This week's SEJ Wrap-Up is all about finding the best blog ideas and why clickbait journalism is no longer cutting it.
The post SEJ Wrap-Up: Finding Blog Ideas That Win, Clickbait Not Cutting It by @megcabrera appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Entrepreneurial burnout is something that can creep up on you without you realizing it.
On Youpreneur.FM, host Chris Ducker shares his own experience with it and discusses the quick steps to avoid it.
One of the subjects Chris is most vocal about is entrepreneurial burnout. Why? Because he experienced it firsthand and wants to save you from doing the same.
By December of 2009, Chris was working like a mad man — 15-16-hour days, 7 days a week. Business was very good, but working so much was taking its toll on his health and impacting his family.
Chris ended up in the hospital from exhaustion and knew something had to change. He and his wife took some time away, during which they decided Chris would become the virtual CEO of their business.
By 2010, they had done it; now Chris has 3-day weekends every week, and works 6-7 hours a day Monday through Thursday.
On today’s episode of Youpreneur.FM, Chris shares his personal recommendations for avoiding burnout and setting yourself up for the long-game of entrepreneurship.
Listen in and take notes so you never have to go through what Chris did.
In this 14-minute episode of Youpreneur.FM, host Chris Ducker discusses:
About the authorRainmaker.FM is the premier digital marketing and sales podcast network. Get on-demand digital business and marketing advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.
The post How to Avoid Entrepreneurial Burnout, without Losing Business, or Your Health appeared first on Copyblogger.
Posted by JoyHawkins
Local SEO can be confusing for those businesses that don’t have a physical store for customers to walk into.
Unlike businesses with a brick-and-mortar storefront, service-area businesses (or SABs) go out to meet with their customers, as opposed to their customers coming to see them. This often results in them servicing multiple cities, which can be problematic—the #1 ranking factor in local SEO is the physical address of the business. In addition, business owners are also usually concerned about privacy, as many of them use their home address and can’t utilize some of the features that Google offers small businesses (like Indoor Street View).
This guide will show you how you can maximize your presence on Google and reach more people in your local market.
As a service-area business, you only have a couple options. Here are some best practices:
Hiding your address means that Google will know where you are (for verification), but users will not see your address publicly on Google.
You should always hide your address if you're using your home address (unless customers actually show up there). If your customers do visit your home address, it needs to be blatantly obvious on your website. You should:
You should hide your address if you have an office, but no one is actively staffing it during the day. If a person walked in at 2pm during a work day, would your door be locked with no one there? If so, hide your address.
If you have an office that is actually staffed, you should leave it unhidden.
Flash from the MapMaker Top Contributor team wrote up a great guide that shows you how to hide your address and the rules that Google has about this.
If you fall into the majority of SABs that need to hide their address, decide if you're okay publicly listing your address on other websites.
My advice is to always list your full address everywhere else online (other than Google My Business), including your website, Facebook page, Yellowpages listing, and so on. If you insist on not listing your home address anywhere, that’s okay, but know that you will run into some missed opportunities. There are still many local directories that require an address to be listed. Phil Rozek wrote a great summary of places you can list your business with a hidden address.
In Google My Business, you can select which areas you service. You can do this by adding either zip codes or the names of the cities you service. It's good to note that what you select here will determine how your business radius and marker will show up on Google Maps. If you choose a ton of cities and zip codes, Google will attempt to find the center of them and put your marker there. The result isn’t always ideal.
Keep in mind that the service areas you select have no impact on your ranking there. It’s extremely unlikely that you will rank in the local pack outside the town your address is in.
“plus.google.com” “999-999-9999” “about” “review”
Look for competitors that either have multiple listings (which is not allowed) or that are using keyword stuffing in their business name. Typically, more spam exists for service-area businesses than for businesses with storefronts. Locksmiths are known in the local SEO world as being the most-spammed business category.
Submit an edit for these listings through Google Maps to remove the keyword stuffing.
If the competitor is a service-area business with multiple listings, you can report the duplicates through Google Maps. As per the guidelines, a service-area business is not allowed to have multiple listings. The only exception would be if they had multiple offices where customers could actually show up.
Service-area businesses with hidden addresses have the advantage of listing the hours that they're available to answer the phone. Businesses with storefronts are supposed to list the actual hours that customers can show up at their front door and get service. If they have a 24-hour call center, they are still not allowed to list themselves that way unless they're someone like McDonald's, with a 24-hour drive-through.
Service-area businesses avoid this rule because they have no physical storefront, so their open hours are the equivalent of the hours that they answer the phone. With Google’s new hours display in the search results, having longer open hours could result in a lot more calls.
Generally, you will only rank in the local pack for the city that your address is in. If your home address isn't in the city that your primary book of business is in, this can be concerning. Other than setting up offices in different cities (real ones, not virtual ones), your best option is to target long-tail keywords & the organic section of Google using really great content.
Here are some tips for ways to generate good content:
Technically, I could continue to add a hundred more items to this list—for now, I wanted to focus on the major starting points that will help a service-area business start out on the right track. If you have questions, please let me know in the comments!
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Email autoresponders are the holy grail of marketing. Here's a step-by-step guide to create an efficient and effective email autoresponsder.
The post A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating an Autoresponder That Subscribers Can’t Wait to Open by @neilpatel appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
