It’s End-of-Month Round-up Time! (Holiday Edition) At Splat, we think that reading insightful articles on interesting topics is almost as fun as writing original content. We’re a big believer in sharing intelligence in the digital constellation and providing our top pics for quick, informative reads. Summer is the best time to indulge in TLC (Tech Learning Continuum) and we promise to keep providing posts that inspire folks to up their digital game. So, in the spirit of seasonal sharing, here are four quick reads to improve your digital footprint.
Ohm for your ORM
Leave it to SEMRush and writer Jason Brown to clear the confusion for business owners. Sometimes Google’s lingo can be a bit daunting. Here’s the skinny on how to remain proactive and not reactive when it comes to ORM. We all know that reviews can be fake and they can also be stingingly negative and factually inaccurate. Here’s what to do so you maintain a blissful Zen-like aura as a calm and rational yet conscientious business person. In the age of two-way consumer communication, Brown gets down to brass tacks and helps business owners take control. Read more here.
Know where your visitors are coming from.
This can be taken two ways – figuratively and literally. If you own an e-commerce site it’s important to understand the general behavior of your typical visitors and it’s just as important to be mindful of where they are coming from as well (did they click on an ad? Did they do a Google Search? Did they access a hyperlink elsewhere?) In this informative piece by Howard Williams for Marketing Tech News, we uncover how digital body language paints a rough data picture of your shoppers. Rapid Scrolling up and down, cursors following text, and visitors navigating quickly from page to page – Williams gives us insights as to what these could mean and translates these actions into brick and mortar behaviors as well. 3-minute read here.
Crystal Ball by John Hall – Did he soar or did he fall?
We love taking a look back at predictions for the year. This Inc.com article takes a look at technologies and techniques to help reach audiences in a noisy web world. We like #2 on his list of 11. High-quality content clusters are the future of search. Creating content clusters focused on targeted topics is the best way to spend your valuable time. What do you think? Read the remaining 10 here.
ABCs of SEO for small businesses
Lately, it seems like everyone’s got a side hustle. This means that people really trying to be “the change that they’d like to see in the world.” This translates to credible branding on the web and being mindful of SEO basics. We love this little ditty by Yoast because it breaks down important topics that seem a bit intimidating to overzealous entrepreneurs who would rather be focusing on bottom-line growth. It’s understandable that some business have a tendency to put their web assets on the back burner but here’s why not to. We especially like advice given on the topic of local rankings and helpful plugins that can help like schema.org. Advice around getting listed on local directories (Yelp, SuperPages, ReferLocal.com, etc.) is helpful too. Optimizing for ‘near me’ searches is often overlooked by small business owners…another salient point that author Michiel Heijmans points out.