Once you have optimized your Google Places page for your business you can start to look at offsite ways to increase your Local Search rankings. By building valuable links, you will start to notice your rankings move up and you should start seeing more impressions in your Google Places account.

The first and easiest way to improve your Local Search rankings is to submit to directories to increase your inbound links.  After researching and using many directories over time, we have created a rating system to rate the quality of directories. The two main things that we are looking for with directories are do we get our own page on their site and more importantly does that page include a citation. Read more…

With Google these days there are many different types of ads displayed to you whenever you do a search. All searches will still get you your regular organic search results with the addition of sponsored ads running along the top and right hand side.  If the search is geo-specific, you will also see a group of local search results. These local search results are becoming more and more popular as we move into the future and are occurring more on mobile devices now more than ever. Just take a look at the predictions below for the next 4 years for the projected increase in the local search market.

This makes it the perfect time to get your piece of the local search action, and how to do it you ask; Google Places for Businesses.

Google Places for Business is Google’s platform which allows business owners to take control of their Google place page for any changes needed to the information such as the buisness address, phone number, store hours, to include pictures, etc. to provide as much information as possible about your business. Read more…

Over the last couple years we have gained some clients that require work done on their Google Analytics account. When we dive into the audit of their account there are many things that we look for right off the bat which will help provide the best information available for their website statistics. These checks will look into whether or not the new asynchronous code is being used, going over the profiles and filters to exclude or manipulate the data, the common scenario of self referred traffic, as well as the goal and ecommerce tracking section of the account. We will look into these troublesome areas that we find with our clients to hopefully help them avoid some of the tracking issues that we have seen in the past.

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Google announced earlier in the month that they will be making some changes to their quality score algorithm. They say that overall relevance and the quality of your destination URL will contribute more to your quality score than in before.  For the last 5 or so years Google has been making many changes to their quality score algorithm in regards to how much weight is appointed from the destination URL. The more relevant the landing page, the better the quality score resulting in a better performance from your account.

What will this do for My AdWords Account?

As long as you have been using relevant and quality destination URLs for your display ads, you should have nothing to worry about regarding your paid search account. Google says that relevant landing pages may even see a ‘strong boost’ when it comes to your display ads quality score. Read more…

One of the most important parts of online marketing is to know what the traffic on your site is doing, and finding out what changes can be made to help the performance of your site. In order to maximize the performance of your site you need to know some things like; where your traffic is coming from, what pages are the surfers visiting, how long are they on the site, where and/or why are they leaving the site, etc.

Google Analytics is one of the best web statistical programs available on the net, and the best part about it is that it’s free to use. Google Analytics has been around for years now and has seen many changes in its lifetime. In the last few months the Dashboard of your analytics account has had an upgrade to a new version which many people are very excited about. Google is up to it again with another major update to their Analytics program offering Real Time analytics data about your site.

How is Google Analytics Changing?

In the past the data you could see was only for past performance of your website whereas you could try to click on the current day to view your statistics but all fields would yield zeros. Now you do have the option to see your statistics in Real Time, which is great for testing new campaigns, watching a new source of traffic, troubleshooting your site, etc. Read more…

Clickable Phone Numbers with Mobile AdWords

If you are one of those mobile internet enthusiasts you should be thrilled that Google AdWords has clickable phone numbers displayed with their ads (launched in January). Since the change you have had the option to allow users to call you directly just the same way as if they were to click on your ad to go to your site. By setting this up in a separate part of your Google AdWords account, you can give the option for the system to make this functional. Read more…

Being that the +1 button from Google came out a few months ago in organic search, we are now seeing this +1 button with AdWords ads. Similar to how this button works in the organic listings, when a person who has visited and likes your site clicks the +1 button, your AdWords ad will now show a little +1 next to your display ad. This gives the users a chance to give some input on how they feel about the click they had made, and the visit to your website.

Will this change how people click on AdWords ads?

We feel that this will definitely change the way people click on ads regarding paid positions. For example, if a site in position 3 or 4 has many +1 clicks and is liked very much, a surfer may click on this ad first over the ad in position 1. We feel this will increase the click through rate on lower positions in AdWords, which is great because these positions are cheaper than the top position. Currently we are recommending all of our clients who use AdWords to at least try the +1 button on their site. Read more…

Some Relatively New Feature for Google AdWords makes it easy to promote your website and/or products. For those who have never heard of Google AdWords, it is their paid search marketing platform that allows you to bid on keywords to have your ad shown on Google. Search engine traffic is the most relevant source of traffic to get to your site, and your leads/sales will show it. Today, we are going to go over some new features within AdWords that help you get your ads shown to your target audience. Read more…