If you want to your content marketing strategy to succeed in 2018, you’re absolutely going to have to write for your customers. That may sound obvious — perhaps even condescending — but the sad reality is that few marketers actually have their audiences in mind when developing content. Instead, they write to make numbers on a machine go up so their boss will be happy. They’re the quintessential “I’m not here to make friends” reality TV contestant. Well, we’re here to set things straight. You are here to make friends, and the machines are not your friends. Algorithms on platforms like Google and Facebook
Watch just about any movie set in the future or a high-tech universe, and you’ll see characters commanding their robotic servants to do their bidding using only the power of their voice. In the future, it seems, buttons are for chumps. Surprisingly, while we don’t have flying cars or that ridiculous looking tiered chess set, voice commands have become a present reality. They may have began as a novelty at first, but they quickly proved their usefulness in real-world scenarios. As voice recognition and natural language processing technology improved, voice command use has increased. We have even created devices that must be interacted
The biggest question when it comes to choosing where to spend your advertising budget is, well, where to spend your budget. The traditional answer is to throw all your money at Google and wait for the results to come in. But there is another player in the search engine field: Bing. So the real question is, "Are Bing ads worth it?" According to a few different case studies, the answer is yes --- sort of. The Lure of Pay-per-Click For the uninitiated, Bing Ads work exactly like Google AdWords ads, meaning they're pay-per-click (PPC) ads that appear alongside search results. If you're new to this kind of
Google's search engine currently recognizes and uses seven different meta tags. Of those tags, the most important ones are the title and description tags. The importance of having unique title tags is already understood by most webmasters. With duplicate title tags, you end up with pages that appear the same to users browsing search results. Having two pages compete for the same terms is confusing to Google and will only harm your rankings. It's also confusing to users who may skip over a page that may have solved their problem and benefited you. When talking about duplicate meta data, the less obvious answers concern duplicate meta
Google dropped a bombshell of a document just a few weeks ago in the form of their Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. The guide is meant to give SEO wonks and concerned site owners a 10,000 mile high view of what they need to have all the needed SEO quality factors present. In many ways, the guide reads like a more in-depth version of our SEO Checklist for 2018 we recently published. What’s most interesting about the guide is how it puts to rest many rumors regarding SEO ranking factors. For instance, the guide clearly outlines the importance of URL length and readability when
“How long does SEO take to work?” It's a question that's heard often, and truthfully, professional marketers simply don't know how to answer it. But instead of saying that, some marketers make vague promises as to when SEO will start to measurably pay off. The truth is that there is no definitive answer. All time frames are estimates based on past experience, but experience also tells us that everything can be variable. Think about it like being on a long roadtrip with the family. Everyone in the car wants to know how long it'll be until they get to where they're going. The driver want to
SEO is constantly changing, yet so many companies stay stuck in the past when it comes to best practices. Starting right now, your Atlanta digital marketing team can pledge to keep up with modern changes and cut out bad habits in 2018 to find greater success. Here are five SEO New Year’s resolutions you can adopt to stick with the times and achieve better performance with less effort in the year ahead. 1. Strategize Content Around Keyword Groups Rather Than Picking Topics at Random Studies from thorough companies like SEMrush reveal that using specific keywords isn’t as important as covering certain topics. In fact, the top-ranked
The rise in search engine use by the average person lead to an explosion in visibility for small businesses. These businesses may not have been able to compete for customer attention through traditional media and advertising. Changes to Google’s search algorithm have made practices that raise search engine visibility all the more important. Because of Google, we all now care about HTMLs security, mobile-friendliness, and creating quality content. Heck, if it weren’t for Google, most of us in the Atlanta internet marketing industry would be out of a job. But are the opportunities Google has created staying the same? Or are they shrinking? Recent changes
Adding just a few quick upgrades to your current digital marketing toolset can make everyone’s lives easier on your team — just in time to serve as a Christmas gift of sorts. It’s the end of the year, and we’re all feeling a bit clocked out counting down the days at our Atlanta digital marketing agency until we get our Holiday break. In these last few days, starting a new project or making a significant change to your digital marketing practices can feel like the last thing you want to do. But you don’t have to write a 1,000 page strategy document to make positive
2018’s almost here, and search engine traffic will continue to play a growing part in nearly all businesses’ success in the months to come. Why? Because the vast majority of people perform research online before making a big purchase, and more often than not they’re turning to search engines to get started. 43% of all website traffic comes from SERP (search engine results page) referrals. And thanks to ad-blocking and things like ad blindness, people are 8.5 times more likely to click on a result that appears organically on the SERP compared to a paid ad. Even small, local businesses have a strong incentive to