Best Practices

Suds and Search 63 | Aleyda Solis, Founder of Orainti

May 20, 2021 Mark Bealin Best Practices, Digital Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Suds and Search

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My guest on this week’s episode of Suds & Search is Aleyda Solis, founder at Orainti. Aleyda was awarded the 2018 European Search Personality of the Year at the European Search Awards.

Aleyda is a popular conference presenter and frequent keynoter. She has presented at over 100 conferences in 20 countries presenting in both English and Spanish. For my money, she is one of my favorite presenters in the industry. You may have heard her present at SMX, MozCon, Pubcon, Women in Tech SEO, and Brighton SEO as well as many, many other places.

Aleyda is the creator of the popular newsletter SEOfomo. When she launched it, SEOFomo took the SEO industry by storm. I’ll ask Aleyda a little about the Newsletter during our conversation.

Google Ads introduces account Monthly Spend Limits

Mark Irvine Best Practices, Digital Marketing, Google Updates, PPC Advertising ,Google Ads, PPC

Google Ads Monthly Spend Limits
Google Ads has a lot of exciting new features, insights, and offers plenty of ROI to excite most marketers. But of course, Google Ads has costs too and fewer marketers get that excited about planning out a budget, and historically Google hasn’t made that process any easier. Where most businesses plan their advertising budgets on a monthly basis, Google Ads complicates this process with its daily budgets on their campaigns. Since 2017, Google Ads further complicated budget management by allowing each campaign to spend up to twice its daily budget on any given day.

So, your monthly advertising budget? Divide that budget into a dozen or so different campaign budgets, then divide each of those budgets by between 28-31 days in a month, and then cross your figures, count the weekends, holidays, and pray that Google hits those budgets consistently without overspending every day. If that math equation has you nervous, then you already know the feeling of managing your PPC at the end of the month as you nearly make or break your budget.

SEO presentation: How to show up in local searches

May 18, 2021 Greg Gifford Best Practices, Digital Marketing, Google My Business, Local Search Tuesdays, Local SEO, Reputation Management, Reviews, Search Engine Optimization

In this week’s video, I share my recent SEO presentation from a Better Business Bureau webinar. It’s longer than my usual weekly video – about 45 minutes – but it’s packed with awesome info about how COVID has changed customer behavior and how businesses should adapt to the change. I outline a Local SEO playbook for 2021, so you definitely don’t want to miss it!

Suds and Search 62 | Jono Alderson, Manager of Special Ops at Yoast

May 13, 2021 Mark Bealin Best Practices, Digital Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Suds and Search

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My guest on this week’s episode of Suds & Search is the amazingly talented Jono Alderson, Manager of Special Ops at Yoast.

Jono has been one of the leading figures in SEO for some time now. He is a frequent keynote speaker, blogger, and educator. You may have heard Jono present at MozCon, SearchLove, SMX, and the Inbounder.

Online review responses and HIPAA compliance

May 5, 2021 SearchLab Best Practices, Digital Marketing, Local SEO, Reputation Management

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) is a federal law that prohibits the disclosure of protected health information (PHI) without patient consent. PHI is defined as “health information that can be used to identify an individual” and includes data related to a patient’s medical or physical condition, and identity. HIPAA extends to online review management, and since responding to reviews is essential to a healthcare organization’s online reputation, healthcare marketers must follow HIPAA guidelines when crafting review responses. Below are best practices to consider when handling online reviews, and some examples of HIPAA-compliant responses.

Best practices for HIPAA-compliant review responses

Avoid a HIPAA violation by following these quick tips:

Have an internal plan. Collaborate internally to develop review response policies, including identifying who will be responding to reviews and creating templates that can be customized for positive and negative reviews.
Protect PHI in your response. Remove all detail about a patient’s diagnosis, treatment, condition, and visit, and do not confirm or deny them as a patient.
Respond broadly. Stick to general responses like, “Thank you for your feedback” or “Thank you for taking the time to leave us a review.”
Take the conversation offline. Give the reviewer the opportunity to further discuss their comments by providing them with a phone number or email address for your office or patient experience team. This also helps prevent further online conversations that could violate HIPAA.

Keeping these tips in mind, below are some real examples of review responses that either violate or follow HIPAA guidelines.

Why rank tracking isn’t a good SEO success metric

May 4, 2021 Greg Gifford Best Practices, Local Search Tuesdays, Local SEO, Marketing Analytics, Search Engine Optimization

In this week’s episode, I share some insight into rank tracking in SEO – and why it’s a horrible way to judge SEO success. You don’t hire someone to do SEO to get you to rank, you hire someone to get you more traffic and leads. It’s all about growing your bottom line, and rank trackers don’t mean squat to your bottom line…

Suds and Search 49 | Jim Ziegler, founder of Ziegler SuperSystems

February 11, 2021 Mark Bealin Best Practices, Resource Library, Suds and Search

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My guest on this episode of Suds & Search is Jim Ziegler, owner of the Ziegler SuperSystems and a legend in the automotive industry. For over 44 years, Jim has contributed his talents as a writer, magazine columnist, professional speaker, and turnaround artist at some of the biggest auto dealerships in the United States.

How to Come Up with Blog Ideas: Four Easy Tips for Business Owners

February 9, 2021 SearchLab Best Practices, Digital Marketing, Local SEO, Search Engine Optimization ,blog content writing, what to blog about

In order to keep your site relevant for your money-making search terms, you need a blog, and you need to publish high-quality content on your blog regularly.

How to come up with blog ideas, though? Where to start?

In this post, I offer a few no-nonsense ways business owners can come up with great blog ideas by leveraging their experience and expertise in their field—no intimidating “keyword research,” “discovery,” or “competitor analysis” process required.

(For my purposes here, by “business owners,” I mean those without SEO training.)

If successful, the tips from this post won’t feed you blog ideas or topics themselves. Rather, they’ll equip you with a reproducible process to ideate stellar content ideas or topics for months (and years) to come. If you take advantage of the tips I provide, you’ll become your business’ very own brainy content strategist—and very likely a richer entrepreneur.

Suds and Search 45 | Stephan Bajaio, Chief Evangelist and Co-founder of Conductor

January 14, 2021 Mark Bealin Best Practices, Digital Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Suds and Search

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My guest on this episode of Suds & Search is Stephan Bajaio. Stephan is the Chief Evangelist and Co-founder of Conductor, a search and content intelligence platform that helps marketers create and optimize content to improve visibility online.

Stephan has a well-earned reputation for being one of the really good guys in our industry. He is an in-demand speaker, podcaster, and SEO expert. He co-hosts the extremely impressive podcast Search on Tap and the equally impressive webcast Search from Home.

His company, Conductor, puts on the C3 conference and the annual Searchie Awards.

Stephan has a gift for identifying problems. He has an innate sense of when things aren’t working right. I’m going to start our conversation asking him about some of those problems and how SEOs might begin to solve them.

Problems with Google My Business? Use the GMB Forum

January 12, 2021 Greg Gifford Best Practices, Google My Business, Local Search Tuesdays

In this week’s video, I share a simple yet not commonly known tip to help with any problems you might have with your Google My Business listing. Google has Community Help forums for each of its products, so whenever you have a problem with your GMB listing that you can’t solve, you should create a forum post. Watch the video for all the details…