SEO Is Dead! Long Live USEO!

Ever since we started in the internet marketing game, we’ve heard warnings about the death of SEO. And frankly, we’ve always hoped that these warnings would come true.Wait what? Why would an online marketing company want SEO to go away? Read on and we’ll explain the method to our madness.

The “Death” of SEO

You could read dozens and dozens of articles dating back almost a decade claiming that SEO is just about on its last breath. But we’ll spare you the boredom. The point every one of these articles makes is the same: Google doesn’t need your help anymore to optimize sites, they can figure out how good your site is all by themselves, thank you very much.

And actually, this is pretty darn accurate circa 2014. Google is damn good now about interpreting what you really want when you type a query into its search engine, and it’s getting better every day. If you search “bike shop,” chances are very good that you are going to get listings of bike shops near you, along with hours, customer ratings, and other info. This means that if you run a bike shop in Seattle, you don’t need to stuff your site with artificial and dumb-sounding keywords like “bicycle bike store Seattle WA” so that Google knows what you are about.

The Birth of Something New

So if the Goog doesn’t need all of these marketing geniuses helping it to figure out what a page is about, it sounds like game over for the online marketing biz. But actually, not so much. Thankfully, all the “marketers” that were really only hawking backlinks or working on other tricks to game the search engines are indeed a dying breed.

But there’s still a lot of marketing you need to do on the web to grow your business, even if SEO is dead as a doornail. Just keeping the focus on your website, you very likely need a more advanced marketing service that we like to call USEO.

What Is USEO?

USEO is the next wave of marketing help for your website. We came up with the term USEO, figuring that if we’re going to keep throwing around acronyms, why don’t we stick with something pretty close to what we already know? Here’s what we’re talking about:

• OLD: SEO – Search Engine Optimization
• NEW: USEO – User Site Experience Optimization

What we love about USEO is that we aren’t focusing on what some algorithm thinks about the text or layout of your site – we’re focusing on the actual users.

Some Elements of USEO

Here are just a few of the factors we consider when evaluating USEO:

• Easy to use navigation
• Intuitive layouts (akin to what car designers call ergonomics)
• Engaging interactivity
• Unique, sharable content
• Captivating messaging
• Clear paths toward information, resources and products
• Social proof

Measuring USEO Success

USEO is all about creating a positive feedback loop for your online marketing. Build a great site that people love to use. Google sees this and sends more people your way. Those people have a good experience, Google finds out through site metrics, social shares, reviews and more, and the cycle builds upon itself.

Not surprisingly, a key metric for USEO is visitation. If you are offering a good user experience, we expect to see Google reward you with more traffic. But that just scratches the surface. We also want to look at metrics such as your conversion ratio (a higher ratio indicates that you’ve built more trust with more users), top landing pages (which represent the key first impression of your business among users and need to be a showcase) and even user experience surveys (such as group-based usability testing or eye tracking studies).

Burying the Dead

So we’re glad to see that SEO is on the decline for realsies this time. And we’re excited to help our clients in the ongoing transition toward making the most of the user experience on their sites. After all, your business still runs on serving people, not robots.

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So Google, What About That HTTPS?

On August 6^th, 2014, Google made the announcement that they would be switching from HTTP to HTTPS. But what’s the difference in the two, and now, over a month later, where has all the HTTPS gone? 

Whereas HTTP stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, HTTPS stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure. That extra letter in the acronym means that a website uses an SSL certificate, or secure sockets layer, to establish a secure connection with the server, encrypting data from visitors to the site. HTTP sites lack this extra security step, so unencrypted data can be read by the server, which can then be used to collect various data. When Google first announced this move, the web giant announced it as a means for a new ranking signal, though it is not part of an algorithm update but rather a separate signal altogether.

At the announcement, Google didn’t just stop at promoting their own personal reasons for pursuing the migration; as part of their “strategy to promote security and user safety across the internet in general,” they are also calling for HTTPS to be everywhere, urging webmasters to make the switch to adding SSL certificates to their websites. But, why? Some are calling this a move that was more directed toward improving PR than actual safety and security for its internet users. The problem is, “HTTPS only protect against a very limited number of site vulnerabilities,” but it does not protect against hacking or various attacks that involve database or server exploitation. HTTPS is useless when it comes to websites that do not require a user log in, so many see it pointless for sites that do not store or transfer personal data to transition to HTTPS. For these reasons, it seems odd that Google would taut this as a move to improve ranking signals and security for users because the majority of the sites wouldn’t use HTTPS in the first place, and if used, it would be a lightweight signal that would act only as a differentiator between pages identically ranked. Basically, it doesn’t mean too much when it comes to search rankings.  

HTTPS has its place, and it’s ideal for sites that collect personal data and need to keep this data secure and protected, such as banking sites, ecommerce sites like PayPal, and social media sites, but beyond that does it really impact rankings as promised by Google?   Forbes reports that right now, not really, but since Google owns 68% of the search engine market share, it is foreseen that HTTPS will “eventually play a bigger role in search ranking algorithm.” And as far as SEO goes, there seems to be no need to switch right now with lacking data so far showing any improvements in SEO rankings.

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10 ESSENTIAL SEO TERMS YOU SHOULD KNOW

If you're new to SEO, you'll find that the terminology is a language all on its own. Improve your SEO vocabulary and knowledge with these 10 essential SEO terms. 

Anchor text - Anchor text is the SEO industry's term for hyperlinked text, being that it is the anchor to the link. Anchor text is prevalent because SEO's found that by using keyword rich anchor text, it could help enhance rankings. While it is okay to optimize anchor text internally (as long as it's relevant and isn't excessive) optimizing anchor text for articles and press releases that will be distributed at larger scales could be considered a link scheme. Best practice is to keep anchor text natural in any articles or press-releases.

Title tag - A title tag, or page title is a tag in the .html denoted by <title>. The title tag represents the page's title and can be seen on the tabs in your browser or in the headline of a search result. Title tags help both the search engines and internet users identify what your pages are about. Best practice for title tags is to create unique, relevant  titles for each one of your pages. 

Meta description - A meta description is another .html tag, but its purpose is to describe the page. While meta descriptions do not have any effect on rankings, they can help increase click-through rates since they do show up in the search results. Like title tags, it's important to have unique, relevant descriptions for each page and make sure to include a call-to-action!

301 redirect - When you delete pages or change URLs, they don't just dissipate into the digital universe. So when users try to search for a URL that no longer exists, they receive a 404 error, or 'Not Found' page. To avoid confusing users and to pass on any ranking authority from retired pages, it is best practice to use a 301 redirect. 301 redirects will redirect users and search engines from the old URL to another active page that you specify. 

SERP - SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. A SERP is what is returned to you after typing in a search query. In essence, it's a page of results after you search. SERP is a coined SEO term that you'll hear frequently. 

Keyword - Keyword is another term that is used a lot in SEO. A keyword or keyword phrase is a word or set of words that exemplify the brand, its services, or products. Keywords are important because they help users and the search engines better identify what your webpages are about . Using relevant keywords in your title tags, headlines and throughout your content can help to give the search engines a better idea of what your page is about. Just be careful not to overusekeywords, or it can actually hurt your rankings. 

Indexing - Indexing is the search engines' process for collecting and storing data across the web. The search engines are constantly scouring the web for updated and new pages to add to their massive databases of information. When the search engines do find new pages, they 'index' it, meaning they add a copy of it to their database, so that they can retrieve it during searches.   

Links - There are two types of links that you will hear SEO's talk about. Internal and external.Internal links are links that occur between pages inside of your website. For example, all links on the navigation bar of your website are internal links. External links are links coming or going from your website, either someone has linked to your website, or yours to theirs. 

Both link structures are important, although links coming to your website are seen as more of an authority signal. Best practice for links is to have an organized and convenient internal link structure, so that both users and search engines can easily find your pages. A good rule of thumb to follow is that every page should be at most two clicks away from the homepage. For external links, it's important to create great content that users would want to link to. Any unnatural links or link schemes could end up in a penalty.

Rel="author" - Google's Authorship Markup, also known as rel="author" is a tag that is used to associate authors with their Google+ profiles. This helps to put a face behind your brand, can help increase click-through rates in the search engines, promote thought leadership and can be seen as a ranking signal to Google.  Rel="author" is a great tool for any author that creates content online and has many benefits.

Canonical URL - Canonical URLs are used in cases where there is duplicate content. Say you sell a product that comes in several different colors, and you have a page for each of those colors. The search engines wouldn't be sure which one to index since they're all the same, so by using a canonical link you are able to specify which page should take precedence in the search engines. While it is not a guarantee, it is best practice when you have multiple pages with very similar or identical content.

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Is Content Marketing a Definitive Strategy for SEO Success?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) isn’t the same as it used to be. You just cannot crop up an ugly website, publish mediocre content, build a few links and expect to rank well.  A well-crafted website, high-quality content, and thousands of links can fetch you decent number of social shares. But the real problem lies when it comes to scaling all of these. Building thousands of links is expensive and time consuming. And if you don’t have anything worth sharing on social web, you’ll not receive any social shares unless you buy them from spammy accounts. So how to build those thousands of links and naturally get thousands of shares? All you need to do is build a strong content marketing strategy.

Why content marketing?

Content marketing is gradually evolving as an effective path to successful SEO. Not only does high quality content produce links at a faster pace, but it is also cost-effective. In addition, high-quality content gets naturally shared on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and also on Pinterest. B2B marketers are spending ¼ of their company’s budget on creating and delivering quality content for better search engine ranking.

Different forms of content marketing

Content marketing involves blog articles/posts, videos, infographics, power point presentation, eBooks, webinars, podcasts, whitepapers, press release, newsletters and web pages. These optimal types of content support SEO/keyword analytics. The trick is to work out the type of content that’s right for the audience

How can content marketing impact the SEO industry?

Maintaining blog content

Blogging consistently is the best way to facilitate working with Google search engine. Google is the best search portal in the world, with its own biggest ad distribution network, and leading keyword analytic tools, so bloggers who keep their content fresh, without incorporating any duplication, are always rewarded. Fresh and regular flow of content is always valued by Google and directly impact the ranking of words.

Creating engaging content influence search engines

Researched content goes a long way in making content valuable. New, informative, fresh and targeted topic is always preferred by Google. The latest buzz on Google algorithms is that dynamic content focusing on keyword analytics, instead of keyword placement, represents the best idea behind productive content marketing. To be consistent with content quality, here a few tips to check out:

Optimize the content

• Make sure the content bears a catchy title, relevant bread-crumb structure, alt tags, header tags and many more
• Publish and make the content accessible through social networking sites including Facebook, Twitter, and Google+
• Measure the content performance through Google Analytics. Analyze the bounce rate, visit and time spent on site
• Based on the analytics reports, make corrections, re-optimize and re-publish the content on the website, as well as on social media platforms
• Creating new content consistently is key to a successful content marketing strategy.
• Being the content-authority in your own domain space not only let audiences find your site in the top searches but also find that the content satisfies their needs.

Google uses Query Deserved Freshness (QDF) to recheck whether there is any fresh content on the topic you’ve produced.

Impressive content can drive inbound links

Inbound linking technique is an effective technique for successful SEO. When your site receives traffic directed from premium sites, your page certainly experience boosts in search rank. This prevents your site from getting penalty from Google. Always remember, Google’s algorithm demands for legitimate and meaningful links. And building great content enhances your chances of being linked to by other sites. High-quality content can increase link to your site by 5 to10 folds.

Word count is imperative for SEO ranking

It has been analyzed that longer content that offers more information attract people who desire long term solutions to their queries. In a nutshell, higher word count means greater conversion and ROI rates. Content that is greater than 1,500 words on average receives 68.1 percent more tweets and 22.6 percent more Facebook likes. However, Google and its algorithm is completely against promotional content that typically includes keyword stuffing. Loading keywords in a web page is the easiest way to manipulate search rankings.

Use of keyword analytics tool

Different types of keywords represent different levels of interest and intent. Proper keyword research can increase your chances of being successful in search engine significantly. However, to do keyword research correctly, you need analytical tool to evaluate factors like competition of the keyword, the search volume or the commercial intent. Keywords and phrase research is also important for content curation. It is imperative to monitor key phrases that are driving traffic to your website, as this allow you to see if customers are easily finding your content.

Search engines have spider robots that browse pages on the internet and determine what those websites are doing about by reading the keyword on the page. The robots look into different areas including title, description, content structure, formatting and even the content on the page. Using keyword analytics tool supports marketers develop content elevated to improve web traffic by finding out queries that brings visitors to the content through search.

Content marketing is more than just sharing blog posts and articles to get back links. It is more of building brand as resource for consumers and becoming a source that people can trust when searching for information. With the passage of time, SEO is becoming much more content-centric.

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Don’t believe what Google tells you about search

Photo by Alan Cleaver on Flickr (CC BY)

How has Google misled us? Let us count the ways!

Target audience: Marketing professionals, SEO specialists, PR pros, brand managers, businesses, nonprofits, educators, Web publishers, journalists.

If you’ve been listening to Google of late, you’ve heard their spokespersons’ declarations that you should go merrily on your way producing content for your followers while making no attempts to improve your search rankings through explicit means. Focus on what you do best and ignore all that voodoo SEO stuff.

Well.

I’ll probably get some blowback for this, but it’s time to call out Google for its — how shall I put this? — sleight of hand, half-truths and tendency to lie about this.

The following list of Google mistruths have some exceptions and caveats. And, Google does make examples of bad actors, which is all to the good.

But for the vast majority of us Web publishers, bloggers and businesses who just want to create content and have it read, you should frankly ignore what Google has been telling you about backlinks not mattering anymore, SEO not mattering anymore and other misdirections.

Let’s do a rundown of which SEO elements actually still work

How has Google misled us? Let us count the ways! (I’ll list my bona fides below, and I have my own caveat: Google hasn’t said that none of the following is important, but let’s run through all of these SEO elements one by one.)

• Good titles are still really very essential – Because Google returns search results based on the sloppy terms you enter into the search field onto a results page that pretty literally just passes your page title through, you had better do a good job of making sure every single page of your site has a very descriptive, accurate, and unique title. That’s all Google has and that’s really all you have when it comes to whether or not someone clicks on your content or not.
• You still need to write for robots – Google is smart. It does understand synonyms and can make leaps in logic; however, Google cares more about speed than cleverness. Luckily, there are so many people who pre-prepare everything so perfectly for Google’s thoughtless pass-through that you’ll always lose. Google doesn’t have to think at all because there are enough other sites besides your site that does everything right — such as writing for robots, literally and across a wide diversity of appropriate keyword phrases — that any laziness on your part will be harshly penalized.
• Site speed is the most important – Even if you do everything right in preparing your site for a simple Google pass-through, Google will drop you as a top-three result on Organic Search if the pass-off isn’t immediate. So, after you make your site perfectly suited for Google and you’re still sucking wind, try upgrading your server, reducing the number of plugins you use, increasing the aggressiveness of your caching strategy (or, get a caching strategy), consider beefing up your server, putting our database on a separate box, get your ping down by getting closer to the the Internet‘s backbone or have someone optimize your DNS, or look into an Internet content delivery network service provider.
• Google is not a thinking thing or thesaurus – As a direct result of Twitter‘s success, Google rightfully feels like its results need to be real-time. In effectively creating an acceptable real time web, Google is generally in a constant feeding frenzy. A lot of cheating happens in this initial couple hours. And Google acts pretty dumb. In its rush to deliver content as it happens, real time, it tends to care more about filling the vacuum of trending breaking news than it cares about verifying. So, while Google does a good job of “trust but verify,” it trusts first. So, it’s still possible, even in 2014, to drive a lot of organic traffic to your site by just trend-surfing, news-surfing, and headline-surfing your content directly to what’s going on right now. You’ll just about always get a crush of traffic if you can be first to press on a big event, disaster, death, or announcement.

• Even in 2014, you can drive a lot of organic traffic to your site by just trend-surfing, news-surfing and headline-surfing your content directly to current events
  Google is still painfully literal – If you don’t write it, literally, in a literal string, on your site, verbatim, please don’t be surprised if your site doesn’t rank at all in that particular topic.
• Conspiracies still work on Google Search — As we have learned from Cristina Everett and the New York Daily News, if you can orchestrate a lot of people to write about the same topic or link to and fro or if you can conspire to write about each other or support each other’s content back and forth or even get everyone else in your little cabal to share and mention your posts, blogs, articles, columns, products, press release, announcement, or post, conspiracies of these sorts still work on Google, especially during its super-dumb feeding frenzy real time web “yay, hot donuts” phase.
• Metatag keywords work – Everyone tells you that the META Keywords tag has been completely deprecated but I don’t buy it, especially on sites that are predominantly visual, graphical, imagistic, photographic, or based on Flash, video, Silverlight, or whatever people use because they’re not smart enough to implement HTML5.
• Metatag descriptions are important – This is what Google passes through directly from the pages of your site verbatim to the results in the form of the page description, second only as important as the Title. If you don’t provide a pretty, well-written, useful one, Google will lazily and hastily scrape one up for you, one that will probably suck and might even eventually result in Google deprioritizing your site (because there’s always someone else who will gladly do it right).
• Alt tags are essential – Google still really can’t do anything with video or images or photos or code blobs unless you describe them or label them textually in a way that Google can read and index. And, if you do a good job of labeling your images, graphics, logos, executables, scripts, documents and PDFs, Google will reward you by showing your photos and videos and images and logos and graphics when people do image or video searches or even inline in regular web searches. If you dominate image and video search in your vertical, it can really help your general ranking everywhere else. So, it’s not even just the ALT tag anymore, there are quite a few ways to use HTML Schema to tell Google what’s going on. Do it! Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, and even Squarespace make it super-easy so you really have no damn excuse! Do it! Do it!
• Name all your files to be Google-readable — I spoke on this in the previous bullet but instead of leaving your photos and images with their default file names, be it what Adobe named them during some sort of slicing process or whatever your digital camera or phone named it when you uploaded it to your server. Instead of Photo.jpg, name your photo chris-abraham-portrait-black-glasses-black-t-shirt-socialmediabiz.jpg or something like that.
• Backlinks (still) matter – Reciprocal links, Page Rank, Domain Name age, and Backlinks are the core of Google and they’ll never really get rid of it. It’s their secret sauce and whether they’ve developed a new formulation there is still some sort of Google Rank or Google Klout going on — this Very Big Lie that backlinks no longer matter is the source of this article, Google is a lying liar that lies, as that’s one hell of a Big Lie.
• Human readable URLs are important – If your content management system (CMS) still gives you URLs that look like www.socialmedia.biz/?p=27642 instead of www.socialmedia.biz/2014/08/20/always-write-for-google-never-for-humans, then you really need to either install a plugin or upgrade your crappy CMS.
• Google still cares about formatting tags — No matter what anyone says, use the <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <em>, <i>, <b>, <u>, and their HTML5 and CSS equivalents — they add structure and Google hearts structure.
• Google still indexes every page “separately” – You need to make sure every single one of the pages on your site are optimized. Google indexes by page and not by site. You need to have a separate title, keywords, description, and copy for every page and not just for the site. You need to either do it perfectly for each page or choose an SEO plugin that can do it for you automagically.
• Google hasn’t given up on Authorship – Even though 70% of all publishers, platforms, sites, papers, bloggers and writers ignored Google Authorship, Google rewards everyone who works happily and merrily toward making Google happy, and they’ll surely find a way to not deprecate the hard work we put into their effing terrible, unpopular, and alienating Google+, Google+ Pages, and Google Authorship.
• Google kisses Google+ users’ bottoms — Go invest the rest of this week mastering Google+, Google Plus Pages, Google+ Business Pages, and Google+ Communities. Do it!
• Google cares very much about site architecture – All robots and bots would always prefer structure data to the muddy hell known as whatever we like to read, research, and explore as humans. So, any predictable structure you can design into your site will be surely appreciated by the robots and bots of Google. If you move your site to a popular publishing platform like WordPress or Drupal, you will have invested in a structured platform that Google gets already.
  
• Google still does care about Sitemaps – Google loves structured data and Google loves it when you let it know that your site’s been updated instead of just waiting around until a Spider or Bot comes around.
• Google still loves RSS and ATOM –  Google loves structured data, remember?
• Google actually prefers long-form content —  Google indexes about half a megabyte, 520 Kb, per page, so you’re doing yourself a disservice by keeping your pages limited to 100 Kb. And, Bing probably indexes upwards of a megabyte of each page. Each page, that’s right, and not your entire site.

My bona fides, or, do I know what I’m talking about?

I’ve been producing websites since 1993, submitting sites to directories well before search engines sent out bots and spiders, and tailoring content for Google since late 1998. Soon to be 16 years later, Google hasn’t left behind all of its old tricks — no matter what Google tries to tell you what Google organic search has become circa 2014. When it comes to how things work when it comes to developing a server, site, content, and brand to appeal to Google, Google is a lying liar that lies.

Google can’t afford to leave anyone behind

Every time Google has tried to raise us up and improve us as Internet publishers, they have failed; and, they can’t afford to leave our content or us behind, especially when they so desperately want the entire world to build a mirror copy of In Real Life online and in a form that Google can index and understand. As a result, they need to do the equivalent of making the search algorithm as patient, accepting, compliant, flexible, and empowering as humanely possible, otherwise, the only sites that will every return are sites that are heavily bankrolled. Google might very well be lying to us, but it really does care about the best customer service experience humanly possible. And, in service of that, Google has and will continue to turn the other cheek while at the same time telling us exactly the opposite.

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3 Ways to Shorten Your B2B Sales Cycle Through Personal Branding

Creating a personal brand and using social media to strengthen it can help you greatly shorten your sales cycle and ultimately achieve better results.

Accounting firm associates, agency account executives, law firm rainmakers, real estate sales representatives, pharmaceutical sales representatives, software sales professionals, and insurance producers all have one glaring thing in common - long sales cycles. In my recent discussions and interviews with professionals from all the above walks of life, it has been clear to me that the sales cycle challenge is one that needs some good resolution.

On top of the fact that these industries' sales processes are long, there is also the obstacle of saturation in digital marketing. There are literally millions of competitors locally, regionally, nationally, and globally that are all pushing to shorten their sales cycle. Some invest heavily in direct marketing, some through industry conferences, some in paid search marketing, some in meal and travel expenses and the list goes on. In that there is also one common advantage - each sales professional is a unique personality.

A properly developed and utilized online personal branding program can work to shorten your sales cycle. Learn the top three ways you can shorten your sales cycle:

1. Identify Your Winning Position and Exploit It

Your "personal brand" cannot work for you unless you first identify what it is that equals your winning formula. To do this, you need a review. Answer these questions:

• What type of clients are drawn to me and why?
• What do I know better than my colleagues, competitors?
• Where do I spend the majority of my time developing new business?
• What are my top strengths? 
• What do people love about me?
• How do I sell? Do I tell stories? Do I like to dig into facts? Am I great at uncovering the return on investment (ROI)?

From this, you will start to understand where you should focus your personal brand and develop a winning position. Exploiting this position through effective online personal branding style and communication will help to shorten the sales cycle because it will start to develop a relationship with your target, where they can see what you do without you having to push or worse, wait for them to reply.

2. Identify Your Best Online Personal Branding Machine and Make It a Daily Practice

Once you have identified such critical personal branding success metrics as your thought-leadership position, your target audience online behaviors, and your selling style, you need to identify your online selling machine. This is where social selling, social sales, or social business comes into play. You can utilize such areas as your own branded blog, your LinkedIn profile, your Twitter profile, your Google Plus profile, and your YouTube channel to deliver a daily online personal brand. This requires a social media strategy and commitment to delivery and management.

So that you can get started in building your machine, answer these questions:

• How do you currently communicate online?
• How do you prefer to communicate?
• How does your target audience make buying decisions? What information do they need and in what frequency?
• Where do you currently network online?
• Do you need the help of a writer?
• Do you need the help of a designer?
• Do you need a video person?

Social media channels and tools provide opportunities for you to amass a targeted online audience and the potential to shorten your sales cycle by creating relationships online.

3. Identify Your Sales Location and Focus, Then Commit to Relationship Development

In the world of SEO, we know that focusing locally first can help to drive results more quickly than going global or focusing on broad terms. The same holds true in the world of driving influence and sales in a local or targeted area versus a broad approach. This is why, as I am sure the sales professionals of large sales organizations such as Eli Lilly, Oracle, IBM, Aon, Northwest Mutual, etc. structure their sales teams in local areas or by specific vertical focus.

In the practice of personal brand development and delivery, the strength of the thought-leadership position is paramount to its success. This is why you will need to identify and build a strong position relative to your location and focus. You will be able to become an expert rather than the next salesperson in your industry for your target audience. If you are in a position to call the shots in terms of where you gain new clients, then a location focus can support community build.

A great way to shorten your sales cycle with a location focus is to join and participate in LinkedIn Groups in location and by target industry focus where you can demonstrate deep experience and help to nurture a community. Other ways you can support your personal brand online and drive more sales in a shorter time frame include starting and growing a G+ community based on your focus area or running a tweet chat doing the same.

When your prospects start to visibly see that you can provide education to support their needs and answer all their questions, they will hold you in a higher regard. Once you are seen as a thought-leader as opposed to a salesperson, prospects will undoubtedly stop playing the many games we as sales trainers know as "power-shifting." Once the games are eradicated, the sales process can be shortened.

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Website Downtime Survival: 4 Negative Impacts of Website Downtime to Businesses

There are a number of reasons why websites suffer downtime. The server may be experiencing systems overload, hardware malfunctions or data center issues. It may be DNS-related like the DNS address may have been wrongly encoded or the domain name has already expired. The outage may be due to scheduled maintenance brought about by a recent web redesign or database migration. An incorrect coding parameter or a malicious attack from hackers may also be the primary causes for it to go down. Regardless of its source, the problem should be promptly addressed as it can greatly impact the business quite negatively.

What Is The Impact Of Website Downtime To Businesses

Look through some of the negative effects of having a down website. Understand the importance of uptimes to the success of your digital marketing campaign.

1.       Reduced search engine rankings. If your site is always inaccessible to the users, that’s a big indicator to the search engine giant that there is something wrong with it thus Google will forward its searchers to another resource. There’s nothing to worry about if it only occurs for a day or if it is something temporary. It is a totally different story if the issue is recurring or if it happens frequently. Not only does it influence your page and SERP ranks, the bots will rate you negatively as well.

2.       Bad UX (user experience). No matter how great the content and how neat the design is, no matter how attractive the promotions you offer, the bottom line is that it is still inaccessible or loads very slowly which makes the entire digital marketing effort useless. Why would the users stay and stick to your page when there are thousands out there who can service them faster and better?

3.       Negative reputation and credibility on the brand. A slow or non-functioning site can be associated to how your brand performs in the real world. It can turn off not just your targeted audience, but possible investors as well.

4.       Lost profits. Considering that this is your platform to communicate with your audience, every second that passes by equates to missed opportunities from potential customers. To cite an example, suppose you have an e-commerce website. Your products are ahead against your competitors, so as your pricing. How do you think your customers would react if during the middle of their shopping experience or when they are about to check their shopping cart out, the webpage suddenly shows an error code? 

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10 Reasons to Combine Search and Social

The combination of search and social is one which cannot be ignored and must be embraced by all. Search engines have changed the way they rank your business because of the integration of social media signals when looking at search algorithms.

Around 58% of consumers will go to a search engine to look for something online and 40% of consumers will seek further advice from friends or colleagues on social media. Combined, around 48% of consumers are combining both search engine and social media functionality to seek help for their purchasing decisions. Here are 10 reasons why combining search and social are important for your business.

1. Social Impacts Your Search Ranking

Google, especially have moved into making their search algorithms more social based. These changes make social signals very important when Google determines who sits at the top of search.

2. Social Search is About Relevancy & Authenticity

Connecting with your community on social media is all about offering relevant content that is authentic and helpful to their business. Building trust and a good reputation for your brand is so important so remember that ranking high in search isn’t just about keywords, its about the relevance and authenticity of your site, in general.3. Social Has Already Integrated Search

You may not know that social has actually already integrated search functionality. Facebook, Twitter and Google+ all have search functionality, along with the second biggest search engine (and also social network) YouTube.

4. Combining Search and Social Delivers Twice the Results

A business that uses a combined search and social approach for their marketing strategy receive twice the results in terms of conversion and revenue per click. If you want more profitable results for your business, you will need to combine the two (as you can see below).

5. More Exposure for Your Brand

The more exposure you can get for your brand, the more likely people are to trust your business and see you as a leader in your industry and to do that, you need to harness the power of search and social.

6. You Can Target Specific Demographics

Social media can help you easily distinguish between certain groups from a particular category or demographic and target them for marketing. Focusing your website based on your target market and what they are looking for online, combined with targeted social media marketing will help you chime in on customers you may not realise were looking for your product.

7. Connects with Mobile Search Users

With so many social media users, actually using networking apps on their mobile give you the chance to connect with these users when combining your social and search marketing approach.

8. Better Overall Promotion of Content

As with most combined marketing tools, you will increase promotion and that’s no different when combining your search and social approach. Content won’t be shared more unless it is high quality and content your target audience wants to actually read.

9. Establishes Your Identity and Ownership

When it comes to ranking in social search, your online identity and ownership is very important. You should strive to have your content verified for authorship. This can be done through Google’s Authorship programme.

10. Combined Social and Search Delivers Great Customer Service

Social media in itself, is a great customer service outlet and your business will thrive if more and more people are sharing positive comments about your business. If 48% of consumers are already using the combination of social and search, you need to be able to deliver first class customer service which will impact how well you rank in search.

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