Use photos to improve your local small business SEO
A colleague of mine was browsing through her Facebook news feed the other day when she saw a picture a FB friend (who lives across the country) had posted. The picture was of a colorful Mexican restaurant front with a sign in the window that said, “Soup of the day: Tequila.” She recognized it immediately as a restaurant (Rose Pepper) in the city where she lives (Nashville). This photo had gone viral to some extent, but the point I want to make is that all photos can be used to boost your small business search engine optimization (SEO) – and in a couple of different ways. Great photos key Using photos for local small business SEO is a fantastic strategy. That’s in part what my Rose Pepper example illustrates. It starts with taking excellent photos. You’re going to be using these photos yourself, but you also want them to be shared in the social media. We know that sites like Facebook are becoming increasingly important to the search engines, so if a photo of your small business goes viral, it may have a significant impact on SEO. This gives you your first strategy: Take good photos that are “share worthy” at your place of business. Save these photos to your computer and give them names that include your keywords and, ideally, the name of your business. Upload them to your social media accounts, adding a keyword-rich description when you can. Also, be sure your geo-tag feature is turned on when you take the photo. However, don’t limit your photo uploads to Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram. Flickr Flickr is a great site to leverage in your quest to boost your local small business SEO using photos. Name your files as I described above, but Flickr also gives you space to add a description and tags. Again, be smart about this. Use the appropriate keywords, tags, and the name of your business if possible. You’ll also have the chance to define who has the rights to your photo. For most purposes, it’s a good idea to let others reuse your photos, perhaps asking for credit…or not. However, if you have people featured in your photo and the photo wasn’t taken openly in a public place, you could have model rights to deal with. If all your photos feature employees, have them sign off on their model rights via a release while they are working for you. Google will find your photos and index them. Hopefully then, others will find your Flickr photos useful and want to use them on their websites or social media. I might also suggest that using Flickr as your central repository for your small business photos will help you keep track of them and give you a good cloud service to store them that is free. And if you properly tag and describe your photos, I think you’ll be surprised how many people view them over time. If you’re more of a visual person than a wordsmith, leveraging photos to improve your small business SEO should be easy, enjoyable and...
read moreThis Week in Small Business: Let’s Keep Score on the 2016 Predictions!
Articles over the last month or so have been looking back to 2015. This week many writers are making their predictions for 2016. Would someone please keep score and report back? Leadership, management and productivity Small business owners have been having trouble finding good employees for quite some time. Learn how to use employer brand management to attract top talent. In today’s environment retailers must constantly improve their customer experience. Here are ways to smartly approach this challenge. Moving forward, an important element will be providing great customer service to Millennials. We’re facing something of a retirement predicament. Here’s how small business can help close the retirement gap. Check your small business 2016 resolutions against this list of 16 items. Do you have your IRS forms yet? The IRS says it’s time to order them. Marketing and sales You certainly won’t use all of the 153 SEO tools on this list, but you should at least give it a quick once-over and find the best for your small business. And speaking of search, get yourself up-to-date on the current trends. In this MarketingDive article, 16 insiders tell us what they see happening in digital marketing in 2016. Get the most mileage out of your small business content marketing materials by using LinkedIn publisher. Is yours a B2B small business? If so, you need to review these 2016 trends and predictions. If you’re new to online marketing, this overview will get you the basics in a hurry. Reeta Gupta, founder of The Network, weighs in with her top five 2016 content marketing trends. Commandments always come in groups of 10. Here are 10 for customer engagement via your content marketing. Entrepreneurship, startups and innovation If you’re launching a startup (or new) website, you’ll want Google to index it immediately. Here’s how. Startup equity investing is not just for the super-rich and that should create a lot of opportunities for both entrepreneurs and average investors. Politics, government and the economy Even before the stock market tanked in recent days, growth in the U.S. economy looked pretty...
read moreTwo simple ways to boost sales in your small business
It is often said that nothing happens until a sale is made. A corollary to that is if you make a lot of sales, a lot of things – and good things to boot – will happen. I’m not here today to sell you some secret sauce to improve sales, but give you two simple, and very concrete, easy-to-understand, tactics or strategies that will improve your ability to sell and I’ll start with the simplest, most direct piece of advice: Unless your prospect tells you directly to stop calling, keep calling. We know after years of experience that it typically takes five contacts with a prospect before a sale is made, but it can take longer. Keeping the communication going is at the top of your list as a sales professional. If you aren’t communicating, you can’t be selling. This doesn’t mean that you’re always applying pressure. Some great sales people live by the ABC rule –Always Be Closing – but “closing” in many settings doesn’t have to be a process that makes the prospect feel uncomfortable and this brings me to the second piece of guidance I have today: See yourself as a doctor, not as a sales person. In a good sales relationship, your job is to fully understand the problem that your prospect is experiencing and prescribe the best cure for it. Sadly, few doctors today have time to really sit down and talk to their patients, so you may have never experienced that kind of relationship with a physician. In any case, the wise and experienced diagnostician asks questions and listens carefully to the answers. The patient does most of the talking. This should be the approach you take with your prospects. If you work this way you’ll experience some immediate benefits. First, you’ll begin to see yourself as the true professional that you are. You’ll lose any of the baggage that sometimes comes with being in sales. Second, your prospects will realize that you care about them and that you are a thoughtful person. They will tell you more and might even reveal what’s really on their minds. That can give you a huge competitive advantage! Remember, if you come off as “salesy,” the first objective for your prospects will be to get you out of the room! Further, when people find doctors they like, they try to keep them for as long as they can. If your clients see you in this kind of light, they will value your relationship in the same way. Get the picture? Nothing I’ve outlined here is difficult. Be persistent, but care about the people you’re serving. That’s always a winning one-two...
read moreIs your small business ready to adopt ‘Facebook at Work’?
The question of whether instant messaging and social media in the workplace are productivity killers or loyalty enhancers has been an intense topic of debate for the last several years. As 2016 rolls in, Facebook, the social media heavyweight champion of the world, is going to put its mark on the topic. After having been in a closed beta mode throughout 2015, Facebook will debut its “Facebook at Work” enterprise service sometime in 2016. Companies will sign up with the service and employees can then join their company’s private Facebook at Work group. All the posting, messaging and scheduling features and tools will be essentially the same as what we’re all used to in the regular edition of Facebook. However, there won’t be any “cross talk or cross posting” between a person’s private Facebook presence and his or her Facebook at Work presence. What happens at work, stays at work. Facebook at Work has the potential to solve some problems that have been annoying small business owners for a while now, not the least of which is that employees enjoy communicating via social media while they’re on the job. Posting, communicating and responding to coworkers in a social media environment has become a way of life. With Facebook at Work, this can be done in a more controlled environment, for the protection of the company and the employees themselves. This could help employers build employee loyalty and serve as a special welcome to the millions of Millennials that will be so important to our workforce in the upcoming years. In other words, Facebook at Work, may represent a natural and positive evolution in the workplace environment. After all, everyone will already know how to use its tools and features. It will feel like slipping into a comfortable pair of old sneakers. I should mention that Facebook management isn’t the only force working feverishly to bring a social element to the workplace. The startup Slack has established leadership in this area. It is officially a tech “unicorn” – a privately held company with a valuation of more than $1 billion. With that much interest – read “money” – in socializing the workplace, Facebook had to make a serious play, and with all of its experience and advantages, it’s safe to bet that it has a good chance at eventually elbowing out or buying out Slack. It’s interesting to note that Slack is built around a multi-platform instant messaging service and Facebook has already adapted its instant message app (in its Android version) for Facebook at Work. The iOS version is due out soon. Being able to instant message and send information between coworkers through Facebook at Work may prove to be its most valuable service. First, these are becoming the natural means of communication today and also, using a private social network for these communications will help diminish the role of email in small businesses. Considering all the security risks that accompany email – even internal email – anything that reduces its presence in the workplace will be extremely valuable. One of the most dangerous security risks is when an email arrives that looks like it came from within your company, but is in fact a fraud. When communications are tied directly to a member of your Facebook at...
read more6 must-have tech items for the four-wheeled road warrior
The so-called “digital nomads” may be the glamor children of the mobile workforce, but the traditional – and somewhat iconic – road warrior is the no-nonsense-worker against which real productivity must be measured. Many small business owners and startup founders spend a lot of time on the road, much of which is behind the wheel of their trusty vehicle and a recent survey conducted by Ford and Manta found that many of these vehicles do double duty. Only 42 percent of small business owners said they use their vehicles solely for business purposes. When you’re flip-flopping back and forth between shuttling the family around town and hitting the road to drive small business growth you need to be able to adapt your vehicle for maximum productivity. Here is some gear to check out: Mileage apps. Since many mix business with family use, a smartphone app for tracking mileage is essential. For iOS devices, try MileBug if you just need an app to automatically keep track of your business mileage. But if you want to toss in other travel expenses. BizXpenseTracker or XpenseTracker are highly rated. Prices range from free to about $7. On the Android side Fuel Buddy and MileIQ, earn high ratings and both are free. For a more comprehensive Android app that includes other travel expenses, check out TripLog. Smartphone holder. There are all kinds of smartphone holders that attach to the vents in your car’s air conditioning system. They are far superior to the old holders we used to stick on our dashboards or windshields. Try the Kenu Airframe or the Belkin Car Vent Mount. Drop Stop. This nifty invention (featured on Shark Tank) is great for business car travel and family shuttling. It jams down between your seat and the middle console to prevent dropping keys, phones, change, receipts, French fries, etc. down into no-man’s land. Desks and file cabinets. There is a range of accessories that will really turn your car into an office-away-from-the-office. These include simple boards that attach to your steering wheel and give you a work surface. to multi-use boxes that hold files and other items and also give you a flat surface to write on or hold your lap top. The boxes are great when your car serves your family because you can just grab the whole thing and put it in your house or leave it at your brick-and-mortar office. Printers and scanners. Sometimes there’s no way around a real signed contract. If you need to print things from your four-wheeled office, the HP OJ 150 Mobile Wireless Color Printer with Copier comes highly rated, although it takes a 90 to 132 volt AC connection (see next item on our list). Visioneer offers a number of mobile scanners designed specifically for the road warrior. Power inverter. Auto cellphone chargers are a rip off. I like having an inverter that will give me 110 volts DC and a couple of USB charging ports, like the BESTEK 300W Dual 110V AC Inverter. This virtually eliminates the need to deal with special cables and other devices that plug into your dashboard. The same cables you use to charge devices from your laptop and plug in your laptop are all you need. By the way, if your mobile office is also your family...
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