Strip back where you can. You have to use a bit of common sense and recognise that you can’t do it all. Why not focus on your key markets and areas, and really dedicate yourself to spreading the word about the parts of your business that really mater. Target your key clients and your potential business, and work at increasing your presence in these important areas where you can win new business and retain crucial existing clients.

Utilize modern technology. There are a wealth of platforms out there which can save you time when it comes to your tweets, shares and comments. Hootsuite is a popular platform which really works if you are looking for a content management system which is simple to use as well as being results focused whilst delivering an analytics package which really allows you to understand how you are performing.

Analytics. Speaking of analytics, you can really fine tune your marketing efforts by carefully studying the impact your marketing is having. You can use Facebook insights, Google analytics, Social Flow and Hootsuite to try to understand just how much impact your different strands of social media marketing are having. You need to give this a little bit of time, but if you are patient and methodical, being able to find out which marketing strategies are working for you will mean a great deal of time saved in the future.

Spread the love. Using a blog is a great way to spread your content a little bit further. If you have a good blog, then use this by sharing content across all social media sites from your blog. This will give your social media marketing plan a bit of structure, and will hopefully deliver a good level of success. Your blog can easily be shared on your Facebook page, your Twitter page, and any other platform you tend to use. Cross platform sharing will lead to a greater number of people reading your content, and it doesn’t take much time to make this happen.

If you’ve read through all of this and you still feel that you don’t have time to do this justice, then it’s really time that you considered using an SEO company to deliver your social media offering. It’s a critical part of any business which has, or wants an online presence. There are plenty of Detroit SEO companies who can run entire marketing campaigns for you, leaving you to spend your time however you see fit.

Obviously, some of these changes are better than others, but there are a few that will really help some. Ad group level extensions are a real plus, but the lack of mobile targeting options is a blow to some marketers. However easy it is to either congratulate or slander the changes that have come into force, there’s really not much point. It’s far more effective to look at what is on offer and work out what can be gained. Simply – is it worth upgrading at present?

Firstly, if you are operating a sophisticated mobile campaign that has been set up over time, then the likelihood is that you will want to wait before upgrading. These campaigns are normally run on the basis of specific bids for specific devices and carriers, and a campaign like this in the new system will simply not be as effective.

If you have a mobile only account you won’t want to upgrade yet either. If you have a small account that only targets mobile devices, then the new system isn’t going to work well for you. In enhanced campaigns, you can’t just target mobile devices. You can set bids as normal, and then choose to override that bid for mobile devices, reducing bid size by 100%. Basically, it means that if you want to bid $30 per click on a mobile device, you will actually have to bid $10 for a desktop click.
Tablet optimized websites will not benefit from the enhanced campaigns either. At the moment there’s just no way to target tablets differently in the enhanced campaigns so it’s best avoided if you’re targeting that market.

Of course, if you’re not doing much mobile targeting, then changing to an enhanced campaign at the moment could make a lot of sense. You benefit from bid adjustments and a higher level of control over extensions.

If your account is struggling with geographic bidding, then the enhanced campaigns will help. The new enhanced campaigns allow you to set bid changes by geography for the same keywords.
As you can see, it very much depends on the sort of campaigns you have been running as to whether it’s worth changing or not. As always, you are going to get the best advice from your local SEO guru. Here in Detroit it is imperative that you have excellent local campaigns, so it’s well worth speaking to a Detroit SEO expert before starting a campaign yourself.

What’s the best way to increase traffic and rankings? It’s creating contagious content. Of course, this is easier said than done, but if you can stick to a few key tasks, then you have a great chance of realising your ambitions.

Firstly, you need the knowledge. If you’re not an expert in your field, then you’ve got some work to do. By this, we mean that you need to be offering information up that your competitors are not. Are you at the forefront of your niche? Is your finger right on the pulse? Are you reporting information before anyone else does? If the answer is no to any of these questions, you need to up your game and up your studying time!

If you’re not first, be second! OK so you’re not always going to be the first to break a big piece of news that relates to your niche. What you can do though, is make sure you spot anyone else doing it, and running with the same information. This is called news jacking, and it is a highly effective method of increasing your traffic. If you can be one of the first to report the big news with fresh, personalised content, then you are likely to gain new traffic.

Be strong. Have a strong viewpoint. People just aren’t interested in someone who is sitting on the fence. You will compel people to read your thoughts if they are interesting, and the only way that they will be interesting is if they are different form everyone else’s!

Who is going to click on your titles? So much is in the title of something. If it doesn’t immediately grab your attention, it’s a goner. So do your keyword research, but don’t jam pack with keywords. Your title should be short, to the point, attention grabbing and clear. If you can provoke or create a sense of intrigue, all the better.

Picking the right sorts of content to create is important too. If you can opt for statistical content, case studies, or video content, there’s more chance that someone is going to bother to click. People love something concrete, and statistics gives this every time. It’s something tangible for people to take away. Case studies will give a real life example of something, which makes people more able to digest the information, whereas video content is just easy for people to take on board. Why read when you can sit back and listen?!

Stick to these points when you are creating your content and you stand a great chance of reaching a wider audience. Don’t forget though, that neglecting your SEO duties is going to render a great deal of this hard work pointless. Back up your content with a strong SEO team behind you. Here in Detroit, there are some fantastic SEO companies who are ready and able to tackle your SEO challenges so you can concentrate on creating content that’s fit for your site.

From what we gave seen, it seems pretty obvious to us that something happened on Friday, March 15th. Matt Cutts had already mentioned that there would likely be a rollout of the update, although Google have not come out and retrospectively said that they have done it. Of course, we can obviously expect the Panda update to be fairly minor. We have already heard that there’s every chance that Panda updates in the future will be virtually unnoticeable – it is thought that the updates in the future are just going to become part of Google’s general indexing, so there’s every chance that we won’t notice them.

So we might not spot them coming, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t affect us. Every site is affected by the way the Google algorithm works which is why we have to keep a close eye on how sites are being affected. There’s no telling exactly what each Panda update is going to affect, and ninety nine times out of one hundred, you will only ever know if your site is penalized. Of course, in this situation, you might be completely in the dark as to why you have been penalized, but your position in the rankings will tell you that something has changed.

This is where employing a local SEO company comes in. If you have got support from a Cleveland SEO company then you will already know that if an update affects the site, most SEO guys are going to be able to figure out pretty quickly what has caused the drop out. Then again, if you’ve got a decent SEO team working for you, the chances are you wouldn’t have been penalized in the first place! The best SEO teams will work alongside you to make sure your website performs as well as it can, but they will also be vigilant in the case of a drop in rankings. There is always going to be an ebb and flow to the rankings, but if there’s a sudden change which remains for a few days, then you can guess that you have been hit by an update. This is where your SEO team earns its corn. It’s their job to work out why you have been penalized, and what they need to do to correct the problem.

So if this recent update has caused a drop in rankings for you, it’s time to start asking questions. Ask questions of your SEO team if you have one in place, and if you don’t ask yourself why not!

Hey, does that sound like something familiar? Maybe something you have in your inbox right now? That’s right: there’s graffiti in Detroit, and SEO has spam. We all know and hate spam, but few of us realize how much of a problem it is. According to Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing Blog:

• Spam costs American consumers and firms nearly $20 billion each year.

43% of adults in the U.S. said that more than half of their emails are from marketers.

• 3.5 billion tweets posted to Twitter every day are spam.
• 8% of social media posts are spam.
• 87 billion spam emails were sent out every day in Q3 of 2012
• Spam averaged 74% of all emails sent during Q3 of 2012.
• 69% of those who are texters say they get unwanted spam or text messages. Of those texters, 25% face problems with spam/unwanted texts at least weekly.

Standing Up And Standing Out
So what do we as SEO people have to do about the spam problem? Two things: stop creating and sending out spam, and tell our peers to do the same. I’m here to officially acknowledge my support of HubSpot’s “Make Love, Not Spam” campaign and encourage all of you SEO types to do the same.

I’d like to encourage all of you to examine not just what you personally are adding to the spamsophere, but what your contractors, employees, freelancers, minions, and underlings are as well. If there is a communication that has your brand on it, you should already have editorial control over it’s content — and if you see that it looks like spam, you should send it back for a redux.

Detroit’s graffiti problem costs the city millions of dollars every year — spam costs the US apparently almost twenty billion. But unlike graffiti, which is done for thrills or for the sake of art itself, spam has a much more venal cause: it’s all about the Benjamins. Baby. But just like Google cracked down on spammy practices first with Panda and then with Penguin, the market itself is shifting. People are getting more inured to spam — they have to, look at those stats again!

Spam won’t ever die. It may change mediums, just as the amount of physical junk mail has lagged a bit since the Internet took over our lives, but it will always be out there. The best we can do as businesses and as individuals is not fall for it and not produce it. Join me, won’t you?

So good for Cleveland, SEO types are thinking right now, what does this have to do with us?

Only that you, like Detroit, would do well to take a page from Cleveland’s playbook. Too many of us SEO people are obsessed with finding some sort of magical peak efficiency where you can have a single ‘best’ something — best link-building whoziwhatsit, best tag to put on your blog posts, best directory to submit your articles to, whatever it may be. The fact is that in the black-and-white (i.e. Panda and Penguin) era, you need variety.

Variety in what, exactly?

• Anchor text: We all figured this one out back when Panda kicked our butts. If full half of your backlinks have the anchor text “Jared Pomranky: Detroit SEO”, it might as well read “Viagra Acai Stop Smoking Penis Enlargement” for all of the credit Google will give it. And if you’re suddenly worried about the ‘best’ way to get a natural link profile, you’re already failing — the answer is there is no best way except the real way: get natural links. Speaking of which…
• Links: Any single link-building tactic, no matter how awesome, turns into spam if you abuse it. Nothing says to Google “I’m getting all my links by the efforts of my own hand!” like when 75% of your backlinks come from, say, guest posts on other people’s blogs. Do something different every week.
• Traffic Sources: This is going to draw some controversy, because isn’t the entire point of SEO to get traffic from a single source (Google)? Well, yes — but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea as a business practice. It might take a lot of time and energy to spread your thinking and effort out past Google, but when something changes (say, they actually decide to implement the 7-result search pages and you lose traffic from a few dozen 8th-place listings), you’ll be happy you did. Hanging all of your hopes on a single anything will eventually lead to disaster, because everything eventually changes.

It’s kind of like the Great Recession, in a way: when huge, world-shifting things happen, it’s the people on the top and on the bottom who notice the least. The people in the middle are the ones who learn that everything they’re basing their lives on is far less dependable than they hoped. Panda and Penguin taught us that lesson on a small scale over the past couple of years, knocking around those of us depending on specific tactics to get the job done.

Let’s move beyond the specific scriptures that the black-and-white era has put upon us, and diversify our tactics, our perspectives, and our work. It’s the only way to become resilient against the kinds of shocks that Panda, Penguin, and Wall Street have inflicted on us in the last half a decade.

Of course, if you feel that your brand could benefit from producing some short video clips via the Vine app through your already successful Twitter account, then here are a few tips to help you to make the most of this fantastic app.

There’s no doubt that Vine has shot to the top of the video platform pile, it’s not because there are hundreds of professional editing touches available. Vine is an extremely simple product. Video is taken with your Smartphone, you can’t edit sound once it is in your post, in fact all you can really do is to pause as you move your finger from the screen. A record and pause function like this obviously allows you to shoot different things during your six second window.

Without the ability to do crazy edits, it’s all about the content. The path to success quite simply lies in how good your video is, how relevant it is to your users and how creative you can be in your tiny little six second slot. You should be looking for creativity, emotion and simplicity. Try to come up with something that will grab someone, can be understood easily, and can connect with people. The first step towards this is by knowing your audience. By now you should be communicating with your followers on a regular basis, and if you’re not, your SEO team should be doing it for you. Think carefully about who you are targeting with your video before you shoot it. The second thing to consider is not to be too sales focused. If you spend six seconds selling your product, no one is going to be listening. Engage, and they will come to you naturally. Don’t throw your logos all over your video, but of course you do want to include it at some point. You can also use the video as an opportunity to introduce your team to your vine viewers – it’s a great platform for humanizing your product, and by showing the people behind the product or business, you will do exactly that.

Another great way to the heart of your vine viewers is to be informative. All you really need to do to achieve this is to tell a story. Of course, it has to be a quick story, so get to the point!

All that remains to be said is that creating a video for vine that is informative as well as being emotive and engaging is not easy. It takes time, so don’t rush through it. Although you only have six seconds to fill, you have to make sure that every second counts. You need to draft your lot, re work it, get second opinions about your storyline and generally rework your video until you are absolutely sure that it is all it can be. It’s time consuming, but has to be worth it. Of course, if you are a busy company then doing all of this is going to be virtually impossible. Of course, this is where a good SEO company comes in. Although Vine is just a mobile phone app, SEO companies are already working out that it can have a major impact on social media, so don’t be afraid to hand the reigns to your social media guru!

Statistics. It’s a fact universally acknowledged that all people love statistics – well about 82% of people do anyway. If you can find industry reports with factual and statistical information that is going to be valuable to your core audience, there’s every chance that your followers are going to pick up on it and share it. Statistics are easy for people to understand and to digest, and they can easily pass the information along – perfect for sharing!

Video content. Video marketing is growing exponentially at the moment. Now that people have such great connection speeds video is a highly accessible format for almost everyone. Video informs and entertains which is far more palatable for most people and doesn’t require the same level of concentration that a long blog post might require. A smaller commitment is required by your readers, and they know this. That’s why they’ll share it.

Case Studies. A case study can be a great way to rally engage people. It’s a real life scenario so people can really relate to it. If you can find something that is a little bit out of the ordinary and relates to your niche, then there’s a great chance that people will share it.

Newsjacked content. This is all about riding the crest of a wave. You have to have your finger on the pulse, but if you can catch the news as it happens in your target area, and put your own spin on it, then there’s every chance that you are going to get a huge number f shares. You will be surfing a wave of supreme popularity, gaining higher levels of views, traffic and shares because everyone is talking about the story that you were talking about first.

A picture tells a thousand words. Well maybe not quite, but you get the idea! An infographic is a fantastic way of condensing what you want to say so that it is easily digested. If you have complex information that you want to share with your followers, there’s every chance that a well put together infographic will be easier for them to understand. What’s more, if they can understand what you are trying to illustrate, it is again likely that your followers will want to share your information.

Unfortunately, many people out there just don’t have the time to really put in place a good system which allows them to operate a slick content creation service which guarantees a good level of shares. Here in Detroit though you will find plenty of SEO companies willing to help you hone the right sort of approach. Simply visit a well respected Detroit SEO expert and speak to them about the content you are using for your Twitter and Facebook accounts, and they should be able to run a successful campaign for you.

If there’s one thing we have learned in the last year it is that Google loves change! And why not? It’s great to see changes being made for the right reasons. The Internet in many respects is becoming a better place, but it has to be said that it’s not becoming a better place for some webmasters. The webmasters who would have seen the New Year in with a big smile on their faces were those who already had a community. It’s clear that Google is rewarding those who have an engaged community, which has not always been so important.

With this in mind, we have to look at ways to engage our communities, and of course, ways to grow our communities in the first place. Sometimes this can be a very organic development, but sometimes it has to be worked at!

First things first, try to increase social media awareness amongst your peers. Some people just love to gain the wrong sort of following, but it won’t help you in the long run. Sure, having five thousand followers on Twitter might look good initially, but if those people aren’t engaged with you, it’s not going to do too much good in the long run. Make sure you attract followers who are genuinely interested in what you have to say, and say things to them! Network within your industry, be helpful and answer other people’s questions to show how much you care!

Make sure you are active on all fronts. This means Facebook, Twitter as well as all of those peripheral sites, such as Pinterest and Google+ and the dozens of other sites out there that you should be able to discover. You are going to want referral traffic from as many sources as possible, and there’s no reason why a customer coming from a lesser known social media site might not be more engaged than one coming from Facebook.

Hire someone who can make a difference – hire someone to be your voice. You might not
have all the time in the world, but there are professionals out there who are paid to do what you don’t have the time for. There are plenty of SEO professionals in the Detroit area who know how to write for the web. They know how to engage and how to talk to your customers, so let them do it. You can find Detroit SEO experts who specialize in social media and how to improve your experience.

Doing all of this should allow you to find a good place in the Detroit SEO community. If you can become valued, then there’s every chance that this is going to have a knock on effect on your website. The authority of your online business is bound to increase if there is an improvement in your standing within your niche SEO community. Search engines favor site owners that have authority, so once people start name dropping you and your business on the web, the search engines will simply have to give your website importance in the web rankings.

The first thing is see if there’s a very easy way back. Google have introduced some steps that can be taken by webmasters that will allow them to right the wrongs. The link disavow tool is excellent for signalling to Google that you wish for certain links not to count towards your magic SEO mark! It’s very rarely the case that a rival company has deliberately linked to your site to cause a drop in the rankings for you, but because it is technically possible, Google is happy to provide an opportunity for webmasters to say something along the lines of ‘It wasn’t me, I’m sorry!’

You will also find that you have options such as re inclusion requests, and of course, starting to use4 webmaster tools if you haven’t been doing so will help you immediately.
There’s still one way that is better than all the rest though, if you want to get back into Google’s good books and more importantly, regain your previous good rankings. The answer, of course, is high quality content. Just take a look at your site, how it looks and the quality of your written content. The chances are, if you think it looks crappy, so will Google. They want it to look good, they want it to be easy for your market to digest it, they want it to be relevant to the people it ought to be relevant to and they want it to engage people!

If you start to make this happen, you will be rewarded! It really isn’t rocket science. Get rid of any nothing pages. Create some fresh content, then create some more. Get some great info graphics up on your site, and use video to make your page comer to life. More often than not, by following your nose and doing what you think is probably the right thing, will lead you to doing the right thing. If in doubt, make it good, and if you don’t think you can, then find someone to do it for you. We now live in an age where search engines are so capable. They’ll find poor content and be rid of it. Be good and stay seen, it’s as simple as that!