very localized, that gets a little bit more difficult because there are less people contributing to that conversation in your particular niche. That’s something to watch out for.

So that’s really what I would look for if you want to be on Twitter.

[youtechagency]

Who Should Be on Facebook Nowadays? What’s up, guys? Happy Wednesday! Mike Norris here talking to you today about Facebook. Should you be on Facebook? Last episode, we talked about Twitter. This episode: Facebook. Now you might be thinking to yourself, “Yeah, I should obviously be on Facebook. There’s how many billion people on Facebook, you know. Obviously, everyone isRead more

Who Should Be on Facebook Nowadays?

What’s up, guys? Happy Wednesday! Mike Norris here talking to you today about Facebook.

Should you be on Facebook?

Last episode, we talked about Twitter. This episode: Facebook.

Now you might be thinking to yourself, “Yeah, I should obviously be on Facebook. There’s how many billion people on Facebook, you know. Obviously, everyone is there. I should be on the platform.”

And, to some extent, that’s true.

But to some extent, you’re not really gonna reach all those people unless you do a lot of things right, so that’s kind of what I’m here to talk to you about today.

The Wrong Way to Be On Facebook

Obviously having a Facebook isn’t a bad thing. It’s not really gonna hurt you just to have a profile but, in some sense, it actually kind of can.

So let’s say you have a website and I visit your website and I’m looking and I’m thinking, “Okay, you know, these guys might be legit. I might want to purchase their product or their service,” and I’m scrolling through. I’m looking for some kind of social proof to make sure that you’re legitimate and I see at the bottom, you’ve got a Facebook icon, and I think, “Okay, I’ll check out their Facebook. Let’s see what that says.”

I check it out and you have 30 followers. You haven’t posted since 2015 and your profile picture looks like ass and your background image looks like ass and I’m like, “Okay, I don’t know about these guys anymore.” So it can hurt you, so don’t do it that way.

The Right Way to Be On Facebook

But what you can do, if you’re going to start a Facebook, is maintain a consistent presence on the platform. It doesn’t matter if you have 200 followers or something. Obviously, that’s not going to generate a lot of business for you, but it will help you in those situations where people are looking for social proof.

Make sure that you have a nice profile picture. Make sure that you have a nice background image and, if you’re really thinking about using Facebook as a tool to drive business, that’s where the advertising comes in.

So, right now, if you decided to create a Facebook out of nowhere, you’re going to have a very difficult time building up an audience unless you have a very passionate group that you’re targeting and you have some excellent content and you’re dedicating quite a bit of time to it.