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Blogging has come a long way from people sharing stories of their families and hobbies. Today, blogging offers a viable path to search engine dominance and improved lead generation.

Companies with blogs produce 67% more leads than those without a blog. Here’s another important fact: 47% of B2B buyers read 3-5 blog posts or content pieces before talking with a salesperson.

Whether you’re selling services or products, blogging can increase awareness, visibility, lead generation, and sales for your company. Before jumping into blogging, however, it’s essential to know what works, what doesn’t, and why most companies hire professional marketing writers to create their blog posts.

Prioritize Blogging

To use blogging successfully in your digital marketing efforts, you must prioritize it. Blogging can’t be something you do in your spare time or a task delegated to a summer intern.

Professional bloggers focus on producing copy that achieves a client’s goals. They also know the tactics and strategies that provide the best response for their clients.

• Frequency: Companies that publish 16+ blog posts per month get nearly 3.5x more traffic than those that publish 0-4 monthly. They also generated 4.5 times more leads than companies publishing 0-4 posts each month. If you leave blogging for “when you get the chance,” it will not be as effective as having a professional dedicated to the task.
• Copy format: If we asked you right now whether longer or shorter blog posts get better results, you’d probably say short posts – and you’d be wrong. Many business owners assume that since people are so time-pressed, they aren’t reading long blog posts. Google and other search engines, however, love long blog posts and often rank them higher in the search engine results page (SERPs) than shorter posts. The trick to pleasing both your human readers and the search engine bots is to know how to break up the longer copy into scannable bullets, lists, headlines, and sub headlines, with each serving the dual purpose of helping your readers understand what the post is about and gaining favor with Google. Does it matter? You bet it does – blogging is responsible for 434% more indexed pages and 97% more indexed links, each of which helps potential customers find you when searching.
• Metrics: The best content writers and marketing writers are also marketers. They understand and use metrics to improve their content pieces, including blog posts, each month. They know how to reach analytics reports and apply that knowledge to their work. Interns and time-pressed executives are unlikely to spend time comparing metrics and consulting with their digital marketing peers to test keywords, copy ideas, and more.

Blogging: An Investment for the Future

Blog content exists along a spectrum of content marketing creation that can take one idea and shape it into many formats. These ideas can be repurposed into graphics, videos, podcasts, and fresh written content.

Useful blog posts provide steady organic search traffic with 1 in 10 blog posts rated as a “compounding blog post.” As the name suggests, search traffic continually grows with such posts, and they may achieve up to 38% of a website’s traffic over time.

If you’d like a consultation regarding professional blogging services or content service, let’s set a time to talk with Jeanne, our content creator who has almost two decades of experience creating award-winning content. Her gardening blog is among the world’s top 50 gardening blogs and is frequently cited in ‘best of’ lists for home and garden. She’s the voice behind several top CEOs and writes for companies worldwide. Wouldn’t it be great to have her write your blog?

As a full-service digital marketing firm, Dashboard Interactive offers content marketing services, including marketing writing, blogging, and other forms of content creation. Achieving success with your blog means prioritizing it as a marketing tactic rather than merely putting out content for the sake of updating it. It is worth the investment over time.

Marin Software’s Stage of Digital Advertising 2019 report shows that paid search ads dominate digital marketing budgets. According to the report, paid search accounts for 39% of total advertisers’ budgets.

Why apportion more than a third of your advertising budget on paid search?

1. Effective: Paid search is highly effective. It matches an ad with what a user is actively searching for at that moment. It’s as if you thought, “I’d like some ice cream” and a genie appears holding a banana split. Because the ads match the keywords people are actively typing into a search engine bar, they are very relevant to what the user needs and generate a higher response. Paid search ads can also target different types of audiences, reaching those who are of a certain demographic or have an affinity toward a certain topic, etc.
2. Cost-effective: The budget for paid search offers a lot of ‘bang for the marketing buck’ so to speak. Goals, competition, bid strategy, campaign type and setup, keywords, etc. can play a major role. Most small businesses generate a better return for their marketing investment when the audience is properly identified, the objectives are clearly defined and campaigns are set up properly.
3. More than search: Paid ads encompass multiple platforms now. Search engines dominate, but social media channels, especially Facebook and Instagram, are popular places for paid search ads, too. This provides many channels through which a company can advertise all during a peak moment to reach decision-makers when they are interested in the advertiser’s products or services.

Where Are the Ads?

If you guessed Google, you’re right. The study states that Google remains the most trusted advertising platform with a ‘trust index’ rating of 98%. People believe that Google’s ads will display what they are searching for most of the time.

• Google’s Responsive Search ads are very popular among advertisers. 84% of the survey’s respondents plan to or are already using Responsive Search.
• 65% say their use of shoppable images within ads has increased. This improves targeting yet again by showing a searcher an item that exactly matches a query and making it easy to click and buy it.
• On social media sites such as Instagram, video dominates. 32% of respondents say that video is most effective, followed by 26% who say image ads are most effective.

Campaign Setup: Not for the Newbie

We all start somewhere in our understanding of a topic. When it comes to your business’ advertising, though, starting your first foray into the world of search advertising on your own can be daunting.

There are many aspects to creating, building, and launching an effective search campaign. This includes creating an overarching digital marketing strategy that takes into account your audience, competition, market size, timing, channels, and more. Next, keyword selection (where appropriate) helps focus on the best keywords to achieve your campaign goals. Budgets and bid strategy must be set and images licensed, sized, and configured to go out.

It takes time and effort to build an effective search campaign. We recommend working with a trusted partner to do so, especially if you’ve never worked on a digital marketing campaign yourself. A mistake can be costly, not just in money, but in wasted time and effort. Paid search is a great way to make money. It’s also a great way to lose money if not done correctly.

Dashboard Interactive can help you create and launch Google search campaigns, social media campaigns, and more. We’ll work with you to build and establish a digital marketing plan that makes sense and helps you achieve your ROI. Please call us at 763-242-2464 to get started.

We’ve all heard the adage that we should invest in our business for success. Now a study published by Backlinko demonstrates that there is indeed a budget ‘threshold’ that improves the potential for search engine success.

According to the study, “clients that spent over $500/month were 53.3% more likely to be “extremely satisfied” compared to those that spent less than $500/month.”

Let’s unpack that figure a bit and see if we can understand why $500 might be the “magic number” that makes the majority of SEO agency clients satisfied.

A Bargain May Not Save You Money

You’ve all met someone who hired a friend or relative for a job to save money but ended up paying twice as much to have a professional fix it in the end.

Well, the same goes for SEO. Hiring a freelancer from a job board like Fiverr may seem cost-effective, but the headaches and additional expense of hiring a professional SEO firm to fix their mistakes may be costly.

Skimping on SEO May Have Negative Consequences

Some possible negative consequences of skimping on SEO services include:

1. Poor visibility: Websites built without technical SEO expertise at the forefront will not rank as quickly or strongly as sites built with expert technical SEO insight. Trying to save money by working with a website developer with limited or outdated SEO skills will result in lower rankings on search engines.
2. Bad site builds: As we near the third decade of the 21st century, websites have evolved from the simple DIY sites of the past. Anything that looks less than professional and loads slowly on a smartphone loses traffic as people click on the next and perhaps better looking and performing website. Low leads and sales conversion may occur if not enough money is spent on the basics of proper optimization.
3. Seasoned SEO support: Spending more pays a dividend later in a search engine campaign that supports your overall marketing goals, enhances your online reputation, and builds brand awareness while achieving clicks and sales. A sound approach to marketing your business as a whole is the basis upon which that SEO spend produces success.
4. Expectations: None of us can be an expert on everything. When you hire an SEO firm, you may have high expectations of what the agency can achieve, but reputable SEO firms will communicate that SEO is a process that takes time. Sometimes, this message is not grasped, but it’s shared for a reason. It’s important to be realistic. The resulting mismatch between expectations and reality can lead to disillusionment and frustration, as well as wasted time and money.

As you can see, there’s a lot more to SEO than adding keywords and title tags to your website. Although the right spending threshold varies according to company, industry, location, and site size, spending more does indeed yield higher satisfaction with the campaign because spending more builds a better search marketing plan and digital marketing presence.

Spend More, but Spend Wisely

Another aspect of smart SEO is considering SEO as part of a comprehensive marketing strategy for your business. Search engine optimization is part of a suite of tactics that support a business strategy to achieve your goals. If you’d like to discuss your goals, needs, and plans, please contact Dashboard Interactive at 763-242-2454.

Almost immediately on the heels of Google’s Basic Core Update came the news of another adjustment: the Google Site Diversity Change.

What is the Site Diversity change? How might it impact your business and what do we foresee as the opportunities and threats to our customers?

The Google Site Diversity Change: What You Need to Know

Unlike the Basic Core Update, which Google considers a major update to its algorithm that determines how websites are displayed in response to a search engine query, the Site Diversity Change isn’t considered to be a major update. Instead, it’s a simple “change” or tweak to the results.

According to a Google tweet, “This site diversity change means that you usually won’t see more than two listings from the same site in our top results. However, we may still show more than two in cases where our systems determine it’s especially relevant to do so for a particular search….”

In plain language, this means that Google will no longer show more than two results from the same website in search engine results. Businesses who relied on domination over the first page of the SERPS by flooding their sites with content optimized around the same keyword phrase may find their traffic dropping as this change takes effect.

The Dashboard Interactive Perspective: Opportunity for Small Businesses

Some site owners expressed concern over the change but many see this as an opportunity and a potential benefit. It levels the playing field between big companies who can easily fill their sites with average quality, heavily optimized content or smaller or medium sized companies with solid SEO support and small businesses who produce only one or two exceptionally high-quality web pages on the same topic. Quality, not quantity, is the watchword for this Google change.

We also view this as a fun challenge for SEO firms and internal SEO departments. This change may separate the good from the average as there will be fewer organic positions to vie for and many will be pushed off page one for targeted keyword phrases.

In the past, being positioned on the lower half of page one for targeted keyword phrases may have led to new sales leads or sales opportunities, but now with the change, businesses that were once on the lower half of page one, may move up or they could find themselves on page 2. This change may require allocating additional marketing dollars to stay competitive or require that your digital marketing firm or marketing department, elevate their game to achieve the same results. As a result, companies may consider changing vendors or adjusting their digital marketing strategy.

With Google, change is a constant when it comes to how they find, index, and return pages in search engine results. The one thing that has always remained the same is relevance: ensuring the web pages are highly relevant to the keyword phrase used to describe the page contents.

Google is going to continue to change how their search engine returns results. It’s just a matter of time before they make further tweaks and changes. They are in the business of relevancy and of ensuring that searchers find what they are seeking quickly.

Small businesses looking to maximize their potential with both organic and paid search marketing would be wise to keep this in mind every time a Google update rolls out. It’s nothing to panic about – if your SEO firm has the knowledge and takes the time to consistently work on both the on-page and off-page SEO factors that help a site rank well.

Attention to detail matters when it comes to search engine marketing. It’s not just the keywords you choose. It’s how your site is built, hosted, created, managed, updated and marketed online and off.

If you’re interested in learning more, contact us today at 763-242-2454 or at 800-807-1854. We work with small and medium sized businesses and agencies and are here to help.

The popularity of video as a marketing tool keeps growing and growing. YouTube, the world’s most famous online video sharing site, boasts 1 billion viewers or about one-third of all internet users. For a company just celebrating its 14th birthday, that’s amazing.

But video marketing goes beyond YouTube to using videos for content marketing, product demonstrations, blogging, and more. Let’s take a look at the popularity of video as a marketing tool and talk about how your company can use this strong and growing marketing channel for brand awareness and lead generation.

Video Marketing by the Numbers

Videos reach everyone, both old and young, consumers and executives. They watch videos to learn more about products or services, tackle how-to projects, and engage with their favorite vloggers (video bloggers) about their thoughts on the latest topics.

Video offers excellent pass-along marketing, too, which results in more people watching and engaging with video content than with many other types of content.

1. 45% of people who watch YouTube watch one hour of videos or more each week.
   According to WordStream, YouTube fans watch at least an hour of the site’s content each week. That’s a lot of people watching one website and underscores the popularity of the video sharing site. Remember, not all YouTube videos are home movies of kids or pets doing funny things. Brands and companies also create and share channels, like television channels, on YouTube. There’s a big audience out there using one site which you can use to share your content, too.
2. 70% of consumers say they’ve shared a brand’s video.
   The Content Marketing Institute states that 27 million marketing pieces are shared daily. With that much content released to the world, you need something that not only stands out but gets passed along to others, thus amplifying the audience reach. This turns watchers into brand evangelists for your company, tapping into each customers’ circle of friends and family and greatly expanding how many potential viewers – and sales or leads – you’ll get from each video.
3. 72% of companies claim that videos improved their conversion rate.
   Conversion rate refers to the number of leads that turn into sales. According to this statistic, 72% of companies say that video helps convince potential buyers to complete their purchase. More leads will close as sales with videos included on a company’s website.
4. 52% of consumers say that videos help them feel confident about their decision to buy.
   Impact BnD cites an Invodo article in which consumers report that videos help them feel more confident about their purchasing decision. Do you sell something new to the market or something that costs a bit more than your competitors? If so, a video may help increase consumer confidence during the buying process. You can use video to showcase how a new-to-the-market product works, demonstrating the proper use of it or creative uses for it. Or, you can explain how a more expensive product offers a better value than the competitor’s products. Both examples help uncertain customers feel confident in their decision to complete the checkout process and buy a product.
5. 65% of executives visit a company’s website, and 39% call them after viewing a video.
   Forbes Insights states that among the executives they surveyed, 65% visited a company’s site after watching their video. B2B sellers are also part of the rising popularity of video for marketing purposes. Companies selling exclusively to other businesses report great success using video marketing, too.

Getting Started the Right Way with Video Marketing

Before you rush to pick up your smartphone or video camera and create your first video marketing piece, read this next part. It’s critical to make professional quality videos to market your business.

Just because we all have access to video cameras on our phones doesn’t make us good at it. Poor quality video can derail your video marketing efforts just as poorly written content can derail your blogging efforts.

Video marketing, like most online marketing, also relies heavily upon keyword-based titles, tags, and other attributes. These keywords help sites like YouTube and Google find and share your content with people looking for it online.

A professional internet marketing agency such as Dashboard Interactive understands how to make the most out of your video marketing budget. At Dashboard, we know that you can write one video script and use it for several content marketing projects and social media posts, or film one long video and extract many useful, shareable bits from it. We understand why it’s essential to upload an exclusive video to Facebook and why it’s essential to use the right keywords on your video. And, we keep you free from tangling in copyright snares by ensuring that all work is original or licensed appropriately from the creators of the music or images used in the piece.

There’s a particular look, feel, and production value to professionally produced video that you can’t get from a shaky handheld camera and your nephew’s editing work. People do judge a book by its cover, and they will judge – and leave – a poorly produced video. By contrast, they also love and share well-produced content.

Video marketing starts with a plan that includes a strategy for your entire web presence. Talk to Dashboard Interactive today to learn more about video marketing and to start your new internet marketing strategy.

Think about the people you trust. What makes them trustworthy?

Chances are you answered with one or more of the following statements:

• They keep their word.
• They show up when they say they will.
• I can depend on them – I know what to expect.

Local search marketing is a lot like building trust in a person. It’s about showing up where you’re expected and creating a consistent appearance. Let’s take a look at what this means for your business and how it builds enough trust with search engines so that they display your business at the top of the local search section of the results page, which in turn generates new clicks, leads, and sales for your company.

The Importance of Local Search

Just how important is local search? Consider the following:

50% of all people who do a local search on their smartphone visit the location the same day.
If your business traffic depends on local search, you need a multi-pronged approach to search marketing. Your site must be mobile-friendly and load quickly without taking up precious data space on a smartphone. Local search marketing, along with advertising, will also help push the results to the top of the page and encourage more people to visit. And, if the stats are correct, half of those who search for a business like yours locally will visit it the same day!

60% of American adults use a smartphone or tablet for local search.
This is another great reason to make sure that your site is set up appropriately for local search. Restaurants, plumbers, handymen, contractors, lawyers, doctors, dentists, accountants, store owners and more all rely on local clients. Make sure people can find you easily and quickly online.

30% of all searches include location.
A growing number of people tag their search queries with location information to ensure results appear in their local area. It’s another motivation to beef up your local search marketing efforts.

46% of all local searches are completed using Google.
Google remains an essential player in the search engine marketing world for both local and global searches. Optimizing your website for Google searches ensures that you’re seen and ranked by this top search engine.

Local Search Citation Sources

If you’re ready to work on your local search engine listings, the first step is to update and check local search citation sources. Like learning to trust certain people in your family or circle of friends, search engines have learned to trust specific websites for business listings. These sites provide accurate and reliable information so that search engines have learned over time to trust what they provide.

If you are serious about performing well in the local search market, you need a listing on each of the following seven directories (in no particular order):

1. Yelp
2. Acxiom
3. Neustar Localeze
4. Factual
5. Facebook
6. Infogroup
7. yp.com

According to Kristen Eichmann, Dashboard Interactive’s local search marketing expert, “The key is not to just be on these directories, but to have a consistent business name, address and phone number (NAP). If more than one listing exists for your business, you should contact them and ask them to remove the listing or merge it with your main listing (with the most accurate info).”

Kristen also points out that a listing on some of the major directories and syndicates will push your business information into smaller listings, spreading the information far and wide. This is another reason to ensure both accuracy and consistency.

“These are some of the major directories that syndicate your business info to other smaller directories. If data is inconsistent across these directories, this increases the chances of Google creating a duplicate Google My Business (GMB) listing for it. Duplicate GMB listings hurt your positioning in Google local because the two (or three+) listings compete with one another. Any duplicate listings then need to be closed, which is something we can assist with.”

Get Started with Local Search Today

Dashboard Interactive specializes in working with small and mid-sized businesses. Many of our clients have found they need help with local search marketing. They need assistance consolidating their listings, updating outdated information, or forming a plan of action on their search marketing.

That’s where we can help. We have a team of experienced marketing professionals including folks like Kristen who are experts at local search marketing. We also have professional web designers, SEO experts, copywriters, and more who can tackle local search projects for you. This frees your time up so that you can work on what you do best – your business – while we handle the marketing side of things.

If you’re ready to push the bar higher on your local search marketing efforts and showcase your business on Google and other search engines, give us a call today.

Right now, just a little over 7% of people say they prefer to search using voice-activated technology. The overwhelming majority prefer good old-fashioned text. They want to type a query into a browser on their computer or phone and read the results.

Does this mean that voice-activated search will never take off? It’s already taking off, and growing!

The Future of Voice Search Looks Bright

comScore predicts that 50% of all searches will be made by voice by 2020, while Gartner estimates that 30% of searches in the future won’t even need a screen.

Just because people prefer to use old-fashioned typing for search doesn’t mean they are opposed to using voice search. Preferences shift as technology becomes more affordable and intuitive. There’s always a delay between the introduction of new technology and the widespread adoption of that technology.

Back in the early 1990s, a good friend of mine, a salesperson for a pharmaceutical company, had an enormous cellphone the size of a shoebox with an antenna as big as her head. Today, we have watches that can double as smartphones. What seemed like something out of a James Bond movie is now ubiquitous.

Cellphones have evolved from bulky, heavy, limited objects to sleek, streamlined gadgets that make our lives easier. The same may be said for voice-activated search. What began as a lark, a cool toy to have in our homes to queue up our favorite music for a party or turn off the lights in the garage from the kitchen has started to become a necessary and accepted part of our lives.

Who Uses Voice Search?

Let’s dig a little deeper into who uses voice search, all preferences aside. The demographic information is invaluable for marketers looking to gain an edge on their search marketing, especially local search.

1. 65% of 25-49-year-olds use voice search. Over 57% of 50+ use it, too.
   This is the prime demographic for many local search opportunities, including restaurants, salons, childcare needs, home repair, and entertainment. If most of your customers come from this demographic, you must pay attention to voice search as part of your search engine optimization strategy, or you may miss a significant opportunity.
2. 58% use voice search to find a local business.
   Finding a local plumber, a restaurant that’s open late at night, or a pharmacy open 24/7 are all tasks for local search. If you cater to a local market, more than half of your local customers are using voice search to find recommendations. It pays to be at the head of the line.
3. 35.6 million Americans used voice-activated devices at least once a month in 2017, two years ago. That figure, however, represents a year-over-year increase of 128.9%

If you still think that voice search is struggling for widespread adoption, think again. More people every year jump on the voice search bandwagon, purchasing unique devices such as Alexa or using voice search assistants already embedded in existing devices, such as Siri in Mac products. Each year, the number of people turning to voice search increases—whether they prefer it or not.

Tapping into the Voice Activated Search Market

To tap into the voice-activated search market, you must have a website that is voice search optimized. What does that mean? It means a site that is:

• Fast: Speed is essential to good search rankings, but it is imperative for voice-activated search. Common code errors, big images, and other issues can slow a site down. A good SEO firm can help you find those problems and fix them.
• Specific: Keyword phrases continue to be necessary for search engine optimization whether voice or text-activated. When optimizing for the local market, it’s important to think like you’re the one using a mobile or other voice activated device and incorporate appropriate request phrases. Including phrases related to your location may help push your site ahead of the other local competitors as well.
• Secure: Google and all search engines put a premium on security. If you do not have an SSL certificate and a secure infrastructure to your website, think again. You may wish to find a provider to run a security audit on your site and suggest ways to improve.

Voice search continues to grow among all demographics thanks to necessity. Cellphones grew in popularity out of necessity. Those who drove long distances liked the security of having a phone handy in case of emergency. As time went by and cellphones could do more, they became indispensable for all types of communication.

The same may be said for voice search—it is rapidly becoming indispensable. It’s time to make sure your site is voice-ready. Call today for an assessment.

Love them or hate them, social media ads are here to stay. And social media itself has grown to the point of being part of the fabric of our daily lives.

The Pew Internet Research Center reports the following from 2018:

• Three-quarters of Facebook users log into the site more than once a day.
• Six in 10 Snapchat and Instagram users log into these sites daily.
• Pinterest remains substantially more popular with women (41% of whom say they use the site) than with men (16%).
• The average person uses three out of 8 popular platforms, with Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram the most popular.

Each social media platform offers unique ways for users to consume, post, and interact with the platforms’ content. Some are better for quick, casual video and photo posts between friends, and others encourage a more polished and produced collection of visuals. Some, like Facebook, try to offer a wide variety of uses with posts that are intended to be more conversational with a mix of text, images, and video sharing options. And others are topic-based visual curation sites where users collect and save ideas and information.

All offer an opportunity to reach the audiences that use them via social media advertising. If you’re new to social media advertising, it can seem daunting to set up and manage a campaign.

Social Media Strategy First, Tactics Second

As with all marketing, the strategy comes first. Knowing your audience is key to a successful social media advertising campaign, according to Robyn Flach, Social Media Marketing team leader at Dashboard Interactive.

“Ad strategy should be well planned with tactics that measure for specific objectives, so you know from the start what each campaign’s goal will be and optimize your advertising dollars for that,” Robyn said.

Most social media platforms provide a wealth of demographic information especially from paid advertising campaigns so that advertisers know who responds to their ads, when, and how. It’s up to an organization’s internal resources or an agency with expertise in social media advertising to leverage that information for successful campaigns.

A New World of Advertising Awaits: Social Media Ads

Social media advertising offers many opportunities for targeting. To give you some idea of the many choices that face you as a marketer, consider the following lists showing just some of the options, each with unique creative requirements and each ideal for specific circumstances and objectives:

As you can see, there are a lot of choices to make when creating your social media advertising campaign. Each option should be determined by what your campaign strategy, audience knowledge, data on past social media and advertising performance, and best practices to achieve your marketing campaign goals.

A marketing agency can work with you to create a realistic social media advertising strategy that works in tandem with other marketing and social media activities and recommend a working budget, keeping the company’s overall goals in mind.

Social Media Advertising: Best Practices and Tips

If you’re ready to jump into social media advertising, our experts have some tips for you to keep in mind.

• Understanding placement options is important. Business owners may decide they don’t want their ads to appear to be associated with certain types of content. For instance, short video ads are sometimes placed as un-skippable mid-roll ads that are positioned in the middle of a longer video belonging to another company. Some business owners may not want their video ad to appear in the middle of a politically charged video, or another video around topics not aligned with their company values. (We can help you with placement issues to avoid conflicts of interest or the appearance of endorsing topics that do not align with your company values).
• Leverage audience actions and results data to create new audiences and campaigns that build off of past successes.

Dashboard Interactive: Social Media Marketing Experts

Creating just the right tone, mood, and message to achieve your social media marketing campaign goals is essential. You need a partner who understands how social media fits into your big-picture marketing goals. Count on Dashboard Interactive to understand your business, develop a goal-focused marketing campaign, and deliver measurable results.