August 2014 | The Web Authority

August 28, 2014August 23, 2014

Pocket a Cool App for Busy People

What gets the thumbs up for busy professionals? Pocket!

Looking for a way to be productive and keep on top of your reading? Consider the app called Pocket.

Pocket allows you to save to read later any article or web page. By saving something of interest to your own Pocket account, you can read it on your phone, on your tablet, or on your desktop. You don’t even have to be online to be able to read the content!

To get started visit www.GetPocket.com. Chrome makes it easy to add a GetPocket app that sits in your browser top menu. IE makes it a little more difficult but follow these instructions and add it to your Favorites Bar. In this case you right click the orange button and then save to Favorites and then in the open list Favorites bar.

You can sort your links, delete them, and favorite them. You can add articles, videos, links whatever you want. Visit Google Play or the Apple Store to get the free smartphone app that expands it use tremendously.

For me, this is a fabulous tool as it takes everything that I want to read later and allows me to be more productive on the go. So often I find cool things or articles I want to read later to blog about and I have been saving them in Outlook for Saturday reading. But I have to be sitting at my computer to re-read them. Now, I can sign into GetPocket.com and read my articles sitting at the dentist waiting on kids or when I have a free moment out and about.

Get more productive with your waiting, down-time, or sitting time by using Pocket to keep you in the know on the go!

August 26, 2014August 23, 2014

The End of Manipulating Google Places

Google Partner Badge — McCord Web Services is a Google Partner.

Very quietly Google has changed Google Places to remove the ability to manipulate a listing for organic performance and rebranded this property now as Google My Business. This action has very quietly slipped under the radar, but the changes are big for businesses.

First, Google sent out notices to all Google+ Local businesses that duplicate listings of the same business would not be allowed. Google immediately disabled access to all Google+ Local pages (also known as Google Maps pages and Google Places accounts) to email addresses that were not recognized by Google as clearly being the account owner by email, or having the business phone number or carrying the registered address. This effectively locked out all third party account managers.

Google then advised all account access users that the main account owner – not even the originator of the account, would have to allow access to any users from the parent account. Additionally that any approved users would then have to manage the account for two full weeks before transfer of the account could be done.

By making the linking and transfer process so complicated Google has effectively locked our all parties except the one account owner. Of additional important note is that Google has been removing one by one the items a business owner could actually change on their account. Over time, Google has removed the ability to add keywords and to craft a message that helped the business place locally.

Google even removed the ability for a monthly promotion as well as comments from the page owner. With this most recent update Google has now forced all Places pages now into the format of a Google My Business Page. No longer is the look and feel different of a Places page from a postable Google+ Business page but identical and one that you can now post to with a third party app like HootSuite.

If you already had a Google+ Business page Google has now made things even more difficult by creating a new page you’ll have to update called a Google My Business page.

August 21, 2014August 16, 2014

Budget Tight? Where Can You Cut Back without Hurting Your Web Visibility?

The month of July has been tough for a number of businesses and August is not looking too hot either. Your company President is asking all departments to start trimming. Where can you trim without seriously affecting online visibility?

1. Take a careful look at social media. You may be able to move from three updates a day to two or from two to one.

2. Look at where your customers are. If you are paying to post to LinkedIn but have never gotten a customer from LinkedIn, use HootSuite to auto feed your blog posts to LinkedIn and drop daily status updates there. How about Google+ can you drop your frequency back?

3. Consider trimming your AdWords pay per click budget back 10%. You may not suffer significantly from this action but don’t just do it automatically. If AdWords has really been a strong lead driver for you, it may be more beneficial to boost your budget there instead of cutting.

4. Consider asking your blog post supplier to move from three days a week to two or from two to one. I do not recommend less than one day a week posting as there are simply too many benefits you receive from great blog content, but it may be time to review your spend in this area.

Although not every business will want to cut back when times are tough you have options to help trim the budget by taking a careful look at what has been working to drive leads and what can simply be trimmed in service level for the time being to trim costs until things turn around financially.

August 19, 2014August 16, 2014

When Does Your Website Need Professional Help?

What gets the thumbs up from search engines?

Here are several indicators that you need serious professional help:

1. Your daily website visits are under 10 a day.

2. When you search for your website under your business name or domain name, you don’t even appear on Google.com.

3. You’ve been blogging for a year but your inbound link numbers are still under 500.

4. Your bounce rate is in the 90 to 80% level.

5. You feel like you have great content but your phone is not ringing.

You’ve got a visibility problem! Although you may be doing many of the right things, you may not be doing them well, doing them consistently, or doing them with a cohesive strategy. That’s when having a second pair of eyes to review your website, your social media activity, and your content can be of value.

I’ve just finished a review just like this for a client this past week and routinely help clients to understand where they’ve gone wrong, what they need to continue doing, and what they need to do more consistently.

You can get concrete help for these difficult visibility issues. Find out how we can help you and the types of visibility review services we provide.