In my last episode I discussed the 8 elements of an effective business proposal including:

1. Cover Page
2. Objective
3. Scope of Services
4. Process
5. Timeframe
6. Pricing
7. Terms
8. Signature or Acceptance Section

In this podcast episode I’ll go through some extremely important things related to getting your proposal accepted and winning more business.

If you want an easy way to write your own business proposals, please check out Propfire.com.

The post Is a Proposal a Contract? appeared first on Arnie Singer - Digital Marketing and Management Expert.

In my last episode I discussed the 8 elements of an effective business proposal including:

1. Cover Page
2. Objective
3. Scope of Services
4. Process
5. Timeframe
6. Pricing
7. Terms
8. Signature or Acceptance Section

In this podcast episode I’ll go through some extremely important things related to getting your proposal accepted and winning more business.

If you want an easy way to write your own business proposals, please check out Propfire.com.

The post How to Write a Business Proposal – Part 2 [Practical Steps] appeared first on Arnie Singer - Digital Marketing and Management Expert.

Do you want to know how to write an effective business proposal?

In this podcast episode I’ll go through the steps you need to write a winning business proposal.

Here are some of the things I’ll cover:

1. Cover Page
2. Objective
3. Scope of Services
4. Process
5. Timeframe
6. Pricing
7. Terms
8. Signature or Acceptance Section

If you want an easy way to write your own business proposals, please check out Propfire.com.

The post How to Write a Business Proposal [Practical Steps] appeared first on Arnie Singer - Digital Marketing and Management Expert.

What is the Google Ad Grants program?

Google Ad Grants is part of Google For Non Profits, a program created by Google to help non profit organizations. As part of the program Google gives qualified non profits $10,000 per month ($329 per day) in Google Adwords ads. That means a non profit using the grant can display $329 worth of Adwords ads to drive visitors to its website each day. The maximum bid for a keyword or phrase is $2.

Do you need this Google Grant?

Will having an extra $10,000 a month in advertising help your non profit? Just about every non profit can benefit from some free advertising, but some will benefit more than others.

If you represent a cause that appeals to a relatively large audience that isn’t concentrated in a small, very local geographic area, then Google ads can drive visitors to your site who are interested in your cause but who otherwise might never have heard of your non profit. Once they’re on your website you’ve got the opportunity to educate about your cause, add them to your mailing list or even get an immediate donation.

The Google Ad Grant gives you the opportunity to get exposure for your organization that you would otherwise no be able to do without paying for it. Let’s face it, no one wants to spend donation dollars on advertising. With the Google Ads Grant, you don’t have to, at least on Google.

How do you qualify for the grant?

To qualify for the Google For Non Profit program you must be registered as a 501C3 with the IRS (or your country’s respective regulatory body) and have a website. You also need to register your non profit with techsoup.org and be located in the US or other eligible countries.

Setting up Adwords

Once you’re approved (which usually takes a day or 2) you’ll have to create an Adwords account and a campaign. Then you’ll need to choose your keywords and write your ads. Once your ads are approved they’ll start appearing for relevant keyword searches.

Your ads can only contain text (no images) and they’ll only show up on Google search result pages (not on Google’s Display Network). They’ll also show up below ads that are being paid for with real cash (not grants). Depending on your particular cause, there might or might not be paid ads. But even if there are, if you play it smart you’ll be able to spend your budget even with the paid competition.

The beauty of Adwords is that it gives you the opportunity to display your ad at the exact time that someone is searching for your particular keywords.You can easily blow your entire budget each day on getting irrelevant traffic with the wrong keywords. That’s why you want to make sure you choose the right keywords that are directly relevant to your non profit.

Just because your ad shows up at the top of the Google search results page doesn’t mean users will click on it and reach your website. Your ad copy needs to be engaging or interesting enough to convince users to click on it. Google helps figure out which of your ads is working best and shows that one more often. The higher your click thru rate the more Google will show your ad as opposed to your competitors for the valuable ad space.

Each ad received an Adwords Ad Rank which Google calculates based on your bid and your ad relevance. Google takes your Ad Rank into account when deciding which ad to display and in what position (at the tope of page 1 or down on page 3). While there isn’t much you can do about your bid (it’s set at $2), you can improve your Ad Rank by choosing relevant keywords, writing good ad copy and creating a relevant landing page.

We’ve been able to drive close to 9,000 visitors to our own nonprofit IsraelAM using our Google Ads Grant by choosing relevant keywords, writing good ad copy and creating a well designed landing page (which happens to now be our website homepage) with relevant content.

In the screenshot below you can see our ad for IsraelAM showing up in the number one position at the top of the Google search result page for the query “Israel new”, which returns over 200 million results.

Without our Adwords grant, there’s no way we’d be able to rank at the top of a Google search for Israel news, ahead of the many Israeli paper websites and other Israel related news sources.

Here’s another example:

Using your Google Ads Grant

According to the latest statistics, the overwhelming majority of participants in the Google Ads Grant program only end up using about $350 of their $10,000 monthly Adwords budget. One reason for this could be that they are in a highly competitive field with lots of paying customers, which would make it hard for their ads to display in good first or second page positions.

The more likely reasons why most program participants only use a tiny fraction of their monthly budgets is because they are not properly utilizing and optimizing their accounts, keywords or ads — most likely all of the above.

It’s not that they don’t care. It’s because they are busy running their organizations and simply don’t have the time or knowledge to effectively manage their Adwords grant. So they end up wasted an amazing opportunity to advertise for free.

Imagine getting a thousand new visitors to your website each month. Do you think that would help your organization to get new supporters or to simply spread its message and get exposure for its mission?

For just a few hundred dollars we can get you your Google Adwords Grant, set up a campaign, add target keywords, write effective ads and launch your free ads so that you take full advantage of Google’s free gift.

Just fill out the form below or contact us to get started today.

The post Google Ad Grant for Non Profits appeared first on Arnie Singer - Digital Marketing and Management Expert.

In a previous post I showed you how to use Linkedin as a sales prospecting tool to generate new leads. The primary technique revolved around locating your target customers, finding their email address either on Linkedin or with another tool, and then contacting them either via an email campaign or by messaging them directly on Linkedin.

I also mentioned that you can use Linkedin to expand your network and extend your reach through organic posting, sharing and commenting. In this post I want to dive deeper into this topic and tell you exactly how to actually do it.

Linkedin is fundamentally a social media platform, meaning that it’s designed to allow people to share status updates, original posts and other published posts. Therefore, you’d assume that if you post and share interesting content, you’ll have a good chance of getting noticed by people in your own network and beyond. Unfortunately,  you’d be making a wrong assumption.

The truth is that the chances that more than a few people will end up seeing the stuff you post or share are pretty slim. The reason for that is because Linkedin’s algorithms decide who will see your posts, and they are much more inclined to display posts that they feel will get lots of engagement and that will keep users on the platform.

So users who are already getting lots of engagement on their posts, like influencers, are more likely to get love from Linkedin while the overwhelming majority of users get to hear the sound of crickets. In addition, posts linking out to external websites are less likely to be displayed than posts without links, because Linkedin wants to keep its users on the platform.

The only way to ensure that people will see your posts (the “right” people) is to pay for that privilege, which is exactly what Linkedin would prefer that you do. That’s how they make a good chunk of their revenue: advertising.

But this post is about using Linkedin for your business organically — without paying for advertising. And although that’s become increasing very difficult, there are still things you can do to give yourself a fighting chance at getting yourself or your business noticed on Linkedin.

Comment on other people’s posts.

This is what they mean by engaging. Take part in conversations on posts by influencers in your industry, but try your best to add some value and sound intelligent.

Asking relevant questions is a great way to get involved and show people in your industry that you exist. They’ll start checking out your profile and maybe even reach out to connect. You can do the same. In this way you’ll slowly expand your network and start positioning yourself as a thought leader.

Write interesting posts without including links

You don’t always have to be promoting an article or blog post. Just operate within the Linkedin platform. Add value to it by writing stuff that people will actually find interesting, and Linkedin might just reward you with some exposure.

The more time people spend on Linkedin, the more money it can make, so if you can help them do that by creating content that people want to read and engage with, then they will love you for it. Maybe not right away, but eventually, as they see you getting more engagement.

Share content written by influencers and tag them in your post.

Everyone loves recognition and even popular influencers like having their content shared. If you tag them in your post, they might share that post with their own audience. I’ve done this before with success. It does work. No, not every time or even most of the time. But I’ll take once in while.

Sharing Links with CTA’s

If you really want to share an article that you think will provide value to your followers (and beyond), then get some extra benefits by sharing it with a tool like Snip.ly. What this tool does is it embeds the content you’re sharing in an iframe and allows you to overlay your own call to action on top of it.

For example, if you “snip” a NYTimes article and share it, the person reading it (from the snip.ly link) will see your face with a message slide out from the corner of the page with a CTA linking to your landing page. There are different ways to design the actions and look of your snip.ly CTA, but the end result is the same: you share other people’s content but get readers to click through to your page. Cool deal!

Now there’s no guarantee that the reader will click on your CTA, but at least you’ve got a fighting chance. The content provider still gets the page hit and the benefits of getting a new visitor that you sent them, so it’s not like you’re stealing. But some content providers block being included in iframes, so it won’t work on every page (but it does work on almost every page :).

It’s Tough out There

Like any other massive social media platform, getting noticed on Linkedin is a tough game to play, and even tougher to win. You need to spend a huge amount of time in a very persistent manner. Gary Vaynerchuk, social media and marketing guru, recommends spending 10-12 hours a day for at least 5 days a week, for years, to build a brand.

Here’s a very long video in which Gary V teaches how to promote your business in 2019:

Bottom Line

Investing your time and resources in organic Linkedin or any other major social media platforms, without spending money on advertising, is a long, hard journey that might or might not pay off. It really depends on what your objectives are.

If you’re looking to build your thought leadership, then it’s a journey you must take.

If you’re looking to pick up new clients, then you should probably be spending the bulk of your energy on other things like direct cold outreach.

The post How to Use Linked in for Your Business [Part 2] appeared first on Arnie Singer - Digital Marketing and Management Expert.

In this podcast episode I’ll go through the steps you need to take to start a new web project. I’ll use, as an example, my own project that I just launched  — Jewish Wisdom.

Here are some of the things I’ll cover:

1. Choosing a domain name
2. Getting your domain name
3. What makes a good domain name
4. Where will your website live
5. Setting up Google Console and Bing Webmaster tools
6. Getting links
7. Content, Content, Content

The post Starting a new web project from scratch [Practical Steps] appeared first on Arnie Singer - Digital Marketing and Management Expert.

When people refer to social media they usually think of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest (and there may be some others I’m not even aware of). If your company sells directly to consumers (B2C) or is looking to build brand awareness in the consumer market then these social media platforms are the way to go.

There are, of course, major differences between the platforms on how to use them and what demographic groups each appeals to. But in general, each platform has the potential for you to reach a mass consumer audience. I’ll dive deeper into each one in later posts.

In this post I’m going to discuss Linkedin — and yes, Linkedin is a social media platform (and not just a place to post your resume and find a job). If you’re a professional, or simply part of the workforce, you most probably have a Linkedin profile with a few sentences about what you do and your work experience. It’s basically your resume.

You probably view Linkedin as a place to potentially find a new job or opportunity, if the need should arise. If you’re lucky enough to not need to use it for that purpose, you probably don’t, other than checking in once a while to waste some time and occasionally click on an interesting looking link.

All that stuff about job searches is true. But that’s not how you use Linkedin for your business.

How do you use Linkedin for business?

The first step to making Linkedin into a useful marketing and sales tool for your business is to view it as such. Stop thinking about it like a massive job board. From now on you need to see Linkedin as the greatest free opportunity to generate business.

Your Profile

The first thing you need to do to take advantage of this amazing tool is to update your profile. If it looks like a duplicate of your 1 or 2 page paper resume, you’re doing it wrong.

Your Linkedin profile should be your unique selling proposition. It should communicate the benefits that you can provide to potential customers or clients. It’s your opportunity to sell yourself.

It starts with your profile photo. Have one. People relate to other people, not placeholders. They want to see that you’re a real person, hopefully presentable and trustworthy looking.

Next comes your headline. It’s the line that people see directly below your name. This a valuable piece of marketing real estate, because it’s very likely the first, and possibly last, thing that people will see when they come across you in a search or in their feed.

You should not just put your job title in your headline — like manager or VP business development. These titles don’t really describe what you do and how you can help the person you want as a customer or client. Instead, tell them exactly how you can help them.

Here’s my own profile as an example:

In addition to my profile photo, I’ve added a cover image with some text on it to take advantage of the opportunity to expand my real estate holdings on the page. Beneath my photo and name I’ve listed the benefit I can provide. I’ve also included a non profit project I’m working on, so that when I reach out to connect with people related to that project, they’ll know who I am.

You should also include your correct contact info in the “see contact info” area, so that people can actually get in touch with you. I’m surprised how many people either leave it out totally or include outdated info or bad links. Not a very smart sales practice.

The next section in your profile is a section where you summarize what you’ve got to offer in greater detail. Include some concrete examples, some links, and even a video.

The next thing on your profile that Linkedin will show people depends on their degree of connection to you. If they are first or second degree connections, they’ll see mutual connections followed by your most recent articles and posts. I’ll discuss more about posting and publishing on Linkedin, but for now just be aware of this feature and either have some quality articles or posts, or don’t have any at all. You don’t want people to judge you by a really bad article or post you’ve written.

Everyone will then see your job experience. This is the part that’s very similar to a paper resume…but it really shouldn’t be. You’re not confined to the boundaries of a sheet of paper, so get creative and use the opportunity to market the hell out of yourself.

You should also create a company profile page, which people will check out if they’re interested in finding out more about your business (but don’t waste too much time on it).

Connecting

Now that you’ve optimized your profile, you want to get other people to view it. Specifically, you want to get potential clients, customers or business partners to view it. The easiest way to do that is to send them connection requests. I won’t go into detail about how to do this, because you’ve all done it before.

The only thing I’ll add is that the research shows that including a personal note with the connection request greatly increases the chances that the person will accept. The note should be short and NOT a sales pitch. If you share mutual contacts or interests, you can use those as a reason to connect. Or think of another NON SALESY excuse for why you think it would be an awesome idea for this person to connect with you. But again, keep it short and to the point.

Sales Prospecting with Linkedin

Let’s cut to the chase. The real reason you’re reading this is to find out how to use Linkedin to get new clients or customers. Sales prospecting.

If you’re looking to sell to a mass consumer market, like I said at the beginning of this post, you should focus on Facebook, Instagram, etc.

But if you are selling B2B and you can identify the customer personal of the person you’re trying to sell to, then Linkedin is the right place for you to be working your magic.

Now from here on in I’m going to viewing Linkedin as if it was exclusively a sales prospecting too. That’s not to say that you can’t use Linkedin as a networking tool to simply expand your business network, get involved in new ventures, or try to find a new job. You absolutely can.

But for our purposes here, I want you to focus on Linkedin as a sales prospecting tool, period.

Customer Persona

Before you can do any sort of sales prospecting you must have a clear picture of whom you’re selling to. The fancy term for that picture is a “customer persona”. It should be as detailed as possible. At the very least it should have your target’s job title, geographic location, industry, company size (or the specific name of their company). If you can’t create a customer persona then you’re not going to be able to use Linkedin effectively for sales prospecting.

Let’s look at an example:

Say you sell enterprise cyber security software that costs $25,000 per license. Let’s say you’re ideal customer is in the banking or financial industry. And the person you’re trying to reach is the Director of Cyber Security (I don’t know if that’s an actual title). You want to target the US.

Searching

Ok, you’ve got a customer persona. Plug those criteria into a search (you might need a premium account depending on how specific you want to get, since the free account only has a few possible search criteria to choose from. But there are ways of circumventing that by including a boolean search string in the keywords field).

Linkedin will return a (hopefully) long list of profiles that fit your search criteria. If the list is too long you can narrow it down by geographic location.

Contact

Now that you’ve got your list, you can either try to get their email addresses and reach out to them via email marketing or you can reach out to them directly on Linkedin either with a connection request or inMail.

Here’s a video with the advantages of using email marketing:

There are tools you can use to automate and facilitate parts of this process (Dux-Soup, and various email finders), but there’s still going to be a good deal of manual work involved.

This strategy of direct outreach is, well…the most direct and, I think, efficient and effective way of sales prospecting using Linkedin.

Posting

In addition to direct outreach, you should use Linkedin to build your authority (thought leadership) by publishing or sharing informative content relevant to your expertise. The sad truth is that very few people will most likely see your posts (which is the same problem on your social media platforms). But if you write really good stuff and work on letting people know, and you get lucky, you might actually start getting noticed.

The hope is that at some point a potential client will stumble across one of your masterpieces and decide to contact you. Inbound marketing. It does happen.

But leaving the inbound hopes aside for a moment, it’s important for you build your thought leadership on Linkedin because when you do reach out to potential clients or customers, they’ll check out your profile and content — and the more impressive your are, the better chance you’ll get of landing their business.

Paid Ads

Yes, Linkedin sells PPC ads. Expensive ones. If you have cash to spare you can try them in addition to your sales prospecting search and contact process. But PPC is beyond the scope of this post.

Bottom Line

Linkedin is THE social media platform for b2b companies to use as a sales prospecting tool. So give it a try and see if it works for you.

The post How to use Linkedin for your B2B business appeared first on Arnie Singer - Digital Marketing and Management Expert.

In my last post I gave a quick intro to the basics of SEO along with some practical tips you can implement on your own website to get it indexed by Google and appearing in your local search results. That might even be all you need if you’re exclusively targeting your specific local market.

But if you’re looking to be found by a larger target audience located outside of your immediate locality, then simply applying the SEO basics probably won’t help you rank on page one (or even page 2 or 3). The reason for this is a combination between competition and time.

Competition

If your business is in a competitive market, and your competitors are also investing in SEO, then how you rank in Google search is going to be directly related to what they do. Even if you try and copy exactly what it is that your top competitors are doing, you face the challenges of time and resources.

Time

Assuming that your competitors have been investing in SEO for a while now, they’ve had the opportunity to acquire links, possibly a great many. Even if they haven’t gotten much link authority, the very fact that they’ve had their website up and running could be a major advantage, especially if you are just starting up. That’s because the data shows that Google gives preference to older domains. Sort of like good wine or beef — the longer it ages the better it becomes.

All other SEO factors being equal, a new domain will have a hard time competing against one that’s a few years old. But all SEO factors are often no equal, and there are ways to beat those older domains — but it takes resources.

Resources

In order to rank higher than your competitors you need more authoritative links and better content.

You’ll notice that I said more “authoritative” links. When it comes to links, it’s not just a numbers game. Google is looking at the authority of the website that’s linking to you, because that shows Google how trustworthy and authoritative your site is. In other words, one link from the Wall Street Journal is going to be worth hundreds of links from low quality or unrelated sites. Having links from authoritative sites in your specific industry is huge, and can significantly boost your site in the rankings.

But getting those links is not easy.

• It requires building relationships with reporters and influencers who might, one day down the road, consider including your company in an article or blog post, along with a link.
• It requires creating content that is so informative that other writers feel compelled to link to it in their own articles. Of course, you’ll need to let those writers know about your content and persuade them to use it.
• It requires building a reputation for thought leadership in your field, so that you can get other website owners to allow you to guest post on their site (thus getting a link back to your own).

Relationship building and content creation demands a significant investment in time and resources. And if your competitors are doing it too, then it’s even tougher and more resource draining.

But Wait…

All this negative talk doesn’t mean you shouldn’t invest in SEO. You absolutely should, because your potential customers are using Google to search for solutions every day. The chance of driving some of them to your site is worth the effort.

But if you want, or need, to see immediate results, then SEO is usually not the strategy to put all your money on because it’s a long term process. I believe that it can eventually pay off big time, but you have to be able to wait for it to happen and continue working on it until it does.

For short term results, your best option lies with paid advertising either on Google search or Linkedin or Facebook, depending on your business and target market.

The post Invest in SEO, But Don’t Expect Immediate Results appeared first on Arnie Singer - Digital Marketing and Management Expert.

SEO is that magic term that you’ve heard will unleash the flow of traffic from Google to your website. Take the SEO pill, sit back and watch the customers roll in. Not. At least not the magic part (or the pill). But SEO is important in getting Google to give you the love I know you deserve, so let’s take a closer look at what it actually is and how you can implement it.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In other words, it is the process of optimizing your web or mobile content to allow Search Engines to find it and to convince those search engines to display it in their search results above all other relevant content.

How does SEO work?

Let’s say a person is looking to purchase custom kitchen cabinets. He types in “custom kitchen cabinets” in Google (or another search engine — the principles are pretty much the same for all, but since Google has over 90% of all searches, we’ll focus on them exclusively). Google has their minions of “spiders” crawling every corner of the web to create the most useful index of available content they can. When you type in your cabinet query, Google displays what they consider to be the most relevant answers from their index, ranked in order of relevance.

Google decides how to rank its search results based on its own proprietary algorithms, which they do not reveal. But Google has given us guidelines as to what they like (and don’t like), and lots of statistical tests have been run, which in total give us a pretty good idea of what we need to do to get Google’s positive attention. It’s called SEO.

Now back to our cabinet example. The first thing Google showed me when I typed “custom kitchen cabinets” are ads.

Yup, this is how Google makes billions of dollars a year. Each time someone clicks on an ad, the advertiser pays Google an amount of money. It’s called pay per click (PPC), and the price of a click is determined based on a competitive auction. The more competition for the particular keyword, the higher the price.

The “custom kitchen cabinets” keyword phrase happens to run around $5 per click. Some keywords can cost as much as $47 per click (mortgage, attorney). That seems a lot for a click, but it really depends on the price of the product you’re selling or even more so, on the lifetime value of a customer. We’ll talk a lot more about this in a dedicated post about PPC.

Once you get past the ads, you’ll see Google’s local listings along with a map.

This is where you’ll find results based in your local area. You’ll see the top 3 on the first page and a longer list by clicking on “More places”. If you have a company, it should show up in Google’s local listings when you search for your related keywords.

For example, when I type in “digital marketing agency” from my home (which is about 1.5 miles from my office), Onrush Digital Marketing is #1 in the organic listings (the first listing is an ad).

Now, even if you don’t do anything, Google will try it’s best to find your company and list it. You don’t even need a website. But you obviously have to be somewhere out there in the web to get found. The most direct and effective way to let Google know you exist and get included in your local listings it to create a Google Business Page. If your company has been around for a while, Google might already have created a page for you, which you’ll need to claim and update with your own copy and images.

Ideally, you’d like to see your website listed in the organic results, which appear beneath the local listings box. Here’s how those results look in our “custom kitchen cabinets” example:

You’ll notice some familiar big box names like Homedepot, Lowes, HGTV and Costco. These huge websites are usually almost impossible to beat, because they have massive “authority”, tons of inbound links and content (we’ll get into why that’s important in a minute).

But you’ll also notice that Google has thrown in a couple of local companies, because it knows where my query is coming from. For instance, suburbancabinet.com, which is second to last on the list is probably on page #1 ahead of Costco simply because it’s located close to where my computer is right now. The first organic result on the list is also located not that far away, in NY.

You can see the importance that location plays in Google’s algorithm. That’s because Google is looking to get you the most useful information relating to what you’re searching for. And if you’re searching for “custom kitchen cabinets”, Google feels it makes the most sense to show you results that are near you.

The SEO you need to do

So what SEO do you need to do to get your website listed on page #1 of Google?

If I could guarantee you a spot on page 1 every time, I’d be a very wealthy man, and probably very hated by Google. All I can do is give you the best SEO practices that you can apply to your site right now and pretty much guarantee that if you ignore them all, you probably won’t hit the top of page 1.

Here are 5 main factors that play a role in SEO:

1. Content
2. Onpage
3. mobile
4. speed
5. Links

Content

People search for keywords, and Google searches for content that contains and relates to those keywords. In order to rank (and get displayed) for those keywords your website content must contain them. But simply stuffing those keywords in nonsensical sentences onto your page isn’t going to do the trick (as it did in the “old days”). That’s called “keyword stuffing” and it could get you penalized by Google.

Your content must not only include the keywords you are targeting, but it must be relevant and informative. Google is looking for the most relevant content that will answer its user’s query. The better your content does that, the better chance you have of ranking highly for it.

It’s important to bear in mind that you are competing with every other website out there that is also trying to target the same keywords as you are. So even if you’re writing great content, your competition might be writing even better content (same goes for links).

Onpage SEO

When applying SEO to your webpage there are a few important items to include:

1. Title tag

   Hover your curser over the browser tab of your page and your see words. This is your Title tag. If it says “Home” or the name of your company, you need to fix it. Your title tag should be a phrase describing what you do that includes the keywords you are targeting. It is one of the primary things that Google will look at when trying to determine what your page is about. That’s why “Home” isn’t going to help you much. And unless someone is specifically searching by typing in the name of your company, neither is your company name.The title tag is usually the first thing I look at to determine whether a website has been built by someone who has a clue about SEO. I have to admin, it makes me joyous to see “Home” because it means that I can reach out to the company and offer them my SEO services.

2. Header tags

   There are several tags in the html code of your webpage that are called header tags. They indicate the degree of importance of the text they surround. When Google sees a line of text surrounded by an H1 tag, it assumes that the text reflects the main focus of the rest of the page.The SEO way to “mark up” a page is to wrap an H1 around a phrase containing your target keywords, and then wrap H2 tags around related keywords, and so on down the line. There should ONLY be one H1 tag on a page. No, your H1 should not be around the phrase, “Welcome to our homepage”. In our cabinets example it would ideally contain the phrase Custom Kitchen Cabinets.

3. Description

   The description tag in the code of your webpage contains the text that Google displays in the search results for your listing. Google will often bold the keywords that are part of the user’s search query, which is why you should include your keywords in your description. The description will also play a big part in convincing the user to click on your listing, which will increase your click thru rate and make it more likely that Google will show your page again.

4. Image tags

   Every image on your page should have an “alt” tag containing words describing the image that preferably include your keywords. Google doesn’t read images (yet), so without the “alt” tag you’re wasting an opportunity to share your content with Google.

Mobile

As we discussed in this previous post, Google judges your site based on its mobile compatibility, so you MUST make sure that your site looks awesome on mobile.

Speed

Google takes the speed of your website into account as a ranking factor. That’s because sites that load quickly provide a better user experience than the ones that make you site and wait for them. Users have little patience for slow loading sites and tend to “bounce” when they encounter one.

Links

Inbound links from authoritative websites are a primary ranking factor because they tell Google that your site has reliable information worth sharing (and trusting). Getting these links is no easy task. It requires writing amazing content and building relationships with the authoritative folks in order to get them to link to it.

At the very least, however, you should get inbound links from major directories and social media sites. There are services that can do this for you for a small fee.

Local SEO

Remember we spoke about Google’s local listings? Well, the only way Google will know that you’re local is if you tell it your location. You should have your company name along with your address and contact info in the footer of your website, so that it appears of every page of your site. It’s better if you add schema markup, but Google will find it even if you don’t.

[By the way, there’s no such thing as submitting your site to the Google directory in order to be indexed. Google does it automatically.]

Final Words

SEO contains various elements and is a process that usually takes time to show results. It’s worth getting started asap. To help you do that I created a brief tutorial showing you how to implement some of the basic SEO elements on your own website today. Click here to watch it.

The post SEO Basics: How to Rank Your Company in Google [Practical Tips] appeared first on Arnie Singer - Digital Marketing and Management Expert.

Unless you’ve been hibernating for the last few years, you already know that the majority of internet users are searching, finding and viewing stuff on their mobile devices. Because of that, Google has decided to make mobile usability a priority when ranking websites. In other words, if there are two websites that answer the same search query, Google will show the one that is mobile friendly first — “Mobile First Indexing“. That could make a huge difference to your business if you’re trying to drive potential customers from Google search.

So now that we’ve established the importance of mobile, let’s get back to our discussion about whether you need a mobile site or app for your business. To recap, in my last post I discussed how to determine if you need a website for your business. The answer was that it depends on your business, your business objectives, target market and competition.

Assuming that you’ve done the analysis and decided to build a website for your business, the next question you need to answer is what to do about mobile. How are you going to accommodate the 50%+ users who will be viewing your website on a mobile device?

There are several options:

• Responsive Website
• Mobile version of website
• Native smartphone application

Responsive Website

Responsive design means that your web pages will look good on devices of different sizes. The same page will look good on a laptop, ipad and iphone. The way that you accomplish this is by making the elements on your web page scale, and by hiding and displaying elements, based on the size of the browser that is rendering it. The actual coding involved in making this happen is beyond the scope of this post and, frankly, probably not something you’re very interested in knowing.

The important thing to understand is that a responsive website will look good on mobile, and thus satisfy users as well as Google. Therefore, when you build your website, it’s imperative to make sure that you make it responsive.

Building a responsive website is pretty standard these days, especially if you use WordPress, Wix, Sqaurespace or any other platform with professionally designed themes or templates. But surprisingly enough, I still see plenty of websites that are not mobile responsive.

There could be several reasons for this:

1. You (or your designer) did not properly utilize the built in settings for responsiveness included in the theme you’re using.
2. You should either hide or display a mobile compatible version or certain elements on your web page. You haven’t done either.
3. Your web page has a custom design that simply doesn’t work on mobile. In this case you’ll have to either modify the design or create a mobile version it.
4. You haven’t even bothered to view your website on phone. If you did you would have immediately noticed that your website sucks on mobile, and fixed the problem.

Before you build a site make sure you or your web design team know that it MUST be responsive. If you already have a site, take a look at it on mobile — and then fix it.

Mobile Version of Website

In most standard websites you”ll be fine using the same site for both desktop and mobile by using responsive design. There are, however, cases where you’ll need to create a full mobile version of your website.

Here are a few possibilities:

1. You already have a huge website with hundreds of unique pages that would need to be updated to be made responsive. In this case you can either modify each page, which could end up breaking the site as a result of human error (which happens quite often) OR you can simply design a mobile friendly site from scratch and import your content.
2. You want to show your mobile users a great deal of content that’s different from what you’re showing your desktop users. Why would you want to do that? Well, maybe your analytics is showing that your desktop users are all middle age and up and your mobile users are millennials. Or you know that users speaking a specific language are usually only viewing your site on mobile, and you want to create a mobile site in that language.
3. You have separate teams in different locations maintaining each respective site.

Building a separate mobile site is at least double the work (and requires double the maintenance) but it does give you the freedom to be super specific in your targeting and create the best experience possible for each respective device.

Native Smart Phone App

When I brainstorm new business ideas with my wife, she always will throw out ideas for apps. “How about an app for …..” , to which my response is usually something like, “why does it need to be an app?”

The “app” usually referred to by people is a native iphone or android app (depending on who you’re hanging with). A native app is a software program developed for a specific device, which takes full advantage of the elements of that devices operating system. It is downloaded by the user onto his or her personal phone, so it does not require wifi to use. And it can access and integrate with other phone elements such as phone, photos and contacts.

If your website needs to integrate with a mobile device, then you should definitely consider developing a a native app. Just bear in mind that it costs a heck of a lot more to develop a native app — at least a custom one. So if your website is primarily informational, then you’ll probably manage very nicely with a responsive site or a mobile version.

But if your application needs to track your user’s location and access the phones camera (for example), then a native app is the way to go. Also, if speed is of the essence, then a native app will be much better, since it does not need the internet (wifi) to work.

Example: Dating App

A great example of a business that might need a native app is a dating site.

Before the advent of Tinder, most dating sites were websites. Then the Tinder app came along and introduced the swiping feature, which is a feature of the smartphone. It also tapped into the phone’s GPS and let you find matches around you.

While people still use dating websites, way more use Tinder and other native apps. In the younger demographic, most use the apps exclusively because of the convenience and the swiping and GPS features. You just can’t beat the swiping!

So if you’re planning to launch a dating business, you pretty much MUST have a native app, unless you’re going for the senior citizen crowd (which might actually not be a bad idea — and plenty of people are already targeting that demographic).

Bottom Line

To determine what kind of mobile presence you should create, analyze your business objectives, target market and competition. If you are primarily informational, you can stick with your original website, as long as it’s mobile compatible. Or you can create a separate mobile version.

If your business objective and target market requires a native app, there are ways of getting one built which will not break your bank. For basic apps there are off the shelf app builder solution like Shoutem and Appypie that charge a relatively small monthly fee, where you can get a basic app onto the iphone app store for around $30 per month.

Of course if you want something custom and sophisticated you’ll need to invest in an app developer, which could run you from a few thousand to, well…the sky’s the limit. It all depends on your specs and the developer you choose.

The post Does Mobile Matter to Your Business? [It Should] appeared first on Arnie Singer - Digital Marketing and Management Expert.