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Marketing

Local SEO is an important aspect of search engine optimization (SEO) that helps small businesses to reach their local audience and compete with larger businesses in their area. With the right local SEO strategies in place, small businesses can improve their online visibility, drive more traffic to their website, and increase their chances of attracting new customers.

Here are some of the key benefits of local SEO for small businesses:

  • Increased online visibility– Optimizing your website and online presence for local search, you can increase your visibility in search results and make it easier for potential customers to find your business. This can help you to reach a wider audience and generate more leads.
  • Improved local search rankings – With relevant local keywords, optimizing your Google My Business listing, and obtaining positive reviews from customers, you can improve your local search rankings and make it more likely that your business will appear at the top of search results.
  • Better engagement with your local audience– Targeting your local audience and optimizing your website for local search, you can better engage with your target audience and establish a strong local presence. This can help you to build brand recognition, establish trust, and increase customer loyalty.
  • Increased foot traffic- By appearing in local search results, you can attract more local customers to your business, increase foot traffic, and drive more sales.
  • Competitive advantage- Investing in local SEO, you can level the playing field with larger businesses and compete more effectively in your local market.
localized seo

Local SEO is an essential component of any successful online marketing strategy for small businesses. By improving your online visibility, increasing your local search rankings, and engaging with your local audience, you can drive more traffic to your website, attract new customers, and grow your business.

Let i3 help you with improving your local presence with #SEO consulting

 

 

 

 

Social media has become a crucial component of digital marketing for businesses of all sizes. With billions of users active on various social media platforms, businesses have a vast audience to reach and engage with. By leveraging the power of social media, businesses can increase their brand awareness, drive more traffic to their website, and generate more leads and sales.

social media

 

One of the key benefits of social media marketing is that it allows businesses to connect with their target audience and engage with them in a more personal and informal manner. This can help to build brand loyalty and trust, as well as improve customer relationships. Social media also offers a low-cost and flexible way for businesses to reach their target audience, as most social media platforms are free to use and allow businesses to tailor their content and messaging to their specific target audience.

social media

Another important role of social media in digital marketing is that it can help businesses to improve their search engine optimization (SEO) and online visibility. By sharing and promoting high-quality content on social media, businesses can drive more traffic to their website, increase their online authority, and improve their search engine rankings.

In addition, social media also provides businesses with valuable insights and data about their target audience, including their preferences, behavior, and engagement with your brand. This information can help businesses to refine their marketing strategies, improve their targeting, and better understand their customers.

insights

Overall, social media is a powerful tool that can help businesses to achieve their digital marketing goals and grow their business. Whether you are looking to increase your brand awareness, drive more traffic to your website, or engage with your customers, social media can help you achieve your goals and succeed in the digital marketplace.

 

Talk to a member of our team today! 

In today’s fast-paced digital world, it is essential for businesses to have a mobile-optimized website that provides a seamless user experience for visitors on mobile devices. With more and more people accessing the internet on their smartphones and tablets, it is crucial for businesses to have a website that is optimized for mobile devices.

Here are a few reasons why mobile optimization is important for your website:

Improves User Experience

A mobile-optimized website provides a better user experience for visitors on mobile devices. With a mobile-friendly design, visitors can easily navigate your website and access the information they need, leading to a higher likelihood of conversions and customer satisfaction.

Increases Search Engine Rankings

Search engines like Google prioritize mobile-optimized websites in their search results. By optimizing your website for mobile devices, you can improve your website’s visibility and ranking on search engines, making it easier for potential customers to find you.

Boosts Conversion Rates

A mobile-optimized website can improve conversion rates by making it easier for visitors to complete actions on your website, such as making a purchase or filling out a contact form. A seamless mobile experience can lead to increased customer satisfaction and repeat business.

Provides a Competitive Advantage

With so many businesses now having mobile-optimized websites, it is crucial for businesses to keep up with the competition. By having a mobile-optimized website, you can stand out from your competition and provide a better experience for your customers.

As you see, mobile optimization is essential for businesses that want to succeed in today’s digital world. With the majority of internet traffic now coming from mobile devices, it is crucial for businesses to have a website that provides a seamless user experience for visitors on mobile devices. By investing in mobile optimization, you can improve your website’s visibility, ranking, and conversion rates, and stay ahead of the competition.

Need i3 to advise on ways to optimize your site? Set up a consultation today!

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is a popular and effective way for businesses to reach potential customers and drive traffic to their website. With PPC, you pay a fee each time someone clicks on your ad (CPC/cost-per-click), making it a cost-effective way to drive targeted traffic to your website and improve your online visibility. Here are some of the key benefits of using PPC advertising.

  1. Targeted reach: PPC advertising allows you to target specific audiences based on factors such as geographic location, demographics, interests, and keywords. This ensures that your ads reach the right people at the right time, maximizing the chances of conversion.
  2. Quick results: Unlike other forms of advertising, PPC advertising can produce results quickly. Your ads can be up and running within a matter of hours, and you can start seeing traffic to your website right away.
  3. Cost-effective: With PPC advertising, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. This makes it a cost-effective way to drive traffic to your website and generate leads.
  4. Measurable results: One of the biggest advantages of PPC advertising is that it is highly measurable. You can track the performance of your ads in real-time, including the number of clicks, impressions, and conversions. This information can be used to adjust your strategy and improve your results over time.
  5. Flexibility: PPC advertising offers a high degree of flexibility, allowing you to adjust your budget, targeting, and ad copy as needed. This means that you can adjust your strategy in real-time to take advantage of changing market conditions and customer behaviors.
  6. Increased brand visibility: PPC advertising can help increase your brand visibility, making it more likely that potential customers will remember your business and turn to you when they are ready to make a purchase.

In conclusion, PPC advertising is a powerful and cost-effective way to reach your target audience and drive traffic to your website. With its ability to produce quick results, its flexibility, and its measurable results, PPC advertising is an excellent choice for businesses looking to improve their online visibility and generate leads.

 

Schedule a consultation with our team to go over what the best PPC plan looks like for you. 

If your business has local customers, the importance of having good local SEO for your website cannot be overemphasized. Simply put, local SEO experts can provide you with the most important form of advertising you can use to reach new customers within your geographic area. Local SEO is also quite effective at getting repeat customers.

What Is Local Search?

seo

Local searches are search queries where the person is looking for information about local businesses in general. There are always specific geographic locations embedded in the search queries. Here are a few examples:

  • surf shops in Southern California
  • a divorce attorney in Jacksonville FL
  • natural food stores in Boston
  • where to buy memory cards in Kansas City

All of these local search queries will generate a Google map in Google with a listing of several business options. If your business doesn’t make the list, for your specific type of business, in your geographic area(s), you are missing out on a lot of potential business. Furthermore, if you are located near the top of this list, and your listing is prominent, you’ll get a lot more business from the listing than another business lower on the list with a less prominent listing.

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Why is local SEO important?

According To a Survey Conducted By Google:

  • Eighty percent of all people use a search engine to find information about a local business. This includes business hours, directions to the store, and product information. In other words, very few people use an old fashioned phone book anymore!
  • Fifty percent of all people who conduct local searches on their smartphone visit a local store related to their local search within one day!
  • Thirty-four percent of all people who conduct local searches on their laptops or other computer devices visit a local store within a day!
  • People who do local searches buy at a higher frequency than those who do not!
  • Eighteen percent of all local searches lead to a sale in less than 24 hours!

Thus, it stands to reason, if you can improve your ranking and quality of listing in local searches on Google, your sales opportunities will increase. You will also get more targeted walk-in traffic that you can use to generate more sales and or more sales leads.
Getting a good listing for your local search terms is a tricky endeavor that is best left to the professionals. Not only are there many nuances most business owners would never know, or even have time to learn if they knew how to find the information, Google updates its search algorithms so frequently it is a full-time job to keep up with them.

seo

We Can Help!

We are very careful to only use “white hat” techniques that Google not only sanctions but actually encourages. Other companies use techniques that may work for a short period of time (long enough to take your money) but are considered spam by Google. If you’re not careful about who you work with, you can get your business URL banned. We are very careful about what local SEO techniques we use for this reason.

Give us a call today so we can discuss the details! 214-702-9438

 

Google has announced a roll-out of a new update known as the mobile first-index. This update simply means that Google will be using the mobile platform first to rank your web pages as opposed to the current desktop platform.

mobile first

The shift to a mobile-first index was motivated by the fact that more Google users today perform their searches through their mobile devices as opposed to desktop computers.

This essentially means Website and blog owners will have to shift to the new algorithm if they want to keep their traffic up.

This mobile first-index roll-out also means that even if your business or company doesn’t get traffic from mobile search, you will still need to shift to this new algorithm for best local SEO practices.

How does mobile first-indexing work?

Indexing is the process where Google identifies pieces of information from your web pages and makes them useful. Google recognizes that the aim is to satisfy user experiences whether they are searching through mobile or desktop. This simply means websites and blogs must now start focusing on the functionality of both mobile and desktop pages, although this is not unique to SEO experts as they understand that traffic pays their bills and they need to start migrating to the new algorithm right now.

This is clearly a monumental change in indexing. And even if you anticipated this change and have been working on mobile optimization for the past years, you still have a couple of things to master.

How can your business be prepared for this paradigm shift?

Google’s announcement of the mobile-first indexing must have caught many business owners by surprise. However, there is no need to panic. There are steps you can take to optimize your site right off to correspond with the Google announcement:

      1. Run a mobile-friendly test to ascertain that your site is optimized for mobile search
      2. For more information on Google optimization, look out for Google’s primary mobile guide
      3. The Google how-to-guide can assist you to determine whether your third-party hosting is working correctly

Do the following to optimize your site:

        • Optimize your mobile responsiveness – Most sites already have responsive designs, so they won’t need lots of optimization to be properly indexed for mobile search

        • Configure your mobile site – Your content markup may be different on the mobile and desktop. You will need to make changes.

        • Construct a mobile site – If you’re constructing a completely separate mobile site, it’s advisable to launch them when completely functional rather than half dormant. The desktop indexing will still continue, so there is no need to rush.

        • Verify both versions – If you have only verified the desktop version page, verify your web page mobile version too

        • Accessibility to Googlebots – Run the mobile-friendily test to ascertain that the mobile version of your web page is accessible to Googlebots for ease of indexing.

        • Availability of canonical links – You don’t need to make any changes if your site has canonical links. Google will continue using these links on both mobile and desktop versions.

        • Structured data testing – You need to run this test for URLs and compare output.

 

One of the biggest upsides is that the ranking will still be based on both desktop and mobile.

Stay ahead of the updates and trends by getting a consultation with our experts today! info@i3megamarketinggroup.com

 

If you are in the process of starting up a business or the owner of a newly established business one of your key considerations is going to be how you invest in your marketing. 

After the contracts are signed, you start bringing in revenue or get approved for a business loan, allocating funds, between advertising, office space, and promotional material can add up. 

Marketing is extremely important in the process of scaling up your business to a successful and profitable company. You might have an innovative business idea, insightful research, and incredibly hard-working employees but without the correct marketing, your start-up is set to fail. Hard work does not always pay off, but magnificent marketing does.

When investing in marketing it is important you consider what platforms and people will work best for your business.

Social media is an essential element of 21st-century marketing. A business today cannot survive without it. However, there are thousands of social media platforms and not every single one will benefit your business so it is important that you take time to think about and weigh up the different options. As you are deciding which platform to choose you must always keep your target customer in mind. The entire point of social media marketing is to put you in contact with your best audience, so make sure you find out where your audience is hanging out online. Do not be fooled by data like followers, while this suggests an audience once was present it does not guarantee an active audience: in fact, a 2019 report claimed as many as 50% of all Facebook accounts were fakes while only a portion of Twitter users have been active in the last month. Once you have located where your active audience is residing you can start to differentiate your marketing for each platform.

Marketing should be adapted to each social media platform. For example, if your chosen social media platform is Instagram you should focus your marketing on image-based and heavily branded content, if your platform is Twitter you should build loyalty by making your audience feel more connected to you or if your platform is LinkedIn you should tailor your marketing messages to other businesses.

Alongside the dominant social media platforms, you might also want to investigate what niche social media sites could work well for your business. There is an endless list of niche sites available online for every business: for example, Untappd is a fantastic site for beer lovers while Ravelry is a go to site for all knitter enthusiasts.

Alongside social media you might also want to launch your own website or Kickstarter for crowdfunding. If you are choosing between a website or a Kickstarter there are positives and negatives to both.

 

Firstly, both platforms would require a lot of time to be invested. Your website is a representative of your business standards and professionalism so you must make sure it aesthetically represents this. Similarly, launching any project online on Kickstarter is going to require a lot of time investment. Most campaigns run for 30 days and that it without taking into account the months of preparation work preceding and following the campaign.

Secondly, both platforms will require expertise. A website will predominantly be text based so communication must be concise and persuasive. This might entail the extra expense of hiring a writer to produce material that will attract an audience. In contrast, previous Kickstarter pages have shown that video resources are often successful. Creating a compelling video is not an easy feat: not only will you need a great script but you will also have to consider purchasing recording and editing equipment and learning how to successfully utilize it.

To maintain a consistent marketing presence for your business you may want to bring in an in house marketing expert or hire an agency. Again, there are pros and cons to both.

For smaller businesses, hiring an agency make be an expense you cannot afford. However, it is worth noting that most marketing agencies do not work for one company alone and instead divide their time between many. This means a part time wage compared to an in house employee who might demand full time pay.

i3 mega marketing

If you are a larger business your marketing might be too complex for just one person. Most marketing employees specialize in one field, and unfortunately, this would mean losing out on other fields. An agency, however, would be able to bring to the table many marketing professionals who all boast different expertise. What’s more, those who work in agencies will constantly be learning and adapting to all the businesses they serve, and this differentiation can only work as a positive for your business.

If you are looking to hire a marketing professional or agency it is vital that you bring in the right talent for your business. Ensure that you are hiring people who completely buy into your business ethos and will be loyal to your business. Working alongside a dedicated marketing professional or agency will make the process of setting up your business far less lonely or overwhelming.

Our team is always looking to take on new projects so Text Us with your ideas today! 214-856-0631

What Are Algorithms?

inboundIn general, algorithms are mathematical instructions used by computers to perform different tasks. Google’s search algorithms are designed to sort web pages and display the most suitable results by finding websites with the right keywords and ranking them on the result page. The rankings depend on a few aspects, one of them being the frequency of the keywords. In addition, the search algorithms pay close attention to headings and keyword dispersal. Google might update them even a few times a month.

Why Algorithms?

In order to ensure that accurate search results reach the users, Google is constantly modifying its algorithms. This is done to stay ahead of Black Hat SEO practices, which consist of stuffing an unnecessarily large number of keywords into the text, adding unrelated keywords, invisible text, and implementing other methods. The end result can get high rankings but the text will not be interesting or even relevant to the users. Google algorithms are a good way to filter good content, but they can make it difficult for SEO experts to keep up with the newest trends.

Always Changing

These search algorithms were created to facilitate users’ browsing by finding the best results possible. However, as some pages implement bad practices for rankings, Google constantly changes its search algorithm to avoid irrelevant content. On the other hand, these constant changes can make the task of achieving a high ranking difficult even for high-quality content. For this reason, SEO experts have to constantly adapt to the ever-changing algorithms and find new ways to improve SEO strategies.

inbound

Mastering The Science

The best way to stay at the top is to find a way to combine high-quality content with the newest trends in search algorithms. It is essential to know all the latest information and to be prepared for upcoming changes. For this reason, it is very important to trust your content to professional SEO experts that would help you implement the most recent methods in order to keep your page at the top of the results.

Let Us Help

While we strive to keep our SEO methods up-to-date, we also consult our clients on creating good, relative content to ensure that they get the high-ranking positions they deserve.

Contact us today at info@i3megamarketinggroup.com

 

 

Voice search has recently become more important than ever before. The future of SEO strategies and search optimization in general highly depends on the Internet users’ ever-changing habits, and marketers are advised to take this into consideration.

Reasons for the Growth of Voice Search

There are a few causes for the enormous growth of the popularity of voice search starting from 2013. The main reason may be the usage of mobile phones, as voice recognition programs have become trendy even among older users.

It’s hands-free, fast and futuristic.

As technology improves with each update, the error rate of voice search plummets. Behshad Behzadi, noted during SWSW 2016 that the speech recognition error rate has been reduced from around 25 percent two years ago to just 8 percent today.

voice search

Voice Search is no longer Just Mobile

However, smartphones are not the only devices suitable for voice recognition. Amazon has released Amazon Echo, a hands-free speaker controlled with voice. It can hear the commands even when loud music is playing. At the same time, Google made its own voice-activated speaker, Google Home. Devices like these allow users not only to play music by uttering simple phrases but also to search for information without the need to type, giving answers immediately.

Voice Search Results are Dissimilar to Typed Searches

voice search

It is evident that search queries are different when people say them aloud rather than when they type them. More conversational language is used, replacing accurate keywords with longer, naturally-flowing questions. A user will more likely say “Where is the nearest Chinese restaurant?” rather than “Chinese restaurants London”. This means that your content should be written in a more natural manner and, instead of an abundance of keywords, there should be questions that would resemble the user’s speech (starting with “where”, “what”, “when”, etc.). Try to implement this into your blogs, posts and other written media.

 

Now is the best time to start implementing the strategies that voice search experts suggest using.  As voice search is increasing in popularity, it is essential to optimize your website for it if you want to be a strong competitor in the business market.

There’s no denying that voice search is a one of the biggest trends of the digital age. With massive improvements to Siri, Google Now and Cortana, SEO marketers would be wise to closely examine voice innovation and think beyond text-based queries.

 

 

In this age of information, reputation marketing is the future of the marketing industry. Users no longer blindly use the services of a company – they simply open their browser and search for online reviews. It is evident that bad reviews can greatly damage the reputation of a company, even if they are not true. To avoid such situations, protect your online reputation the right way.

Reputation Marketing Defined

This concept refers to shaping your online reputation by emphasizing your positive reviews and turning them into a marketing tool. It is much more effective than reputation management, which is just a passive way of responding to already existing reviews, negative or positive, after they have already been posted online. Reputation marketing, on the other hand, suggests responding to bad reviews before they appear on online, as well as building and marketing positive reviews to the advantage of the company. According to Reputation marketing, on the other hand, suggests responding to bad reviews before they appear on online, as well as building and marketing positive reviews to the advantage of the company. According to Wikipedia, “reputation marketing has evolved from the marriage of the fields of reputation management and brand marketing.” Instead of trying to push negative reviews to the bottom of the search results, it suggests a new approach that consists of making the best of the positive feedback posted online by your customers.

Potential Benefits of An Excellent Online Reputation

Having positive reviews on social media or your own web site can significantly increase your profit because they work as an extremely good marketing tool. People tend to trust online reviews almost as much as their friends’ recommendations and you should not miss this great opportunity. For this reason, it is essential to increase the number of positive reviews so that they would appear at the top of the results when users search for your product or brand. This means taking matters into your own hands by reacting to your customers’ feedback immediately, thus creating an excellent online reputation of your company.

A Higher Star Rating Can Equate To Increased Business

You can find many real-life examples that support this. For example, the economists at the University of California, Berkeley conducted a study which analyses the online ratings of Yelp in Economic Journal. It reveals that a restaurant’s business increases by 19% when its overall rating increases by only a half star. It shows that even a slight change on the online profile of your business can greatly shape the user’s perception of your company.

In this situation, reputation marketing can have an immense effect on your profit. It is essential to try building a five-star reputation by making the best of your positive reviews, and we can help you take advantage of this opportunity.

Contact us today by emailing info@i3megamarketinggroup.com for a consultation.