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Year: 2018

business 

Why You Should Build a Community Around Your Small Business (And How to Do It)

news

Even if you already have a strong customer base, you can grow it further by building a branded community around your business. Many consumers are drawn to these communities because they offer inspiration, encouragement, and support. Your business, however, benefits by getting a boost in brand exposure and credibility, reduced need (and costs) for customer support, better customer retention, and more sales. But as a small business owner, you already have enough on your plate, and building a community for your brand might seem expensive and difficulty. Fortunately, it doesn’t have…

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SEO 

SEO Poll: Would You Work With Competitive Clients?

news

A Sphinn discussion asks, would you accept new work if that new work is competitive to your existing client’s niche? In short, do you offer official or non-official exclusivity to your clients? Most of the responses in that discussion claim they would never work on a competitive project. They said it just isn’t fair to their clients. Here are some of the responses: Just imagine the situation you could get into with one doing 10 times better than another. Or one gets dinged by Panda and the other doesn’t. Too…

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SEO 

Poll: SEO Certification & Standards Needed?

news

Sphinn has an excellent discussion taking place on if the SEO industry needs certifications and standards. To be honest, there are various certification programs out there. None of them are backed by a centralized non-profit agency such as SEMPO. There is SEO training with certifications led by SEO companies and SEO conferences but not a accredited SEO certification from an organization that represents the SEO industry. At the same time, there are no real standards for the industry as well. There are best practices, mostly laid out by Google but…

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SEM 

Google Ads introduces ‘ad strength’ indicator & reporting for responsive search ads

news

Ad strength will be visible when advertisers create responsive search ads as well as in a new column in the web interface. One of the loudest complaints I’ve heard so far about Google’s new responsive search ads — which are still in beta —  is a lack of reporting on which combinations work best. Another is how to tell if there is enough variety in the options advertisers provide while still being relevant to the ad group. Google announced a few updates Monday to help advertisers manage responsive search ads…

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google 

New Google Search Console Finally Gets Link Report

news

Google has announced that the new beta Google Search Console is now getting the link report. Google said they are moving the Links to your site and Internal Links report from the old interface into the new Google Search Console under a single Links report. I do not see it rolled out yet but it should be live soon, Google says. You will be able to access the link report, as I covered at Search Engine Land, over at https://search.google.com/search-console/links when it is rolled out – but that might take…

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google 

Google marks 14 years as a public company

news

Today the search giant ranks as the world’s third most valuable company. Despite concerns that going public might endanger Google’s famously quirky but intensely focused culture, the company’s initial public offering (IPO) went forward on August 19, 2004. The company offered 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share, valuing the company at more than $23 billion. Fourteen years later, Google parent company Alphabet’s market cap is just over $766 billion, behind only Apple ($927 billion) and Amazon ($778 billion). The company was just five years old at the…

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Social 

LinkedIn set to launch redesigned Groups platform by end of August

news

The company sent a notification email to Group managers outlining coming changes. LinkedIn is building a new version of its Groups platform used by many social media managers and marketers and is set to launch it at the end of August. The company sent an email this week to Group managers outlining coming changes, along with functionalities that will be unavailable as they roll out the latest updates. “We’ve heard from many of you over the past year that boosting engagement and enabling vibrant discussions in your groups is important,…

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Marketing 

7 Most Attention-Grabbing Words to Use in Your Online Marketing

news

Words are powerful. For marketers, they can mean the difference between successful conversions or a failed campaign. Certain words can pique a customer’s attention while others might repel them. So what words have the most power to get people interested in what you have to offer? 7 Words That Will Grab the Attention of Your Customers 1. Free People love to get free stuff, so it’s no surprise that “free” is one of the most persuasive words in the English language. It’s often the primary factor in what product a customer…

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Bing 

Bing Knowledge Panels Cite Sources & Can Pull From Facebook & YouTube

news

Brodie Clark posted on Twitter that he found it interesting that Bing would show Facebook as a source of information for their knowledge graph. Microsoft and Facebook do have a partnership, of course. But still. Here is the example he used, where the knowledge panel for [portion perfection] used Facebook data. The neat thing is that they actually cite and link to where the knowledge information is coming from. Same with a search in Bing for [google] – it says this comes from Wikipedia, Crunchbase and Freebase and the text…

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SEO 

How Bing is enhancing search and apparently growing as a result

news

Sure, Google is still bigger, but contributor Adam Dorfman notes that Bing has been introducing significant innovations. Here’s why the underdog search engine is worth another look.   When Microsoft announced strong annual financial results July 19, the growth of the company’s cloud services dominated the conversation. But I noticed something else in the company’s numbers: continued growth for Bing.  Although Bing accounts for a small share of Microsoft’s revenues, the search platform grew 17 percent year over year. TechRadar reported, “As more people used Bing, the search revenue (excluding traffic…

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