Panoptic Online Marketing

How to Make Your Page More Visible in the New Facebook Graph Search Tool

By

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

By now you probably have heard of the new Facebook feature called Facebook Graph Search.

facebook graph searchIt’s still in beta (only Facebook users in the United States currently have access to it), but as the feature rolls out to more and more users, it is important to learn how it could affect your marketing strategy.

How is Facebook Graph Search different from the current Facebook search?

Using the current Facebook search box, searching will give you results of People, Places or Pages with your specific search term in their title. It also shows web results through Bing search engine. However, with Facebook Graph Search, results are personalized based on what you and your Friends/Fans have shared within Facebook. [Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Why You Need to Pay Attention to Your Mobile Presence

By

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

mobile

According to Google research, “By 2013, more people will use their mobile phones than PCs to get online.”  Furthermore, if you haven’t been paying attention to what your site looks like on a mobile device, chances are you are sending your potential clients elsewhere.

What does a bad mobile experience can do to your business?  Here are some numbers from a recent survey:

  • 61% of users said that they’d quickly moved to another site if they didn’t find what they were looking for right away.
  • 79% of users will search for another site if they don’t like what they find on one site.
  • Even if they like a business, 50% of users said they will use them less often if the website isn’t mobile-friendly
  • 52% of users said that a bad mobile experience made them less likely to engage with a company

[Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Case Study: Two WordPress Minisites

By

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

In 2013 we were hired to produce a number of “mini-sites” — that is, sites that consist of no more then four of five pages, designed to drive a single message or promote a particular product.  Here are two of our favorites.

Minisite for Specialty Law Practice

In the case of our dental business lawyers, the purpose of the site was to collect leads by offering free “Essential Steps” handbooks and capturing contact information at the point of download. Each of the three PDFs targeted dentists at different stages of their career or practice development: the new dentist, the dentist seeking to buy into a practice (or seeking to bring an associate into a practice) and the dentist seeking to buy or sell their dental practice.

Collected contacts were used to seed an email list, already segmented depending upon the selected download. Future marketing messages could then specially targeted to a particular group of dentists, depending upon their specific legal/business needs.

WordPress websites and blogs by Panoptic Online Marketing, LLC
A minisite to capture leads for a specialty legal practice

[Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Case Study: B2B Social Media Marketing

By

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Fabricating.com is a start-up company that came to us in July 2012 to develop a presence on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  Working closely with the business owner, we crafted a social media marketing campaign around the company’s unique values and core marketing messages and built a robust and lively community of manufacturers, suppliers, colleagues and friends who help us spread their message.


Ongoing management of Fabricating.com’s social accounts by our strategic partners at Gingerlime Marketing.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Presentation from WordCamp New York City 2012

By

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Panoptic’s Melissa Cahill presented at this weekend’s WordCamp New York City 2012.  The topic was “Do it Yourself SEO w/WordPress”  and the session proved to be tremendously popular — standing room only on Saturday and Mel was asked to repeat the presentation on Sunday.  And the room filled up on Sunday, too!

Below are the slides from the presentation.  Video is likely to be posted on the WPNYC.org site sometime this week, so keep an eye out.

[Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Google’s Terrible Penguin Affecting Your Rankings?

By

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

penguinLast week a colleague of mine proposed, only half jokingly, that we  offer to help small businesses recover from the effects of the latest Google changes by removing all the bad links pointing back to their websites.  He was talking about “Penguin,” a recent upgrade to the all-powerful Google search engine algorithm.  In a nutshell, Penguin knocked down the rankings of sites that had spammy link profiles — that is, Google penalized websites that, among other things, tried to “game the system.” One of the biggest factors contributing to your website’s ranking are the number of “backlinks” or “incoming links” — links that points back to a page on your site from somebody else’s site. Search engines assume that the more links that point to your website, the more useful your website must be. Makes sense, right? But in the race to secure those precious top rankings, many folks tried to beg, borrow or pay for as many links as possible, regardless of where they came from. Unfortunately, a lot of SEOs used these same tactics on behalf of their clients, and now find that all those worthless links need to be removed. What a mess! Remember: Google has to ensure that the results returned by a search are going to be relevant and credible, so they are constantly seeking ways to reduce the “web spam.” It’s not that Google wants to ban SEO — only lousy SEO. Here’s what Matt Cutts of Google had to say about it late last year:

[Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Why Your Beautiful, Expensive, Custom Website Gets So Little Traffic

By

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Three times in the last two months I’ve taken on small business clients who find themselves in an identical situations: they’ve spent good money for a high-design website, have generally been delighted with the results (ooh, ah — pretty!) and are perplexed when, a couple of months after launch, they see very low visitor traffic, or poor showings in search results, or both.  Even the least internet savvy business owners know that they need to show up in search results — and most have an intuitive understanding that the Top 10 sites returned in a Google search get the lion’s share of the visitors.

So why does it happen?

GooglebotBecause web designers are not search marketers, and very few of them are familiar with sound SEO practices.

In two of the three cases I mention here, the designers chose WordPress as their platform.  When we were conducting our preliminary research and competitive analysis for these clients, we saw their WordPress-based websites and thought, “Yippie — onsite optimization will be a snap!”

WWordpress SEO by YoastordPress is great for SEO out of the box; using one of the popular SEO plugins, like Yoast’s WordPress SEO, makes it even easier and more robust. The plugin provides guidance for optimizing meta tags and on-page content, has options for applying basic indexation rules, generates and maintains Google XML sitemaps for you — all the behind the scenes stuff the designer doesn’t know or care anything about.  (Why should she?  She’s a designer!)

[Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

6 Ways to Leverage LinkedIn for Your Business

By

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

With over 150 million users, LinkedIn is considered to be the largest professional network on the Internet.  A lot of people have been using LinkedIn for networking, job prospecting, and building credibility in their areas of expertise through the Recommendations feature, or by actively taking part in LinkedIn Groups.  But while many business owners understand how to use their professional profiles, only a few are taking advantage of the many benefits that the company page has to offer.

A study conducted by HubSpot in January found that LinkedIn is 277% more effective for lead generation than Twitter and Facebook combined.  So if you haven’t created a LinkedIn company page for your business, or only have a brief description and/or logo there, you are missing an opportunity to give your business a more robust presence.

Here are some of the features that you can take advantage of to make your business stand out from your competitors:

1. Blog RSS Feed and News Mention.  Aside from creating a keyword-rich description, you can add more content in your company page by adding your blog’s RSS feed.  This works well if you regularly post new content in your company blog.

[Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Get More Bang From Your Blog: Optimize Posts!

By

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

BlogIf you are a small business owner or are trying to build your brand or professional reputation via the web, chances are you are already blogging.  Hopefully you’re using your blog to share your expertise, offer advice and industry insights – offering your readers something of value and not just self-promoting. Your blog can open up tremendous opportunities for you. Readers may have questions about your products or make inquiries about guest posting on your blog.  Press and media contacts often look to bloggers to provide “expert” quotes, opinion or commentary for articles they’re writing, or may even ask you to contribute an article for their site, allowing you to expose your brand to new audiences.

[Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

From the Blog

Follow Us

FREE SEO AUDIT REPORT

Free one-hour consultation and SEO Audit Report for qualified business website owners. Get in touch today!