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Search Optimization

SEO is constantly evolving every day, and it’s important for you to keep up. Are you actively tracking the changes in the landscape? This is a really thoughtful podcast episode on project management for SEOs and agencies and how to improve it presented by Jeremy Rivera.

Do you know what your audience is looking for when they come to your site? If not, there’s a good chance your website isn’t satisfying your customers’ intent. Active and passive intent are significant factors that can hugely affect what kinds of visitors arrive onto your site. It is in this context that search queries and content determine the difference between a quick browse or a dedicated sale on your website – AJ Kohn explains it all in a smart post on aggregating intent.

Auditing websites is no easy task – indexation, crawlability, on-page content, and competitive analysis are just a few of what you should be keeping in mind during a site checkup. Ryan Stewart has the floor in this comprehensive Slideshare presentation on SEO auditing.

Each day, more than 3 billion searches are performed in Google. In order to take advantage of this search traffic, focus on each of the three types of queries: informational, transactional, and navigational search queries. Providing the appropriate content to queries relevant to your niche will boost your traffic dramatically. Cory Bosket provides offers more information in a post.

Social Optimization

Does your social media properly align with your content marketing strategy? Doing this allows visitors to have a more connected experience on both your website and on the social networks you engage them on. Remember to plan ahead and practice consistency across all channels. Brian Honigman lays out the most optimal plan for us to put into practice.

Looking to grow your social traffic to raise sales? You have to be aware of which social channels work for your brand and which don’t. However, don’t pin all your hopes in just one – see which networks resonate with fans the most and, here’s the clincher, share positive reviews on those channels. Aimee Millwood gives us a little more background in her article.

Social networking is quite a nuanced activity for business owners. Your followers will be able to tell if you’re simply promoting your services or attempting to connect with them on a genuine level. The best thing to remember on social media is that these are real people just like you. Dan Medcraft goes to great lengths to show why your social media plan is failing in this post.

Facebook’s demographic profile is changing at an increasing rate. If you’re savvy enough, you’ll be able to oversee and target the groups that best compliment your business. Rob Brooks helps us learn where our customers are in social media.

Local Optimization

Rob Reed lists several ways multi-location brands can dominate in local optimization within search engines.

Mobile matters in the local game. Think about what local mobile users are searching for: store hours, directions, contact information, and more. Learn more in this great read by John Dietrich.

More than 60% of mobile adults prefer to use mobile devices for local search. Take care to not overlook these statistics, as these are the behaviors that should influence how you treat users coming to your site from local searches. Kristina Knight outlines the rest of the stats right here.

Google’s now taking a more active approach to put local businesses on the map with its latest initiative. Additionally, Google’s willing to host domains for free for brand new web presences. Greg Sterling has the rest of the story.

Email Marketing

As we all know, your work doesn’t end after getting a new subscriber. You also have to keep email subscribers engaged and continue to offer value in the form of content or new information. Another key point: don’t just talk at your readers. Be a listener. Here are the 13 lifecycle templates for better emails by Emma O’Neill.

Facebook is quickly proving to be an invaluable tool in getting more targeted traffic back to your website. Increase your email subscribers by using Facebook’s advertising capabilities funnel visitors to a focused landing page. Roel Manarang takes us step-by-step into the process.

Email marketing is certainly alive and well, with returns well over 44x for every dollar spent. Granted that’s only if you know how to do email marketing well. It takes a certain skill to track response rates and regularly offer something your readers want. The Powered By Search team gives us five hacks to grow your email list.

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Content Marketing

Nir Eyal’s book, Hooked, has made quite an impact in the marketing world. You can use his framework for hooking customers to grow traffic to your own website. In this post by Anuj Adhiya, we see how his website uses the Hook model to capture content creators and consumers.

Non-promotional content is going to be the bread and butter of your content strategy. It’s not that readers don’t like your brand, but they don’t want to be sold to every hour of the day. Remember that you’re just one of thousands of brands pitching their services. Give them relevance and intrigue their curiosity – you’ll be much farther ahead of the game. Shachar Orren makes the case for non-promotional content in this phenomenal post.

Measure your content’s performance by selecting specific KPIs (key performance indicators) for your team to track. Traffic, engagement, leads, and revenue are great places to start. Yael Kochman goes into more detail to improve the impact of your content.

Content marketers make mistakes all the time when it comes to content. Sometimes it’s that the content isn’t good enough. Other times its that the content does have a purpose to it, even if it is good quality. Lack of promotion is another top mistake (“build it and they will come” is not a valid content strategy!). Tamas Torok puts together a robust list of content marketing mistakes to avoid.

Mobile Optimization

Want your questions answered about the upcoming mobile update (we’re less than a month away, by the way). Matt Southern answers all of your burning questions in a post.

The folks at RefuGeeks compile a massive guide on mobile optimization and mobile website SEO to prepare your site for the update. Interesting read!

Conversion Optimization

Without knowing your customers and their concerns, you can easily get siloed in a bubble of your own beliefs about your business. Customer feedback helps uncover marketing insights that can improve your conversion rate. Vishal Ray Malik lists 10 ways surveys can increase your bottom line.

Here’s a neat infographic from KISSmetrics posted by 60 Second Communications on how colors affect conversions.

Reputation Management

Negative hits to your reputation can often seem unrecoverable. Assuming you’ve addressed the situation (and hopefully cleaned up your act) there are several ways you can salvage an online reputation nightmare. All it takes are some positive mentions and a little content optimization to put you on the track back to success! Chris Silver Smith offers up some technical tips for ORM SEO.

The list above includes some of the most interesting articles we caught in our streams this week. If you want to share other great inbound marketing news, please let us know below in the comments.

Author

Adam Polaszewski, Head of Marketing at UpCity is a data driven demand marketing professional with more than a decade of digital marketing experience creating award-winning online and offline marketing programs. Adam’s passion for marketing and technology has moved him from coast to coast working for some of the fastest growing start-up in the country. He lives in Chicago with wife Sarah, baby Leo-Cruz (2years old) and just recently baby Zoey-Lane (5 months).

About UpCity

UpCity is a local inbound marketing platform built for agencies looking to acquire, scale, and drive results for their small business customers profitably. We accomplish this by combining our proprietary SEO/inbound marketing platform with a full range of sales and SEO service offerings.

UpCity’s makes it seamless for agency partners to increase efficiencies by managing and delivering customized tasks, generating robust on-demand reports, and providing full SEO services to help our partners generate new revenue.

Our passion for the industry and dedication to building long-lasting relationships with agency partners is the foundation of our business. It’s what inspires us to continue to raise the bar in the industry.

For more information please visit us at www.upcity.com, email salesteam@upcity.com or call 312-239-8256.