SEO This Week EP18- Checklists, Calendars, Certificates, and Tools

1. SEO This Week Episode 18 Checklists, Calendars, Certificates, and Tools olympiaseo.com/seo-this-week-episode-18/ 1/9/2017 by Clint Butler January 9, 2017 in Marketing News Checklist of Essential Small Business Technology in 2017 1/8

2. Print out this free essential small business technology in 2017 checklist to help keep the most important considerations top-of-mind Read More Our Insights: I don’t know that this list is really a technology list versus some concepts that small businesses need to take advantage of as soon as possible. For instance, mobile is emphasized again and specifically mobile websites and applications to allow your customers to engage with you on the tablets and phones. There are some other cool things that you should think about only if they apply to your business model, i.e. live chat and chatbots using AI. Nearly Half of Small Businesses Expected to Adopt Mobile Apps by 2017 (Infographic) 2/8

3. The amount of small businesses with mobile apps is expected to increase this year. Read More Our Insights: We actually offered a solution to develop mobile apps for businesses at one point based on their websites. This was great for our customers because they didn’t need a whole new design concept drawn up and their branding was consistent from website to app. However, after the clients had the app they didn’t leverage the thing. So if you do decide to try a mobile app make a plan for how you are going to use it in your everyday business. Simple Customer Retention Tactics to Improve Your Sales Funnel 3/8

4. Maintaining a customer base isn’t easy. With a slew of industry competitors, consumers can quickly buy products from other brands. It’s vital that your team continue to add value and offer quality service to your customers. “Customer retention is a byproduct of customer service and experience. Read More Our Insights: Even we have to get better at customer retention tactics because there is always going to be someone trying to lure away our clients by selling the dream of $300 SEO. So we have to stand out from that noisy crowd and make sure that we are illustrating the value that we are providing each and every day while improving our position in the community. There are some great insights in this article to help gets your creative juices flowing in order to address your own customer retention. Embedding SEO into Your Organization If people in your organization do not understand the importance of SEO … decisions are especially important because they impact SEO heavily and are costly to change. Read More Our Insights: We had a client who had a very strong advocate for search engine marketing on hand that was instrumental in hiring us. Unfortunately, the rest of the C-level personnel and webmaster had to be convinced that SEO was a good idea before they took us on. Then throughout the relationship, we had to essentially justify why they were hiring us at every turn to a webmaster who didn’t see the value of taking us on and presented that skewed opinion to the C-Level staff. Needless to say, we lost that client even after getting them results. I tell that story because it is important the everyone involved in decision making for your marketing needs to be on board with SEO. If they are not, don’t start with an agency or in-house SEO team until they are. If you don’t handle it that way, you’ll end up with slow marketing response times and failed digital marketing campaigns. 2017 Marketing Calendar + A Free Template to Get Started 4/8

5. All brands have their own way of marketing but there are certain holidays that every marketer should have on a list to stay in-the-know. Here is a list of holidays ripe for marketing. Plus, check out my free template! Read More Our Insights: Marketing for specific holidays has always been a great way to get a boost in sales throughout the year. With a little bit of planning, a business can actually make up for any shortcomings during the holidays. This post covers some great ideas on what you might be able to do for your holiday marketing campaigns and it provides a cool little spreadsheet to manage it all. A comprehensive guide to SSL certificates 5/8

6. Need to secure your site, but not sure where to start? Check out columnist Stephanie LeVonne’s helpful guide to SSL certificates and get informed. Read More Our Insights: This is a pretty article about SSL certificates and the various types that are available to users. The real value of this information is that websites that require passwords or user information need to have an SSL certificate installed. Browsers are going to start declaring your site insecure if you ask for that information on a standard http connection. There is a section where the author claims that free SSL’s are not good, well she’s wrong. Google spearheaded “Let’s Encrypt” that gives away free SSL certificates to webmasters and many host providers are integrating that service into their offerings to help webmasters get it installed. Google’s Sitelinks Search box and Yoast SEO 6/8

7. A couple of years ago, Google introduced the Sitelinks Search box. When activated, this search box appears under the main search result from a given brand. So after searching for the brand in Google, you can directly use the search engine of the online store or site where you want to look something up. Read More Our Insights: This is a cool little feature in Google that webmasters should take advantage of. While it won’t show anywhere in the search results but your brand typically, it certainly can’t hurt to leverage a feature that makes it easier for your users. Chrome’s DevTools for SEO: 10 ways to use these browser features for your SEO audits If you’re conducting an SEO audit, you should probably be using DevTools in Google Chrome. Columnist Aleyda Solis shares 10 ways to use these tools to identify and fix SEO issues. Read More 7/8

8. Our Insights: This is a great read and offers some wonderful information is you are doing your own audits. That said, there are two things everyone should know how to check. First, there is mobile emulator inside of development tools that will allow you to see how your site will look on mobile devices and tablets. Use that when you make changes or get a new website in order to make sure everything looks right. Second, the page speed data is pretty interesting when compared with other testing tools so get used to looking at that once in a while to make sure everything is running as expected. Content Marketing for Small Business: Does it Really Work? Content marketing has helped small businesses double their revenue while cutting marketing spend in half – find out how! Read More Our Insights: we close ou this week with another look at content marketing. The author actually provides some great examples of companies that are using content marketing to increase their business while reducing their marketing budgets just by leveraging content and SEO. Images from smallbiztrends.com, kissmetrics.com, practicalecommerce.com, searchenginejournal.com, searchengineland.com, yoast.com Husband, father, dog owner, marketer. Clint Butler, an Army vet, founded Olympia SEO to combine his love of marketing with his desire to help small and medium sized business succeed. 8/8