This Week in Marketing and Web Development – Friday, October 21st

  1. Google has launched a trusted stores program that instantly denotes to people that this website provides great service and secure shopping. Our assumption is that this may indirectly affect your ranking at some point in the future. If you have an e-commerce website – now is the time to fill out the application and get on Google’s waiting list! Read about the program here.
  2. LinkedIn’s new company status updates ‘let members receive further insights — breaking news about the company, employee moves, relevant job opportunities or the latest on their products and services including multimedia content — directly from the companies they follow.’ Basically, this means your company can now communicate with your followers in the same fashion that you currently use on Facebook. And since LinkedIn is a more professional setting, you might find it easier to communicate with other business that need your products and services. Read more about it here.
  3. If you haven’t updated your website to follow the new online shopping trends, now is the time. In a market where people spend more time shopping from their couch (than in a store) it’s vital to ensure your website expands your market. Handling online sales in different languages and payment methods are tools to do just that. While this article is targeted at e-commerce websites, it also brings up interesting arguments for ensuring you are designing a website that allows all your target audiences to feel comfortable working with you.
  4. Log into Facebook and look at your friend count. Then look at how many company pages you liked. Now go to your news feed and scroll. How far down do you have to scroll to get to the post your company made today? Pretty far – not there at all? If so, understanding how EdgeRank works will help bring your company posts to the top of the news feed. Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm works best when you have less fans and more engagement. This doesn’t mean you need to stop getting fans, since you need to find fans that enjoy engaging with your content. What it means is that you have to figure out what your fans want to engage in. To get started, look at other Facebook company pages and see which posts produce the most engagement. Our Social Marketing 101 package offers these features and many more.
  5. The other day we received an email from Google stating that they ‘will soon update your listing data on our consumer properties such as Google and Google Maps to more accurately reflect the latest information we have about your business.’ After more research we found that this means Google might exchange the content you have added with content they feel ‘is more trustworthy’. If you haven’t reviewed your listing in the past six months, now would be the time. Give us a call if you want us to manage your local listings.
  6. Having issues reaching out to your international market on Facebook? Tired of maintaining separate pages for each language? Finally there’s a solution that will allow for translations directly on your company Facebook page. If you’re a page admin, read this article to find out how to activate the translation service.
  7. You might be missing some important analytics the next time you log into Google Analytics. On Google’s blog, they stated ‘today the Google Search team announced that SSL Search on https://www.google.com will become the default experience for signed in users on Google.com.’ So, the millions of people that happen to use Google – while they are logged in – won’t see the keywords they use to find your site. This is a problem, because Google Analytics reports the keywords used when searching for your website. And with that information you can figure out which ones perform well and those that do not, and tweak the site to get the under-performing keywords to deliver better results. Read about it here.