Prime Cuts from PubCon’s All-You-Can-Eat Buffet

Man, PubCon, you play rough! We’re just plum tuckered out after trying to keep up with you in Vegas this week. With this distillation of the content we covered while liveblogging the conference, we offer up a final toast to a great show! Bon appetit!

Local Search Rankings

• Ask customers who come to your business (in-person) questions that will help you identify how they can be interacted with online. Questions include: “How did you hear about us?”, “Did you use any gadgets to get here?” and “Do you use the map features on your smart phone?”
• Point people to relevant review sites through appropriate opportunities, including: on receipts, in emails, with postcards, on business cards and on your site, and create a custom, shortened URL to share with clients.
• Do competitive research and data mining on competitors’ Google Places pages. Compare your Google Places listing with those who are ranking well, looking at addresses, categories, phone numbers, etc.

Winning with Google Places

• Before you create a listing in Google Places, check to see if it already exists. Then, either claim the existing listing or create a new one. Use a unique Google account dedicated to the business, and not a personal Google account.
• Choosing the right keywords to include and optimize for a Google Places page is critical. Find a balance between traffic volume, competitiveness, semantic appropriateness and current ranking.
• Other assorted tips for Google Places optimization include: Addresses with P.O. boxes might be depreciated by Google; 800 number may also be depreciated by Google; and use the additional details field to include long-tail keywords.

Neuromarketing / Successful Mega SEO Framework

• Avoid images of money because it generally turns off viewers.
• Avoid hard to read fonts. If it actually takes people longer to read, it could take them longer to perform the action you want them to do.
• When doing SEO in an large business setting or otherwise, it may be helpful to consider the four basic layers of SEO: sitewide issues such as crawling and indexing; subsidiary issues of planning and execution; site-specific issues; and on-page, including keywords, content, links, likes and code.

Facebook Today

• Reach only the Facebook users you want using Facebook’s demographic targeting. You can target by age, sex, relationship status, sexual orientation, education, workplace, likes, interests, movies and television tastes and more.
• The three factors that influence Facebook ad auctions are bid price, ad quality and performance.
• 74% of Facebook users expect to stay within the platform when they click on an ad.

Convergence of Online Marketing & Analytics

• Data is a great asset for your marketing. Data visualizations can attract viewers. If you’re going to use data in marketing, use data visualization instead of infographics.
• User feedback is data, too. You can survey people and measure that way if you don’t have the number data.
• Data should drive actions. If you want to get insight out of data, you should form hypotheses first and then use analytics to test that hypothesis. It’s more efficient than aimlessly wading through data.

Monetizing & Optimizing Your Blog

• If you plan to monetize a blog using affiliate marketing, there are multiple ways to implement, including: product reviews, anchor links, widgets, banner ads, store fronts and services and value-adding tools.
• Relevancy is critical. Blog content should satisfy the user’s info requirements, furprise and delight, leverage multimedia and be grammatically sound.
• Make sure the blog is mobile-friendly.

Social Media Measurement & Signals

• Instead of asking “What is the ROI of social?” ask “What is the ROI of a specific activity within the social network?”
• The key to measuring social is to look at the metrics that can define value to your website. Meaningful metrics for social media may include: quality of sales, repeat sales, email captures, resolved complaints, brand mentions, brand searches, and direct contacts.
• Social media influencers can help amplify your message. When using this strategy, first ask what your objective is for reaching the influencer and what types of influencers do you want to reach.

Virginia Nussey is the director of content marketing at MobileMonkey. Prior to joining this startup in 2018, Virginia was the operations and content manager at Bruce Clay Inc., having joined the company in 2008 as a writer and blogger.

See Virginia's author page for links to connect on social media.