LinkNow Media Blog Tag: LinkNow

How to Take Advantage of User Intent for SEO

For a lot of small business owners, the world of SEO can seem overwhelming. If understanding the mysterious ranking systems that Google uses is hard enough, keeping up with the constant changes can feel downright impossible. Over the years, SEO experts have developed a few metrics that can help businesses to understand how searchable their pages are. These metrics give us hard facts about what works and what doesn’t. For SEO professionals like us, these numbers help explain to clients how well their pages are doing. The most important ones are: keyword and search engine rankings organic web traffic backlinks volume of searches conversion rates The problem is, Google often changes the things they prioritize. Which explains why user intent has become something of a game changer. User intent allows marketers and small business owners to determine a constant element in SEO. An element that Google puts before everything else. […]

10 Online Marketing Tricks to Take Your Landscaping Business to the Next Level

Remember the days when you’d open your mailbox in the morning and find a bunch of postcards and flyers advertising local services? You’d collect them all, put them on the kitchen table, and two days later throw them in the recycle. And two days after that you’d be looking at your lawn, wondering why it had all these yellow patches and think, ‘Didn’t I just see a flyer for lawn care services?’ Then you’d spend ten minutes digging around in the trash trying to find that flyer. It was a routine. A ritual. Something no one enjoyed, but everyone misses. And the fact is, it used to work really well. In those pre-Internet days, most landscaping companies were able to generate leads by forcing potential clients to rummage through the trash! But those days are long gone. For better or worse, the internet has fundamentally changed the way consumers spend […]

Google Maps Fraud: How False Business Listings Hurt Your Business

This article by CNBC is a good primer on an increasing phenomenon: businesses using Google Maps in a fraudulent fashion to increase calls to their business. The article details the example of a telemedicine business that posed as an urgent care walk-in clinic to improve the SEO for their website. We’re sure you know how important a tool Google My Business is when it comes to improving your website ranking in local searches. But it’s easy to see how this can lead to abuses that can have serious consequences. In this case, a parent took a sick child to the fake clinic believing it to be a late-night alternative to a local emergency room. That’s not only bad for business but in cases like this, it’s negligent and dangerous! Google Maps Fake Listings: How Widespread Is the Problem? The CNBC article goes into detail about volunteers who track down fake […]

Google My Business Finally Welcomes Video

The turn of the new year saw Google introduce a lot of changes to the operating systems of a variety of its platforms. This included increasing multiple new languages to its Maps platform as well as moving one step closer to infinite scrolling on their main search engine through the adoption of a ‘more results’ page. However, it is clear that the developments and changes did not stop there. Google My Business has now got in on the act and it appears that the option to upload videos to a listing on this site has finally arrived. The ability to add a video to a local listing via Google Maps has been in place since August 2017 but January 2018 is the first time that this option is showing up inside of the GMB dashboard. An official announcement from a Google My Business representative confirmed the development and the ability […]

Twitter: An Incredible Tool to Rehabilitate Your Business’s Image

Twitter is a social media that was launched in 2006 and quickly became one of the most important and popular sites on the web. With 330 million active monthly users worldwide, you probably already know that Twitter is a good way to reach out to potential customers and build an engaging brand presence. But did you know that Twitter is also one of the best ways to manipulate your search results and maintain better control over the content that clients see when they search for your business? SearchEngineLand reports that obtaining a Twitter search carousel takes up a massive amount of vertical space. If you have negative reviews or contributor’s pages jockeying for space on your search result, you know the value of gaining control over what displays on search pages for your brand or business. But are there other ways to use Twitter to increase the reach of your […]

How Can I Get my Website to Rank Higher in Voice Search Queries in 2018?

If you’re a small business owner, you know the importance of getting your website out in front of potential customers. The Internet has upended the field of marketing, and successful companies are devoting at least 40% of their marketing budget to web and search marketing. But building an online presence for your business is hard work. One algorithm changes and suddenly your website drops in search rankings. The most important quality in search isn’t technical brilliance. It’s your ability to adapt. With that in mind, here’s the next thing you need to focus on. It’s a sea of change from previous search engine optimization (SEO) strategies. And it’s the future of search. What is Voice Search? Voice search refers to any technology that allows users to conduct Internet searches via voice recognition rather than typing. When we talk about Voice Search, we mean several searching technologies that big players such […]

You Can Now Add ‘Services’ to Your Google My Business Page

If you’re not a search engine optimization geek then you may not have noticed, but Google now allows businesses to add lists of services to their Google My Business (GMB) pages. The rollout appears to be happening quietly but also pretty quickly. We’ve tested a few GMB listings for our clients and it seems like about half of them have the option to add service menus. If this change sticks around, expect it to reach most of the North American GMB community in a few days. The change was reported on by various search engine marketing industry blogs over the last week. At LinkNow Media we’re always trying to find new ways to improve our clients’ local search rankings and we expect this will be a great tool moving into the future. What’s Changed? Have you ever performed a search for a laundromat near you? Go ahead and do it […]

“The Shed at Dulwich”: How a Fake Restaurant Soared to the Top of TripAdvisor (And What it Means for Your Business)

The most interesting soft story in reviews for 2017-2018 is without a doubt the curious case of The Shed at Dulwich. Over the course of seven months, Oobah Butler, a 27-year old freelance writer who works for Vice, managed to transform the shed in the back of his garden into the hottest and most exclusive restaurant in London. The problem? The restaurant didn’t exist. To uncover how Butler pulled off his scheme, we’re going to look at TripAdvisor and how gaming the system with fake reviews was the key to creating The Shed at Dulwich hoax. It All Starts With a Well-Designed Website Journalists have devoted many words to The Shed at Dulwich. I’ll be offering a bit of a recap of some of these points. It seems that Mr. Butler got the idea for his hoax after he was paid to write fake reviews of restaurants on TripAdvisor for […]

White-Hat SEO: How Playing by the Rules Can Help You Win

If you want to make sure that your website ranks well on Google without facing any potential penalties that could end up hurting your brand, then you need to look take a close look at white-hat SEO. If you are unsure about what white-hat SEO really is and want more information about how this approach can help take your business to the next level, then don’t worry because we at LinkNow Media are here to help explain everything you need to know. The first thing that you need to understand about white-hat SEO techniques is that they are the most legitimate means of increasing your business’s visibility, and any dividend that you obtain from this endeavour will enhance your site’s online ranking capabilities without the risk of any penalties being incurred. One of the biggest concerns that many business owners have about adopting white-hat SEO techniques is that if they […]

Waze Launches Waze Local Advertising

Waze Local: A Powerful New Weapon for Your Arsenal At 6:30 a.m. this morning, I was packing lunch for my two daughters when my phone started buzzing like a hive. SearchEngineLand broke the news that Waze Local had finally launched and the blogosphere took notice. I was so distracted, I almost added my keys to my morning blender smoothie. Readers—this is a big deal. I Don’t Get It. What’s So Exciting About Waze Local? Waze Local is an advertising tool platform that small businesses can use to transmit their locations to users of the Waze app. At LinkNow Media, we’re always trying to stay on top of the latest developments in search engine optimization and search engine marketing. When we hear about a new ad platform, we get excited. Waze Local was in beta for most of the last year, but now it’s open to anybody who wants to promote […]