Christmas is just around the corner and here’s a last-minute Marketing checklist to make sure your audience receives the best gift from you this holiday season!
- Check Your Listings – Have you updated your Google Listings? Let your customers know your holiday operating hours and boost your visibility by providing accurate information of your business.
- Spread Holiday Cheer – Create festive images and share it through your social media pages. Be creative!
- ‘Tis the Season of Giving – It’s always nice to be grateful to your loyal customers, and this is the right time to do it! Think of discounts, promos or offers you can give this season. You can also send personalized cards or thank you notes for being the awesome people that they are.
- Share the Christmas Spirit – Create brand awareness by making videos of what you’re grateful for this year, and what you and your business is looking forward for the year to come.
Americans Starting New Businesses at Record Pace
New figures from a study by LendingTree indicate the number of new business applications across America in 2020 has surpassed the figure from the previous year’s total by mid-October.
New business applications reached over 3.4 million new applications in 2020 up from last year’s 3.4 million figure. Even with the nation experiencing the worst economy since the Great Depression, new business applications have surpassed 2019’s figures. Overall business applications growth was triggered following the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act was signed into law on March 27.
Businesses Starting at Record Pace in 2020
However, the data indicates high-propensity business applications have declined. Only 35% of 2020 business applications through mid-October were from high-propensity businesses. High-propensity businesses are companies with a high rate of business formation that include a corporate entity, hire employees, and offer planned wages. In fact, the percentage of high-propensity business applications has fallen in all 50 states since 2006.
https://smallbiztrends.com/2020/12/lendingtree-businesses-starting-2020-record-pace.html
WordPress Easy WP SMTP Plugin Vulnerability
Popular WordPress plugin with over 500,000 active installations was recently patched to fix an exploit that grants hackers complete control.
Popular WordPress plugin Easy WP SMTP plugin, with over 500,000 active installations, just patched a vulnerability that allows an attacker to take control of a site. The flaw in the WordPress plugin allows hackers to reset the admin password and take complete control of a website.
Easy WP SMTP Vulnerability
The vulnerability is in a debug log file that is exposed because of a very basic error in how the plugin maintained a folder. Plugin folders on a server that contain files that are not meant to be seen by users usually contain a blank index.html file. The purpose of that file is to keep someone from navigating to that folder and discovering a list of files within that folder.
If someone can see the list of files, then they can potentially access those files, which is the case.
The folder where the debug log file exists does not have an index.html file. So on servers where directory index listings are not disabled by default a malicious hacker can gain access to that file.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/easy-wp-smtp-plugin-vulnerability/390109/
Google Introduces New Features for Small Business on Maps and Search
Your online small business profile now must provide a whole host of information. And you have to make this information available quickly and accurately. Google is making this possible by bringing messaging capabilities and customer insights on Google Maps and Search.
This new feature is the second part of an effort by Google to simplify the way businesses update their information. In May of this year, the company made it possible to update your Business Profile directly from Maps and Search. This time around, you can access more Google products and features to engage with your customers as well as update your business information. And you can do all this from the same place with direct messaging.
https://smallbiztrends.com/2020/12/google-maps-search-updates-local-small-business.html
Website Structure: 10 Factors That Can Affect SEO
A good website structure should have a significant impact on SEO traffic and conversion.
It should also help your whole organization engage better with users and create an experience aligned with your business goals, product, and service structure.
In this article, I share some key points to consider as to how website structure affects SEO.
1. Site Crawlability
Site crawlability is one of the most important factors when it comes to website structure.
Crawlability refers to a search engine’s ability to crawl through your website’s entire text content to figure out what your website is all about.
Part of this process is navigating through subpages and particular topics to understand the website as a whole.
A webpage has to take a visitor someplace else within the website, from one page to another, to be considered crawlable.
Search engine robots are responsible for website crawling.
An important tenet of good website crawlability is that there are no dead ends while crawling through your website.
2. URL Structure
One of the essential factors relating to how website structure affects SEO comes back to the URL structure.
URLs are also the building blocks of an effective site hierarchy, passing equity through your domain and directing users to their desired destinations.
The best URL structures should be easy to read by a user and a search engine and contain target queries, so they are content-rich.
Effective structures replicate logic across your whole website and submitting an XML sitemap to search engines with all of the most important URLs you want to rank for also helps.
Try to keep URLs simple and don’t over complicate them with too many parameters.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-website-structure-affects-seo/387034/?ver=387034X2
An SEO’s Experience in 2020: Opportunities and Challenges
Throughout this blog post, I’ll discuss the various tactics I’ve seen work incredibly well for our clients and in the wider industry as a whole, in addition to advice for increasing productivity and overall happiness with the change of scenery to full-time working from home. I hope that this post provides ideas and potential projects SEOs can work on in-house or with clients, and that my tips for working from home also help you take a step back, unwind, and increase your productivity and work/life balance.
SEO tactics that worked extremely well this year
“Low hanging fruit” initiatives
With the influx of users sitting at home and spending more time online this year, a strategy we employed across our clients was to tackle pages that ranked in positions 5-9, or 11-14, and optimize existing content to increase visibility in the SERP.
These optimizations consisted of simple, yet effective changes that match and cater to the user’s search intent. As it’s been proven that people scan as few as the first two words of a title tag, the importance of having an effective title tag that concisely describes the content on the page cannot be overlooked. Title tag tweaks, H1, and meta description updates are some of the ways that our clients’ rankings have improved on the first page, and also won Answers Box and People Also Ask results.
Targeting “People Also Ask” questions
We’ve found that with increased searches in 2020, users are asking more questions overall and are looking for in-depth and valuable answers. Google’s People Also Ask SERP feature is the most effective way for companies to answer regularly asked questions, and drive more traffic to their site.
PAA questions have been an effective strategy in 2020 to increase traffic and increase brand awareness to our clients’ sites. The main way we targeted landing in the People Also Ask section for clients was to tailor new and existing content around answering these user’s questions. Tools such as AlsoAsked.com were vital in identifying these questions, and creative writers were extremely beneficial in attacking this SERP feature.
https://moz.com/blog/seo-2020-opportunities-and-challenges
How to Expand Your Facebook Ad Targeting to New Audiences
In this article, you’ll learn the six types of warm audiences you can target with Facebook ads and how to scale them to many different lookalike audiences. You’ll also discover how to find cold audiences that will work for you.
#1: Create 6 Warm Facebook Advertising Audiences
The first audience category we’re going to talk about is warm audiences. These will be some of your best audiences on Facebook because they’re people who are already familiar with your brand and business. It’s a good thing to continue to show up in the news feed of your warm audiences because the more they see you, the more trust and rapport you build with them.
Some of your best warm audiences on Facebook are your email list, website traffic, video views, ad engagement, Facebook page engagement, and even Instagram profile engagement. If your business is brand-new, you’ll cultivate these audiences over time. But if you already have enough volume in these audiences, you can start using them immediately.
#2: Create 4 Lookalike Audiences to Scale Each Warm Facebook Audience
Once you’ve created your warm audiences in Facebook Ads Manager, you can start creating lookalikes of those audiences.
Let’s say you’ve created a Facebook custom audience from your purchase list. You can tell Facebook to find more people who look like people who’ve purchased from your business. Facebook will then find what’s common among all of these people and look for others who look and behave like those who have already purchased from you.
You want to create lookalikes of your purchase list, email lists, website traffic, video views, ad engagement, Facebook page engagement, and Instagram profile engagement. And if you’re doing Facebook lead forms, build lookalikes of your lead forms too.
https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-expand-facebook-ad-targeting-to-new-audiences/
YouTube Has More Ways to Build Hype For a New Video
YouTube Premieres, which allows creators to generate interest in a video before it goes live, is gaining 4 new features.
YouTube is expanding the capabilities of its Premieres feature with 4 new ways to drum up hype for a video.
What YouTube is calling ‘Premieres 2.0’ is the most significant update to the feature since it launched in 2018.
Premieres is designed to allow creators, publishers, and artists to turn their newest video into a shared viewing experience.
Creators can use Premieres to publish newly-uploaded videos at a scheduled time. This gives the creator an opportunity generate advance buzz and get people to RSVP via the video’s watch page.
Viewers can visit the watch page to set a reminder and receive a notification when the premiere is about to start. When they tune into the channel on the scheduled premiere date, they’ll join a group chat where everyone can watch the video together in real-time.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/youtube-has-more-ways-to-build-hype-for-a-new-video/389735/
What are your Learnings in Marketing this Year?
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