5 Actionable Social Media Marketing Tips For Gig Workers

Getty

Gig workers who are totally localized (caterers, electricians, painters, plumbers, wedding planners, etc.) often discount the value of using social media for their marketing. Why? Because these platforms are at least national, if not international and what would be a use for a local business? 

Indeed, localized SEO and local advertising can drive you a steady stream of traffic and revenue. But you should not discount social media as a good tool for your marketing. Here are five actionable social media marketing tips for local contractors and other gig workers. 

1. Geo tagging and targeting is your allies

Social media platforms may have global reach, but they also allow you to go very granular with your marketing. Facebook lets you add a map to your business page and tag specific address. You can also opt to share your location when publishing updates. Instagram is even simpler – you can add a variety of geotags both to your stories and your posts, so that people exploring the local can see your content. 

Furthermore, both platforms have very precise geolocation targeting options for paid advertising campaigns. You can choose to pitch your services only to people who are in your state, city or even neighborhood. Or you can set geofencing ads – a digital boundary around certain areas that are of interest to you (e.g. Upper West Side, NYC) or that are close to your physical location. Once a customer that matches your demographics requirements steps inside the fence, they'll be served with your ads.  

2. Use social listening tools

Initially, social listening was limited to whenever a company or business was mentioned anywhere on the web. Newer technologies now have social media listening and monitoring tools that are location-based. And they can be utilized by entering keywords, not just business names. So, when a Facebook user reaches out to his community for recommendations for "painters in Jacksonville," you will be alerted and can access that post with a brand promotion response, along with a link to your website.

3. Try location-based advertising

Apart from purchasing ads on social media, you can also experiment with local PPC or direct paid-for advertising (if your budget will allow). For instance, if you are looking for strategies to grow your plumbing company in Orlando, you can experiment with geo-targeting in several residential areas  – Lake Eola Heights, College Park, Wadeview Park – to see where you are getting the best results. You can adjust your campaign and display ads only in specific locations and even within a certain radius. Don't forget to enable location extensions in your ads as those will immediately display a your business address, phone number and a map of your location within the ad, making it even easier for a customer to reach you. 

4. Make current customers your brand ambassadors

Ask your current satisfied customers to share their stories on their social media accounts and recommend you to their friends and followers. Adding an incentive will provide an additional motivation for them to do just this – a solid discount, a freebie, etc. Because social media users tap into their personal network for recommendations and referrals, getting brand ambassadors on board can bring in solid leads that can then be nurtured. If you are a caterer, for example and someone in your locale posts, "Does anyone know of a good caterer for a wedding," to their Facebook friends, you will be getting that recommendation.

5. Segment your target audience by interests 

Facebook also allows you to create audience profiles by interest and target people who are already following some brand or business. For instance, if you are an interior designer, you might want to find the page of a local furniture retailer or decor shop and chose to target their followers with your ads. Chances are that people who recently bought a lot at Home Depot are doing some renovations. The leads you gain through clicks are warm-to-hot – people actually looking for a product or service you are selling.

So if you have some marketing budgets to spare, don't discard social media altogether. When done right, such campaigns can help you attract a lot of new clients and make your brand (or personal) name more recognizable among the local crowd.

5 Excellent YouTube Channels to Follow to Learn SEO

SEO can be a tough subject to master. But what better way is there to learn than by the SEO experts themselves? If you're looking to improve your SEO game, there are a few high-quality YouTube channels you should subscribe to today. No matter your level of expertise, these YouTube channels are guaranteed to help you learn a thing or two about SEO.

5 YouTube Channels that Will Help You Learn SEO Neil Patel

Industry leader, Neil Patel, digs deep into SEO on his channel, providing you with an abundance of safe, white-hat practices that are certain to boost your rankings. Patel's collection of "How-to" videos are perfect for any skill level. The best part of Patel's videos is that the majority of them are approximately 5 minutes long. You can learn easy-to-implement tips and tricks in just a few minutes.

Eric Enge

As part of the SEO community, you must familiarize yourself with Eric Enge, co-author of The Art of SEO, otherwise known as the "Bible of SEO." Enge's YouTube channel offers a huge collection of educational and comedic videos. In his "Digital Marketing Classroom," Enge offers top-shelf suggestions, best practices, and tutorials that you can't miss. If you're looking to learn from an SEO master himself, definitely check out this channel.

Recommended For You Webcast, October 15th: Your Baby is Ugly - Live Rapid-Fire Website ReviewsRegister Now Ahrefs

Ahrefs' YouTube channel provides actionable SEO tutorials that will show you how to increase your organic search traffic and earn higher rankings. They offer several in-depth SEO videos perfect for beginners. I highly recommend their keyword-related tutorials. They also have a great selection of SEO tool comparison videos. These videos can help novice SEOs select the best tools for their needs without wasting money and time trying out every tool.

Moz

Moz provides a plethora of useful SEO information and tips in their Moz Daily SEO Fix and Whiteboard Friday YouTube series. Each of their videos contains helpful resources that educate viewers on inbound marketing and SEO for business owners. You'll learn the ins and outs of SEO from some of the biggest names in inbound marketing and get some insight into popular Moz tools.

Hack My Growth

SMA Marketing's Hack My Growth channel offers tips and strategies that our agency uses on a daily basis. Our channel features the latest trends in SEO, inbound, content marketing, data, analytics, and more. You'll learn proven tactics to grow your website's organic visibility and maximize your exposure. You'll even get a chance to see some of our agency's favorite SEO tools.

Give Your SEO Skills a Boost

Implementing a strong, high-quality SEO strategy is not only beneficial to your brand and marketing efforts, but it is critical for your web presence, especially within competitive markets. Whether you're new to the field or consider yourself an expert, staying current on industry best practices is crucial for SEO success. Stay on trend with these YouTube channels.

3 tips to turbo-charge your SEO campaign

You have 1 new notifications

Check out how you can generate leads, close deals, & manage pipelines with HubSpot. Get a startup-friendly offer up to 90% off when you apply for HubSpot for startups today. Check it out >>>

Pilot and scale your fintech company in Vietnam with local corporate partners! Apply now >>>

We'll help you engage with the ever-growing e27 community. Find out more here >>>

The nuances of fundraising: what startups need to know. Read about it here >>>

ICMG harnesses the power of FORGE to support corporate-startup innovation. Read about it here >>>

 

Liqui-Site Named an Industry Leader on Clutch for Non-profit SEO

HOBOKEN, N.J., Oct. 2, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Liqui-site, an eMazzanti Technologies company and New York City area digital agency, was recently named as an industry leader in SEO for non-profits by Clutch, a Washington, D.C. based research, ratings, and reviews firm.

Clutch provides verified reviews and detailed profiles for companies on its site to enhance their online presence. Clutch ranks companies as leaders on their platform through a thorough analysis of client reviews, obtained primarily through interview style phone calls, as well as their own scoring system and market research.

"In our digital-first world, SEO and digital marketing are critical tools for companies to increase their online presence," stated Jennifer Mazzanti, CEO, eMazzanti Technologies. "Liqui-Site, helps clients attract top talent, tell their story and increase advertising effectiveness to grow their brand. We are excited to be recognized by Clutch for our digital team's outstanding work."

Liqui-Site offers search engine optimization (SEO), custom website design and development, ecommerce, digital advertising, pay-per-click, email marketing and automation as well as website hosting services. The agency's clients excel in a variety of verticals, including non-profit, manufacturing, publishing, entertainment and others.

"Based on your strong reviews and ability to deliver, it's clear that your company goes above and beyond for your clients," stated The Clutch Awards Team in a September 18, 2019 recognition letter.

With an award-winning web portfolio across fourteen years, Liqui-Site brings digital marketing talent to the table as well as innovative web technology to deliver increased leads, sales and profitability for common clients. The agency's mantra conveys its passion, "Do good work. Work to do good."

The Liqui-Site offerings provide a natural extension of services for eMazzanti's customers. Clients enjoy greater access to digital marketing creative resources and ecommerce expertise to enhance revenue growth opportunities. Primary industries targeted for the new services include retail, non-profit, legal, professional services, healthcare, manufacturing and distribution.

Related resource information:

Digital Marketing: What It Is, and Why You Need It

More Than a Logo: 3 Indispensable Tips to Help Build Your B2B Brand

About Clutch

Clutch is a Washington, DC-based B2B research firm that identifies top service providers and solutions firms that deliver results for their clients. The Clutch methodology is an innovative research process melding the best of traditional B2B research and newer consumer review services. To date, Clutch has researched and reviewed 1000+ companies spanning 50+ market segments.

About eMazzanti Technologies

eMazzanti's team of trained, certified IT experts rapidly deliver increased revenue growth, data security and productivity for clients ranging from law firms to high-end global retailers, expertly providing advanced retail and payment technology, digital marketing services, cloud and mobile solutions, multi-site implementations, 24×7 outsourced network management, remote monitoring and support.

eMazzanti has made the Inc. 5000 list eight consecutive years, is a 4X Microsoft Partner of the Year, the #1 ranked NYC area MSP, NJ Business of the Year, 5X WatchGuard Partner of the Year and one of the Top 200 U.S. Microsoft Partners! Contact: 1-866-362-9926, info@emazzanti.net or https://www.emazzanti.net Twitter: @emazzanti Facebook: Facebook.com/emazzantitechnologies.

 

SOURCE Liqui-Site

Simple SEO Tips To Optimize Blog Posts

There are as many as 600 millions blogs on the internet and as many as 2 billion blog posts are published yearly across the world wide web. That means, each day we come across almost 5,760,000 blog posts. Every minute, there are 4000 blogs posts that go live on the internet (2018, Internet Live Stats). That is huge competition.  

If you are blogging,you are not alone. Competition is tough. Optimising the blog posts that can easily rank in google is important. Listed down are top 11 tips that can make it easy for bloggers to improve their blog post ranking. 

Keyword Research Is Necessary 

For any blogger, keyword research is of great importance. 

There are plenty of keyword research tools such as Keyword Planner by Google, Soovle. Moz Keyword Explorer, SEMRush Keyword Tool, Jaaxy. Ahrefs Keywords Explorer. SECockpit. KeywordTool.io and others.  A simple search using one of these tools will help you explore what type of keywords can be good for the post. 

Use Less Competitive Keywords In The Posts 

Brining Visitors To Blog

I would recommend the use of the less competitive keywords in the blog posts if the blog is new. This will help the bloggers reach some position in Google easily and this way their blog will receive some good amount of traffic. There is no sense in trying to rank for a keyword that is competitive and for which there are already hundreds of other popular blogs with strong domain authority and backlink profile. 

But, this doesn't mean that you should stop trying to make use of the popular and high-volume keywords. What I mean to say is first work on low-volume keywords and try to get some decent traffic to the site. After some months of blogging, you can target such popular keywords. By that time, your blog will also grow. With decent traffic and increasing social shares, Google will consider ranking your site on other popular keywords too. 

Science Behind Keyword Usage

There is simple science in creating an seo-friendly post. You do not have to be a blog scientist to write posts that achieve first page ranking in google and other search engines. 

Just learn to add keywords wherever necessary in the post. 

For example:

It is important that the title of the post shall have the target keyword. 

The URL of the post shall carry the target keyword. 

The first paragraph of the post shall also have the target keyword and other versions of it. It is always good to add some synonyms of the keywords you are using, the keyword you want to get ranking on. 

The use of the keywords in the subheadings is recommended too. But, it is not necessary that you shall use only the target keyword for the subheadings. If you can use the target keyword once in the top-level subheadings such as H2 and H3, it is enough. Use other similar or close-match keywords, short and long tail keywords in the post. 

It is also important that the keywords shall be distributed in the article evenly.  

Using LSI Keywords Is Recommended 

What are LSI Keywords? Latent Semantic Indexing is a new form of SEO. Try to cover all types of LSI keywords in the post to get good preference from Google. You can use the website such as LSIKeywords.com to check what type of keywords you can include in the post. 

Write For People, Not For Google

Generate content for the people you want to read and enjoy. SEO is secondary. When the content is good enough for the visitors, it can work like magic for you to increase its share on social sites and bring more number of visitors to the blog. Google also prefer content that is made for the users. 

Long-form Content 

Source: SerpIQ

Gone are the days when a 500 words article was enough to be seen on first page of Google. Times have changed. We are living in an era of long-form content. Build sky-scraping content. To dominate first-page ranking, an article of 1500-3000 words is needed. Close look at some of the popular sites such as Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Watch, Moz, Wordstream and others will reveal this fact. 90% of the blog posts on these sites carry words from 500-5000 and even more than that. 

Strong Interlinking 

Make sure the content is interlinked properly with other relevant posts. Remember, strong internal linking is also a crucial SEO factor. If you ignore, your site will have to bear the brunt of the giant search engine. 

Click-worthy Title and Meta Description 

Add title and meta description that can compel people to click on the link. Click-through-rate (CTR) is significantly low for many sites because webmasters do not pay attention to writing unique and more effective title and meta description. Poor title and description will not help the site. Even if it is on first page of google, users may not click it. 

Share On Social Sites For Immediate Indexing 

Share posts on social sits for instant indexing

As soon as you publish the article, take time to promote it on social sites, submit the blog post URL to google using Search Engine Console. This will make indexing easy. 

Creating backlinks 

To be honest, backlinks are not an important SEO factor for a post to rank higher in 

Google these days because, Google now gives importance to only quality content. 

But, one has to focus on building quality backlinks in order to improve domain authority and domain rank that will ultimately help the site appears in the search results more easily. 

Conclusion:

SEO is constantly changing. It is important to learn what type of tricks can help with optimising the site in the right way.  Webmasters, website owners and bloggers shall not stop from experimenting new things but focusing on standard SEO principles is quintessential to achieving successful online presence in google. 

Stop Wasting Money: 8 Tips to Maximize Your Content Marketing Budget

Content is fuel for digital marketing. It is hard to do anything – SEO, paid search, social media, email, etc. – without having quality content.
Whether it is in a range of formats like video, articles, blog posts, images, content is a necessity.
We have varying levels of sophistication when it comes to research and development of our schedules and calendars.
Depending on our focus and target audience, we may lock in on short-form articles, long-form, whitepapers, gated content, video, webinars for B2B, or go with quick hits and short formats that are visually heavy for B2C.
Regardless of our current level of planning and strategy and our organization's target audience, we know we can improve the return on investment of our content and be more efficient in the process of generating it.
Here are eight tips to maximize your content budget and stop wasting money.
1. Align Content Needs with Goals
If a digital marketing channel like SEO is driving the push for more or different content, that can be a problem. SEO and digital marketing professionals need content for their efforts.
If they're asking for it and it is a surprise or if they're asking for formats and topics that aren't in the broader digital marketing, or marketing plan, that isn't a good sign.
Take a step back and ensure that all digital marketing channels are aligned toward overall marketing goals for the organization.
Then, work backward to see how each need content to contribute to the customer journey. From there you'll be able to find shared content needs that will funnel into the overall goals.
SEO and other digital marketing channel goals shouldn't be so different that their targeting and audience focuses require 100% unique and separate content to be generated than the other channels.
2. Create a Strategy
A strategy isn't stating that we're going to create two blog posts per week, do some SEO to them, and share them on social. (Apologies if I step on any toes here!)
If you're in that boat, there's no shame. Now is the time to take your goals (see above), do research (more on that to come), and create a bigger strategy.
Yes, you'll need the tactical part of it regarding when you'll create and deploy content. However, you need to know:

What you're producing.

Why you're producing it.

Your expected content ROI at a top-level as well as a channel-specific one.

Most importantly – bring all of your marketing channels to the same table.
Understand what they are targeting, make sure there's alignment across the board, and determine what their content needs are individually to create a cohesive strategy.
3. Learn from the Past
If you haven't taken a deep-dive into analytics, channel metrics, and anecdotal results from the sales team – now's the time.
While we can speculate on what performed well or what we want to promote, we definitely need to gain insight from what has worked and what hasn't in the past.
Jane may think the piece on the quantum physics of how we engineer the widget is the best article ever written for the industry while John bets his lunch on the whitepaper comparing all of the inferior competitor widgets to our company's widget.
Both may be right, both may have impressions based on what they feel is important in messaging.
If you have data and can trust how the content was optimized, shared, and promoted in the past, use this to influence the strategy going forward.
4. Learn from Competitors
While there may be an argument that we're different and better than all of our competitors – or that no one really does what we do – there's always something to learn.
Even a basic review and documentation of the topics, formats, and what we can see externally and through research tools in terms of engagement on competitor websites can help us.
We don't need to repeat the competitors' mistakes and we can leverage what appears to be working with our better and different take on the topics.
5. Listen to Your Audience
Going beyond the review of the past in analytics and reporting for engagement and what has worked well, talk with your team. Or, even better, talk to your customers.

What are their pain points?

What are the questions they had when in the research and buying process?

What content helped them?

What do they wish you had told them?

How could they have found you faster?

There are a lot of great questions that can be asked both internal and external stakeholders. This doesn't have to be through a statistically significant sample or survey.
Use conversations, surveys, and meetings to get this info and see how it aligns with goals, topics, and the plan.
6. Leverage Your Subject Matter Experts
Creating content can be a significant investment in both hard and soft costs for an organization. If you're paying external writers, photographers, videographers, strategists, subject matter experts, etc., you're investing a lot.
If you have internal subject matter experts, you have a wealth of knowledge readily available. The challenge is unlocking that knowledge and turning it into content.
You've got a strategy, you have goals, you know what the competition is saying and doing, you know what your channels need, now you need to produce the content.
Sure Jane and John aren't marketers and writing in alignment with the content marketing plan isn't their strong suit. That doesn't mean that we can't use them.

Get bullet points from them.

Interview them.

Write an initial draft and have them add to it.

Have them give you an initial draft.

With some guidance and the right process to get valuable content out of them, you can mine your internal resources and save both external and internal resource capital.
7. Use the Same Content in Multiple Ways
The goal of investment in content should be to get the most out of it.
Being able to leverage it in multiple digital marketing channels, for uses beyond marketing, and by packaging it in different ways, we can get the most out of it.
Additionally, being able to reuse the same content (if it isn't breaking news or tied to a trending topic), you can find ways to resurface it and put different angles on it down the road.
For example, if you had a great article about the upcoming "mobilegeddon" you can write follow up pieces repurposing it when the deadline is nearing and even after the fact: "Mobilegeddon 1-month out: what we learned".
By thinking about the multiple formats, channels, and ways to revisit and repurpose content topics, we can get even more out of original pieces of content without having to start from scratch.
Plus, more focus and concentration on a topic helps build thought leadership rather than just sprinkling out posts and mentions on a wide range of topics.
8. Measure Content Performance & Be Agile
While we can have the best 12-month plan in place with goals, strategy, tactical scheduling, and budget lined up, the reality is that things won't play out exactly as we predict.
We have to have some level of agility built into the strategy or process.
This means we have to be constantly measuring the performance of our content against goals at the top level and within digital marketing channels and be willing to adjust the strategy as we go.
If we're getting a ton of traction on a certain topic, putting more time into that topic and delaying another might be the answer.
In other cases, if we aren't seeing traction, there may be a case for moving onto other areas of the strategy or adjusting the promotional and optimization plans.
Regardless, this is a fluid process that can't be planned on an annual static calendar and rigid with no way to adjust.
Yes, you need the long-term strategy and calendar, but you have to build in the mechanisms to be able to adjust as you go.
Conclusion
With content being a focal point and necessary function of virtually all digital marketing channels – including search marketing – we know we have to invest in it.
By being proactive with our content marketing approach and finding ways to save money, become more efficient, and see better performance as a bonus.
More Resources:

SEO Tips For Attorneys And Law Firms

For attorneys and law firms, SEO is a crucial strategy that can attract new clients online. Your potential clients are likely using search engines to find law firms, so neglecting SEO means you could be losing business. Don't make this mistake.

Here are my tips for attorneys and law firms that want to attract more visitors to their websites.

Don't Neglect Your Mobile Site

With mobile-first indexing, Google is looking at mobile sites over desktop sites for search results. If your primary content and markup are the same across your mobile and desktop sites, then you may not need to make any changes. However, if they're different, then there are some simple changes you may want to consider.

First, ensure that any high-quality content from your desktop site exists on your mobile site. Second, use the same structured data on both your desktop and mobile sites. Structured data is code that site owners use to help search engines provide more detailed search results. You can verify the existence of structured data on each version of your site using Google's Structured Data Testing Tool.

The major search engines have joined together to create Schema.org. On this site, you can find structured data markup that search engines recognize. You can copy the specific code that you're looking for and adapt it to meet your needs. To add structured data to your site, you simply add the code to the backend. If you're using Schema.org structured data for the first time, and don't want to mess anything up, there are several website plug-ins that can aid you tremendously. For WordPress users, we recommend using the Schema plug-in. Other options include Schema Pro and All In One Schema Rich Snippets.

Improve Your Site's E-A-T Scores 

E-A-T stands for "expertise, authority, and trustworthiness." Your E-A-T score is a major factor in how Google determines page rankings, so try to improve all three E-A-T factors to boost your search rankings and page visits. E-A-T scores are especially important for legal websites, which are considered YMYL (your money or your life) sites.

First, ensure that your site's content reflects your expertise as a legal professional. One way of doing this is by incorporating your past case results into the beginning and ending paragraphs of your content pages. Also, highlight any other experience you have that's relevant to the topic or practice area.

To establish your site as a source of reliable information, link to high-authority sites, such as the U.S. Department of Justice website.

Google should also see your site as trustworthy. If you don't have an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate, consider getting one. An SSL certificate is a standard security feature that allows encrypted communication between a web browser and a server. You can get an SSL certificate through a certificate authority (CA). Do a Google search to find one that has good user ratings.

A CA will vet your site for the level of encryption that you want to have. After the vetting process is complete, you'll receive an SSL certificate.

Make Sure Your Site Loads Fast

According to Think With Google, 53% of mobile site visitors leave a website if it fails to load in under three seconds. This can inevitably cost you clients, considering that more than 50% of web traffic comes from mobile these days.

Slow loading speeds can also affect search rankings for your site. Page speed is a ranking factor that Google's algorithms take into consideration.

There are several ways to help improve your site's page speed. First, you can compress your CSS, HTML and JavaScript files to reduce their size. To do this, right-click on the file you're looking to compress, and then select "Compress." If you're unsure of how to do this yourself, ask your web developer to tackle it.

Second, look into limiting the overall number of redirects that exist on your site. The more redirects that your site has, the longer it will take for the HTTP request-response cycle to finish. Analyze the redirects that are currently active on your site and remove any that are nonessential.

Third, optimize your website code by eliminating any unnecessary spaces or characters. The process of removing unnecessary spaces or characters is referred to as "minifying." To manually minify a file, all you have to do is remove unnecessary items from your code. If you're not comfortable doing this yourself, you can also use online tools like CSSMinifier.com or WP Rocket.

Use Content Clustering

Content is a major ranking factor for your site. When Google crawls your site, it uses a search algorithm that relies on keywords. The goal is to use keywords within your content that people often use in their Google searches. If your content contains these keywords and is well-written, then Google will be more likely to view your site as an authority on that particular topic. It will then be more inclined to push your content further up in the search results.

What the content conveys is important, but so is how your site uses the content. One effective strategy to use is content clustering, where existing content on your site serves as a hub that links to content containing information about similar topics.

With this strategy, you can take one high-ranking piece of content and link it to other pages on your site. This could potentially boost the rankings for the content pages linked to the high-ranking hub page. To accomplish this, simply create internal links on each content page that link to the main hub page.

The competition between law firms to attract new clients online is intense. In the current marketplace, it's often no longer enough to be good at your job. You may also have to be good at the internet. Implementing these tips can help you gain that competitive edge and secure new business.

Zach Thompson is CEO of MediaSmack, a legal marketing firm, where he oversees the strategic vision and growth of the company.