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August 5, 2024 by

Applications For Real World Metaverse And Virtual Real Estate

Recently, we were on a Twitter Space webinar to discuss the use cases of web3 NFTs, metaverses, and virtual real estate (digital real estate) associated with actual real world locations which you can visit physically. These are different than “fictional world” metaverses such as Decentraland, Sandbox, and similar virtual real estate metaverse platforms which don’t associate directly with actual locations in the physical world.

Some of the benefits web3 assets, which merge NFTs and metaverses along with existing online marketing efforts, include:

  • Existing web2 SEO efforts such as ranking in the search engines, Maps, YouTube and elsewhere
  • Local lead generation
  • Reducing advertising spending around town in order to acquire a new customer, client, patient, or event attendee/fan
  • Rewarding your existing customers, clients, and fans in new ways to foster further participation with your company
  • Repurposing your images and video content
  • Building Artificial Intelligence (AI) avatars to answer prospective customers’ questions with a good degree of accuracy while simultaneously featuring your real world location
  • Associating your company with known landmarks
  • Brand new ways to solve problems and associate your business with the easy-to-understand solution
  • Beginning to open your business to using or accepting cryptocurrency, altcoins, or other payment forms beyond your existing methods of sending/receiving funds
  • Much more

Thank you to Marcus (“wenairdrop“) at Iheartdomains.com for hosting the Twitter Space. The audio recording is available on his website, or you may play the audio recording below:

You also may play the recording from Spotify at this link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/03she1WRozgkE1TbAc4Hh8?si=8144659bf0a04f94

Filed Under: Backlinks, link building, local marketing, metaverse, nft, search engine marketing, SEO, virtual land, web3, Webinars
June 22, 2023 by

SEO And Marketing Your Local Business On Patch.com

This page will use Dallas Texas as the example city for various ways in which local businesses can market their products and services on the Patch.com website. There are several ways in which a local business can see an increase in new customers or clients by using the features inside (and outside!) of Patch in intelligent ways.

First, let’s compare Patch with sites like Craigslist and NextDoor:

Craigslist

Service listings in Craigslist now typically require a monthly fee (roughly $5/month) for service business classified ads like HVAC, roofing, and even licensed professions like tax returns and real estate. This is different than it was in the past. However there is no targeted zip code/regional advertising other than the flat monthly fee.

Craigslist doesn’t permit reviews and it doesn’t have a “social” component to its features. You can list events for free, but you will have to pay to get exposure in other regions if your business crosses Craigslist’s regional boundaries.

NextDoor

Nextdoor has very basic free listings for businesses such as this Dallas-area business. Your business is allowed to add a logo, some pictures, hours of operation, a website link, and a small business bio. You will have to pay to get exposure outside of a small radius around your physical office/building/store location. Nextdoor users are allowed to leave reviews, but business owners have minimal option to reply to those reviews unlike Google Business Profile (Google Maps) business listings.

So Why Use Patch?

Patch, at the time of this post, is more powerful at the local level than most people realize. It has the ability to offer some nice benefits to any local business owner:

  • Free to join
  • You can have two listings -> one “personal” and one official “business”
  • Your services can be added as “Classifieds”
  • Your company’s events can be promoted locally
  • Paid advertising options within Patch exist (see more here)
  • The classified ad service listings, if optimized properly, can rank in Google on their own for local keywords
  • You are allowed to add an image with your classified listings (not all classified ad sites permit this)
  • The links inside your business profile and classified listings can help power up your main website, Google Business listing, YouTube channel and other web properties to rank higher in the search engines
  • You can follow other local businesses and like/share their postings, thus raising awareness of your business once they see you engaging with their content
  • Local news keeps you updated on happenings in your area
  • You can post local news (not just service listings) and start to build trust in your company from other local Patch users

Combining the above, you can increase the chances of your business gaining new customers/clients and building goodwill in your local market.

Examples Of This Working

This local Dallas sports bar offers a stage with large screen, DJ booth, microphone system, and more in case a private party wants to rent the restaurant for an awards event, live music event, or even a large birthday party. Their Patch listing ranks #1, even above Maps, in Google for those seeking such a venue:

If you post an event, the links inside the description can be used for “off-page SEO link building” to help send traffic to the inner pages of your website. The goal is to use relevant, authoritative and trustworthy websites to point links to these non-home page portions of your website in order to boost those pages higher up in the search engines.

Patch is interesting in that even after the event has concluded, it keeps the original listing live. This means that the power of those links doesn’t go away once the event is finished. This listing is still live even though the event concluded a few weeks ago (from the time of this post):

Your listing on Patch even can rank well when people go the search engines and look for a wider geographic area. In this case, local training classes for “Dallas Fort Worth” are ranking #1 in the organic listings (just under the Maps listings) in Google despite the Patch listing only being posted in the “Dallas” community:

Sometimes you need to increase your company’s brand name plus the city in which you are located for increasing search engine authority that your business is a legitimate local company. Here is one such example where this was done, especially for a business with office out of the home:

Some times you may be entering a niche within a highly-competitive local market. Bathroom remodeling in Collin County is highly-competitive with the County’s overall revenue potential for quality contractors, so this niche (shower glass doors) is using Patch to begin to enter that market and start getting phone calls:

Occasionally you get a unique situation such as this driving school located on the Garland-Richardson border. The main instructor also is approved by Texas DPS to be an off-site “third party” driving test location. This is so that people won’t have to wait for weeks to take their driving tests, especially in high-population areas like Dallas and Garland.

If you are expanding into a new region, you also can use Patch to test (probe) and see if you need to invest heavily in pay-per-click for a new niche. In this case, a video production company with a Downtown Dallas address wants to enter the niche (“podcast video recording”) in a suburb of Dallas – in this case McKinney. The Patch listing ranks #1 in Google after the “Sponsored” paid ad section of the search result.

What Else Can Be Done With Patch?

In addition to ranking in the search engines and using the description of your profile & classified ad service listings for SEO link building, here are some first step suggestions:

  • Engage with the local businesses and active people in your geographic area. Do this to start to build awareness and trust in your company.
  • Post any open-to-the-public event that you are hosting or promoting. Using the sports bar example earlier, they should use Patch to promote the nights when they have boxing, MMA, or major professional or college sporting event watch parties.
  • Test new niches and/or markets with an ad to determine if your Patch listing will rank in Google quickly (like the podcast video recording example above). If it doesn’t rank on the first two pages in the search engines after a week, then your “probe” indicated that you likely will need to invest more into SEO hard costs like link building, content creation, on-page SEO development and possibly something like a paid press release.
  • Do some low-cost advertising within Patch to reach neighboring areas. Using the sports bar example again, they are located on the border of Dallas and Irving/Las Colinas. Currently they are in the “Dallas” Patch community due to their physical address, so they should consider paying to get exposure in the “Irving” Patch community for their services and/or events.
  • ** An advanced technique is to consider any listing on Patch (your business profile or one of your classified service ads) which links to your website as a “Tier 1” web property. In competitive local markets you can boost both your Patch listing as well as your main website with intelligent “Tier 2” link building, CTR traffic, social sharing and other advanced off-page SEO techniques. Contact us for more details about your specific needs.

Finally, be sure to geo-tag your images with appropriate latitude/longitude, meta data in the Properties field and more to help your efforts. You likely spent time and/or money on your photos and graphic designed image files, so take a few extra steps to give each image file the best odds of helping you. Once geo-tagged you can use these image files where appropriate, such as on your Patch business profile and your individual Patch classified listings.

While Dallas Texas was used as the example in this post, the action steps mentioned are applicable to most areas of the United States. In some cases, you can reduce website costs if you only care about getting quick wins in the search engines; but please note that you can lose your rankings overnight if your Patch profile gets deleted. It always is best for you to have a fully-optimized website which you control all aspects: domain registration, website hosting, content, SEO optimization, images, other multimedia, and control the access as to whom can make changes.

Thank you and hopefully you found some benefit in reading this far! If you need help with your local internet marketing then Contact Us to schedule a call. We then, together, can customize a game plan to help you achieve what you would like to do in order to grow your business.

Filed Under: classified advertising, Event, internet marketing, link building, local marketing, online marketing, SEO
June 10, 2016 by

Google My Maps Marketing And SEO Strategy

Benefits Of Using Google My Maps

One of the more unique tools offered by Google in recent months is its new “My Maps” functionality.   The ability to use for real world marketing, online marketing, SEO, boosting your YouTube videos, boosting awareness of your website’s (or other web property’s) images, inner pages and posts, and “Tier 2” link building is impressive.

 

What Is “My Maps”?

Unlike regular Google Maps, which promotes specific locations such as your corporate headquarters or store locations, this tool enables you to make an indefinite number of “maps” which you can customize and use to show the public several aspects of your business.   For example, you can create a custom My Maps map of:

  • Cities where your customers or clients are located anywhere around the world
  • Specific locations where you may have been a public speaker
  • Locations where you have been an exhibitor at trade shows
  • Event venues where you have performed or had your products (or services) used
  • Any other way you can think of displaying relevant geographic information in a visual manner rather than a simple list

 

Why Should I Consider Using This My Maps Method?  What Benefit Can It Give Me To Make My Phone Ring Or Otherwise Grow My Business?

These are great questions!

Since this is a Google-owned property, which you can access using your Google account that you likely already use for YouTube/Gmail/Docs/Blogger (Blogspot) blogs/etc., you will easily be able to create many of these maps.  The benefits are many, including the flexibility to highlight subsets of your business such as “Client Locations In 2015” (and you can do another My Map for a previous year like 2014) or some of the benefits mentioned earlier.

In terms of online marketing and SEO benefits, you surprisingly can get more benefit out of these My Maps than you may realize.  Here are some specific things you can do with these Maps:

  • Most people don’t know that these My Maps can rank on their own in the search engines, much like a YouTube video can rank on its own.  Be sure to do proper keyword research and put the keywords in the correct My Maps fields
  • In the description field include your business “NAP” (for citations) and your phone number, if appropriate
  • In the description field link to your website, your social media properties, and any other web properties that make sense to promote (e.g. a press release distribution account central location, YouTube channel, guest post that features your business favorably, etc.)
  • Embed optimized YouTube videos in the specific map marker locations to help with local SEO for videos
  • Embed optimized (including geo-tagged) images in specific map marker locations
  • Link to inner pages on your website (or other web properties) which are relevant to the geographic area defined by the map marker
  • Much more

 

What To Do With These My Maps Once They Are Created?

You can do several things with these custom My Maps, both with the direct link and using iFrame embed code.  You can:

  • Embed the My Maps iFrame code on your website, blog or other primary web property
  • Share the link to the My Maps URL on your social media properties
  • Share the link in any e-mail newsletter you have
  • Make a QR code to the specific URL and share the code on print materials at trade shows, business cards, or other marketing done in the real world
  • Have the iFrame code get embedded on third-party web properties to send traffic to the My Maps page
  • Many other ways to market the link to the My Maps page (URL)

 

If you would like help on creating, marketing, getting search engine marketing benefits, or getting real world benefits from these custom Google My Maps then you are welcome to contact us.   We can help you gain more exposure to the My Map as well as promote your website and other web properties.

 

Examples Of These My Maps

Here is an example of a My Map for an optometrist in Dallas who wanted to promote the neighboring businesses near his office location:

 

Here is an interior designer based in Dallas, listing the nearby cities and suburbs where she has clients:

 

 

Here is a DFW real estate agent who lists some North Texas new neighborhoods where the home builders are offering incentives for prospective home buyers:

 

Here is a Map of client location history for a defense attorney who specializes in health care fraud cases such as those pertaining the False Claims Act, CLIA, Medicaid billing, anti-kickback and similar medical industry situations:

 

Here is a My Map featuring some of the locations of a commercial modular construction manufacturing company’s recently completed projects across the United States:

 

And here is a ranch and farm real estate broker’s My Maps listing of counties and towns featuring recently sold ranches and agricultural properties in Texas and Oklahoma:

Filed Under: Backlinks, image marketing, lead generation, link building, local marketing, Mobile, my maps, QR code, SEO, video optimization, youtube Tagged With: ,
April 18, 2015 by

Link Building After The Penguin Updates

This is a repost of an article I was asked to contribute to Greg’s old SearchSimplicity.com website.  It is reposted in its entirety here.

Please note that SEO has changed since the time of this article (late 2013), so contact me for more up to date strategies.  Nonetheless there are some helpful tips here which are still valid.

————————————–

The Types Of Links Which May Be “Friendly” As Tier 1 Links In The Post-Penguin 2.1 Environment

Many people involved with SEO may have legitimate concerns in the post-Penguin 2.1 environment.  Even with solid strategies being employed before the update, many professionals have had their strategies rendered worthless or counterproductive since the first week of October 2013.  These strategies could have included posting inadequately-spun content on only one type of platform, having too high of a percentage of the link anchor text containing the exact keyword, placing content on properties with low authority (Page Rank, Domain/Page Authority, etc.), or having too much “spammy” link content on a third tier of a typical tiered-linking system.

There is much discussion about how to recover lost rankings for affiliate sites, client sites, personal websites and authority sites.  Such discussions have revolved around changing anchor texts on first-tier (Tier 1) links which you can control, using the Google disavow tool, getting more social signals, improving on-page loading times and making websites more mobile-friendly.  All of these are helpful strategies, but no single strategy is likely to be the “magic bullet” sought when a panic situation happens.

One strategy which can help you regain (or even improve) your search engine rankings is to create more top-quality (Tier 1) links which point directly to a page on your website.  Additionally, they have to be formatted properly and in “Penguin-friendly” ratios.  The reasons for this recommendation include:

  • You can be in control of the links, including changing or removing them if needed in the future
  • You can structure the wording of your anchor text and the words surrounding the links
  • Images, videos, infographic content, podcasts and other multimedia has the potential to be embedded and generate a quality link
  • Link building software (e.g. GSA, SENukeX, Magic Submitter) can be used to boost these new Tier 1 links, if created properly
  • Previous content, such as images or PDF content, can be used separately

The goal is to focus on value-added content, ideally which has some sort of “verification” factor to it.  For example, a video on YouTube has the ability to be pulled – or at least voted with thumbs down ratings – should it fail to provide the YouTube community with value.  Likewise, value-added comments on industry blogs must be approved by the moderator especially if there are follow-up comments.

Going forward, you have over 30 options for the types of Tier 1 links which have high likelihood of being Penguin 2.1-friendly.  What you want to do is focus on getting your anchor text ratios in order.

As a rule of thumb, consider a “1 for 10″ breakdown.  This means that for every 10 quality (tier 1) links you create, only one should have the exact keyword for which you want to rank, pointing to a specific web-page on your website (or other web property).  The other nine links can be broken down like this:

*  1-2 links can be longer tail keywords, perhaps containing the main keyword
*  3-4 links should be “generic” anchor text like “click here”, “visit this page”, etc.
*  2-3 links should be focused (if applicable) around brand names, names of people, etc.
*  1-2 links should be derivations of the URL (with or without “http : //”, using capitalization on the first letter, etc.)

Of course, you should use as much unique content as you possibly can.  If you choose to use spun content, make every attempt to have the originally unique content spun at the sentence and/or paragraph level.  If you can, include multimedia such as images, videos, audio files and other complementary material.

Here are the roughly 30 types of links which you may wish to consider for your next batch of properly formatted and created Tier 1 links.  You are welcome to add comments about these as well as strategies to create quality Tier 2 links to these newly created Tier 1 links.

POSSIBLE PENGUIN-FRIENDLY TIER #1 LINK TYPES:

1) Citations (business directory listings) like Yelp, InsiderPages.com, Kudzu, etc. — obviously for local (primarily)

2) Intelligent, unique comments on high authority sites such as industry websites and blogs (like SearchSimplicity.com) for national keywords/authority and on local newspaper, radio, TV and local magazine sites for local SEO

3) Guest posts.  These opportunities can be found using all of the appropriate search strings (e.g. KEYWORD + “guest blogger”)

4) Private blog network –> unique hosting accounts, unique/relevant content (including images & videos), unique themes, varied anchor text, varied plug-ins, and even varied platforms (not all just WordPress).  Be smart and careful with these!

5) The top 40-50 article directory sites based on Alexa/PR/Moz Authority.  Again focus on those which require some sort of verification before going live.  You also may post unique, helpful content on sites which even may pay you a little bit of money (e.g. Seekyt.com)

6) Paid press release distribution on quality generic distribution sites (e.g. PRWeb.com) or on industry-specific newswires. Obviously a release (with or without embedded video) may get picked up on other sites. If you want to be conservative, do not optimize the URL with a keyword in the anchor text.  Instead, go with a straight URL or the company name/brand name as the anchor text

7) Optimized videos on sites like YouTube + the YouTube channel

8) Podcasts w/ unique content and distributed on podcast directory sites which still have some decent PR/other authority. Also you may consider a channel w/ unique content on a site like BlogTalkRadio.com with consistently-added content

9) Niche directories which have authority. Examples: industry/trade association directories or local chamber of commerce

10) Competitor backlinks (AHREFS, BacklinkWatch.com or MajesticSEO) and then run through AHREFS for Domain/Page Authority (or through Scrapebox for page-specific PR) or those with high relevance

11) Relevant forums which have some authority on the root domain. Optimized forum profile page and optimized signature files ONLY for those forum profiles where there are actual replies or forum thread starts

12) Social media platforms with legitimate, unique content (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, plus any niche-specific)

13) Answers on sites like Yahoo Answers or similar high-authority answers sites

14) Manually created Web 2.0 pages with unique content and a decent profile page.  These are not necessarily SENuke or GSA SEREngines web 2.0 pages, but rather manually created ones which look like a real human created (or at least edited!) them

15) A service like AutomaticBacklinks.com which puts links on pages w/ PR and some measure of relevance (not always perfect, but okay a portion of the time)

16) Helpful, unique infographic images uploaded to infographic-sharing sites.  Also, you can provide source code to have people embed your infographic on their websites, linking back to your desired web page

17) Getting broken links on relevant sites cleaned up.  You can ask the webmaster to provide a link back to your web property; or, if appropriate, have the webmaster change the link from the broken one to your desired web property

18) Pinning relevant, interesting images on Pinterest and Instagram.  You also can upload, and link back to your desired web property, on image-sharing sites so long as the content is relevant and interesting

19) Interactive content such as quizzes, widgets and other interactive/dynamic content.  These can be added to sites like Quizilla and widget-sharing sites.  Make sure that the content is unique, timely and relevant.  Like the infographic content, you can provide source code to have people embed your infographic on their websites, linking back to your web property

20) Syndicating your blog content.  You can do this by syndicating your RSS feed, using WordPress services which share your content on other websites, sharing content via blog directories, etc.

21) Getting your content shared with volume on social news sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, etc.  This is different than traditional social media properties like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc.

22) Links acquired from sources other than traditional “guest posts”.  These include assisting reporters through services like Help A Reporter Out

23) Links on sites which permit discounts, incentives, giveaways, etc.  Focus on those which require some sort of verification process to minimize being in a “neighborhood” with spam

24) Relevant comments on EDU, GOV, MIL and other “hard to get” domains.  These can be tough to acquire, so be sure that the time invested is worth the effort

25) Sponsorship and/or donation links on scholastic (EDU) and organization links.  Ideally, see you can get social media or industry (or local) press about the donation to generate further links

26) Networking to get links.  An example at the local level is to ask a local hotel to provide a link to a local taxi website if the taxi service provides the hotel’s guests with quality service

27) Have others post on your website and then have them share the link to the post on your website through their social media accounts

28) Uploading relevant software to software directories to get links.  Be sure that this isn’t spam software, but actually valuable content which can be given favorable reviews and/or be worthy enough of being shared on social media

29) Any other types of links which can be generated by providing content through networking like Buzzstream and/or Buzzbundle

30) If possible, create helpful tutorials and share them on tutorial sites

31) Share unique content via PDF or slide content on sites like Scribd.com, Slideshare.net and similar document-sharing sites.  Some e-book directories may qualify here; but focus on those which have the high levels of traffic and search engine authority to get a quality link

Additional quality links could be established by “paid reviews”/”paid blog posts”, classified ads (though most are temporary), getting other people to bookmark your content on their social bookmarking accounts (especially relevant ones) and a few other possible methods.

If you do not feel comfortable using any of the 30+ link types mentioned as Tier 1 links, then you likely can use them as Tier 2 links pointing to the Tier 1 links.  This allows for the customized indirect linking which Greg mentioned on his October 22, 2013 post.

Thank you for reading this far.  Feel free to comment on additional types of Tier 1 links which you believe which are Penguin-friendly going forward into 2014 and can drive direct traffic plus help with your overall SEO efforts.

 

Filed Under: link building, SEO
November 5, 2013 by

Google Penguin Update Recovery Tips Podcast

The other day I was invited by JenningsWire/AnnieJenningsPR.com to be the guest on a podcast.  I was asked these kinds of questions regarding the recent Google update and what kind of Google Penguin update recovery tips may be useful to help businesses (both local and national) improve their search engine optimization (SEO) efforts:

  • Google had its Penguin 2.1 update in the beginning of October. What took place?
  • Why is link building still important? Shouldn’t people just be focused on social media now?
  • Some SEO professionals recommend to their clients that they build links in “tiers”. Why do you think this is the case?
  • What else is missing from most companies’ SEO efforts?
  • Researching keywords has changed recently as well. What recommendations do you offer that are unique and not commonly suggested?

You can listen to the podcast here or click the image below:

JenningsWire_Banner_LOGO_For_Bloggers_Jpg_Format_2013

 

The audio content is roughly 10 minutes long.  One of the topics we covered is about using intelligent link building in the upcoming months.  Click this link for more information to read a recent article about which types of links to consider for your new link building efforts.

Filed Under: Backlinks, link building, Podcasts, search engine marketing, SEO Tagged With: , , , ,