The pandemic has prompted businesses to put longstanding assumptions to the test. Quarantine has revealed that many operating principles were more like unquestioned habits. Companies are reconsidering everything—including where they get the marketing help they need.
Category: Digital Marketing
What to Know About Google My Business
For companies with a local or regional customer base, Google offers a free tool to make them more visible to prospects. We asked our Google wizard, Arlene, to share some of her knowledge. Q: Let’s start at the beginning. What, exactly, is Google My Business? A: It’s a platform, offered free from Google, to help […]
A Path to Rapid Revenue Recovery
In a previous article, we wrote about the McKinsey & Company roadmap as a tool to Rapid Revenue Recovery. Now we’re building on their advice to act quickly by providing five actions you can take now. We believe these are smart investments of your marketing resources that will pay off as we move into the new normal, whatever that may bring.
Planning now for a healthy recovery in the post-COVID era
The world changed and so did marketing. Where do we go from here? First, we were all just trying to keep our balance (along with our health) as the full impact of the COVID-19 pandemic sank in. Businesses took defensive measures to limit losses in revenue, employees and customers. Work from home and adoption of […]
What to Know About SEO
We asked our expert, Arlene, to share some of her knowledge. She offered clear observations about a complex topic. Q: We have heard a lot about the importance of user intent. Can you explain? A: The term refers to a more nuanced use of keywords. It contrasts with the simplistic notion that merely including a […]
Key things to know about PPC keywords.
In order to get the word out about your business, you need to use certain organic keywords to attract the attention of Google and everybody else. But the keywords you use for Pay Per Click campaigns (e.g. Google Ads) could be different from the ones you use for organic search engine optimization (SEO). Below, we […]
Why we diagnose websites before fixing them
It sounds obvious—of course we should diagnose first. But many new clients—fed up with their sites—ask us to skip that part because they can just tell us what’s wrong. Here’s why that’s a bad idea. Maybe a product image isn’t showing correctly, or a bunch of links lead to 404 pages. We understand the urgency—but […]
California Consumer Privacy Act Begins in January
This January, the California Consumer Privacy Act will restrict how companies collect and use data. RLM has a solution to help you stay safely in compliance. CONSUMERS ARE INCREASINGLY CONCERNED AND DISTRUSTFUL ABOUT THE COLLECTION AND MANAGEMENT OF THEIR PERSONAL DATA ON THE INTERNET. After headlines about Target, Equifax, Capital One, Marriott, Yahoo, eBay, Heartland […]
5 things to improve your website’s UX in the age of zero attention span.
Website owners must continually improve their user experience by making everything easier, faster, and more rewarding—because people are really impatient. Indeed, a study determined that goldfish can pay attention longer than humans. (No details on the experiment, but if it involved measuring how long a person could focus on a flake of fish food, it […]
Things website owners should know about malware. (And a few notes on those weird names.)
Hackers have devised any number of ways to get their digital destroyers to find cracks in websites. Below we take an illuminating overview of malware, including a few observations on those weird names. Viruses and malware are here to stay. We recently notified our website hosting customers that we were installing crucial updates on their […]
4 Trends that are Affecting Business Planning and Investment in Websites: Trend #4: Competitive Spend is Increasing
Businesses are investing more to acquire page rank and ad position – because it works. In our previous articles in this series, we cited 3 important contributors to the need to budget for ongoing website maintenance and marketing: increased security requirements, expanding complexity in website structure, and rapidly evolving SEO. Each of those factors demand […]
4 Trends that are Affecting Business Planning and Investment in Websites: Trend #3 – SEO is Harder
The secret to SEO is that there is no secret. Doing it well means doing many things well—consistently. “I used to outrank all of my competitors,” a prospective client told us. “And now I’m barely on page one. I don’t know what happened.” He wanted a new website, and he wanted it to appear at […]
4 Trends that are Affecting Business Planning and Investment in Websites Trend #2 – More Features, Less Hassle
Your customers expect your site to be a breeze. Here’s how to deliver. Designers and developers are always cramming new features into their sites as bandwidth gets cheaper and devices more powerful. Each feature is an improvement (at least in theory)— but a truckload of improvements can destroy your site’s user experience. We get spoiled […]
4 Trends that are Affecting Business Planning and Investment in Websites Trend #1: Security
Small businesses are realizing that hackers aren’t snobs about who they attack. They just want in. And they’ve learned that small to medium sized businesses are easier prey. Easier because of the dangerous delusion that no cybercriminal would try to hack, say, The Kupcake Korner when they could be hacking Pillsbury and its vast, flour-begotten fortune. […]
4 Trends that are Affecting Business Planning and Investment in Websites
Businesses are waking up to the costs of leaving their websites untended—and the returns they reap when they budget for regular SEO and content updates. The days when you could put a site in place, do some SEO so you’ll show up in a search, and then let it coast, are extinct. This is the […]
What is video hosting, and why should I use it?
Video is a necessary power tool for digital marketers. Inclusion of videos on business sites is huge and expected to grow. A good video can give users helpful information, how-to demonstrations, and other content that is proven to drive conversions. Video on a landing page can increase conversions by 80% or more. The average CVR […]
How to clean up your digital marketing strategy for summer
If you’re like us, summer probably has you ready to pack a cooler, hop in the car, and hit your nearest beach, lake, or cookout. But before you break out the shorts and burgers, take some time to reevaluate your digital marketing strategy. Summer is a fantastic time of year to get rid of digital […]
4 Reasons Why a Website Maintenance Service is a Good Idea
Your new website is finally launched. Time to kick back and relax, right? Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. The moment your gleaming new site goes live, various forces are already starting to pick away at it. Hackers poke at your infrastructure. Updates bob around, promising to make things better, yet often failing to do so. […]
How to Drive More Business through LinkedIn Lead Generation Forms
B2B sales get easier with LinkedIn lead generation forms. Ever tried to fill out a long, boring web form on your mobile phone? One glance at a dozen boxes to fill out makes you want to revisit that how-to video on getting rid of carpet stains. That’s why we’re psyched about the new LinkedIn lead […]
Watch Out for “The Guy”
“So, who’s managing the back end of your web site?” “Oh, we got a guy.” And thus strike the gongs of doom. More often than we’d like, clients come to us because they used “A guy.” It conjures images of a self-taught, one-man shop working out of his basement to make websites on the cheap. […]
When To Use Professional Photography?
Amazingly, some stock photography doesn’t suck. So why hire a pro for professional photography shots? There was a time when every single stock photograph in the whole universe was an embarrassment to the very idea of imagery. I am still haunted by the memory of disturbingly phony models posing stiffly, their unnaturally white teeth glaring […]
Content Marketing Tips: How to Avoid the Black Hole of Content
The internet has become a massive black hole of content. Here are some content marketing tips that can help you execute a smart content strategy in spite of it. Beautifully created content is getting lost in cyberspace. It’s dropped off on the side of the road in the most remote areas of the information superhighway, […]
RLM Marketing Madness: The Final Four
After winning the Final Four, SEMrush is the 2016 RLM Marketing Madness Champion! After the Final Four, SEMrush capped an amazing tournament run with a buzzer beater upset victory over giants Google Analytics. And after making it through the earlier rounds with impressive victories over social media superstars Sprout Social and Simply Measured, SEMrush seemed […]
The Elite 8! Round 2 of RLM Marketing Madness
Round 2: Elite 8 Matchups Set for Monday, March 28th! After a whirlwind Sweet 16 round, we are down to 8 teams left in the 2016 RLM Marketing Madness Tournament. Who will win the Elite 8? ROUND 2 SCHEDULE 1 @Hootsuite vs 2 @SproutSocial – Sprout Social advances to the Final Four! 3 @Marketo vs […]
RLM Marketing Madness 2016
We are excited to host the 2016 RLM Marketing Madness Tournament, an epic battle for bragging rights among the top digital marketing tools available today. The Marketing Madness Tournament Selection Committee has been hard at work reviewing the potential participants and determining the top 16 seeds. We selected each team based on its number of […]
