A Super Quick Brief Reason Why Your Business Needs to be Blogging

As we've mentioned in the past, content marketing helps your business become an industry leader, if the blogging is done right. However, a concern was raised to our creative marketing agency about how much of an impact blogs had on consumer trust.

According to a survey in the US and the UK, bloggers are the third most trusted source of information behind family (first) and friends (second). In a study of 2000 people in the US and the UK this past February and March, 57 percent of them said that they look to independent bloggers & vloggers when it comes to purchasing decisions. 

So, you must be reading this blog with great trust in our Chicago SEO company because we blog. We won't abuse your trust any longer. Sorry about that.

One last thing, if your business is not blogging or doing it well, it is losing trust from consumers. Hire Integraphix to help you with your blogging! 

Twitter-Google Deal Is Going into Effect. Tweets Now in Google Search Results. For Real This Time.

Remember at the beginning of the year when Google and Twitter announced a deal that would allow tweets to show up in Google search results? Well the two tech giants are delivering on their promise and now Google is showing tweets in search results on mobile; Google has mentioned that the effects of the deal will show up on desktop searches in the near future.

Our Chicago SEO team did a test run and it looks like tweets will appear on the page in a slider format. If you search for a hashtag, or keywords that are strong enough on Twitter, those tweets will appear one at a time with the option to see "more tweets for [subject]."

The only trouble is that there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason for where the tweets appear on the results page; sometimes they appear at the top and sometimes they appear in the middle or bottom. Sometimes the tweets won't appear on the search results at all. Presumably, according to our SEO agency, is that you will see the tweets surrounding a hashtag or topic when that subject is trending. 

Even though social media marketing was becoming more and more of a common practice for businesses, this deal between Google and Twitter has put it on the fast track.

If your business is not taking SEO or social media for business seriously, it needs to start doing that. If you have no idea how to do that or don't have the time, then call or email Integraphix and get a free consultation.

4 Benefits of Blogging for Business

The other day, the professional copywriting team from our SEO firm was talking to a group of business owners and we were asked, "Why should our businesses be blogging? What's in it for us?"

There are four core reasons that every business, especially small businesses, should be blogging.

1. It drives traffic to your website. 

If you want to have more traffic to your website, then you are among the thousands of business owners who wish to have more traffic to their site. Let's consider the various ways that people will find your website: 

• They could type your URL right into their web address bar. However, for that to happen, they have to already know your URL, which means your business already has them. You are on their radar and they know about your business. 
• You can pay for the web traffic by purchasing some email lists, emailing the people (victims?), and hoping for some clickthrough with the emails. However, that is both tacky and sort of illegal (Google hates it, a lot). 
• You can buy Adwords and pay for high placement in search results. This is an effective method, to a point, but people only click on these links 20-30% of the time. 
• That means that organic links get clicks 70-80% of the time. 

So how can you drive traffic to your site since those three methods got shut down? Blogging, social media marketing, and search engine marketing. 

Blogging draws the eye of search engines to your site, which helps with traffic in two ways. 

The first way is that search engines like content, fresh content. If your business actively blogs, this adds another fresh page of content to your site for search engines to crawl, index, and like (hopefully). This enhances your chances of good organic rankings. The alternative is to update the content on your website; this is a great method but how many times can you actually update your "About Us" page? The second way is that people will read your blog posts and click to your site. In each blog post, you will include links to your site via keywords and images. By extension, you can drive traffic to your site (and blog posts) with blog posts being shared on social media. It can be tough to have social media posts worth looking at, let alone sharing, blog posts help both issues. 

2. It helps you convert all that traffic into qualified leads. 

Now your site has all that traffic flooding its pages; you have a fantastic opportunity to convert that traffic into qualified leads. How do you do this? Insert a good, lead-generating call-to-action (CTA) to each blog post. 

Your CTAs can be things like free ebooks, whitepapers/fact sheets, pamphlets, consultation meeting, trial memberships, etc. It has to be something someone will be willing to give their email up for, not something lackluster. 

If you are already writing blog posts but don't have a quality CTA, start adding that to the blog posts right now. 

3. It helps establish your expertise and authority in the field. The people who write about topics in an industry are the people who know the most about it and can share info. How many blogs about an industry are written by "rookies", at least that you see? Not many, if any. 

The best corporate blogs are blogs that can answer consumer questions. If you can create content that helps your target market, they will see you as an authority. This is helpful, nay, necessary for good sales leads. Your sales team will thank your SEO copywriting team. A card would be nice. 

Measuring your success in establishing your business as an authority can be difficult, if not impossible. You can gauge it by how many readers your blog posts get, comments, and shares on social media. 

4. It drives great long-term results. 

A good blog post can drive traffic and help establish good, organic search results for months after the blog posts was published. Our Chicago SEO company has at least half of our monthly web traffic come from blog posts that are several months old. Crazy! 

If your blog posts can rank on their own, then they can each drive traffic for days, weeks, even months after being published. 

Is a company blog something that your business needs to invest in? Then call or email Integraphix. Our SEO team will give you a free website analysis! 

For the First Time Ever, Mobile Searches Beat Desktop Searches

After many years of speculation about the survival of desktop search, Google has released the stats for last month's search results and mobile has taken over desktop.

That's right, all the rumblings about mobile search's power are coming true. Smartphones and tablets count towards the "mobile" searches, while desktop PCs and laptops count towards desktop searches. Of the mobile searches, smartphones carried more than half the weight.

This puts a new challenge on digital marketing and mobile marketing teams as it puts the livelihood of the purchase funnel in jeopardy. Instead, what we see happening are "micro-moments", dubbed by Jerry Dischler (VP
of product management at Google), which requires marketers to be present at all times.

Google has built a new ad format so that the mobile ads are more prominent in mobile search results; this is great for advertisers since it cuts down on the amount of time that people have to scroll through results, reducing frustration and increasing conversion.

Advertisers can also have the great ability to buy mobile ads with Google on-the-fly since approximately 15 percent of searches are brand new each day.

This news is not so shocking after Google's April 21st deadline for sites to be mobile-friendly or be penalized on mobile search rankings. The push to accommodate smartphones and tablets is in full-force for Google, so brands better catch on real quick.

If you are concerned about your SEO, digital marketing, or site's mobile-friendly status, then contact Integraphix, a Chicago SEO company.