016 Holly Miller Talks Twitter (plus new job postings!)

holly millerGuest

Holly Miller (@millertime_baby) is a Senior Marketing Manager at an online marketing agency called The Search Agency based in Los Angeles, CA. She has experience as an SEO account manager and now is a leader in the marketing side as well. She is an alumnus of Chapman University with a degree in PR and Advertising and was recently appointed to the Chapman50.

Company

The Search Agency is an integrated online marketing firm helping marketers make better decisions through the use of data. From Paid Search (SEM), to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and Consumer Experience (landing page optimization, conversion path optimization), The Search Agency offers services in Display Media, Social Media, and Comparison Shopping Management to maximize the effectiveness of integrated online marketing campaigns. It is one of the largest and fastest growing search marketing firms, having been named a top-five independent U.S. search marketing agency by Advertising Age.

Quotes

“85% of people will feel more connected to your company if you get them to follow you on Twitter.”

“Your followers are 47% more likely to visit your website than those who don’t follow you.”

“Followers are 72% more likely to purchase from you than non-followers.”

Story

Holly Miller shares her experience at the IMPACT 14 conference. From great speakers to valuable new content to live tweeting, Holly reveals her thoughts on the benefits of engaging with other thought leaders and how to capture “tweetables” that speak to the essence of what a presenter is saying while simultaneously catching the attention of social media. Doing this effectively garners you more followers and more engagement. In addition to industry conferences, Holly gives us a peak into the weekly thought leadership meetings she is a part of and ways marketers can stay on the pulse of important trends and industry changes.

Show Links & Social

Holly Miller: [social_link type=”linkedin” url=”https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=28986965&authType=NAME_SEARCH&authToken=sIGZ&locale=en_US&srchid=254187611425944115315&srchindex=1&srchtotal=1&trk=vsrp_people_res_name&trkInfo=VSRPsearchId%3A254187611425944115315%2CVSRPtargetId%3A28986965%2CVSRPcmpt%3Aprimary%2CVSRPnm%3A” target=”on” ][/social_link][social_link type=”wordpress” url=”http://itsmillertimebaby.com/” target=”on” ][/social_link] [social_link type=”twitter” url=”https://twitter.com/millertime_baby” target=”on” ][/social_link]

The Search Agency: [social_link type=”linkedin” url=”https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-search-agency?trk=company_logo” target=”on” ][/social_link][social_link type=”wordpress” url=”http://www.thesearchagency.com” target=”on” ][/social_link] [social_link type=”twitter” url=”http://twitter.com/thesearchagency” target=”on” ][/social_link]

IMA Network: [social_link type=”linkedin” url=”https://www.linkedin.com/company/internetmarketingassociation” target=”on” ][/social_link][social_link type=”wordpress” url=”http://www.imanetwork.org” target=”on” ][/social_link] [social_link type=”twitter” url=”https://twitter.com/IMA_Network” target=”on” ][/social_link]

Dominick Sirianni: [social_link type=”linkedin” url=”http://www.linkedin.com/in/domsir/en” target=”on” ][/social_link][social_link type=”twitter” url=”http://twitter.com/domsir411″ target=”on” ][/social_link] Email

Interviews Mentioned:  005: Christoph Trappe   015: Darian Shirazi   017: Darian Shirazi   018: Brian Wong

All podcasts:  itunes   Stitcher

 

Local SEO for Your Business

With Google’s new Penguin updates, local is making bigger inroads into the Google SERPs. Local SEO is relevant for a business with a local presence requirement, whether you are a lawyer, a dentist, a doctor, a restaurant or a painter.

Local vs. National SEO

Local and national SEO share a large number of factors in common such as on-page, links, social, indexing, etc. But local does have a few differences. For local, you want to claim your Google profile, which is the page that will show up in the local search results. Next, you need to get a citation. A citation is a website that uses your name, address and phone number – all on the same page. Make sure that your details are the same everywhere. Changing your address or zip code could confuse Google. Third, generate reviews. Lots of reviews. The more, the merrier. The quantity and quality of the reviews for your page are one of the most important local ranking factors.

On-Site Optimization

Make sure name, address and phone numbers are on every page of your site, in the same format as your Google local listing. Use schema markups to better help search engines identify and show your location. Also include a KML file on your site. While some of this may seem redundant, it never hurts to send as many legitimate signals as you can.

Maximizing Local SEO Rankings

The fundamental way to do this is to increase citations, overall number of reviews and positive reviews. At this point, local results are quite Google specific. So, the more you can do in terms of  getting a better page for your business, the better your outcome is going to be. Ask clients to leave positive reviews and to +1 your page, keep it updated and keep linking to it. Location being close to the city center helps, since Google assumes you are close to city center when doing a search.

Getting Local Search Results

Go to Google place to sign up for your listing and complete all the details. This includes adding images, videos and all the other information you can share about your business. But don’t get too “SEO” on this listing. You don’t want to over-optimize for SEO and make it look unnatural in any way.

Sign up at Yext. They will send out your information to other major local platforms in the same format. Each of these will become a citation, which is hugely valuable. Next, use a tool like KnowEm to get your social profiles. Yext and KnowEm do have a charge for setting up profiles, but it is well covered in terms of returns. Invest your money as you feel comfortable for your budget and start with Yext.

Along with making your profiles, don’t ignore SEO on your website. Make sure that at least some of the links you build towards your website contain your target city/state combo. And, although it isn’t entirely correct to encourage people to go to your profile and write reviews, do suggest that if your customers are happy with you they leave a review at your pages.

Tools for the Task

WhiteSpark provides services for locating local citation sources, and you can try them out. In case you are doing some local guest blog posts, you can add your bio into the post data and generate some citations from it.

Ways to Get Reviews

Let your customers or clients know that they can rate their experience with you on your Google Places profile. Have logos up in your windows or in your office showing the places where people can leave reviews. Include your profile links in your email communications (particularly in follow-up emails after a purchase or visit), direct mail and anywhere else you can think of to get in front of customers. Of course, if you want poitive reviews, you need to provide a product and/or service that warrants them.

And while this should go without saying, DON’T BUY REVIEWS. While Google doesn’t always catch fake reviews, they are working constantly to get better at it. Yelp, on the other hand, errs on the site of extreme caution and often banishes overly positive reviews.

Outsource or Self-Promote

Depending on what your budget is, you can make a few choices. From the tips above, you may be able to do a large part of this on your own. Or you can hire an agency that will take the pain away for you. While we can’t specifically make a recommendation for an agency, keep in mind that typically with SEO, what you pay is what you get. There are a large number of agencies, but as a start you can check the WhiteSpace service at $16.

Keep building up reviews and citations for your business over time, and you will rapidly see the number of visitors coming to your local business go up.

Avoid Out-of-Date SEO

To create good website content, you may try to follow all the usual SEO techniques to get a top ranking in search engines. But even after implementing all the SEO techniques you know, back linking the website with other popular sites, social networking sites, etc., you may see that your website rankings are not appearing in search engines. There can be many reasons behind this problem, among which using outdated SEO techniques is most important.

While learning about SEO, you might have followed websites that talked about older search engine optimization guides and tips which were once highly popular. But with the flow of time, technology is getting upgraded everyday and so is SEO. There are certain things that you always need to consider while optimizing a website for search engines.

  • First and foremost, you must always remember that while creating a website never ever create a duplicate website thinking that more than one website will help you to drive double the traffic to your website. Absolutely wrong! Whenever you are creating a duplicate site of an original, search engines will raise the issue of duplicate content. In some cases, search engines may suspend these websites as well. So, ultimately your search engine ranking is held back. In addition to this, the quality of your website content is also neglected whenever there is a problem of duplicate content and your website(s) will be held back in Google rankings there as well. This is a serious problem with many top notch companies, and it is always suggested that you should focus on only one website with quality content in it to win good search engine rankings.
  • Unlike earlier SEO concepts, meta keyword tags are not as important as they used to be today. Search engines don’t depend on these keywords/tags these days. Basically, these keywords are irrelevant in modern SEO techniques. Keywords are used today in websites only to highlight to other similar websites what you are targeting. If you are not bothered about your competitors, instead of wasting time incorporating meta keyword tags, concentrate on quality content while improving your website with modern SEO techniques to get good search engine rankings.
  • Many people think that submitting websites to search engines helps in earning good rankings. But this is not the case. Simply link to it and your website will be in the top rankings if your website really reads well and has original content. Your website will get more and more exposed with the number of links you bring to it.
  • Now, link building doesn’t mean stuffing links only in one particular anchor text. Search engines prefer to see various kinds of anchor texts hyperlinked with various sources. So, look for variations in anchor texts as well as links to increase your website’s visibility in search engines. While linking, always remember to link your brand name.
  • Search engine ranking and page ranking are something totally different. Even if you get a higher PageRank, it does not necessarily mean that your search engine ranking is also high. Getting a good PageRank indicates that your links are effectively working and websites are driving relatively good traffic to your website. You need to spend time on your website to earn good rankings, not just worry about PageRank.
  • The last (and also a typically outdated) concept is to place link directories in your website. These link directories do no other effective work other than simply cluttering the website with irrelevant links. Instead of incorporating link directories, it is better to link to social networking sites.

 

How To Recover From A Manual Google Penalty – A Step By Step Guide

Sometimes while designing your website, you put in a number of links to increase the website’s visibility in search engines, but you may often come across a typical problem where Google reviews your website citing a problem with your links. Here is a step by step guide about recovering from physical link problems.

Whenever there are irrelevant or unnatural links on your website, the Google Webmaster Tools starts giving you warnings. Sometimes, if a warning is not given it might be an algorithmic problem caused by Google Penguin. With Google Penguin, you will not have to submit any reconsideration requests because this is a process where you can discuss the manual penalty with Google.

Now, if you have received any waning from Google Webmaster Tools, then it is time to analyze your back links seriously. This can be a time consuming process, so you need to be very patient. First, sketch out an entire image of your back links. While analyzing the back links, you might need a number of back link analysis tools because there is no such tool that can provide you with an overall profile. Some of the useful and important back link analysis tools are Google Webmaster Tools, Majestic SEO, Bing Webmaster Tools, Link Detox, Open Site Explorer and LinkRisk.

An important thing about backlink analysis tools is that you should never ever consider Google Webmaster Tools as the only weapon that can help you out just because Google has warned you about the problem. Google only provides you with an example of the links causing problems and does not give you an entire image of the links on your website. So, you need a handful of different weapons to analyze all your back links properly.

A Google warning indicates a problem. There could be different problems: paid links, advertorials or manipulation of PageRank. So, first identify which problem Google is talking about. The category of the links will be chosen according to the cited problem. Anything in your website that is unnatural or irrelevant anything that is there just for SEO purposes, should be piled up and simply removed from your website.

The next step is link removal. Whenever you are aware of the list of links that are causing trouble to your website, it is time to remove them, but this process is very painstaking and not very effective at the same time. At the end of the removal process, you may come up with a very poor removal rate. But you have to carry out this unlinking process repeatedly to remove all the unnatural links from your website.

The next step is Disavow which enlists all the unnatural links and asks Google to reject those while providing a Google ranking to the website. This will help you to remove all those unnecessary links from your website that you could not remove. This step helps you to remove all the unnecessary links as a whole and not individually. Hence, it is easier to disavow all the links of a particular domain without deleting individual links from the same domain.

By completing all these tasks, you can proceed further by submitting your website to Google for reconsideration. But make sure that you are honest about your activities.

Reasons to Invest in SEO

There’s never a time when your website couldn’t use a little more love at the search engines. After all, is there such a thing as too much traffic?! From time to time, you’ll notice some onsite factors that are a clear indication that you should start spending more time on your website before things get out of hand. Many of us see our websites as a backyard garden, something that we’ll tend to one of these days but just never really get down to doing.

Here’s a quick list of issues and tips for fixing up your website.

Dead Pages with Links Pointing to Them

During the course of maintaining your website, you will add new pages, update pages and remove pages. You may have removed pages because you stopped offering a product line or service. However, each page of your website can have external pages pointing to it, and search engines like to use these links as a signal about the quality of your website. When you have dead pages, you will generally have a new page that has come up in its place. You can set up a simple page redirect via your .htaccess file or via your CMS to ensure that the links you already have don’t lose potential and that your visitors have a seamless experience.

Slow Loading Pages

When your website loads slowly, it makes a difference in the end user experience. It also makes a difference in search engine rankings. If search engines notice your website can’t take the load, they will stop sending you as much traffic as you would like. The simple answer to fixing your speed problems is to get a better hosting company. The technically correct way of figuring out why your website is not working the way it should is to do a test on the loading pattern. You can run a test at tools.pingdom.com. Pingdom will give you a stat on how long each part of your website takes to load. The initial time taken is generally because of the programming code/logic. If you have a high first-byte time, you need to ask the programming team to clean up their code by caching or optimizing. You can also add a subdomain to store images, CSS and JavaScript files. This will make the load time quicker as you won’t have overhead data in your requests.

Checking Alternate Keywords

When you’ve optimized your website for a few keywords and have hit the sweet spot at search engines for traffic from those terms, you can always do more from there. A quick method to ensure that you are not leaving out ancillary products for your competition to snatch up is to look at your keywords log. Look at what phrases your customers are looking for when they visit your site, and see if you can create a product or service that would be useful to them. Quite often you will notice that people search for slightly similar terms to your products, and search engines will send you traffic thinking that your website has the required services available. It would be wise to invest some time and effort into making the most of that traffic and having something that your customers can use in those niches as well.

Mobile, Social and More

If you haven’t already created a mobile experience for your users, you need to look into that  soon. Mobile browsing isn’t just a fad anymore. It’s here to stay and it’s everywhere. People are looking at your website from their phones, and they need to see the data that is relevant to them quickly and easily before they move to alternate providers. Social websites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are a great connection point. There’s nothing like hearing the pain and pleasure points so quickly from your end users and making changes to ensure that you are ready for the next big wave that people are looking for. The new media options available today allow us to hear what people want in an instant. If we don’t adapt to those demands, someone else will.

SEO for Your eCommerce Website

Google supports a number of Schema.org-based classes and properties. What this means for your website is that the level of control you have for your store is pretty awesome. In case you’re wondering what schema’s are and how they help your website, schemas are open-source class implementations that integrate into Google search results. These schemas help show things like photos of a page author, star rating for a product, location of a store, phone number and so on.

Let’s take a look at new implementations from Google and how they can help your store convert more customers.

Using the new tags allows you granular control over your products and lets you leverage the strength of Google search into your product feed. There are as many as 25 different attributes you can use to describe your product and get into Google’s search feed with better results.

The new attributes also allow you to link products to each other and describe physical properties of products. For example, you could have isAccessoryOrSparePartFor, isConsumableFor, isRelatedTo or isSimilarTo. Plus, physical product properties can include color, depth, height, weight, width and itemCondition. These properties allow you to provide structured data about the dimensions, appearance and condition of your products.

This is just a sampling of the attributes available from GoodRelations that can give you far more control over your product list. Another potential benefit of using snippets in your pages is being on the good books of Google. There is no denying the fact that when you see a photo of the page owner, a star rating or a list of reviews for the product, the conversion rate goes a lot higher.

In the long run, these Schema integrations have excellent benefits for the end user. For example, a single page with a list of all products and prices for a product would certainly make life easier for your customer. Whichever way you look at it, there are exciting times ahead for consumers and retailers alike with the integration of these new schemas and granular information being available for products.