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#EDIT: moved organizational tags up so they actually work
roseverdict · 4 months
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#EDIT: moved organizational tags up so they actually work#rosie rambles#in the tags#hellscape in palestine#thinking about the whole. yknow. war crime situation in palestine#and it might just be my brain connecting unconnected dots#but wasn't there something going around a while back about how to pronounce gaza and palestine#(bc europeans/americans/whoever are claiming palestinians can't even pronounce 'palestine' correctly#except they're calling the localized 'palestine' the 'correct' pronunciation which is. so incredibly wrong)#bc it's been rattling around in my head for a while now. it's more of a falasteen than a pal-ah-stein. falasteen. philistine.#PHILISTINE. AS IN. THE FUCKING. PEOPLE WHO LIVED THERE ALREADY BY THE TIME MOSES AND THE ISRAELITES SHOWED UP.#THERE WAS AN ENTIRE SUNDAY-SCHOOL-FAVORITE STORY IN THERE ABOUT IT#VEGGIETALES MADE AN ADAPTATION OF ONE OF THE FIGHTS#look. i am very much way too goy and way too sleepy to consider myself an authority on any of this.#but palestinians were (seemingly) there first.#then israel (the original nation not the reconstruction we have nowadays) dropped in and was there for a good long while.#then other nations conquered and un-conquered and conquered some more for a while#then modern israel came into being. and like. ok. i'm Christian. this is a known fact abt me. but i'm pretty sure our holy book told us we#won't know the day or the hour of the end of days. and yet there's this push to send Good Jewish People back to israel that's spesrheaded#by…alleged Christians. who believe that jewish people need to return to israel to signal the end of days.#which. again. won't be predictable.#idk where i'm going with this#i just. i think i'm just getting way too jaded from hearing people irl cheerfully support genocide and being unable to convince them#that it's Fucking Genocide. or in one specific case#that it's Fucking Genocide. And That Is BAD#i think i just needed to straighten out my thoughts a bit before i go to sleep#just. if we were going to just look at the ancient past. both nations have existed in that plot of land. and peace would be nice.#however.#it is Very Clear that one side's definition of 'peace' is 'peace and quiet. because the Others are all dead :)' which is. Not Great!#augh.
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the-colony-roleplay · 2 years
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New Rules Re: Thread Tracking and Multiple Characters!
Hello my darlings!! Hope everyone is well this fine January weekend!! 
Maddie and I have been in discussion about thread tracking as of late, and we’ve come to the decision that we will be instating a new rule for anyone with 3 or more characters. 
As you may know, we have posted tips and reminders about tracking your own activity and threads in the past and have warned against relying solely on tumblr’s activity feature many-a-time [x]. This is because tumblr’s activity feature is extremely unreliable, and though it’s somewhat manageable when you only have one or two characters, it starts to become extremely easy to lose threads once you have any more than that.   
Obviously, everyone loses threads sometimes, and it does still happen every once in a while, even if you have tracking systems in place, and that’s okay! These things happen to the best of us and so long as you’re attentive and communicating with your rp partner, it doesn’t have to be a big deal! 
However, as losing and accidentally dropping threads isn’t just about you, but also your RP friends and fam, we’d like to enable everyone to be as effective with thread tracking as possible! There are already guidelines in place for taking on additional characters that require you to demonstrate you have the time management and organizational skills to juggle the responsibilities of multiple characters; so moving forward, any members with three or more characters will be required to have a tracking system in place. 
Obviously, we will highly encourage the use of ThreadTracker, as it’s easy to use and set up, extremely user friendly, customizable and versatile, and all of our members who do use it say that it has transformed the way they RP and significantly minimized stress. Even I held off trying it for years, thinking it would be more work than it was worth or that it would stress me out even more. But now that I’ve tried it, not only do I regret all the time I spent not using it, I also don’t know if I could ever go back. It’s streamlined everything about RP for me, has made tracking multiple threads and characters so much less stressful, and has actually significantly helped my motivation when it comes to replies. If you have not tried it yet, Maddie and I cannot stress enough how worthwhile it is to give it a shot! 
However, we acknowledge that everyone has their own tastes and preferences, and if you discover ThreadTracker is not for you and you would like to use a more basic (if less efficient) tracking system, then you can do so! Back before ThreadTracker days, many of us kept a post in our drafts (or on your phone or computer!) of all our ongoing threads on every character, which we would edit any time we got replies back, or posted replies, in order to keep track of who’s turn was up. Of course, this was less effective in that it requires you to edit and change the status of each thread manually every time, but so long as you keep it updated, even if you do miss a reply, it’s harder to forget about threads, and you’re more likely to notice when you haven’t seen a reply for it in a while and you can follow up by checking the character’s blog (tip: people use tags for a reason! Check them!) or by contacting your RP partner. 
So, with the instatement of this new rule, anyone who will be starting a new ThreadTracker account, we will require them to send us a screenshot of their ThreadTracker dashboard once they have all their characters and threads set up! Anyone who uses their own manual tracking system will have to send us a screenshot of that, instead. Please note that sending these screenshots will be a one-time only thing. We will not be monitoring your systems or breathing down your neck after that. We just want to see that you have set yourself up with something and then it will be up to you to maintain it!
However, though it will not be mandatory to use ThreadTracker, Maddie and I request that you at least try it, as it’s much more effective and will track your threads for you, rather than relying on you to edit a post or note every time. For anyone new to ThreadTracker, it has a comprehensive tutorial video on how to set up and use your account built right into the help pages of ThreadTracker. You will also find a bit more information about it (and other helpful tumblr tools!) on the Colony’s resources page. 
This rule will be effective immediately, and should be added to the rule page/multiple character guidelines page within the next couple days. 
As always, if anyone has any questions or concerns at all, please don’t be afraid to contact us on the main about it! We will be glad to help out anybody who may need some assistance, guidance or advice on setting up a way to track their threads in a way that suits their needs!
Cheers all! Much love and hope you all have a fabulous, relaxing Sunday!
xxMod!Ro
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kinetic-elaboration · 3 years
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100 Days of Writing: Day Sixty-Three
I decided to catch up on The 100 Days of Writing and then I... accidentally wrote a large number of words. In my defense, this is like 2 weeks’ worth of questions. Also I skipped the ones I didn’t have anything to say about so actually this could be worse.
(I’m not even kidding, this is really long. I talk about writing rituals, tools for plotting, my thoughts on opening with dialogue and why I don’t like it, my favorite topics, the weather, and what length of fic I like to write.)
I’m tagging, and apologizing to, @the-wip-project and fellow participants @she-who-the-river-could-not-hold, @thelittlefanpire, @hopskipaway, @easilydistractedbyfanfic, @dylanobrienisbatman, and @fontainebleau22.
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Day 49: How do you get yourself in the mood to write? Do you have a ritual?
Every time I tell myself I’m going to get back into doing these questions, I see this one in my bookmarks and go nope! and turn around. It’s not a hard question; I’ve just been having trouble consistently getting into the mood to write, so I feel like any answer I try to give to it will be, in some sense, a lie. Like do I ever get “in the mood” to write? Really?? Also, I feel like I’m relying too much on ‘ritual,’ building up ‘the perfect writing situation’ in my head, which at the end of the day is less important than just saying ‘I’m going to do this now’ and then doing it.
I do have some things I always do when I sit down to a writing session. I write on my couch. Almost always (unless I’m on an event deadline where I just have to write in bits and pieces whenever possible), I write in sprints—I use write or die to keep me actually typing and not staring into space. I write in order, and I often write a whole scene at a time. So before I start I need to have at least a couple solid opening sentences in mind, plus some kind of idea about what happens/needs to happen in the scene. In order to get in the right headspace, I usually spend some time just thinking before I actually get to writing. I reread my outline or notes, and skim whatever I might have already written on the project. Sometimes I look at images that help me get in the right mood. Sometimes I just imagine or daydream for a bit. The difficulty, especially recently, is in making sure I do this just enough and not too much, because then I get too caught up in my head and I can no longer translate what I’m seeing into words.
In a broader sense, I also have a building up to writing ritual—again, I think this is part of my problem, that I don’t know how to balance this build up with actual writing. In the hours/days before writing something, I turn it over in my head a lot. I practice different versions of those critical opening sentences. I play it out like a fantasy just to see if there’s a possible flow, even if the final version is different. Basically, I try to turn it into something that just needs to be written, that just needs to get out. But again—this can lead to overthinking and frustration.
The best way I can describe writing for me is that, when it goes well, I find a rhythm, or enter into a zone, where I can describe the images in my head in a way that’s both accurate and pleasant to read. But entering that zone or finding that rhythm is like jumping into a game of jump rope. If you don’t do it right, you’re just going to trip over your feet and get tangled in the rope. But if you do it correctly, it’s fun and exhilarating and you can keep jumping for a long time. Sometimes it takes me some false starts to jump in. And recently I’ve been having days where I just can’t at all, where I tangle the rope up so much I can’t unknot it. Those are the days I just have the same sentences repeating over and over in my head, sounding wrong, and I can’t do anything about it. On the other hand, I write in much longer sprints than I did a couple years ago. I used to only write partial scenes, maybe a few hundred words. Now I can write whole scenes without stopping, and on a few occasions, I’ve written multiple scenes or even whole stories without stopping. So in other words, when it works,  it really works. But it doesn’t always, and there’s not a lot of in between.
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Day 50 What fic/story made you?
Um… honestly I’ve been writing, in general and fic specifically, for such a long time that I didn’t have a ‘maybe I can do this’ moment. I mean one problem I’ve never had is thinking I can’t do this. I had positive reinforcement for my school and academic writing, and for a long time my fictional stories were just for me, and I knew what I liked. Even just thinking about my fic writing… I’ve been posting fic online since 2006, and I’ve been in multiple fandoms. I don’t really have much connection to a lot of those early stories anymore. They feel like they were written by someone else, a little. I’ve also moved on from most of the fandoms I wrote for in my early fic days so I don’t feel like I can really judge them anymore.
That said… there is kinda an obvious answer for my Star Trek fic lol. I also have favorite stories, and stories that stick out even years after I wrote them, in all (or at least most) of the fandoms I’ve been in. But I’m not sure if that’s the same.
Also, I had two teachers who were really encouraging of me and who I still think about often. One was my seventh grade English teacher, who had us do a lot of writing exercises of various types, both large and small, including keeping writing journals we wrote in every day at the start of class. He once told my mom that I wrote well, not for a seventh grader, but in general, and to be honest I still think of that with some regularity and take a lot of pride and comfort in it. The other was my creative writing professor in college. I don’t think I did my best work for that class, but she was very encouraging and seemed to like what I did. At the end of the semester, as I was preparing my portfolio, she told me that if I didn’t want to do much editing, I didn’t have to, because my unedited work would stand on its own. Again, especially considering all the problems that I saw with my writing for that class even then, I really took that comment to heart. When I’m feeling very self-critical, I remind myself that even my raw scribblings have, perhaps, something to them, and it helps ease the excessive and unwarranted pressure I put on myself. These aren’t really stories about specific writing pieces that ‘made’ me but I do think they speak to that ‘maybe I can do this’ feeling.
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Day 51: Do you use tools for plotting and what are they?
So, generally, no. Sometimes I’ll look at various writing/plotting/organizational tools as a method of distraction, but my actual process is very simple. I use plain old notebooks and pens, and word documents on my computer, to plan all my fics, from the one-shots to the multi-chapters. I start by writing down general thoughts and brainstorming, then I build a scene list and/or outline, and then, if necessary, I separate the scenes lists into chapters. Sometimes I break down the scenes even more, if I have additional ideas I don’t wan to forget or if I know I need to hit certain points in a specific scene. The process varies a little bit from project to project, but that’s basically all I do.
I did use Evernote to plan the (still unwritten….) Ark AU. I don’t know if that was the best program choice or if something else exists that would have more precisely met my needs. But that’s what I used and that’s how it is. It’s a little annoying that every time I open it, it’s been updated, and the interface looks totally different and I have to relearn where everything is. But the tagging system has worked decently to allow me to see the big picture of this complex, multi-strand, multi-character, multi-ship disaster epic of a story. I struggled to plot it for a long time because I didn’t know how to balance all of the different parts. In Evernote, I made one ‘note’ for each character, and one for each scene (in addition to miscellaneous notes about sub plots, relationships, questions, etc.). Then I tagged each of them, including tagging the scenes by chapter. So now I can look at a list of all the characters, or all the scenes, or all of the scenes in chapter 8, or whatever, but I can also look at just one particular note at a time, and not be distracted by anything else. That said, I do also have one note that is just a total scene list for the whole fic, which is pretty reminiscent of my usual outlining process.
So… somehow this helped me plot (tentatively) the whole thing, but as I’ve written almost none of it—I finished outlining this in February 2020 so in my defense… I think you can see why it stalled—I’m not yet sure if it was a successful experiment in a ‘plotting tool.’
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Day 60: How do you start your chapters? Do you start with dialogue? Why or why not?
While I am definitely against prescriptive “writing rues” generally, as my own personal rule, I try not to start with dialogue unless I have a very good reason.
To be quite honest, I think it’s lazy. I do think that dialogue openings can be used well, if the writer acknowledges that they are intensely stylistic and, from a reader’s perspective, quite difficult. Even within fanfiction, where a line of dialogue (especially if accompanied by a dialogue tag or swiftly followed by a reference to the speaker) gives a lot more information to the reader than in original fiction, opening with dialogue still shoves the reader directly into the deep end of the scene, with very little to orient her. WHERE is the speaker? WHO is being addressed in the dialogue? WHAT is the context of the conversation? Who ELSE might be present in the scene?
There are reasons you might want to throw the reader in the aforementioned deep-end. Maybe it’s an in media res situation and you want to emphasize the overwhelming nature of the action—starting a scene with “Get down!” for example. Or maybe the overall mood is one of disorientation or floating or uncertainty, and you want to create the same effect in the reader.
But I think if you’re starting a scene with dialogue because that’s the first thing that comes to mind for you—the person who conveniently already has the setting, character list, and even future plot already in mind—and it’s just simplest and easiest to start that way, you’re doing a disservice to the reader.
For example, I actually am planning to start the next chapter of the Sleeping Beauty AU with dialogue. My POV character is in a room with multiple other characters, and she’s examining something meaningful to her and not fully listening to the conversation around her. So I want the dialogue to float around in the background, to feel unmoored, and to stand in contrast to the very precise, detailed thoughts and memories that she’s experiencing, which are grounded in physical sensations like touch.
I haven’t quite gotten it to work yet, though, in part because opening with dialogue and doing it well is, in my opinion, quite hard. The difficulty lies in alleviating the challenges the reader is experiencing and making the text fluid and easy to picture. You need to get all of that scene-setting information—the who, what, when, where, and why—in very quickly, but without being jarring. In this scene in particular, I have multiple characters, all in a comparatively unusual location, and I need to establish where they are, who exactly is there, how they’ve come to meet my POV character (which happens ‘off screen’ between the end of Ch5 and the beginning of Ch6), all on top of the character’s thoughts and feelings.
I know all of this very well. To picture the scene in my own head takes only a moment. I just think about it and I see all seven of the characters, where they’re sitting, how they’re positioned, what their facial expressions are, and I also know roughly what each of them is thinking and feeling. To describe all of this in words would take several sentences. Do I put all those sentences on the front end? Do I weave them in among other description and dialogue? Is all of it even necessary—maybe we don’t need to know who’s sitting in what order on the couch, for example.
I’ve gone over a couple of different ways to do this in my head, and I’m sure it is possible, but I’m struggling to get it all down in a coherent way. (Admittedly, I’ve only made one solid attempt. As I was describing above, I’m probably going to jump in with several false starts, and then it will suddenly click.)
My initial attempt to set up the scene relied heavily on dialogue, but when I read it over, what sounded snappy and interesting in my head just fell completely flat—because it lacked context and thus, any meaning. I think the gulf between how dialogue openings feel to the writer and how they feel to the reader is large. To the writer, they feel easy and natural. To the reader, they can feel forced and, contrary to the writer’s intention, serve as an additional reminder that this is a constructed narrative rather than an immersive experience—the opposite of natural. In other words, as I said, they’re a highly stylized form of writing.
To illustrate, this was my first try at the Chapter 6 intro:
"I still can't believe it," a lightly awed voice says from somewhere behind Clarke. "The Princess of Alpha Station really used to live in our quarters.”
She pictures Miller, sunk into the couch cushions, slowly shaking his head, the expression on his face equal parts satisfied and amused.
"Really? That's what you think is the oddest part of all this?"
"Yeah, Bry, I do. Would you prefer I gloat? About being right this whole time? Who says she's just a legend now?"
My current idea is to still start with dialogue, but to move back into a significant amount of description pretty immediately afterward, and only then add more dialogue. Even this is a little hazy, since I haven’t thought much about this fic in a while. But I do think it’s quite clear this won’t work.
As for how I DO start chapters/scenes/stories… I like to start with a strong image that sets the scene and mood of the story, and hopefully leaves the reader wanting to know more. Here are some examples of story openings I’ve written recently, which I like a lot:
When Bellamy is angered, deafening bouts of thunder shake the heavens.
The cawing of the crows—high, sharp, angry shots of sound. The buzzing of the telephone wires.
Marcus Kane's body shows up again in June, skeletal and rotting, six months after his disappearance at the turn of the year.
The sky has turned a bruised yellow, like the inside of a plum, by the time Bellamy starts seeing the robots in the fields.
At noon on the third-to-last day before Christmas, Murphy leaves the cafe, with a single peppermint mocha and a small paper bag, and heads right, walking parallel to the ocean.
The last one doesn’t seem as interesting but consider: you get the who, what, when, and where, the mystery of the paper bag and where he might be going, and also the immediate understanding that this is probably going to be a Fluffy Beach Christmas story—which is correct, that’s exactly what it is.
I’m not saying that I’m always creative or unique. I often start stories off with descriptions of the weather. And I have committed the ~~cardinal sin~~ of starting with a character waking up, heaven forbid. I don’t have any hard and fast rules for myself other than that I try to avoid dialogue, or at least, be careful about its use (another example: I use dialogue to start off Mad Women—but it reads like narration, until it’s rudely interrupted, a sort of in-joke/reference/twist). I try to match the mood of the story and, as I said, include something that will create a question for the reader, some version of why, that the rest of the story will answer.
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Day 61: Do you describe the weather? Try changing a scene you wrote by adding weather effects.
After writing a book for the last question, here’s an easy one! Yes, I describe the weather. A lot. Often. In detail.
(Though if we’re talking about the Sleeping Beauty AU as my “current wip,” I actually don’t do much weather describing there, because 4 of the 6 chapters take place in a location with no weather.)
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Day 62: What is your favorite thing to write about?
Honestly I like to write about people being dramatic about their emotions. That’s what I’ve discovered while writing my surprisingly self-indulgent Troped fic: I want to describe people acting as if Everything was the Most Ever. It’s fun. Part of this is getting into the usual romantic tropes—longing, pining, exaggerated touches and glances and the like—but why stop at romance when you also have stuff like The Weather and Random Feelings to contemplate?
I also like setting scenes that I find soothing, which is part of why I like Seasonal Stories.
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Day 63: Are you more of a drabble/flash or a longfic/novel kind of writer?
I’m in the middle. I mostly write one-shots, and I’ve noticed that a lot of them fall in the 4-6k range. Long one-shots can get all the way to 10-12k but I feel like most of those are, semi-objectively speaking, too long, and would probably have been stronger if they were pruned down to 6k, or, better yet, never made it past 6k in the first place.
I have written some multi-chapters, or, uh, started multi-chapters, but I’m VERY bad at it. The only thing that makes me slightly less bad is being stubborn. Hence the existence of a WIP that I’ve had going for over 10 years now and refuse to call abandoned. Hence this year’s extended angst about the Sleeping Beauty AU, which is only 6 chapters but has taken me literally years to write. I don’t honestly know if I’ve ever finished a multi-chapter WIP, like, properly speaking. I’ve done some short multi-chapters that I wrote as if they were one-shots and then split up for ease of reading or, I dunno, just because. I wrote a Big Bang once, but it’s not very good. Nor very long, if I remember correctly. Generally speaking I probably shouldn’t be allowed to write novels lol—I have a lot of them in my ‘I should write this one day’ idea list—but as it so happens, no one can stop me, so here we are. I definitely have wild fantasies of writing multi-chapters with ease but I’m just a very slow writer and my ideas can’t keep up with my actual-writing. Thus one shots are much easier than multi-chaps, and one-shots on a deadline are much easier than ‘I’ll finish this whenever’ one-shots. One-shots written for events or exchanges also tend to be shorter (and, imo, better) because of the deadlines they’re written on, and are thus more likely to hit that sweet 4-6k spot than stories where I’m allowed to ramble at will.
All that said, I ALSO write a good number of drabbles/writing exercises. I used to write them more often than I do now, but still over the last five years I’ve produced 110,000+ words in free-standing scenes so like… that’s also a thing I guess.
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[edited!]: This post is now just being used as personal reference for a big project going forward! Don’t mind it, PSAs will come when needed!
The current sitch:
Presently I have 3 tumblr accounts I have any possible intention on using: 
my personal ( mainblog: skykinks ) which I use to follow IRL folks, artblogs, and other junk. It’s really messy, though, and I don’t log on as much as I want to. It also sort of acts as the ‘holding’ place for all my inactive sideblogs so I don’t have to feel guilty looking at URLs I’m not active on. Also currently the home of my artblog, which is a sideblog.
main RP account ( mainblog: pirequehideux ) which I use for general RP purposes. Great and all, but all my follows come from one RP blog which is currently in desperate need of an overhaul.
side RP account ( mainblog: marmoriites ) which is a??? RP account I made to house all my anime RP shit ( which is frankly mostly Voltron ), and while I really love the worldbuilding I did there, and am really happy with my muses, I don’t like the fandom and don’t feel like reaching out so... these blogs are getting shoved in the graveyard but I don’t want to abandon all the work? marmoriites started out as a sideblog and shouldn’t be TOO hard to move back to one, that way I can at least keep my #branding and my content easily accessible.
Between the first two accounts, I have-- a SHITTON of sideblogs. ( though I’m putting my full blog list here, just so all my info is in one spot )
pirequehideux - Altered Plot Phantom of the Opera. Needs a bit of a characterization overhaul. Might??? Go quiet for a while as I want to use my version of the story to make an actual graphic novel for publishing, since Leroux’s book is open license and I’ve literally written my own version!
tidehearted - Age of Sail multimuse. Not going anywhere, just needs to be polished & have some muses added.
ferrousstars - Panfandom multi for muses that don’t fit anywhere else, or whose fandoms I avoid getting too deep in. I’ve also been using it to sort of store some RPC type stuff?? Needs muses added, might have more going on- but that’ll be below.
neutralreborn - Tolkien AU Melkor. Needs a bit of a re-vamp for characterization.
forgedinflame - Tolkien Gothmog/Kosomot who might as well be an OC for all the character development I’ve given him, versus his minimal canon appearances, & has a billion AUs that make him accessible in almost any fandom- except Age of Sail because he fucking hates water. Needs to have more information added.
elvesbehavingbadly - Tolkien multimuse Needs completely rebuilt tbh, and needs characters/details added. Huge project tbh.
ofsubtlearts - HP Severus Snape. All HP blogs need a disclaimer/selectivity update. Needs some verses added and some info updated/re-organized.
technicallyaferret - HP Draco Malfoy. All HP blogs need a disclaimer/selectivity update. Needs a SERIOUS overhaul to most info/characterization details, needs tags, etc.
indiscretus - HP multimuse. All HP blogs need a disclaimer/selectivity update. Needs a complete overhaul & move to a fresh blog ( same URL ). full overhaul, basically.
violencetorn - a Kylo Ren blog I foolishly made because I fell in love with those damn movies. He may or may not make his way onto ferrousstars, but I also just want to find a use for the bg I made for this blog. Otherwise this blog is going to the graveyard.
url redacted - super hidden private marvel multi. Needs a HUGE overhaul & major update. might be going less hidden eventually with it??
marmoriites/marmcrites - voltron galra/worldbuilding hub. needs to be scooted to a sideblog & re-organized but probably needs to stay dead.
lionlocked - voltron paladin blog. Has basically no info on it whoops.
skyjynx - an aesthetic/moodboard blog. needs a url change because whoops this is my art username, needs cleaned up and some organizational tags added so I can reblog more general aesthetic pictures in addition to the blog when I don’t have time to make edits.
skyjynxart - my art blog. Needs to actually get running whoops orz
skykinks - miscellaneous??? personal??? 
Things I have been thinking about/wanting to do with my blogs/blogs I’ve been considering running:
fashion blog? - I always find gorgeous outfits/dresses/shoes/accessories/etc and think “I know I’m going to use this!!!” but have no immediate use for it so it sits in my likes for years bc I don’t have anywhere to stow it where it won’t get lost?? So I’ve been contemplating a fashion blog, or perhaps a set of fashion tags on that aesthetic blog, idk, to store stuff like that. Happening regardless of what big choice I make, but whether it’ll be a new set of tags when I revamp the aesthetic blog or a blog unto itself is to be determined.
RPH - I want to have a solid place to collect useful info, writing tips, memes I can’t use immediately but want to in the future, and possibly even answer questions for newbies or something like that. I don’t want to go super serious with a big RPH blog, but it would be nice to have somewhere to dump all my resources so they’re not scattered across blogs.
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14 Businesses Doing a Great Job at skillshare – full post production workflow
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MAM manages the entire lifecycle of your content, making it easy to browse and retrieve media across multiple tiers of storage for reuse or repurposing.
What is DAM technology?
The primary function of the Asset Manager is to assist in all aspects of the administrative, financial, capital and operations of the assigned portfolio. Essential Functions: Oversee local third party property managers and leasing agents. Assist in the preparation and approval process of property operating budgets.
Media asset management (MAM) is the process and software used to manage high-volume video and multimedia files.
NAB Labs Futures Park is a showplace designed to display the newest of advanced projects, demonstrations of high-tech media developments in progress, prototypes, and products not yet available for sale.
It's a smaller version of your file that creates less overhead in the way of space, as well as usually demands on the computer processor.
However, for most productions, the transcoding time involved would be unacceptable.
There’s no end to what you can describe and categorize with metadata.
I chose to research film project management due to its wide appeal yet limited presence among project management references, academic sources, and published literature.
Clarizen – Fully-featured, enterprise-grade software to manage your entire agency process with portfolio, collaboration, resource management, and workflow tools
What is the role of an asset manager?
Bitcoin uses blockchain technology to create a digital asset that is entirely decentralized and managed across a wide network of computers rather than by a single entity. The virtual coins generated by the Bitcoin network are called bitcoins (lowercase b).
DAM stands for Digital Asset Management and in relation to photography, it describes everything we do with our image files from the moment we begin to download them from the memory card or camera. We recommend that the Marketing or Business Development teams work to map out an efficient workflow. Active digital asset management (DAM) enables you to have a central location where all visual assets are approved and up-to-date. DAM cuts down on wasted time and allows the design team to focus on what matters.
Company Profile Post Production Editing
Organizational IT, Empress, and one of its system integrator partners can work together to build, deploy, and support a system to meets the needs of the largest organizations. Asset managers with built-in archiving make moving content into and out of an archive seamless and straightforward. For most asset managers, assets can be archived directly from the graphical interface.
Work smarter, not harder with project management software
The Preserve Service provides an AI-tagged archive to search and share media on a secure platform. The Create Service adds collaborative editing for video and graphic productions. Using a centralized storage location, producers, editors, and graphic artists can access content and rough-cut video sequences.
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usefulstuffmouzon · 4 years
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Annual Twitter Update
This is not quite complete; I’ll update the last item or two later.
I finally got my entire tweet catalog organized, hash tagged for topics, tweet casted events & speakers earlier this year. I also established a Fave field for what I consider good tweets and a Classic field for the great ones. Other fields include date & time (obviously), a checked/unchecked field I use for general organizational stuff, a field that starts with the text of the tweet followed by the speaker’s name if it’s not me, and a field that counts the number of characters in the tweet. This will be the first time I’ve added to the organized catalog, so I’m recording the steps so I won’t have to figure it out again next year.
Request Twitter Archive
The first step is to get my Twitter archive. In a web browser on my laptop, there’s a More button at the bottom of the left sidebar. Click that, then on the pop-up window click Settings & Privacy. On the next screen, click Your Twitter Data under Data & Permissions. Under Download your Twitter data, there’s one button for Twitter and another for Periscope. Click Twitter. It’ll ask for my password. It takes awhile to put it all together, but in the next hour or two I’ll get a notification saying it’s ready. Now, Twitter lets people download their data only once per month, so it’s important to pick the time carefully to avoid copying a bunch of new tweets into the catalog by hand.
Convert Archive
Until this year, the archive included a CSV of all tweets back to the beginning. This year, they added a bunch of new stuff, including all of the media (pics & movies) you’ve ever posted, which is nice, but they inexplicably left out the Index.html file where you could see all the tweets just as they appeared and the CSV file which you could easily open in any spreadsheet. Now, everything except the media is in JSON files, which only a tiny fraction of people know how to manipulate. It took me several days to figure out how to convert it so I can open it in Mac Numbers.
Searching for a solution, it’s obvious many other people have had the same problem, and none of the ones I found had discovered a solution that non-programmers could easily do. So I tried to find an app, or find an online converter, which you would think would be easy. But every one I tried had some sort of problem. They either said “conversion failed,” or they tried to extort me for hundreds of dollars per year to get what they said was a successfully converted file. Obviously, I’m not going to do that.
Finally, I noticed that several of the failed conversions kept saying there was a problem with the first line of the file. Fortunately, I needed to download my archive a few months ago, and was able to convert it successfully on one of the online converters. It turns out that Firefox can open Javascript files as text, so I opened both of them. Sure enough, the first line of the new file that didn’t work was “window.YTD.tweet.part0 = [ {“ while the first line of the old file that did work was just “[ {“. So I deleted the offending “window.YTD.tweet.part0 = “. And I should note that while YTD implies that it’s only Year To Date, the file actually contains all my tweets back to the beginning like it always has.
The converter I originally used, and which I was really happy with, is the very simple & totally free https://onlinecsvtools.com/convert-json-to-csv by browserling. Click Import From File on the JSON side and it’ll load the file in a few seconds (upload time depends on file size, of course). Click Use Headers in the box just below the JSON box so it’ll convert the first line to a header row. Very quickly, it converts the file and the data pops up in the SCV window. If it doesn’t pop up, there’s something wrong with the file. Click Save As… to get the file. Unfortunately, it only read a few of the columns. While they were the most important ones, there was a lot of useful stuff missing.
So I went back and looked at a conversion I’d done in early November, and it was on a site convertcsv.com. So I went back to that site to convert the data. Simply put, it was one of the most painful things I’ve ever done. Nearly all day New Years Eve was spent trying to shepherd it through. For the first several times, the browser kicked cranked on it for several minutes, then reset itself due to lack of memory. And to be fair, xfinity was incredibly slow that day, so that may have had something to do with it. I ended up doing it in Firefox, since I had a bunch of windows open in Safari and didn’t want to close them. Before running it, I restarted my Mac just to be sure it was as clean as possible. Still, it repeatedly ran low on memory, so I’d follow it in the CleanMyMac widget in the toolbar, and free up memory every time it got below 10 gigs. It was absolutely painstaking because I couldn’t do anything else other than sit there and play games on my phone and watch it out of the corner of my eye. But fiiiiiiiinally, it finished and I was able to download the converted data.
Delete Columns
When I opened the file in Numbers, I got an error message saying that Numbers only reads the first 256 columns, and there were over 500. Assuming that Twitter probably put the most important stuff near the beginning, I said OK and opened it. Turns out that was correct. In the spreadsheet structure, they put the first few of an item type near the beginning, then I’d find more buried deeper. Towards the end, data was getting really sparse so I doubt there was anything really essential in the columns that didn’t load. And I found many columns that contain stuff I know I don’t need, or that duplicated other info, such as the full URL of a link (which I kept) versus various other iterations (like the Twitter-shortened URL) of exactly the same thing.
Without getting into the rationale of why I deleted columns, here are the ones I kept: favorite_count, retweet_count, created_at, full_text, entities/urls/0/expanded_url, entities/media/0/expanded_url, people mentioned & their usernames 11 deep (I’ll probably only need the first one, if even that), and hashtags 6 deep.
Fix Date
There are several extraneous things in the date & time, so I create a new column where I’ll create a text formula to keep only what I need. Currently, the date & time look like this: Mon Jan 26 17:31:04 +0000 2009. I don’t need the day of the week or the +0000, but I do need the year with the month & date so Numbers will read it correctly. The formula is: MID(E2,5,3)&" "&MID(E2,9,2)&" "&RIGHT(E2,4)&" "&MID(E2,12,8). This converts the date & time above into: Jan 26 2009 17:31:04. I paste this into every cell of the column.
So the dates look right on the screen, but they’re still just formulas, so I create another column named date & time beside the formula column. I copy the formula column and Paste Formula Results into the date & time column, so Numbers sees it as actual dates & times, not formulas.
Change the date & time format to look like this: 2009-01-26 17:31:04, and so that it left-justifies.
Sort by date & time.
Delete the created_at column & the date working column.
Copy Orphan Tweets
I do a holiday mailing each year that contains some of my best work on Twitter for the year, so I have to harvest the archive before the year is over. This means there are always some orphan tweets that didn’t make it into the catalog already. So I find those and copy the date & time and the text of the tweet.
Delete Previous Years
I make a Filter for all dates before 1/1/19 (or whatever the current year is, then delete all rows remaining, as they are in previous years.
Total Faves & RTs & Measure Length
I added a column after the fave & RT columns totaling the two, for a sense of the impact of the tweet, in the interest of assigning fave & classic settings in the final document. I also added a length column before the text of the tweets measuring total characters.
Delete Short Tweets
I sort the Length column, and delete most of the short tweets which tend to be stuff like “Thanks!” For this year, the shortest tweet I found that was useful standing alone was 45 characters.
Delete Original Green Daily
I do a paper.li newsletter every day. When paper.li puts it out, it tweets The Original Green Daily is Out! with a link. So I sort by text, which puts them all together so I can delete all 365 of them at once. DON’T filter for that text, because while it’ll only show the 365, if you select those rows and delete, it’ll delete everything else in between, basically wiping out your database. If you do, Undo before you save!
Clean Out Long Copy Chains
The longest tweets will be those with long copy chains, where many people are in the conversation. My longest one this year was over 900 characters. So strip out all the usernames to see what’s actually being said at the end. There’s no easy way to do this; allow 20-30 minutes.
The Long Edit Slog
This is the most time-consuming part except maybe the hashtagging; allow a couple days depending on how much you’re starting with. For this year, after deleting the stuff noted above, I had about 3,300 tweets. After this edit, I have about 2,300 so this pass takes out almost a quarter of the tweets. There are four things to do in this pass: 1. edit the tweets, 2. assign them fave & classic status, 3. move the names of people I’m quoting to the @ column, and 4. tag the event I’m tweetcalting in the tweetcast column. The edit involves several things: 1. Because the tweets stand alone in the catalog, I strip out all the @usernames at the beginning that didn’t get taken out in the long copy chain cleaning above, and remove remnants of conversational text, leaving just the statement of principle. For tweetcasts, I move the speaker name to the @ column (either as @username if they’re on Twitter or #FirstLast if not) and the event to the tweetcast column. Obviously, once I have one of each, it’s easy to duplicate. Then I strip the speaker & event name out of the text. I also delete a lot of tweets in this step that don’t belong in the catalog; some because they’re banal, others because they’re conversational and no part of them can be properly understood standalone. Until this morning, I was deleting truncated retweets as well but may have found a way around that, so will leave them for the moment (see The Retweet Problem). Also, I don’t want to have to read a tweet more than once, so while I’m here, I assign fave & classic status. Faves can be assigned for a number of reasons: 1. compelling content, 2. a memorable event to me (it’s my catalog, after all), and 3. the number of times they were favorited or retweeted on Twitter. Classics are much rarer, and must be both unusually compelling in some way and also evergreen. In other words, they won’t go out of date quickly. Every classic is also a fave.
Column Gymnastics
Because this is a working file, I toss the columns around a lot, putting what I need side by side as much as possible. I also hide columns I don’t need to see for clarity.
Fave & Classic Cleanup
Assign Hashtags
Once the edits are complete, it’s time to assign hashtags. I’ve harvested 6 columns of hashtags from the Twitter  archive (/0/-/5/) but some of them were used to tag speakers who weren’t on Twitter or the names of events I tweetcasted. I delete these entries from the six columns for clarity, then move the columns just to the left of the text column.
The Retweet Problem
Retweets in the archive are truncated to 140 characters, which makes all but the shortest text-only retweets useless. I’ve been searching for days to figure out a way around this, and finally found something this morning. Apparently, something called Python can be used to access the Twitter API and get whatever info I want. I had an app called Komodo that I got for reasons I don’t recall several years ago, but apparently it can edit Python scripts, so I’ve downloaded the latest version. I’ve also just applied with Twitter as a developer, so if they approve me I’ll update this on the adventure.
Copy to Yearly Template
I have a template file which looks just like the big catalog file except it has 3 columns at the far left: faves, RTs & total. This is where I paste that date from the archive sheet, but which won’t get copied to the main sheet once I’ve set fave & classic designations. To be sure, the cells have a grey background. It’s important to get the data into the template at this point so everything is properly formatted from this point on.
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kadobeclothing · 4 years
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The Social Media Content Calendar Template Every Marketer Needs [Free Template]
“We have a 9 a.m. meeting? Hold on — let me just click around the internet like a maniac to find something for the morning tweet.”  Sound familiar? Scrambling for social content is nothing new. We have meetings. We run late. Things come up. And it’s really hard to get any meaningful amount of work done when you have the next social media update looming over your head every 30, 60, or 90 minutes. It all moves so fast that you might periodically feel a case of the vapors coming on, which is why pre-scheduled social media content should be your new best friend. To make social media content easier for companies to plan and schedule across the accounts they manage, we created a social media content calendar template. And recently, we updated to be better, faster, stronger, and just generally prettier.  You can fill it in at the same day and time every single week to prep for the following week’s social media content. That means when you burst through the office doors at 9 a.m., you won’t be in panic mode looking for something to push out to your Facebook fans — you already took care of that last week. This blog post will walk you through exactly how to use the template to stay on top of your social media content planning for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and Google+. Note: HubSpot customers can also schedule content through Social Inbox, or use this spreadsheet to organize their content and subsequently upload it to Social Inbox. Detailed instructions for doing this exist in the cover sheet of the template.
How to Use the Social Media Calendar Template to Plan Your Content Schedule When you open up the social media content calendar template, you’ll notice the bottom of the Excel spreadsheet has several different tabs, most of which are dedicated to a specific social network.
The reason you’ll want a different worksheet for every social network is simply that every social network is a little bit different. You can’t just craft one, single social media update and use it across LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Google+. You can certainly promote the same piece of content across all six of those networks, but that doesn’t mean you’ll craft your update in the same way for every single one of them. (In fact, you may even want to add additional tabs if you’re active on other networks, like Quora or YouTube.) This following sub-sections will walk you through how to fill out each of the four tabs you see in this template — the updates for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and Google+. But before we get to that, let’s just walk through the “Monthly Planning Calendar” so you know what that’s for. Monthly Social Media Schedule  The tab “Monthly Planning Calendar” provides an overall snapshot of your monthly social media campaigns. It’ll help you coordinate better with other stakeholders, not to mention keep all the moving parts straight in your own mind. Here’s what it looks like:
There are three sections to take note of when you edit this template for your own purposes. First, the color-coding key: These are the types of content or campaigns around which you might coordinate, like ebooks, webinars, blog posts, product launches, and so on. Though only some of these might be relevant to you, they’re there to indicate what you may want to put in there — so be sure to edit these categories to align with your own campaigns. The other two sections you’ll need to edit are the Month and Year at the top of the calendar (duh), as well as the cells below each day of the week. In those cells, you should enter the type of content you’ll be promoting that day and color-code it to align with the campaign it’s supporting. Instead of deleting all the content in this spreadsheet each month, I recommend copying this worksheet twelve times over, and creating a separate sheet for each month. (If that gets to be too overwhelming, you can always save those tabs as a separate file.) Planning Your Twitter Content Calendar Alright, now let’s get to the social media content. This section will be the lengthiest, because all subsequent sections will draw on the instructions we go through here. So if you read one section in this whole post, make it this one. Let’s say you want to add some tweets to your scheduling template. Skip over to the “Twitter Updates” tab, where you’ll see this:
The first four columns, “Day,” “Date,” “Time,” and “Date & Time” are there for your convenience, and if you choose to use a third-party app for pre-scheduling your tweets (like HubSpot’s Social Inbox), then these columns will be useful. For now, just fill in the date on which you’d like your updates to publish to Twitter, and the time at which you’d like them to go out. The “Date & Time” column will automatically change based on what you input in the previous two columns. Now, let’s move over to the “Message” column. Here, input the copy you’d like to appear in your tweet, bearing in mind you should cap it at 116 characters to allow enough room for a link, and at 115 characters to allow room for an image. (Read this blog post for a full character count guide.) This spreadsheet will auto-calculate the number of characters you’ve entered to keep you on-point, turning yellow when you’ve reached 95 characters, and red when you’ve reached 116 characters. After you’ve composed your tweet, paste the URL you’d like to include in your tweet in the “Link” column. Be sure to include UTM parameters so you’ll know whether all of these tweets are actually driving traffic, leads, and customers. This is an important step to remember if you’d like to be able to demonstrate ROI from social. You can also use the “Campaign” column to add an associated campaign, which helps which more robust tracking and reporting. Finally, in the “Image” column, attach the tweet’s image (if you have one). For Twitter, we recommend images that are 1024 x 512 pixels. (Click here for a full cheat sheet of social media image sizes.) If you’re having trouble attaching your image to the spreadsheet, follow these steps: Step 1: Right-click the cell in which you’d like your image. Step 2: Click “Hyperlink,” then click the “Document” button, and finally, click “Select” to choose your image. Step 3: In the “Choose a File” window, select the image from your computer and click “Open.” Step 4: You’ll now see the image attached to the “Insert Hyperlink” screen. Feel free to edit the “Display” text to change the file name, then click “OK.” Note: This process is simply for organizational purposes. If you decide to upload the spreadsheet to your social media publishing software, it will not attach — you’ll have to do that with your marketing software. If you’re a HubSpot customer, details for how to bulk upload your Twitter content to Social Inbox can be found within the downloaded template. Planning Your Facebook Content Calendar Now, let’s talk about how to plan your Facebook marketing in advance with the template. Navigate on over to the tab in your template labeled “Facebook Updates.”
Facebook updates work similarly to Twitter updates, with the exception being bulk uploading your content is not possible in Social Inbox. The first three columns, “Day,” “Date,” and “Time” are there for your convenience. Head on over to the column labeled “Message” and input the copy you’d like to appear in your status update, corresponding to the days and times you’d like those updates to run. Then, move to the “Link” column and input the link you’ll be, you know, linking to in the update. (Don’t forget that tracking token.) If you’d like the update to be tagged to a certain campaign, include this in the “Campaigns” column. Finally, attach an image just like you did with your Twitter updates — if you’re using one, we suggest you edit it to be 1200 x 900 pixels. (Click here for a full cheat sheet of social media image sizes.) Planning Your LinkedIn Content Calendar LinkedIn updates are the most unique, because you have both Company Pages and Groups to consider. To demonstrate the difference between Company Page updates and Group updates, let’s navigate over to the column labeled “Title (For Group Discussions Only).”
LinkedIn Groups let you post a few kinds of updates, one of which is called a “Discussion.” You will only fill out the “Title (For Group Discussions Only)” column if you’re looking to post a Discussion to your LinkedIn Group — because Discussions are the only update you’ll be posting that requires a title. If you’re not posting a Discussion to a LinkedIn Group, you don’t need to fill out this field, because your update will not have a title. You’ll fill out the next column, “Message,” for every type of update you post, whether it’s for a Company Page or a Group. Simply input your copy into this column, and then navigate to the next two columns, “Link” and “Campaign” to input the URL to which you’re directing readers with the tracking token you’ll use to track activity, and the associated campaign if one exists. If you’d like to use an image for an update, attach it per the instructions laid out in the “Twitter” section. We recommend editing the image to 700 x 520 pixels. Planning Your Instagram Posting Calendar Now, let’s move on to how to set up your Instagram photos and videos in advance with the template. Navigate on over to the tab in your template labeled “Instagram Updates.”
Instagram updates work similarly to Facebook updates, in that content can’t be uploaded in bulk to Social Inbox like it can with Twitter. The first three columns, “Day,” “Date,” and “Time” are there for your convenience. Head on over to the column labeled “Message,” and input the copy you’d like to appear in your post’s caption, corresponding to the days and times you’d like those updates to run. Keep in mind that although Instagram captions can be up to 2,200 characters long, they cut off in users’ feeds after three lines of text. The exact length of these three lines depends on the length of your Instagram handle. (Read this blog post for a full character count guide.) Next, move to the “Link for Bio” column and input whichever link you plan to put in the bio when you publish the accompanying Instagram post. (The reason you’d put a link in your bio and not the photo caption itself is because clickable URLs aren’t allowed anywhere except the single “website” box in your bio. See #13 in this blog post for more on how that works.) Oh, and don’t forget that tracking token. If you’d like the update to be tagged to a certain campaign, include this in the “Campaigns” column. Finally, attach an image just like you did with your other social media updates — we suggest you edit it to be 1080 pixels x 1080 pixels. (Click here for a full cheat sheet of social media image sizes.) Planning Your Pinterest Content Calendar Alright, now let’s go over how to set up your Pinterest pins in advance with the template. Navigate on over to the tab in your template labeled “Pinterest Updates.”
Pinterest updates work similarly to Facebook and Instagram updates, in that content can’t be uploaded in bulk to Social Inbox like it can with Twitter. The first three columns, “Day,” “Date,” and “Time” are there for your convenience. Go to the column labeled “Message,” and input the copy you’d like to appear in your pin’s description, corresponding to the days and times you’d like those updates to run. Then, move to the “Link” column and input the link you’ll be, you know, linking to in the update. (Don’t forget that tracking token.) If you’d like the update to be tagged to a certain campaign, include this in the “Campaigns” column. Finally, attach an image like you did with your other social media updates — we suggest you edit it to be 735 pixels x 1102 pixels. Planning Your Google+ Posting Calendar Finally, we come to Google+.
Update: Google recently announced it is shutting down its Google+ platform. Please consider using the template and instructions below for any potential social networking platform Google launches in the future, and check back with us for an updated template that reflects this rollout. Start in the “Message” column, and input your status update. Then move over to “Link” column, where you’ll input the link to which you’re directing readers. If you’d like the update to be tagged to a certain campaign, include this in the “Campaigns” column. If you’re attaching an image, you could use multiple different sizes, but 960 pixels x 960 pixels works best. (Click here for a full cheat sheet of social media image sizes.) Content Repository (Or, Where to Source Social Media Content) This template also provides you with a tab called “Content Repository,” which should help you keep track of all your content and maintain a healthy backlog of fodder to make sourcing social media content easier.
As you create more assets, you’ll likely want to resurface and re-promote those pieces down the line, too. To ensure you don’t lose track of all of that content, record it on this tab so you’re never at a loss for what to publish on social. If the content you’re promoting isn’t evergreen, be sure to include an expiration date in the column marked “Expiration” so you don’t promote it when it’s jumped the shark. This tab will also help you maintain a healthy balance of content: A mix of your own content and others’, a mix of content formats and types, and mix of lead generation content vs. MQL-generating content vs. traffic-friendly content. Don’t Forget to Interact With Your Followers Whether you use this spreadsheet to plan your content out in advance or upload to a third-party app, you’ll still need to supplement these updates with one the fly content. Breaking news hits? Whip up a quick update to share it with your network. Someone in your network tweets something interesting? Give it a retweet with some commentary. Got a fascinating comment on one of your updates? Respond with a “thank you” for their interaction or an additional follow-up comment. Coming up with and scheduling your social media content in advance is a huge time-saver, but it should go without saying that you still need to monitor and add to your social presence throughout the day. Finally, we encourage you to experiment with your social media publishing. This template provides publishing dates and times for each social network, but you may find those are way too many updates for you to fill, or perhaps too infrequent for your booming social presence. You should adjust your social media publishing frequency as needed.
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youtubeog-blog · 6 years
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best music player apps for Android
A lot of folks these days have transferred to some sort of music streaming service like Pandora, Spotify, Google Play Music, or Apple Music. However, there are those of us left that hang on to our collection of media because streaming isn’t quite good enough yet. If you have your own music collection and the stock music player isn’t doing it for you, then here are our picks for the best music player apps on Android! Please note, if you’re looking for something that plays local music and also streams music, your best bet is Google Play Music.
LOOKING FOR MORE MUSIC PLAYER AND VIDEO PLAYER OPTIONS? TRY THESE! 10 best music streaming apps and music streaming services for Android 10 best video player apps for Android
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BlackPlayer Price: Free / $2.69 DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY BlackPlayer is a simple, but elegant music player that puts very little between you and your music. It operates on a tab structure and you can customize the tabs to use only the ones that you actually want. On top of that, it has an equalizer, widgets, scrobbling, an ID3 tag editor, no ads, themes, and support for most commonly used music files. It’s delightfully simple and a fantastic option for fans of minimalism. The free version is a little bare bones with the paid version providing far more features. It’s one of the music player apps worth trying.
jetAudio HD Price: Free / $3.99 + $2.99 DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY jetAudio is a long time favorite of Android users because it has enough features to be better than most, but still simple enough for everyone to use. This one features a variety of audio enhancements that come as plugins so you can tweak your music experience a little more than usual. On top of that, it comes with an equalizer (complete with 32 presets), simple effects like bass boost, a tag editor, widgets, and even MIDI playback. The free and paid versions are virtually identical. The paid version just removes advertising and adds themes.
MediaMonkey Price: Free / $2.49 DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY MediaMonkey is a bit of a dark horse in the music player apps business. It has a ton of features, including organizational features for things like audiobooks, podcasts, and the ability to sort songs by things like composer (instead of just artist). It also has basic stuff like an equalizer. What makes MediaMonkey a truly unique music player is the ability to sync your music library from your computer to your phone (and back) over WiFi. It’s a bit complicated set up, but it’s virtually a one-of-a-kind feature. The interface is simple and the app is an overall solid option.
n7player Price: Free / $3.49 DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY n7player is a music player that tries to do something a little different and succeeds. Instead of having lists of music sorted in various ways, n7player creates a giant collage style list of your music which you can scroll through and listen to. It also comes with a 10-band equalizer, volume normalization, a tag editor, scrobbling, and plenty of other features. A lot of this is definitely form over function. Those looking for more powerful music player apps may not like this. They also recently updated their app to version 3.0. That includes Material Design and some other new stuff.
Neutron Player Price: Free trial / $5.99 DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Neutron Music Player is another music app that isn’t nearly as popular as it probably should be. It features a 32/64-bit audio rendering engine that is (according to the developers) independent of the Android OS. The idea is that it helps music sound better. It also has a lot of other features, including support for more unique file types (flac, MPC, etc), a built-in equalizer, and a host of other audiophile specific features. It’s a bit expensive, but many swear by it as their go-to music player app.
YOU’RE HALFWAY DONE! CHECK OUT THESE AWESOME APPS! 15 best free Android apps of 2018! 10 best video streaming apps and video streaming services for Android
Phonograph Price: Free / optional donation DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Phonograph is one of the newer music player apps. It bills itself as being simple. lightweight, and easy to use. In most cases, it succeeds. It features a classic, simple Material Design UI. It’s quick to move through as needed. You can also change the theme if you want, but the theme editor isn’t especially powerful. Along with that, you’ll get Last.fm integration, a tag editor, playlist features, a home screen widget, and some other navigation features. It’s very simple and a great option for those who just want to listen to their music without anything getting in the way. It’s a music player worth trying.
PlayerPro Music Player Price: Free / $4.99 DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY PlayerPro Music Player is another lesser-known music app that should be getting a little more traffic. It features a good looking interface that makes everything easy to use along with skins that you can download and install for more customization. You’ll also get support for playing video, a rare ten band equalizer, Android Auto and Chromecast support, various audio effects, widgets, and some fun little features like the ability to shake the phone to get it to change tracks. It even supports Hi-Fi music (up to 32-bit, 384kHz). You can demo the app for free before forking out the $4.99.
Poweramp Price: Free trial / $3.99 DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Poweramp has long been one of the go-to music player apps choices for a lot of Android users. It has a sleek interface with themes that you can download from the Google Play Store. The interface can be too clever for its own good sometimes. It’s effective and efficient, though. There are also themes to make it look how you want. It includes many playback features, including gapless playback, crossfade, and it has support for several types of playlists. You’ll also find widgets, tag editing, and more customization settings. It’s a powerful player that seems to strike the right chord with almost everyone.
Pulsar Music Player Price: Free DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Pulsar is probably the best completely free music player out there right now. The features include beautifully done Material Design, tag editing, gapless playback, smart playlists, a sleep timer, and Last.fm scrobbling. Puslar also has Chromecast support, which is awesome. It’s not as feature heavy as some of the paid options, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s bad. It’s a great option for those looking for something minimal, lightweight, and good looking. This one also works decently well with Android Auto, if that helps.
Shuttle+ Music Player Price: Free / $2.49 DOWNLOAD ON GOOGLE PLAY Shuttle Music Player is an increasingly popular music player. The developer took some time off from updating the app for a bit. However, it looks like the wheels are turning once again. It’s a Material Design laden music player with plenty of options. They include a six band EQ, gapless playback, support for embedded lyrics, tons of themes, Last.fm scrobbling, and more. Those who go pro can also get Chromecast support, ID3 tag editing, folder browsing, and even more theme options. It’s excellent for what it is and one of the must-try music player apps.
THANK YOU FOR READING OUR LIST OF MUSIC PLAYER APPS! HERE ARE A COUPLE MORE APP LISTS! 15 best Android launcher apps of 2018! 10 best Android file explorer apps, file browser apps, and file manager apps
If we missed any of the best music player apps for Android, tell us about them in the comments! This is an update of a previously written article, so check the comments for some suggestions from our readers! You can also click here to check out our latestAndroid app and game lists!
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Enterprise Local SEO is Different: A Checklist, a Mindset
Enterprise Local SEO is Different: A Checklist, a Mindset
Posted by MiriamEllis
Image credit: Abraham Williams
If you’re marketing big brands with hundreds or thousands of locations, are you certain you’re getting model-appropriate local SEO information from your favorite industry sources?
Is your enterprise checking off not just technical basics, but hyperlocalized research to strengthen its entrance into new markets?
Before I started working for Moz in in 2010, the bulk of my local SEO experience had been with small-to-medium business models. Naturally, the advice I was able to offer back then was limited by the scope of my work. But then came Moz Local, and the opportunity to learn more about the more complex needs of valued enterprise customers like Crate & Barrel with more than 170 locations, PAPYRUS with 400, or Bridgestone Corporation with 2000+.
Now, when I’m thumbing through industry tips and tactics, I’m better able to identify when a recommended practice is stemming from an SMB mindset and falling short of enterprise realities, or is truly applicable to all business models. My goal for this post is to offer:
Examples of commonly encountered advice that isn’t really best for big brands
An Enterprise Local SEO Checklist to help you shape strategy for present campaigns, or ready your agency to pursue relationships with bigger dream clients
A state-to-enterprise wireframe for initial hyperlocal marketing research
Not everything you read is for enterprises
When a brand is small, like a single location, family-owned retail shop, it’s likely that a single person at the company can manage the business’ Local SEO, with some free education and a few helpful tools. Large, multi-location brands, just by dint of organizational complexities, are different. Before they even get down to the nitty gritty of building citations, enterprises have to solve for:
Standardizing data across hundreds or thousands of locations
Franchise relationships that can muddy who controls which data and assets
Designating staff to actually manage data and execute initiatives, and building bridges between teams that must work in concert to meet goals
Scaling everything from listings management, to site architecture, to content dev
Dealing with a hierarchy of reports of bad data from the retail location level up to corporate
I am barely scratching the surface here. In a nutshell, the scale of the organization and the scope of the multi-location brand can turn a task that would be simple for Mom-and-Pop into a major, company-wide challenge. And I think it adds to the challenge when published advice for SMBs isn’t labeled as such. Over the years, three common tips I’ve encountered with questionable or no applicability to enterprises include:
Not-for-enterprises #1: Link all your local business listings to your homepage
This is sometimes offered as a suggestion to boost local rankings, because website home pages typically have more authority than location landing pages do. But in the enterprise scenario, sending a consumer from a listing for his chosen location, to a homepage, and then expecting him to fool around with a menu or a store locator widget to finally reach a landing page for the location he’s already designated that he wanted is not respecting his user experience. It’s wasting his time. I consider this an unnecessary risk of conversions.
Simultaneously, failure to fully utilize location landing pages means that very little can be done to customize the website experience for each community and customer. Directly-linked-to landing pages can provide instant, persuasive proofs of local-ness, in the form of real local reviews, news about local sponsorships and events, special offers, regional product highlights, imagery and so much more that no corporate homepage can ever provide. Consider these statistics:
“According to a new study, when both brand and location-specific pages exist, 85% of all consumer engagement takes place on the local pages (e.g., Facebook Local Pages, local landing pages). A minority of impressions and engagement (15%) happen on national or brand pages.” - Local Search Association
In the large, multi-location scenario, it just isn’t putting the customer first to swap out a hoped-for ranking increase for a considerate, well-planned user experience.
Not-for-enterprises #2: Local business listings are a one-and-done deal
I find this advice particularly concerning. I don’t consider it true even for SMBs, and at the enterprise level, it’s simply false. It’s my guess that this suggestion stems from imagining a single local business. They create their Google My Business listing and build out perhaps 20–50 structured citations with good data. What could go wrong?
For starters, they may have forgotten that their business name was different 10 years ago. Oh, and they did move across town 5 years ago. And this old data is sitting somewhere in a major aggregator like Acxiom, and somehow due to the infamous vagaries of data flow, it ends up on Bing, and a Bing user gets confused and reports to Google that the new address is wrong on the GMB listing … and so on and so on. Between data flow and crowdsourced editing, a set-and-forget approach to local business listings is trouble waiting to happen.
Now multiply this by 1,000 business locations. And throw in that the enterprise opened two new stores yesterday and closed one. And that they just acquired a new chain and have to rebrand all its assets. And there seems to be something the matter with the phone number on 25 listings, because they’re getting agitated complaints at corporate. And they received 500 reviews last week on Google alone that have to be managed, and it seems one of their competitors is leaving them negative reviews. Whoa – there are 700 duplicate listings being reported by Moz Local! And the brand has 250 Google Questions & Answers queries to respond to this week. And someone just uploaded an image of a dumpster to their GMB listing in Santa Fe…
Not only do listings have to be built, they have to be monitored for data degradation, and managed for inevitable business events, responsiveness to consumers, and spam. It’s hard enough for SMBs to pull all of this off, but enterprises ignore this at their peril!
Not-for-enterprises #3: Just do X
Every time a new local search feature or best practice emerges, you’ll find publications saying “just do X” to implement. What I’ve learned from enterprises is that there is no “just” about it.
Case in point: in 2017, Google rolled out Google Posts, and as Joel Headley of healthcare practice growth platform PatientPop explained to me in a recent interview, his company had to quickly develop a solution that would enable thousands of customers to utilize this influential feature across hundreds of thousands of listings. PatientPop managed implementation in an astonishingly short time, but typically, at the enterprise level, each new rollout requires countless steps up and down the ladder. These could include achieving recognition of the new opportunity, approval to pursue it, designation of teams to work on it, possible acquisition of new assets to accomplish goals, implementation at scale, and the groundwork of tracking outcomes so that they can be reported to prove/disprove ROI from the effort.
Where small businesses can be relatively agile if they can find time to man-up to new features and strategies, enterprises can become dangerously bogged down by infrastructure and communications gaps. Even something as simple as hyperlocalizing content to the needs of a given community represents a significant undertaking.
The family-owned local hardware store already knows that the county fair is the biggest annual event in their area, and they’ve already got everything necessary to participate with a booth, run a contest, take photos, sponsor the tractor pull, earn links, and blog about it. For the hardware franchise with 3,000 stores, branch-to-corporate communication of the mere existence of the county fair, let alone gaining permission to market around it, will require multiple touches from the location to C-suites, and back again.
Checklist for enterprise local SEO preparedness
If you’re on the marketing team for an enterprise, or you run an agency and want to begin working with these larger, rewarding clients, you’ll be striving to put a checkmark in every box on the following checklist:
☑ Definition of success
We’ve determined which actions = success for our brand, whether this is increases for in-store traffic, sales, phone calls, bookings, or some other metric. When we see growth in these KPIs, it will affirm for us that our efforts are creating real success.
☑ Designation of roles
We’ve defined who will be responsible for all tasks relating to the local search marketing of our business. We’ve equipped these team members with all necessary permissions, granted access to key documentation, have organized workflows, and have created an environment for documentation of work.
☑ Canonical data
We’ve created a spreadsheet, approved and agreed upon by all major departments, that lists the standardized name, address, phone number, website URL, and hours of operation for each location of the company. Any variant information has been resolved into a single, agreed-upon data set for each location. This sheet has been shared with all stakeholders managing our local business listings, marketing, website and social outreach.
☑ Website optimization
Our keyword research findings are reflected in the tags and text of our website, including image optimization. Complete contact information for each of our locations is easily accessible on the site and is accurate. We’ve implemented proper markup, such as Schema or JSON-LD, to ensure that our data is as clear as possible to search engines.
☑ Website quality
Our website is easy to navigate and provides a good, usable experience for desktop, mobile and tablet users. We understand that the omni-channel search environment includes ambient search in cars, in homes, via voice. Our website doesn’t rely on technologies that exclude search engines or consumers. We’re putting our customer first.
☑ Tracking and analysis
We’ve implemented maximum controls for tracking and analyzing traffic to our website. We’re also ready to track and analyze other forms of marketing, such as clicks stemming from our Google My Business listings traffic being driven to our website by articles on third party sources, and content we’re sharing via social media.
☑ Publishing strategy
Our website features strong basic pages (Home, Contact, About, Testimonials/Reviews, Policy), we’ve built an excellent, optimized page for each of our core products/services and a quality, unique page for each of our locations. We have a clear strategy as to ongoing content publication, in the form of blog posts, white papers, case studies, social outreach, and other forms of content. We have plans for hyperlocalizing content to match regional culture and needs.
☑ Store locator
We’ve implemented a store locator widget to connect our website’s users to the set of location landing pages we’ve built to thoughtfully meet the needs of specific communities. We’ve also created an HTML version of a menu linking to all of these landing pages to ensure search engines can discover and index them.
☑ Local link building
We’re building the authority of our brand via the links we earn from the most authoritative sources. We’re actively seeking intelligent link building opportunities for each of our locations, reflective of our industry, but also of each branch’s unique geography.
☑ Guideline compliance
We’ve assessed that each of the locations our business plans to build local listings for complies with the Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google. Each location is a genuine physical location (not a virtual office or PO box) and conducts face-to-face business with consumers, either at our locations or at customers’ locations. We’re compliant with Google’s rules for the naming of each location, and, if appropriate, we understand how to handle listing multi-department and multi-practitioner businesses. None of our Google My Business listings is at risk for suspension due to basic guideline violations. We’ve learned how to avoid every possible local SEO pitfall.
☑ Full Google My Business engagement
We’re making maximum use of all available Google My Business features that can assist us in achieving our goals. This could include Google Posts, Questions & Answers, Reviews, Photos, Messaging, Booking, Local Service Ads, and other emerging features.
☑ Local listing development
We’re using software like Moz Local to scale creation of our local listings on the major aggregators (Infogroup, Acxiom, Localeze and Factual) as well as key directories like Superpages and Citysearch. We’re confident that our accurate, consistent data is being distributed to these most important platforms.
☑ Local listing monitoring
We know that local listings aren’t a set-and-forget asset and are taking advantage of the ongoing monitoring SaaS provides, increasing our confidence in the continued accuracy of our data. We’re aware that, if left unmanaged, local business listing data can degrade over time, due to inputs from various, non-authoritative third parties as well as normal data flow across platforms.
☑ In-store strategy
All public-facing staff are equipped with the necessary training to implement our brand’s customer service policy, answer FAQs or escalate them via a clear hierarchy, resolving complaints before they become negative online reviews. We have installed in-store signage or other materials to actively invite consumer complaints in-person, via an after-hours helpline or text message to ensure we are making maximum effort to build and defend our strong reputation.
☑ Review acquisition
We’ve developed a clear strategy for acquiring reviews on an ongoing basis on the review sites we’ve deemed to be most important to our brand. We’re compliant with the guidelines of each platform on which we’re earning reviews. We’re building website-based reviews and testimonials, too.
☑ Review monitoring & response
We’re monitoring all incoming reviews to identify both positive and negative emerging sentiment trends at specific locations and we’re conversant with Net Promoter Score. We’ve created a process for responding with gratitude to positive reviews. We’re defending our reputation and revenue by responding to negative reviews in ways that keep customers who complain instead of losing them, to avoid needless drain of new customer acquisition spend. Our responses are building a positive impression of our brand. We’ve built or acquired solutions to manage reviews at scale.
☑ Local PR
Each location of our brand has been empowered to build a local footprint in the community it serves, customizing outreach to match community culture. We’re exploring sponsorships, scholarships, workshops, conferences, news opportunities, and other forms of participation that will build our brand via online links and social mentions as well as offline WOM marketing. We’re continuously developing cohesive online/offline outreach for maximum impact on brand recognition, rankings, reputation, and revenue.
☑ Social media
We’ve identified the social platforms that are most popular with our consumer base and a best fit for our brand. We’re practicing ongoing social listening to catch and address positive and negative sentiment trends as they arise. We’ve committed to a social mindset based on sharing rather than the hard sell.
☑ Spam-ready
We’re aware that our brand, our listings, and our reviews may be subject to spam, and we know what options are available for reporting it. We’re also prepared to detect when the spammy behaviors of competitors (such as fake addresses, fake negative/positive reviews, or keyword stuffing of listings) are giving them an unfair advantage in our markets, and have a methodology for escalating reports of guideline violations.
☑ Paid media
We’re investing wisely in both on-and-offline paid media and carefully tracking and analyzing the outcomes of online pay-per-click, radio, TV, billboards, and phone sales strategy. We’re exploring new opportunities, as appropriate and as they emerge, like Google Local Service Ads.
☑ Build/buy
When any new functionality (like Google Posts or Google Q&A) needs to be managed at scale, we have a process for determining whether we need to build or acquire new technology. We know we have to weigh the pros/cons of developing in-house or buying ready-made solutions.
☑ Competitive difference-maker
Once you’ve checked off all of the above elements, you’re ready to move forward towards identifying a USP for your brand that no one else in your market has explored. Be it a tool, widget, app, video marketing campaign, newsworthy acquisition, new partnership, or some other asset, this venture will require deep competitive and market research to discover a need that has yet to be filled well by your competitors. If your business can serve this need, it can set your brand apart for years to come.
Free advice, specifically for local enterprises
It’s asserted that customers may forget what you say, but they’ll never forget how you make them feel.
Call me a Californian, but I continue to be amazed by automotive TV spots that show large trucks driving through beautiful creeks (thanks for tearing up precious riparian habitat during our state-wide drought) and across pristine arctic snowfields (instantly reminding me of climate change). Meanwhile, my family have become Tesla-spotters, seeing that “zero emissions” messaging on the tail of every luxury eco-vehicle that passes us by. As consumers, we know how we feel.
Technical and organizational considerations aside, this is where I see one of the greatest risks posed to the local enterprise structure. Insensitivity at a regional or hyperlocal level -- the failure to research customer needs with the intention of meeting them — has been responsible for some of the most startling bad news for enterprises in recent recall. From ignored negative reviews across fast food franchises, to the downsizing of multiple apparel retailers who have been unable to stake a clear claim in the shifting shopping environment, brands that aren’t successful at generating positive consumer “feelings” may need to reevaluate not just their local search marketing mindset, but their basic identity.
If this sounds uncomfortable or risky, consider that we are seeing a rising trend in CEOs taking stands on issues of national import in America. This is about feelings. Consumers are coming to expect this, and it feeds down to the local level.
Hyperlocalized market research
If your brand is considering opening a new branch in a new state or city, you’ll be creating profiles as part of your research. These could be based on everything from reading local news to conducting formal surveys. If I were to do something like this for my part of California, these are the factors I’d be highlighting about the region:
California
Enterprises
We’ve been blasted by drought and wildfire. In 2017, alone, we went through 9,133 fires. On a positive note, Indigenous thought-leadership is beginning to be re-implemented in some areas to solve our worst ecological problems (water scarcity, salmon loss, absence of traditional forestry practices).
Can your brand help conserve water, re-house thousands of homeless residents, fund mental health services despite budget cuts, make legal services affordable, provide solutions for increased future safety? What are your green practices? Are you helping to forward ecological recovery efforts at a tribal, city or state level?
We’re grumbling more loudly about tech gentrification. If you live in Mississippi, sit down for this. The average home price in your state is $199,028. In my part of California, it’s $825,000. In San Francisco, specifically, you’ll need $1.2 million dollars to buy a tiny studio apartment... if you can find one. While causes are complex, people I talk with generally blame Silicon Valley.
Can your brand be part of this conversation? If not, you’re not really addressing what is on statewide consumers’ minds. Particularly if you’re marketing a tech-oriented company, taking the housing crisis seriously and coming up with solutions for even a modest amount of relief would certainly be positive and newsworthy.
We’ve turned to online shopping for an interesting variety of reasons. And it’s not just because we’re techie hipsters. The retail inventory in big cities (San Francisco) can be overwhelming to sort through, and in small towns (Cloverdale), the shopping options are too few to meet our basic and luxury desires.
Can your brand thrive in the gaps? If you’re located in a metro area, you may need to offer personal assistance to help consumers filter through options. If you’ve got a location somewhere near small towns, strategies like same-day delivery could help you remain competitive.
We’ve got our Hispanic/Latino identity back. Our architecture, city and street names are daily reminders that California has a lot more to do with Mexico than it ever did with the Mayflower. We may have become part of the U.S. in 1850, but pay more attention to 2014 — the year that our Hispanic/Latino community became the state’s largest ethnic group. This is one of the most vibrant happenings here. At the same time, our governor has declared us a sanctuary state for immigrants, and we’re being sued for it by the Justice Department.
Can your brand celebrate our state’s diversity? If you’re doing business in California today, you’ll need bilingual marketing, staff, and in-store amenities. Pew Research publishes ongoing data about the Hispanic/Latino segment of our population. What is your brand doing to ensure that these customers feel truly served?
We’re politically diverse. Our single state is roughly the same size as Sweden, and we truly do run the political gamut from A–Z here. Are citizens removing a man-made dam heroically restoring ecology or getting in the way of commerce? You’ll find voices on every side.
Can your brand take the risk of publicizing its honest core values? If so, you are guaranteed to win and lose Californian customers, so do your research and be prepared to own your stance. Know that at a regional level, communities differ greatly. Those TV ads that show trucks running roughshod through fragile ecosystems may fly in some cities and be viewed with extreme distaste in others.
Money is top of mind. More than ⅓ of Californians have zero savings. Over½ of the citizens have less than $1000 in savings. We invest more in Welfare than the next two states combined. And while our state has the highest proportion of resident billionaires, they are vastly outnumbered by citizens who are continuously anxious about struggling to get by. Purchasing decisions are seldom easy.
Can your brand employ a significant number of residents and pay them a living wage? Could your entry into a new market lift poverty in a town and provide better financial security? This would be newsworthy! Have ideas for lowering prices? You’ll get some attention there, too.
Obviously, I’m painting with broad strokes here, just touching on some of the key points that your enterprise would need to consider in determining to commence operations in any city or state. Why does this matter? Because the hyperlocalization of marketing is on the rise, and to engage with a community, you must first understand it.
Every month, I see businesses shutter because someone failed to apprehend true local demand. Did that bank pick a good location for a new branch? Yes — the next branch is on the other side of the city. Will the new location of the taco franchise remain open? No — it’s already sitting empty while the beloved taco wagon down the street has a line that spills out of its parking lot all night long.
Summing up
"What helps people, helps business." - Leo Burnett
The checklist in this post can help you create an enterprise-appropriate strategy for well-organized local search marketing, and it’s my hope that you’ll evaluate all SEO advice for its fitness to your model. These are the basic necessities. But where you go from there is the exciting part. The creative solutions you find to meet the specific wants and needs of individualized service communities could spell out the longevity of your brand’s success.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
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ormlacom · 6 years
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Enterprise Local SEO is Different: A Checklist, a Mindset
Something every woman should know - WHY MEN LIE!
Posted by MiriamEllis
Image credit: Abraham Williams
If you’re marketing big brands with hundreds or thousands of locations, are you certain you’re getting model-appropriate local SEO information from your favorite industry sources?
Is your enterprise checking off not just technical basics, but hyperlocalized research to strengthen its entrance into new markets?
Before I started working for Moz in in 2010, the bulk of my local SEO experience had been with small-to-medium business models. Naturally, the advice I was able to offer back then was limited by the scope of my work. But then came Moz Local, and the opportunity to learn more about the more complex needs of valued enterprise customers like Crate & Barrel with more than 170 locations, PAPYRUS with 400, or Bridgestone Corporation with 2000+.
Now, when I’m thumbing through industry tips and tactics, I’m better able to identify when a recommended practice is stemming from an SMB mindset and falling short of enterprise realities, or is truly applicable to all business models. My goal for this post is to offer:
Examples of commonly encountered advice that isn’t really best for big brands
An Enterprise Local SEO Checklist to help you shape strategy for present campaigns, or ready your agency to pursue relationships with bigger dream clients
A state-to-enterprise wireframe for initial hyperlocal marketing research
Not everything you read is for enterprises
When a brand is small, like a single location, family-owned retail shop, it’s likely that a single person at the company can manage the business’ Local SEO, with some free education and a few helpful tools. Large, multi-location brands, just by dint of organizational complexities, are different. Before they even get down to the nitty gritty of building citations, enterprises have to solve for:
Standardizing data across hundreds or thousands of locations
Franchise relationships that can muddy who controls which data and assets
Designating staff to actually manage data and execute initiatives, and building bridges between teams that must work in concert to meet goals
Scaling everything from listings management, to site architecture, to content dev
Dealing with a hierarchy of reports of bad data from the retail location level up to corporate
I am barely scratching the surface here. In a nutshell, the scale of the organization and the scope of the multi-location brand can turn a task that would be simple for Mom-and-Pop into a major, company-wide challenge. And I think it adds to the challenge when published advice for SMBs isn’t labeled as such. Over the years, three common tips I’ve encountered with questionable or no applicability to enterprises include:
Not-for-enterprises #1: Link all your local business listings to your homepage
This is sometimes offered as a suggestion to boost local rankings, because website home pages typically have more authority than location landing pages do. But in the enterprise scenario, sending a consumer from a listing for his chosen location, to a homepage, and then expecting him to fool around with a menu or a store locator widget to finally reach a landing page for the location he’s already designated that he wanted is not respecting his user experience. It’s wasting his time. I consider this an unnecessary risk of conversions.
Simultaneously, failure to fully utilize location landing pages means that very little can be done to customize the website experience for each community and customer. Directly-linked-to landing pages can provide instant, persuasive proofs of local-ness, in the form of real local reviews, news about local sponsorships and events, special offers, regional product highlights, imagery and so much more that no corporate homepage can ever provide. Consider these statistics:
“According to a new study, when both brand and location-specific pages exist, 85% of all consumer engagement takes place on the local pages (e.g., Facebook Local Pages, local landing pages). A minority of impressions and engagement (15%) happen on national or brand pages.” - Local Search Association
In the large, multi-location scenario, it just isn’t putting the customer first to swap out a hoped-for ranking increase for a considerate, well-planned user experience.
Not-for-enterprises #2: Local business listings are a one-and-done deal
I find this advice particularly concerning. I don’t consider it true even for SMBs, and at the enterprise level, it’s simply false. It’s my guess that this suggestion stems from imagining a single local business. They create their Google My Business listing and build out perhaps 20–50 structured citations with good data. What could go wrong?
For starters, they may have forgotten that their business name was different 10 years ago. Oh, and they did move across town 5 years ago. And this old data is sitting somewhere in a major aggregator like Acxiom, and somehow due to the infamous vagaries of data flow, it ends up on Bing, and a Bing user gets confused and reports to Google that the new address is wrong on the GMB listing … and so on and so on. Between data flow and crowdsourced editing, a set-and-forget approach to local business listings is trouble waiting to happen.
Now multiply this by 1,000 business locations. And throw in that the enterprise opened two new stores yesterday and closed one. And that they just acquired a new chain and have to rebrand all its assets. And there seems to be something the matter with the phone number on 25 listings, because they’re getting agitated complaints at corporate. And they received 500 reviews last week on Google alone that have to be managed, and it seems one of their competitors is leaving them negative reviews. Whoa – there are 700 duplicate listings being reported by Moz Local! And the brand has 250 Google Questions & Answers queries to respond to this week. And someone just uploaded an image of a dumpster to their GMB listing in Santa Fe…
Not only do listings have to be built, they have to be monitored for data degradation, and managed for inevitable business events, responsiveness to consumers, and spam. It’s hard enough for SMBs to pull all of this off, but enterprises ignore this at their peril!
Not-for-enterprises #3: Just do X
Every time a new local search feature or best practice emerges, you’ll find publications saying “just do X” to implement. What I’ve learned from enterprises is that there is no “just” about it.
Case in point: in 2017, Google rolled out Google Posts, and as Joel Headley of healthcare practice growth platform PatientPop explained to me in a recent interview, his company had to quickly develop a solution that would enable thousands of customers to utilize this influential feature across hundreds of thousands of listings. PatientPop managed implementation in an astonishingly short time, but typically, at the enterprise level, each new rollout requires countless steps up and down the ladder. These could include achieving recognition of the new opportunity, approval to pursue it, designation of teams to work on it, possible acquisition of new assets to accomplish goals, implementation at scale, and the groundwork of tracking outcomes so that they can be reported to prove/disprove ROI from the effort.
Where small businesses can be relatively agile if they can find time to man-up to new features and strategies, enterprises can become dangerously bogged down by infrastructure and communications gaps. Even something as simple as hyperlocalizing content to the needs of a given community represents a significant undertaking.
The family-owned local hardware store already knows that the county fair is the biggest annual event in their area, and they’ve already got everything necessary to participate with a booth, run a contest, take photos, sponsor the tractor pull, earn links, and blog about it. For the hardware franchise with 3,000 stores, branch-to-corporate communication of the mere existence of the county fair, let alone gaining permission to market around it, will require multiple touches from the location to C-suites, and back again.
Checklist for enterprise local SEO preparedness
If you’re on the marketing team for an enterprise, or you run an agency and want to begin working with these larger, rewarding clients, you’ll be striving to put a checkmark in every box on the following checklist:
☑ Definition of success
We’ve determined which actions = success for our brand, whether this is increases for in-store traffic, sales, phone calls, bookings, or some other metric. When we see growth in these KPIs, it will affirm for us that our efforts are creating real success.
☑ Designation of roles
We’ve defined who will be responsible for all tasks relating to the local search marketing of our business. We’ve equipped these team members with all necessary permissions, granted access to key documentation, have organized workflows, and have created an environment for documentation of work.
☑ Canonical data
We’ve created a spreadsheet, approved and agreed upon by all major departments, that lists the standardized name, address, phone number, website URL, and hours of operation for each location of the company. Any variant information has been resolved into a single, agreed-upon data set for each location. This sheet has been shared with all stakeholders managing our local business listings, marketing, website and social outreach.
☑ Website optimization
Our keyword research findings are reflected in the tags and text of our website, including image optimization. Complete contact information for each of our locations is easily accessible on the site and is accurate. We’ve implemented proper markup, such as Schema or JSON-LD, to ensure that our data is as clear as possible to search engines.
☑ Website quality
Our website is easy to navigate and provides a good, usable experience for desktop, mobile and tablet users. We understand that the omni-channel search environment includes ambient search in cars, in homes, via voice. Our website doesn’t rely on technologies that exclude search engines or consumers. We’re putting our customer first.
☑ Tracking and analysis
We’ve implemented maximum controls for tracking and analyzing traffic to our website. We’re also ready to track and analyze other forms of marketing, such as clicks stemming from our Google My Business listings traffic being driven to our website by articles on third party sources, and content we’re sharing via social media.
☑ Publishing strategy
Our website features strong basic pages (Home, Contact, About, Testimonials/Reviews, Policy), we’ve built an excellent, optimized page for each of our core products/services and a quality, unique page for each of our locations. We have a clear strategy as to ongoing content publication, in the form of blog posts, white papers, case studies, social outreach, and other forms of content. We have plans for hyperlocalizing content to match regional culture and needs.
☑ Store locator
We’ve implemented a store locator widget to connect our website’s users to the set of location landing pages we’ve built to thoughtfully meet the needs of specific communities. We’ve also created an HTML version of a menu linking to all of these landing pages to ensure search engines can discover and index them.
☑ Local link building
We’re building the authority of our brand via the links we earn from the most authoritative sources. We’re actively seeking intelligent link building opportunities for each of our locations, reflective of our industry, but also of each branch’s unique geography.
☑ Guideline compliance
We’ve assessed that each of the locations our business plans to build local listings for complies with the Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google. Each location is a genuine physical location (not a virtual office or PO box) and conducts face-to-face business with consumers, either at our locations or at customers’ locations. We’re compliant with Google’s rules for the naming of each location, and, if appropriate, we understand how to handle listing multi-department and multi-practitioner businesses. None of our Google My Business listings is at risk for suspension due to basic guideline violations. We’ve learned how to avoid every possible local SEO pitfall.
☑ Full Google My Business engagement
We’re making maximum use of all available Google My Business features that can assist us in achieving our goals. This could include Google Posts, Questions & Answers, Reviews, Photos, Messaging, Booking, Local Service Ads, and other emerging features.
☑ Local listing development
We’re using software like Moz Local to scale creation of our local listings on the major aggregators (Infogroup, Acxiom, Localeze and Factual) as well as key directories like Superpages and Citysearch. We’re confident that our accurate, consistent data is being distributed to these most important platforms.
☑ Local listing monitoring
We know that local listings aren’t a set-and-forget asset and are taking advantage of the ongoing monitoring SaaS provides, increasing our confidence in the continued accuracy of our data. We’re aware that, if left unmanaged, local business listing data can degrade over time, due to inputs from various, non-authoritative third parties as well as normal data flow across platforms.
☑ In-store strategy
All public-facing staff are equipped with the necessary training to implement our brand’s customer service policy, answer FAQs or escalate them via a clear hierarchy, resolving complaints before they become negative online reviews. We have installed in-store signage or other materials to actively invite consumer complaints in-person, via an after-hours helpline or text message to ensure we are making maximum effort to build and defend our strong reputation.
☑ Review acquisition
We’ve developed a clear strategy for acquiring reviews on an ongoing basis on the review sites we’ve deemed to be most important to our brand. We’re compliant with the guidelines of each platform on which we’re earning reviews. We’re building website-based reviews and testimonials, too.
☑ Review monitoring & response
We’re monitoring all incoming reviews to identify both positive and negative emerging sentiment trends at specific locations and we’re conversant with Net Promoter Score. We’ve created a process for responding with gratitude to positive reviews. We’re defending our reputation and revenue by responding to negative reviews in ways that keep customers who complain instead of losing them, to avoid needless drain of new customer acquisition spend. Our responses are building a positive impression of our brand. We’ve built or acquired solutions to manage reviews at scale.
☑ Local PR
Each location of our brand has been empowered to build a local footprint in the community it serves, customizing outreach to match community culture. We’re exploring sponsorships, scholarships, workshops, conferences, news opportunities, and other forms of participation that will build our brand via online links and social mentions as well as offline WOM marketing. We’re continuously developing cohesive online/offline outreach for maximum impact on brand recognition, rankings, reputation, and revenue.
☑ Social media
We’ve identified the social platforms that are most popular with our consumer base and a best fit for our brand. We’re practicing ongoing social listening to catch and address positive and negative sentiment trends as they arise. We’ve committed to a social mindset based on sharing rather than the hard sell.
☑ Spam-ready
We’re aware that our brand, our listings, and our reviews may be subject to spam, and we know what options are available for reporting it. We’re also prepared to detect when the spammy behaviors of competitors (such as fake addresses, fake negative/positive reviews, or keyword stuffing of listings) are giving them an unfair advantage in our markets, and have a methodology for escalating reports of guideline violations.
☑ Paid media
We’re investing wisely in both on-and-offline paid media and carefully tracking and analyzing the outcomes of online pay-per-click, radio, TV, billboards, and phone sales strategy. We’re exploring new opportunities, as appropriate and as they emerge, like Google Local Service Ads.
☑ Build/buy
When any new functionality (like Google Posts or Google Q&A) needs to be managed at scale, we have a process for determining whether we need to build or acquire new technology. We know we have to weigh the pros/cons of developing in-house or buying ready-made solutions.
☑ Competitive difference-maker
Once you’ve checked off all of the above elements, you’re ready to move forward towards identifying a USP for your brand that no one else in your market has explored. Be it a tool, widget, app, video marketing campaign, newsworthy acquisition, new partnership, or some other asset, this venture will require deep competitive and market research to discover a need that has yet to be filled well by your competitors. If your business can serve this need, it can set your brand apart for years to come.
Free advice, specifically for local enterprises
It’s asserted that customers may forget what you say, but they’ll never forget how you make them feel.
Call me a Californian, but I continue to be amazed by automotive TV spots that show large trucks driving through beautiful creeks (thanks for tearing up precious riparian habitat during our state-wide drought) and across pristine arctic snowfields (instantly reminding me of climate change). Meanwhile, my family have become Tesla-spotters, seeing that “zero emissions” messaging on the tail of every luxury eco-vehicle that passes us by. As consumers, we know how we feel.
Technical and organizational considerations aside, this is where I see one of the greatest risks posed to the local enterprise structure. Insensitivity at a regional or hyperlocal level -- the failure to research customer needs with the intention of meeting them — has been responsible for some of the most startling bad news for enterprises in recent recall. From ignored negative reviews across fast food franchises, to the downsizing of multiple apparel retailers who have been unable to stake a clear claim in the shifting shopping environment, brands that aren’t successful at generating positive consumer “feelings” may need to reevaluate not just their local search marketing mindset, but their basic identity.
If this sounds uncomfortable or risky, consider that we are seeing a rising trend in CEOs taking stands on issues of national import in America. This is about feelings. Consumers are coming to expect this, and it feeds down to the local level.
Hyperlocalized market research
If your brand is considering opening a new branch in a new state or city, you’ll be creating profiles as part of your research. These could be based on everything from reading local news to conducting formal surveys. If I were to do something like this for my part of California, these are the factors I’d be highlighting about the region:
California
Enterprises
We’ve been blasted by drought and wildfire. In 2017, alone, we went through 9,133 fires. On a positive note, Indigenous thought-leadership is beginning to be re-implemented in some areas to solve our worst ecological problems (water scarcity, salmon loss, absence of traditional forestry practices).
Can your brand help conserve water, re-house thousands of homeless residents, fund mental health services despite budget cuts, make legal services affordable, provide solutions for increased future safety? What are your green practices? Are you helping to forward ecological recovery efforts at a tribal, city or state level?
We’re grumbling more loudly about tech gentrification. If you live in Mississippi, sit down for this. The average home price in your state is $199,028. In my part of California, it’s $825,000. In San Francisco, specifically, you’ll need $1.2 million dollars to buy a tiny studio apartment... if you can find one. While causes are complex, people I talk with generally blame Silicon Valley.
Can your brand be part of this conversation? If not, you’re not really addressing what is on statewide consumers’ minds. Particularly if you’re marketing a tech-oriented company, taking the housing crisis seriously and coming up with solutions for even a modest amount of relief would certainly be positive and newsworthy.
We’ve turned to online shopping for an interesting variety of reasons. And it’s not just because we’re techie hipsters. The retail inventory in big cities (San Francisco) can be overwhelming to sort through, and in small towns (Cloverdale), the shopping options are too few to meet our basic and luxury desires.
Can your brand thrive in the gaps? If you’re located in a metro area, you may need to offer personal assistance to help consumers filter through options. If you’ve got a location somewhere near small towns, strategies like same-day delivery could help you remain competitive.
We’ve got our Hispanic/Latino identity back. Our architecture, city and street names are daily reminders that California has a lot more to do with Mexico than it ever did with the Mayflower. We may have become part of the U.S. in 1850, but pay more attention to 2014 — the year that our Hispanic/Latino community became the state’s largest ethnic group. This is one of the most vibrant happenings here. At the same time, our governor has declared us a sanctuary state for immigrants, and we’re being sued for it by the Justice Department.
Can your brand celebrate our state’s diversity? If you’re doing business in California today, you’ll need bilingual marketing, staff, and in-store amenities. Pew Research publishes ongoing data about the Hispanic/Latino segment of our population. What is your brand doing to ensure that these customers feel truly served?
We’re politically diverse. Our single state is roughly the same size as Sweden, and we truly do run the political gamut from A–Z here. Are citizens removing a man-made dam heroically restoring ecology or getting in the way of commerce? You’ll find voices on every side.
Can your brand take the risk of publicizing its honest core values? If so, you are guaranteed to win and lose Californian customers, so do your research and be prepared to own your stance. Know that at a regional level, communities differ greatly. Those TV ads that show trucks running roughshod through fragile ecosystems may fly in some cities and be viewed with extreme distaste in others.
Money is top of mind. More than ⅓ of Californians have zero savings. Over½ of the citizens have less than $1000 in savings. We invest more in Welfare than the next two states combined. And while our state has the highest proportion of resident billionaires, they are vastly outnumbered by citizens who are continuously anxious about struggling to get by. Purchasing decisions are seldom easy.
Can your brand employ a significant number of residents and pay them a living wage? Could your entry into a new market lift poverty in a town and provide better financial security? This would be newsworthy! Have ideas for lowering prices? You’ll get some attention there, too.
Obviously, I’m painting with broad strokes here, just touching on some of the key points that your enterprise would need to consider in determining to commence operations in any city or state. Why does this matter? Because the hyperlocalization of marketing is on the rise, and to engage with a community, you must first understand it.
Every month, I see businesses shutter because someone failed to apprehend true local demand. Did that bank pick a good location for a new branch? Yes — the next branch is on the other side of the city. Will the new location of the taco franchise remain open? No — it’s already sitting empty while the beloved taco wagon down the street has a line that spills out of its parking lot all night long.
Summing up
"What helps people, helps business." - Leo Burnett
The checklist in this post can help you create an enterprise-appropriate strategy for well-organized local search marketing, and it’s my hope that you’ll evaluate all SEO advice for its fitness to your model. These are the basic necessities. But where you go from there is the exciting part. The creative solutions you find to meet the specific wants and needs of individualized service communities could spell out the longevity of your brand’s success.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
Reverse Phone - People Search - Email Search - Public Records - Criminal Records. Best Data, Conversions, And Customer Suppor
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isearchgoood · 6 years
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Enterprise Local SEO is Different: A Checklist, a Mindset
Posted by MiriamEllis
Image credit: Abraham Williams
If you’re marketing big brands with hundreds or thousands of locations, are you certain you’re getting model-appropriate local SEO information from your favorite industry sources?
Is your enterprise checking off not just technical basics, but hyperlocalized research to strengthen its entrance into new markets?
Before I started working for Moz in in 2010, the bulk of my local SEO experience had been with small-to-medium business models. Naturally, the advice I was able to offer back then was limited by the scope of my work. But then came Moz Local, and the opportunity to learn more about the more complex needs of valued enterprise customers like Crate & Barrel with more than 170 locations, PAPYRUS with 400, or Bridgestone Corporation with 2000+.
Now, when I’m thumbing through industry tips and tactics, I’m better able to identify when a recommended practice is stemming from an SMB mindset and falling short of enterprise realities, or is truly applicable to all business models. My goal for this post is to offer:
Examples of commonly encountered advice that isn’t really best for big brands
An Enterprise Local SEO Checklist to help you shape strategy for present campaigns, or ready your agency to pursue relationships with bigger dream clients
A state-to-enterprise wireframe for initial hyperlocal marketing research
Not everything you read is for enterprises
When a brand is small, like a single location, family-owned retail shop, it’s likely that a single person at the company can manage the business’ Local SEO, with some free education and a few helpful tools. Large, multi-location brands, just by dint of organizational complexities, are different. Before they even get down to the nitty gritty of building citations, enterprises have to solve for:
Standardizing data across hundreds or thousands of locations
Franchise relationships that can muddy who controls which data and assets
Designating staff to actually manage data and execute initiatives, and building bridges between teams that must work in concert to meet goals
Scaling everything from listings management, to site architecture, to content dev
Dealing with a hierarchy of reports of bad data from the retail location level up to corporate
I am barely scratching the surface here. In a nutshell, the scale of the organization and the scope of the multi-location brand can turn a task that would be simple for Mom-and-Pop into a major, company-wide challenge. And I think it adds to the challenge when published advice for SMBs isn’t labeled as such. Over the years, three common tips I’ve encountered with questionable or no applicability to enterprises include:
Not-for-enterprises #1: Link all your local business listings to your homepage
This is sometimes offered as a suggestion to boost local rankings, because website home pages typically have more authority than location landing pages do. But in the enterprise scenario, sending a consumer from a listing for his chosen location, to a homepage, and then expecting him to fool around with a menu or a store locator widget to finally reach a landing page for the location he’s already designated that he wanted is not respecting his user experience. It’s wasting his time. I consider this an unnecessary risk of conversions.
Simultaneously, failure to fully utilize location landing pages means that very little can be done to customize the website experience for each community and customer. Directly-linked-to landing pages can provide instant, persuasive proofs of local-ness, in the form of real local reviews, news about local sponsorships and events, special offers, regional product highlights, imagery and so much more that no corporate homepage can ever provide. Consider these statistics:
“According to a new study, when both brand and location-specific pages exist, 85% of all consumer engagement takes place on the local pages (e.g., Facebook Local Pages, local landing pages). A minority of impressions and engagement (15%) happen on national or brand pages.” - Local Search Association
In the large, multi-location scenario, it just isn’t putting the customer first to swap out a hoped-for ranking increase for a considerate, well-planned user experience.
Not-for-enterprises #2: Local business listings are a one-and-done deal
I find this advice particularly concerning. I don’t consider it true even for SMBs, and at the enterprise level, it’s simply false. It’s my guess that this suggestion stems from imagining a single local business. They create their Google My Business listing and build out perhaps 20–50 structured citations with good data. What could go wrong?
For starters, they may have forgotten that their business name was different 10 years ago. Oh, and they did move across town 5 years ago. And this old data is sitting somewhere in a major aggregator like Acxiom, and somehow due to the infamous vagaries of data flow, it ends up on Bing, and a Bing user gets confused and reports to Google that the new address is wrong on the GMB listing … and so on and so on. Between data flow and crowdsourced editing, a set-and-forget approach to local business listings is trouble waiting to happen.
Now multiply this by 1,000 business locations. And throw in that the enterprise opened two new stores yesterday and closed one. And that they just acquired a new chain and have to rebrand all its assets. And there seems to be something the matter with the phone number on 25 listings, because they’re getting agitated complaints at corporate. And they received 500 reviews last week on Google alone that have to be managed, and it seems one of their competitors is leaving them negative reviews. Whoa – there are 700 duplicate listings being reported by Moz Local! And the brand has 250 Google Questions & Answers queries to respond to this week. And someone just uploaded an image of a dumpster to their GMB listing in Santa Fe…
Not only do listings have to be built, they have to be monitored for data degradation, and managed for inevitable business events, responsiveness to consumers, and spam. It’s hard enough for SMBs to pull all of this off, but enterprises ignore this at their peril!
Not-for-enterprises #3: Just do X
Every time a new local search feature or best practice emerges, you’ll find publications saying “just do X” to implement. What I’ve learned from enterprises is that there is no “just” about it.
Case in point: in 2017, Google rolled out Google Posts, and as Joel Headley of healthcare practice growth platform PatientPop explained to me in a recent interview, his company had to quickly develop a solution that would enable thousands of customers to utilize this influential feature across hundreds of thousands of listings. PatientPop managed implementation in an astonishingly short time, but typically, at the enterprise level, each new rollout requires countless steps up and down the ladder. These could include achieving recognition of the new opportunity, approval to pursue it, designation of teams to work on it, possible acquisition of new assets to accomplish goals, implementation at scale, and the groundwork of tracking outcomes so that they can be reported to prove/disprove ROI from the effort.
Where small businesses can be relatively agile if they can find time to man-up to new features and strategies, enterprises can become dangerously bogged down by infrastructure and communications gaps. Even something as simple as hyperlocalizing content to the needs of a given community represents a significant undertaking.
The family-owned local hardware store already knows that the county fair is the biggest annual event in their area, and they’ve already got everything necessary to participate with a booth, run a contest, take photos, sponsor the tractor pull, earn links, and blog about it. For the hardware franchise with 3,000 stores, branch-to-corporate communication of the mere existence of the county fair, let alone gaining permission to market around it, will require multiple touches from the location to C-suites, and back again.
Checklist for enterprise local SEO preparedness
If you’re on the marketing team for an enterprise, or you run an agency and want to begin working with these larger, rewarding clients, you’ll be striving to put a checkmark in every box on the following checklist:
☑ Definition of success
We’ve determined which actions = success for our brand, whether this is increases for in-store traffic, sales, phone calls, bookings, or some other metric. When we see growth in these KPIs, it will affirm for us that our efforts are creating real success.
☑ Designation of roles
We’ve defined who will be responsible for all tasks relating to the local search marketing of our business. We’ve equipped these team members with all necessary permissions, granted access to key documentation, have organized workflows, and have created an environment for documentation of work.
☑ Canonical data
We’ve created a spreadsheet, approved and agreed upon by all major departments, that lists the standardized name, address, phone number, website URL, and hours of operation for each location of the company. Any variant information has been resolved into a single, agreed-upon data set for each location. This sheet has been shared with all stakeholders managing our local business listings, marketing, website and social outreach.
☑ Website optimization
Our keyword research findings are reflected in the tags and text of our website, including image optimization. Complete contact information for each of our locations is easily accessible on the site and is accurate. We’ve implemented proper markup, such as Schema or JSON-LD, to ensure that our data is as clear as possible to search engines.
☑ Website quality
Our website is easy to navigate and provides a good, usable experience for desktop, mobile and tablet users. We understand that the omni-channel search environment includes ambient search in cars, in homes, via voice. Our website doesn’t rely on technologies that exclude search engines or consumers. We’re putting our customer first.
☑ Tracking and analysis
We’ve implemented maximum controls for tracking and analyzing traffic to our website. We’re also ready to track and analyze other forms of marketing, such as clicks stemming from our Google My Business listings traffic being driven to our website by articles on third party sources, and content we’re sharing via social media.
☑ Publishing strategy
Our website features strong basic pages (Home, Contact, About, Testimonials/Reviews, Policy), we’ve built an excellent, optimized page for each of our core products/services and a quality, unique page for each of our locations. We have a clear strategy as to ongoing content publication, in the form of blog posts, white papers, case studies, social outreach, and other forms of content. We have plans for hyperlocalizing content to match regional culture and needs.
☑ Store locator
We’ve implemented a store locator widget to connect our website’s users to the set of location landing pages we’ve built to thoughtfully meet the needs of specific communities. We’ve also created an HTML version of a menu linking to all of these landing pages to ensure search engines can discover and index them.
☑ Local link building
We’re building the authority of our brand via the links we earn from the most authoritative sources. We’re actively seeking intelligent link building opportunities for each of our locations, reflective of our industry, but also of each branch’s unique geography.
☑ Guideline compliance
We’ve assessed that each of the locations our business plans to build local listings for complies with the Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google. Each location is a genuine physical location (not a virtual office or PO box) and conducts face-to-face business with consumers, either at our locations or at customers’ locations. We’re compliant with Google’s rules for the naming of each location, and, if appropriate, we understand how to handle listing multi-department and multi-practitioner businesses. None of our Google My Business listings is at risk for suspension due to basic guideline violations. We’ve learned how to avoid every possible local SEO pitfall.
☑ Full Google My Business engagement
We’re making maximum use of all available Google My Business features that can assist us in achieving our goals. This could include Google Posts, Questions & Answers, Reviews, Photos, Messaging, Booking, Local Service Ads, and other emerging features.
☑ Local listing development
We’re using software like Moz Local to scale creation of our local listings on the major aggregators (Infogroup, Acxiom, Localeze and Factual) as well as key directories like Superpages and Citysearch. We’re confident that our accurate, consistent data is being distributed to these most important platforms.
☑ Local listing monitoring
We know that local listings aren’t a set-and-forget asset and are taking advantage of the ongoing monitoring SaaS provides, increasing our confidence in the continued accuracy of our data. We’re aware that, if left unmanaged, local business listing data can degrade over time, due to inputs from various, non-authoritative third parties as well as normal data flow across platforms.
☑ In-store strategy
All public-facing staff are equipped with the necessary training to implement our brand’s customer service policy, answer FAQs or escalate them via a clear hierarchy, resolving complaints before they become negative online reviews. We have installed in-store signage or other materials to actively invite consumer complaints in-person, via an after-hours helpline or text message to ensure we are making maximum effort to build and defend our strong reputation.
☑ Review acquisition
We’ve developed a clear strategy for acquiring reviews on an ongoing basis on the review sites we’ve deemed to be most important to our brand. We’re compliant with the guidelines of each platform on which we’re earning reviews. We’re building website-based reviews and testimonials, too.
☑ Review monitoring & response
We’re monitoring all incoming reviews to identify both positive and negative emerging sentiment trends at specific locations and we’re conversant with Net Promoter Score. We’ve created a process for responding with gratitude to positive reviews. We’re defending our reputation and revenue by responding to negative reviews in ways that keep customers who complain instead of losing them, to avoid needless drain of new customer acquisition spend. Our responses are building a positive impression of our brand. We’ve built or acquired solutions to manage reviews at scale.
☑ Local PR
Each location of our brand has been empowered to build a local footprint in the community it serves, customizing outreach to match community culture. We’re exploring sponsorships, scholarships, workshops, conferences, news opportunities, and other forms of participation that will build our brand via online links and social mentions as well as offline WOM marketing. We’re continuously developing cohesive online/offline outreach for maximum impact on brand recognition, rankings, reputation, and revenue.
☑ Social media
We’ve identified the social platforms that are most popular with our consumer base and a best fit for our brand. We’re practicing ongoing social listening to catch and address positive and negative sentiment trends as they arise. We’ve committed to a social mindset based on sharing rather than the hard sell.
☑ Spam-ready
We’re aware that our brand, our listings, and our reviews may be subject to spam, and we know what options are available for reporting it. We’re also prepared to detect when the spammy behaviors of competitors (such as fake addresses, fake negative/positive reviews, or keyword stuffing of listings) are giving them an unfair advantage in our markets, and have a methodology for escalating reports of guideline violations.
☑ Paid media
We’re investing wisely in both on-and-offline paid media and carefully tracking and analyzing the outcomes of online pay-per-click, radio, TV, billboards, and phone sales strategy. We’re exploring new opportunities, as appropriate and as they emerge, like Google Local Service Ads.
☑ Build/buy
When any new functionality (like Google Posts or Google Q&A) needs to be managed at scale, we have a process for determining whether we need to build or acquire new technology. We know we have to weigh the pros/cons of developing in-house or buying ready-made solutions.
☑ Competitive difference-maker
Once you’ve checked off all of the above elements, you’re ready to move forward towards identifying a USP for your brand that no one else in your market has explored. Be it a tool, widget, app, video marketing campaign, newsworthy acquisition, new partnership, or some other asset, this venture will require deep competitive and market research to discover a need that has yet to be filled well by your competitors. If your business can serve this need, it can set your brand apart for years to come.
Free advice, specifically for local enterprises
It’s asserted that customers may forget what you say, but they’ll never forget how you make them feel.
Call me a Californian, but I continue to be amazed by automotive TV spots that show large trucks driving through beautiful creeks (thanks for tearing up precious riparian habitat during our state-wide drought) and across pristine arctic snowfields (instantly reminding me of climate change). Meanwhile, my family have become Tesla-spotters, seeing that “zero emissions” messaging on the tail of every luxury eco-vehicle that passes us by. As consumers, we know how we feel.
Technical and organizational considerations aside, this is where I see one of the greatest risks posed to the local enterprise structure. Insensitivity at a regional or hyperlocal level -- the failure to research customer needs with the intention of meeting them — has been responsible for some of the most startling bad news for enterprises in recent recall. From ignored negative reviews across fast food franchises, to the downsizing of multiple apparel retailers who have been unable to stake a clear claim in the shifting shopping environment, brands that aren’t successful at generating positive consumer “feelings” may need to reevaluate not just their local search marketing mindset, but their basic identity.
If this sounds uncomfortable or risky, consider that we are seeing a rising trend in CEOs taking stands on issues of national import in America. This is about feelings. Consumers are coming to expect this, and it feeds down to the local level.
Hyperlocalized market research
If your brand is considering opening a new branch in a new state or city, you’ll be creating profiles as part of your research. These could be based on everything from reading local news to conducting formal surveys. If I were to do something like this for my part of California, these are the factors I’d be highlighting about the region:
California
Enterprises
We’ve been blasted by drought and wildfire. In 2017, alone, we went through 9,133 fires. On a positive note, Indigenous thought-leadership is beginning to be re-implemented in some areas to solve our worst ecological problems (water scarcity, salmon loss, absence of traditional forestry practices).
Can your brand help conserve water, re-house thousands of homeless residents, fund mental health services despite budget cuts, make legal services affordable, provide solutions for increased future safety? What are your green practices? Are you helping to forward ecological recovery efforts at a tribal, city or state level?
We’re grumbling more loudly about tech gentrification. If you live in Mississippi, sit down for this. The average home price in your state is $199,028. In my part of California, it’s $825,000. In San Francisco, specifically, you’ll need $1.2 million dollars to buy a tiny studio apartment... if you can find one. While causes are complex, people I talk with generally blame Silicon Valley.
Can your brand be part of this conversation? If not, you’re not really addressing what is on statewide consumers’ minds. Particularly if you’re marketing a tech-oriented company, taking the housing crisis seriously and coming up with solutions for even a modest amount of relief would certainly be positive and newsworthy.
We’ve turned to online shopping for an interesting variety of reasons. And it’s not just because we’re techie hipsters. The retail inventory in big cities (San Francisco) can be overwhelming to sort through, and in small towns (Cloverdale), the shopping options are too few to meet our basic and luxury desires.
Can your brand thrive in the gaps? If you’re located in a metro area, you may need to offer personal assistance to help consumers filter through options. If you’ve got a location somewhere near small towns, strategies like same-day delivery could help you remain competitive.
We’ve got our Hispanic/Latino identity back. Our architecture, city and street names are daily reminders that California has a lot more to do with Mexico than it ever did with the Mayflower. We may have become part of the U.S. in 1850, but pay more attention to 2014 — the year that our Hispanic/Latino community became the state’s largest ethnic group. This is one of the most vibrant happenings here. At the same time, our governor has declared us a sanctuary state for immigrants, and we’re being sued for it by the Justice Department.
Can your brand celebrate our state’s diversity? If you’re doing business in California today, you’ll need bilingual marketing, staff, and in-store amenities. Pew Research publishes ongoing data about the Hispanic/Latino segment of our population. What is your brand doing to ensure that these customers feel truly served?
We’re politically diverse. Our single state is roughly the same size as Sweden, and we truly do run the political gamut from A–Z here. Are citizens removing a man-made dam heroically restoring ecology or getting in the way of commerce? You’ll find voices on every side.
Can your brand take the risk of publicizing its honest core values? If so, you are guaranteed to win and lose Californian customers, so do your research and be prepared to own your stance. Know that at a regional level, communities differ greatly. Those TV ads that show trucks running roughshod through fragile ecosystems may fly in some cities and be viewed with extreme distaste in others.
Money is top of mind. More than ⅓ of Californians have zero savings. Over½ of the citizens have less than $1000 in savings. We invest more in Welfare than the next two states combined. And while our state has the highest proportion of resident billionaires, they are vastly outnumbered by citizens who are continuously anxious about struggling to get by. Purchasing decisions are seldom easy.
Can your brand employ a significant number of residents and pay them a living wage? Could your entry into a new market lift poverty in a town and provide better financial security? This would be newsworthy! Have ideas for lowering prices? You’ll get some attention there, too.
Obviously, I’m painting with broad strokes here, just touching on some of the key points that your enterprise would need to consider in determining to commence operations in any city or state. Why does this matter? Because the hyperlocalization of marketing is on the rise, and to engage with a community, you must first understand it.
Every month, I see businesses shutter because someone failed to apprehend true local demand. Did that bank pick a good location for a new branch? Yes — the next branch is on the other side of the city. Will the new location of the taco franchise remain open? No — it’s already sitting empty while the beloved taco wagon down the street has a line that spills out of its parking lot all night long.
Summing up
"What helps people, helps business." - Leo Burnett
The checklist in this post can help you create an enterprise-appropriate strategy for well-organized local search marketing, and it’s my hope that you’ll evaluate all SEO advice for its fitness to your model. These are the basic necessities. But where you go from there is the exciting part. The creative solutions you find to meet the specific wants and needs of individualized service communities could spell out the longevity of your brand’s success.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
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christinesumpmg1 · 6 years
Text
Enterprise Local SEO is Different: A Checklist, a Mindset
Posted by MiriamEllis
Image credit: Abraham Williams
If you’re marketing big brands with hundreds or thousands of locations, are you certain you’re getting model-appropriate local SEO information from your favorite industry sources?
Is your enterprise checking off not just technical basics, but hyperlocalized research to strengthen its entrance into new markets?
Before I started working for Moz in in 2010, the bulk of my local SEO experience had been with small-to-medium business models. Naturally, the advice I was able to offer back then was limited by the scope of my work. But then came Moz Local, and the opportunity to learn more about the more complex needs of valued enterprise customers like Crate & Barrel with more than 170 locations, PAPYRUS with 400, or Bridgestone Corporation with 2000+.
Now, when I’m thumbing through industry tips and tactics, I’m better able to identify when a recommended practice is stemming from an SMB mindset and falling short of enterprise realities, or is truly applicable to all business models. My goal for this post is to offer:
Examples of commonly encountered advice that isn’t really best for big brands
An Enterprise Local SEO Checklist to help you shape strategy for present campaigns, or ready your agency to pursue relationships with bigger dream clients
A state-to-enterprise wireframe for initial hyperlocal marketing research
Not everything you read is for enterprises
When a brand is small, like a single location, family-owned retail shop, it’s likely that a single person at the company can manage the business’ Local SEO, with some free education and a few helpful tools. Large, multi-location brands, just by dint of organizational complexities, are different. Before they even get down to the nitty gritty of building citations, enterprises have to solve for:
Standardizing data across hundreds or thousands of locations
Franchise relationships that can muddy who controls which data and assets
Designating staff to actually manage data and execute initiatives, and building bridges between teams that must work in concert to meet goals
Scaling everything from listings management, to site architecture, to content dev
Dealing with a hierarchy of reports of bad data from the retail location level up to corporate
I am barely scratching the surface here. In a nutshell, the scale of the organization and the scope of the multi-location brand can turn a task that would be simple for Mom-and-Pop into a major, company-wide challenge. And I think it adds to the challenge when published advice for SMBs isn’t labeled as such. Over the years, three common tips I’ve encountered with questionable or no applicability to enterprises include:
Not-for-enterprises #1: Link all your local business listings to your homepage
This is sometimes offered as a suggestion to boost local rankings, because website home pages typically have more authority than location landing pages do. But in the enterprise scenario, sending a consumer from a listing for his chosen location, to a homepage, and then expecting him to fool around with a menu or a store locator widget to finally reach a landing page for the location he’s already designated that he wanted is not respecting his user experience. It’s wasting his time. I consider this an unnecessary risk of conversions.
Simultaneously, failure to fully utilize location landing pages means that very little can be done to customize the website experience for each community and customer. Directly-linked-to landing pages can provide instant, persuasive proofs of local-ness, in the form of real local reviews, news about local sponsorships and events, special offers, regional product highlights, imagery and so much more that no corporate homepage can ever provide. Consider these statistics:
“According to a new study, when both brand and location-specific pages exist, 85% of all consumer engagement takes place on the local pages (e.g., Facebook Local Pages, local landing pages). A minority of impressions and engagement (15%) happen on national or brand pages.” - Local Search Association
In the large, multi-location scenario, it just isn’t putting the customer first to swap out a hoped-for ranking increase for a considerate, well-planned user experience.
Not-for-enterprises #2: Local business listings are a one-and-done deal
I find this advice particularly concerning. I don’t consider it true even for SMBs, and at the enterprise level, it’s simply false. It’s my guess that this suggestion stems from imagining a single local business. They create their Google My Business listing and build out perhaps 20–50 structured citations with good data. What could go wrong?
For starters, they may have forgotten that their business name was different 10 years ago. Oh, and they did move across town 5 years ago. And this old data is sitting somewhere in a major aggregator like Acxiom, and somehow due to the infamous vagaries of data flow, it ends up on Bing, and a Bing user gets confused and reports to Google that the new address is wrong on the GMB listing … and so on and so on. Between data flow and crowdsourced editing, a set-and-forget approach to local business listings is trouble waiting to happen.
Now multiply this by 1,000 business locations. And throw in that the enterprise opened two new stores yesterday and closed one. And that they just acquired a new chain and have to rebrand all its assets. And there seems to be something the matter with the phone number on 25 listings, because they’re getting agitated complaints at corporate. And they received 500 reviews last week on Google alone that have to be managed, and it seems one of their competitors is leaving them negative reviews. Whoa – there are 700 duplicate listings being reported by Moz Local! And the brand has 250 Google Questions & Answers queries to respond to this week. And someone just uploaded an image of a dumpster to their GMB listing in Santa Fe…
Not only do listings have to be built, they have to be monitored for data degradation, and managed for inevitable business events, responsiveness to consumers, and spam. It’s hard enough for SMBs to pull all of this off, but enterprises ignore this at their peril!
Not-for-enterprises #3: Just do X
Every time a new local search feature or best practice emerges, you’ll find publications saying “just do X” to implement. What I’ve learned from enterprises is that there is no “just” about it.
Case in point: in 2017, Google rolled out Google Posts, and as Joel Headley of healthcare practice growth platform PatientPop explained to me in a recent interview, his company had to quickly develop a solution that would enable thousands of customers to utilize this influential feature across hundreds of thousands of listings. PatientPop managed implementation in an astonishingly short time, but typically, at the enterprise level, each new rollout requires countless steps up and down the ladder. These could include achieving recognition of the new opportunity, approval to pursue it, designation of teams to work on it, possible acquisition of new assets to accomplish goals, implementation at scale, and the groundwork of tracking outcomes so that they can be reported to prove/disprove ROI from the effort.
Where small businesses can be relatively agile if they can find time to man-up to new features and strategies, enterprises can become dangerously bogged down by infrastructure and communications gaps. Even something as simple as hyperlocalizing content to the needs of a given community represents a significant undertaking.
The family-owned local hardware store already knows that the county fair is the biggest annual event in their area, and they’ve already got everything necessary to participate with a booth, run a contest, take photos, sponsor the tractor pull, earn links, and blog about it. For the hardware franchise with 3,000 stores, branch-to-corporate communication of the mere existence of the county fair, let alone gaining permission to market around it, will require multiple touches from the location to C-suites, and back again.
Checklist for enterprise local SEO preparedness
If you’re on the marketing team for an enterprise, or you run an agency and want to begin working with these larger, rewarding clients, you’ll be striving to put a checkmark in every box on the following checklist:
☑ Definition of success
We’ve determined which actions = success for our brand, whether this is increases for in-store traffic, sales, phone calls, bookings, or some other metric. When we see growth in these KPIs, it will affirm for us that our efforts are creating real success.
☑ Designation of roles
We’ve defined who will be responsible for all tasks relating to the local search marketing of our business. We’ve equipped these team members with all necessary permissions, granted access to key documentation, have organized workflows, and have created an environment for documentation of work.
☑ Canonical data
We’ve created a spreadsheet, approved and agreed upon by all major departments, that lists the standardized name, address, phone number, website URL, and hours of operation for each location of the company. Any variant information has been resolved into a single, agreed-upon data set for each location. This sheet has been shared with all stakeholders managing our local business listings, marketing, website and social outreach.
☑ Website optimization
Our keyword research findings are reflected in the tags and text of our website, including image optimization. Complete contact information for each of our locations is easily accessible on the site and is accurate. We’ve implemented proper markup, such as Schema or JSON-LD, to ensure that our data is as clear as possible to search engines.
☑ Website quality
Our website is easy to navigate and provides a good, usable experience for desktop, mobile and tablet users. We understand that the omni-channel search environment includes ambient search in cars, in homes, via voice. Our website doesn’t rely on technologies that exclude search engines or consumers. We’re putting our customer first.
☑ Tracking and analysis
We’ve implemented maximum controls for tracking and analyzing traffic to our website. We’re also ready to track and analyze other forms of marketing, such as clicks stemming from our Google My Business listings traffic being driven to our website by articles on third party sources, and content we’re sharing via social media.
☑ Publishing strategy
Our website features strong basic pages (Home, Contact, About, Testimonials/Reviews, Policy), we’ve built an excellent, optimized page for each of our core products/services and a quality, unique page for each of our locations. We have a clear strategy as to ongoing content publication, in the form of blog posts, white papers, case studies, social outreach, and other forms of content. We have plans for hyperlocalizing content to match regional culture and needs.
☑ Store locator
We’ve implemented a store locator widget to connect our website’s users to the set of location landing pages we’ve built to thoughtfully meet the needs of specific communities. We’ve also created an HTML version of a menu linking to all of these landing pages to ensure search engines can discover and index them.
☑ Local link building
We’re building the authority of our brand via the links we earn from the most authoritative sources. We’re actively seeking intelligent link building opportunities for each of our locations, reflective of our industry, but also of each branch’s unique geography.
☑ Guideline compliance
We’ve assessed that each of the locations our business plans to build local listings for complies with the Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google. Each location is a genuine physical location (not a virtual office or PO box) and conducts face-to-face business with consumers, either at our locations or at customers’ locations. We’re compliant with Google’s rules for the naming of each location, and, if appropriate, we understand how to handle listing multi-department and multi-practitioner businesses. None of our Google My Business listings is at risk for suspension due to basic guideline violations. We’ve learned how to avoid every possible local SEO pitfall.
☑ Full Google My Business engagement
We’re making maximum use of all available Google My Business features that can assist us in achieving our goals. This could include Google Posts, Questions & Answers, Reviews, Photos, Messaging, Booking, Local Service Ads, and other emerging features.
☑ Local listing development
We’re using software like Moz Local to scale creation of our local listings on the major aggregators (Infogroup, Acxiom, Localeze and Factual) as well as key directories like Superpages and Citysearch. We’re confident that our accurate, consistent data is being distributed to these most important platforms.
☑ Local listing monitoring
We know that local listings aren’t a set-and-forget asset and are taking advantage of the ongoing monitoring SaaS provides, increasing our confidence in the continued accuracy of our data. We’re aware that, if left unmanaged, local business listing data can degrade over time, due to inputs from various, non-authoritative third parties as well as normal data flow across platforms.
☑ In-store strategy
All public-facing staff are equipped with the necessary training to implement our brand’s customer service policy, answer FAQs or escalate them via a clear hierarchy, resolving complaints before they become negative online reviews. We have installed in-store signage or other materials to actively invite consumer complaints in-person, via an after-hours helpline or text message to ensure we are making maximum effort to build and defend our strong reputation.
☑ Review acquisition
We’ve developed a clear strategy for acquiring reviews on an ongoing basis on the review sites we’ve deemed to be most important to our brand. We’re compliant with the guidelines of each platform on which we’re earning reviews. We’re building website-based reviews and testimonials, too.
☑ Review monitoring & response
We’re monitoring all incoming reviews to identify both positive and negative emerging sentiment trends at specific locations and we’re conversant with Net Promoter Score. We’ve created a process for responding with gratitude to positive reviews. We’re defending our reputation and revenue by responding to negative reviews in ways that keep customers who complain instead of losing them, to avoid needless drain of new customer acquisition spend. Our responses are building a positive impression of our brand. We’ve built or acquired solutions to manage reviews at scale.
☑ Local PR
Each location of our brand has been empowered to build a local footprint in the community it serves, customizing outreach to match community culture. We’re exploring sponsorships, scholarships, workshops, conferences, news opportunities, and other forms of participation that will build our brand via online links and social mentions as well as offline WOM marketing. We’re continuously developing cohesive online/offline outreach for maximum impact on brand recognition, rankings, reputation, and revenue.
☑ Social media
We’ve identified the social platforms that are most popular with our consumer base and a best fit for our brand. We’re practicing ongoing social listening to catch and address positive and negative sentiment trends as they arise. We’ve committed to a social mindset based on sharing rather than the hard sell.
☑ Spam-ready
We’re aware that our brand, our listings, and our reviews may be subject to spam, and we know what options are available for reporting it. We’re also prepared to detect when the spammy behaviors of competitors (such as fake addresses, fake negative/positive reviews, or keyword stuffing of listings) are giving them an unfair advantage in our markets, and have a methodology for escalating reports of guideline violations.
☑ Paid media
We’re investing wisely in both on-and-offline paid media and carefully tracking and analyzing the outcomes of online pay-per-click, radio, TV, billboards, and phone sales strategy. We’re exploring new opportunities, as appropriate and as they emerge, like Google Local Service Ads.
☑ Build/buy
When any new functionality (like Google Posts or Google Q&A) needs to be managed at scale, we have a process for determining whether we need to build or acquire new technology. We know we have to weigh the pros/cons of developing in-house or buying ready-made solutions.
☑ Competitive difference-maker
Once you’ve checked off all of the above elements, you’re ready to move forward towards identifying a USP for your brand that no one else in your market has explored. Be it a tool, widget, app, video marketing campaign, newsworthy acquisition, new partnership, or some other asset, this venture will require deep competitive and market research to discover a need that has yet to be filled well by your competitors. If your business can serve this need, it can set your brand apart for years to come.
Free advice, specifically for local enterprises
It’s asserted that customers may forget what you say, but they’ll never forget how you make them feel.
Call me a Californian, but I continue to be amazed by automotive TV spots that show large trucks driving through beautiful creeks (thanks for tearing up precious riparian habitat during our state-wide drought) and across pristine arctic snowfields (instantly reminding me of climate change). Meanwhile, my family have become Tesla-spotters, seeing that “zero emissions” messaging on the tail of every luxury eco-vehicle that passes us by. As consumers, we know how we feel.
Technical and organizational considerations aside, this is where I see one of the greatest risks posed to the local enterprise structure. Insensitivity at a regional or hyperlocal level -- the failure to research customer needs with the intention of meeting them — has been responsible for some of the most startling bad news for enterprises in recent recall. From ignored negative reviews across fast food franchises, to the downsizing of multiple apparel retailers who have been unable to stake a clear claim in the shifting shopping environment, brands that aren’t successful at generating positive consumer “feelings” may need to reevaluate not just their local search marketing mindset, but their basic identity.
If this sounds uncomfortable or risky, consider that we are seeing a rising trend in CEOs taking stands on issues of national import in America. This is about feelings. Consumers are coming to expect this, and it feeds down to the local level.
Hyperlocalized market research
If your brand is considering opening a new branch in a new state or city, you’ll be creating profiles as part of your research. These could be based on everything from reading local news to conducting formal surveys. If I were to do something like this for my part of California, these are the factors I’d be highlighting about the region:
California
Enterprises
We’ve been blasted by drought and wildfire. In 2017, alone, we went through 9,133 fires. On a positive note, Indigenous thought-leadership is beginning to be re-implemented in some areas to solve our worst ecological problems (water scarcity, salmon loss, absence of traditional forestry practices).
Can your brand help conserve water, re-house thousands of homeless residents, fund mental health services despite budget cuts, make legal services affordable, provide solutions for increased future safety? What are your green practices? Are you helping to forward ecological recovery efforts at a tribal, city or state level?
We’re grumbling more loudly about tech gentrification. If you live in Mississippi, sit down for this. The average home price in your state is $199,028. In my part of California, it’s $825,000. In San Francisco, specifically, you’ll need $1.2 million dollars to buy a tiny studio apartment... if you can find one. While causes are complex, people I talk with generally blame Silicon Valley.
Can your brand be part of this conversation? If not, you’re not really addressing what is on statewide consumers’ minds. Particularly if you’re marketing a tech-oriented company, taking the housing crisis seriously and coming up with solutions for even a modest amount of relief would certainly be positive and newsworthy.
We’ve turned to online shopping for an interesting variety of reasons. And it’s not just because we’re techie hipsters. The retail inventory in big cities (San Francisco) can be overwhelming to sort through, and in small towns (Cloverdale), the shopping options are too few to meet our..
https://ift.tt/2qEb7Ti
0 notes
rodneyevesuarywk · 6 years
Text
Enterprise Local SEO is Different: A Checklist, a Mindset
Posted by MiriamEllis
Image credit: Abraham Williams
If you’re marketing big brands with hundreds or thousands of locations, are you certain you’re getting model-appropriate local SEO information from your favorite industry sources?
Is your enterprise checking off not just technical basics, but hyperlocalized research to strengthen its entrance into new markets?
Before I started working for Moz in in 2010, the bulk of my local SEO experience had been with small-to-medium business models. Naturally, the advice I was able to offer back then was limited by the scope of my work. But then came Moz Local, and the opportunity to learn more about the more complex needs of valued enterprise customers like Crate & Barrel with more than 170 locations, PAPYRUS with 400, or Bridgestone Corporation with 2000+.
Now, when I’m thumbing through industry tips and tactics, I’m better able to identify when a recommended practice is stemming from an SMB mindset and falling short of enterprise realities, or is truly applicable to all business models. My goal for this post is to offer:
Examples of commonly encountered advice that isn’t really best for big brands
An Enterprise Local SEO Checklist to help you shape strategy for present campaigns, or ready your agency to pursue relationships with bigger dream clients
A state-to-enterprise wireframe for initial hyperlocal marketing research
Not everything you read is for enterprises
When a brand is small, like a single location, family-owned retail shop, it’s likely that a single person at the company can manage the business’ Local SEO, with some free education and a few helpful tools. Large, multi-location brands, just by dint of organizational complexities, are different. Before they even get down to the nitty gritty of building citations, enterprises have to solve for:
Standardizing data across hundreds or thousands of locations
Franchise relationships that can muddy who controls which data and assets
Designating staff to actually manage data and execute initiatives, and building bridges between teams that must work in concert to meet goals
Scaling everything from listings management, to site architecture, to content dev
Dealing with a hierarchy of reports of bad data from the retail location level up to corporate
I am barely scratching the surface here. In a nutshell, the scale of the organization and the scope of the multi-location brand can turn a task that would be simple for Mom-and-Pop into a major, company-wide challenge. And I think it adds to the challenge when published advice for SMBs isn’t labeled as such. Over the years, three common tips I’ve encountered with questionable or no applicability to enterprises include:
Not-for-enterprises #1: Link all your local business listings to your homepage
This is sometimes offered as a suggestion to boost local rankings, because website home pages typically have more authority than location landing pages do. But in the enterprise scenario, sending a consumer from a listing for his chosen location, to a homepage, and then expecting him to fool around with a menu or a store locator widget to finally reach a landing page for the location he’s already designated that he wanted is not respecting his user experience. It’s wasting his time. I consider this an unnecessary risk of conversions.
Simultaneously, failure to fully utilize location landing pages means that very little can be done to customize the website experience for each community and customer. Directly-linked-to landing pages can provide instant, persuasive proofs of local-ness, in the form of real local reviews, news about local sponsorships and events, special offers, regional product highlights, imagery and so much more that no corporate homepage can ever provide. Consider these statistics:
“According to a new study, when both brand and location-specific pages exist, 85% of all consumer engagement takes place on the local pages (e.g., Facebook Local Pages, local landing pages). A minority of impressions and engagement (15%) happen on national or brand pages.” - Local Search Association
In the large, multi-location scenario, it just isn’t putting the customer first to swap out a hoped-for ranking increase for a considerate, well-planned user experience.
Not-for-enterprises #2: Local business listings are a one-and-done deal
I find this advice particularly concerning. I don’t consider it true even for SMBs, and at the enterprise level, it’s simply false. It’s my guess that this suggestion stems from imagining a single local business. They create their Google My Business listing and build out perhaps 20–50 structured citations with good data. What could go wrong?
For starters, they may have forgotten that their business name was different 10 years ago. Oh, and they did move across town 5 years ago. And this old data is sitting somewhere in a major aggregator like Acxiom, and somehow due to the infamous vagaries of data flow, it ends up on Bing, and a Bing user gets confused and reports to Google that the new address is wrong on the GMB listing … and so on and so on. Between data flow and crowdsourced editing, a set-and-forget approach to local business listings is trouble waiting to happen.
Now multiply this by 1,000 business locations. And throw in that the enterprise opened two new stores yesterday and closed one. And that they just acquired a new chain and have to rebrand all its assets. And there seems to be something the matter with the phone number on 25 listings, because they’re getting agitated complaints at corporate. And they received 500 reviews last week on Google alone that have to be managed, and it seems one of their competitors is leaving them negative reviews. Whoa – there are 700 duplicate listings being reported by Moz Local! And the brand has 250 Google Questions & Answers queries to respond to this week. And someone just uploaded an image of a dumpster to their GMB listing in Santa Fe…
Not only do listings have to be built, they have to be monitored for data degradation, and managed for inevitable business events, responsiveness to consumers, and spam. It’s hard enough for SMBs to pull all of this off, but enterprises ignore this at their peril!
Not-for-enterprises #3: Just do X
Every time a new local search feature or best practice emerges, you’ll find publications saying “just do X” to implement. What I’ve learned from enterprises is that there is no “just” about it.
Case in point: in 2017, Google rolled out Google Posts, and as Joel Headley of healthcare practice growth platform PatientPop explained to me in a recent interview, his company had to quickly develop a solution that would enable thousands of customers to utilize this influential feature across hundreds of thousands of listings. PatientPop managed implementation in an astonishingly short time, but typically, at the enterprise level, each new rollout requires countless steps up and down the ladder. These could include achieving recognition of the new opportunity, approval to pursue it, designation of teams to work on it, possible acquisition of new assets to accomplish goals, implementation at scale, and the groundwork of tracking outcomes so that they can be reported to prove/disprove ROI from the effort.
Where small businesses can be relatively agile if they can find time to man-up to new features and strategies, enterprises can become dangerously bogged down by infrastructure and communications gaps. Even something as simple as hyperlocalizing content to the needs of a given community represents a significant undertaking.
The family-owned local hardware store already knows that the county fair is the biggest annual event in their area, and they’ve already got everything necessary to participate with a booth, run a contest, take photos, sponsor the tractor pull, earn links, and blog about it. For the hardware franchise with 3,000 stores, branch-to-corporate communication of the mere existence of the county fair, let alone gaining permission to market around it, will require multiple touches from the location to C-suites, and back again.
Checklist for enterprise local SEO preparedness
If you’re on the marketing team for an enterprise, or you run an agency and want to begin working with these larger, rewarding clients, you’ll be striving to put a checkmark in every box on the following checklist:
☑ Definition of success
We’ve determined which actions = success for our brand, whether this is increases for in-store traffic, sales, phone calls, bookings, or some other metric. When we see growth in these KPIs, it will affirm for us that our efforts are creating real success.
☑ Designation of roles
We’ve defined who will be responsible for all tasks relating to the local search marketing of our business. We’ve equipped these team members with all necessary permissions, granted access to key documentation, have organized workflows, and have created an environment for documentation of work.
☑ Canonical data
We’ve created a spreadsheet, approved and agreed upon by all major departments, that lists the standardized name, address, phone number, website URL, and hours of operation for each location of the company. Any variant information has been resolved into a single, agreed-upon data set for each location. This sheet has been shared with all stakeholders managing our local business listings, marketing, website and social outreach.
☑ Website optimization
Our keyword research findings are reflected in the tags and text of our website, including image optimization. Complete contact information for each of our locations is easily accessible on the site and is accurate. We’ve implemented proper markup, such as Schema or JSON-LD, to ensure that our data is as clear as possible to search engines.
☑ Website quality
Our website is easy to navigate and provides a good, usable experience for desktop, mobile and tablet users. We understand that the omni-channel search environment includes ambient search in cars, in homes, via voice. Our website doesn’t rely on technologies that exclude search engines or consumers. We’re putting our customer first.
☑ Tracking and analysis
We’ve implemented maximum controls for tracking and analyzing traffic to our website. We’re also ready to track and analyze other forms of marketing, such as clicks stemming from our Google My Business listings traffic being driven to our website by articles on third party sources, and content we’re sharing via social media.
☑ Publishing strategy
Our website features strong basic pages (Home, Contact, About, Testimonials/Reviews, Policy), we’ve built an excellent, optimized page for each of our core products/services and a quality, unique page for each of our locations. We have a clear strategy as to ongoing content publication, in the form of blog posts, white papers, case studies, social outreach, and other forms of content. We have plans for hyperlocalizing content to match regional culture and needs.
☑ Store locator
We’ve implemented a store locator widget to connect our website’s users to the set of location landing pages we’ve built to thoughtfully meet the needs of specific communities. We’ve also created an HTML version of a menu linking to all of these landing pages to ensure search engines can discover and index them.
☑ Local link building
We’re building the authority of our brand via the links we earn from the most authoritative sources. We’re actively seeking intelligent link building opportunities for each of our locations, reflective of our industry, but also of each branch’s unique geography.
☑ Guideline compliance
We’ve assessed that each of the locations our business plans to build local listings for complies with the Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google. Each location is a genuine physical location (not a virtual office or PO box) and conducts face-to-face business with consumers, either at our locations or at customers’ locations. We’re compliant with Google’s rules for the naming of each location, and, if appropriate, we understand how to handle listing multi-department and multi-practitioner businesses. None of our Google My Business listings is at risk for suspension due to basic guideline violations. We’ve learned how to avoid every possible local SEO pitfall.
☑ Full Google My Business engagement
We’re making maximum use of all available Google My Business features that can assist us in achieving our goals. This could include Google Posts, Questions & Answers, Reviews, Photos, Messaging, Booking, Local Service Ads, and other emerging features.
☑ Local listing development
We’re using software like Moz Local to scale creation of our local listings on the major aggregators (Infogroup, Acxiom, Localeze and Factual) as well as key directories like Superpages and Citysearch. We’re confident that our accurate, consistent data is being distributed to these most important platforms.
☑ Local listing monitoring
We know that local listings aren’t a set-and-forget asset and are taking advantage of the ongoing monitoring SaaS provides, increasing our confidence in the continued accuracy of our data. We’re aware that, if left unmanaged, local business listing data can degrade over time, due to inputs from various, non-authoritative third parties as well as normal data flow across platforms.
☑ In-store strategy
All public-facing staff are equipped with the necessary training to implement our brand’s customer service policy, answer FAQs or escalate them via a clear hierarchy, resolving complaints before they become negative online reviews. We have installed in-store signage or other materials to actively invite consumer complaints in-person, via an after-hours helpline or text message to ensure we are making maximum effort to build and defend our strong reputation.
☑ Review acquisition
We’ve developed a clear strategy for acquiring reviews on an ongoing basis on the review sites we’ve deemed to be most important to our brand. We’re compliant with the guidelines of each platform on which we’re earning reviews. We’re building website-based reviews and testimonials, too.
☑ Review monitoring & response
We’re monitoring all incoming reviews to identify both positive and negative emerging sentiment trends at specific locations and we’re conversant with Net Promoter Score. We’ve created a process for responding with gratitude to positive reviews. We’re defending our reputation and revenue by responding to negative reviews in ways that keep customers who complain instead of losing them, to avoid needless drain of new customer acquisition spend. Our responses are building a positive impression of our brand. We’ve built or acquired solutions to manage reviews at scale.
☑ Local PR
Each location of our brand has been empowered to build a local footprint in the community it serves, customizing outreach to match community culture. We’re exploring sponsorships, scholarships, workshops, conferences, news opportunities, and other forms of participation that will build our brand via online links and social mentions as well as offline WOM marketing. We’re continuously developing cohesive online/offline outreach for maximum impact on brand recognition, rankings, reputation, and revenue.
☑ Social media
We’ve identified the social platforms that are most popular with our consumer base and a best fit for our brand. We’re practicing ongoing social listening to catch and address positive and negative sentiment trends as they arise. We’ve committed to a social mindset based on sharing rather than the hard sell.
☑ Spam-ready
We’re aware that our brand, our listings, and our reviews may be subject to spam, and we know what options are available for reporting it. We’re also prepared to detect when the spammy behaviors of competitors (such as fake addresses, fake negative/positive reviews, or keyword stuffing of listings) are giving them an unfair advantage in our markets, and have a methodology for escalating reports of guideline violations.
☑ Paid media
We’re investing wisely in both on-and-offline paid media and carefully tracking and analyzing the outcomes of online pay-per-click, radio, TV, billboards, and phone sales strategy. We’re exploring new opportunities, as appropriate and as they emerge, like Google Local Service Ads.
☑ Build/buy
When any new functionality (like Google Posts or Google Q&A) needs to be managed at scale, we have a process for determining whether we need to build or acquire new technology. We know we have to weigh the pros/cons of developing in-house or buying ready-made solutions.
☑ Competitive difference-maker
Once you’ve checked off all of the above elements, you’re ready to move forward towards identifying a USP for your brand that no one else in your market has explored. Be it a tool, widget, app, video marketing campaign, newsworthy acquisition, new partnership, or some other asset, this venture will require deep competitive and market research to discover a need that has yet to be filled well by your competitors. If your business can serve this need, it can set your brand apart for years to come.
Free advice, specifically for local enterprises
It’s asserted that customers may forget what you say, but they’ll never forget how you make them feel.
Call me a Californian, but I continue to be amazed by automotive TV spots that show large trucks driving through beautiful creeks (thanks for tearing up precious riparian habitat during our state-wide drought) and across pristine arctic snowfields (instantly reminding me of climate change). Meanwhile, my family have become Tesla-spotters, seeing that “zero emissions” messaging on the tail of every luxury eco-vehicle that passes us by. As consumers, we know how we feel.
Technical and organizational considerations aside, this is where I see one of the greatest risks posed to the local enterprise structure. Insensitivity at a regional or hyperlocal level -- the failure to research customer needs with the intention of meeting them — has been responsible for some of the most startling bad news for enterprises in recent recall. From ignored negative reviews across fast food franchises, to the downsizing of multiple apparel retailers who have been unable to stake a clear claim in the shifting shopping environment, brands that aren’t successful at generating positive consumer “feelings” may need to reevaluate not just their local search marketing mindset, but their basic identity.
If this sounds uncomfortable or risky, consider that we are seeing a rising trend in CEOs taking stands on issues of national import in America. This is about feelings. Consumers are coming to expect this, and it feeds down to the local level.
Hyperlocalized market research
If your brand is considering opening a new branch in a new state or city, you’ll be creating profiles as part of your research. These could be based on everything from reading local news to conducting formal surveys. If I were to do something like this for my part of California, these are the factors I’d be highlighting about the region:
California
Enterprises
We’ve been blasted by drought and wildfire. In 2017, alone, we went through 9,133 fires. On a positive note, Indigenous thought-leadership is beginning to be re-implemented in some areas to solve our worst ecological problems (water scarcity, salmon loss, absence of traditional forestry practices).
Can your brand help conserve water, re-house thousands of homeless residents, fund mental health services despite budget cuts, make legal services affordable, provide solutions for increased future safety? What are your green practices? Are you helping to forward ecological recovery efforts at a tribal, city or state level?
We’re grumbling more loudly about tech gentrification. If you live in Mississippi, sit down for this. The average home price in your state is $199,028. In my part of California, it’s $825,000. In San Francisco, specifically, you’ll need $1.2 million dollars to buy a tiny studio apartment... if you can find one. While causes are complex, people I talk with generally blame Silicon Valley.
Can your brand be part of this conversation? If not, you’re not really addressing what is on statewide consumers’ minds. Particularly if you’re marketing a tech-oriented company, taking the housing crisis seriously and coming up with solutions for even a modest amount of relief would certainly be positive and newsworthy.
We’ve turned to online shopping for an interesting variety of reasons. And it’s not just because we’re techie hipsters. The retail inventory in big cities (San Francisco) can be overwhelming to sort through, and in small towns (Cloverdale), the shopping options are too few to meet our..
https://ift.tt/2qEb7Ti
0 notes
mariasolemarionqi · 6 years
Text
Enterprise Local SEO is Different: A Checklist, a Mindset
Posted by MiriamEllis
Image credit: Abraham Williams
If you’re marketing big brands with hundreds or thousands of locations, are you certain you’re getting model-appropriate local SEO information from your favorite industry sources?
Is your enterprise checking off not just technical basics, but hyperlocalized research to strengthen its entrance into new markets?
Before I started working for Moz in in 2010, the bulk of my local SEO experience had been with small-to-medium business models. Naturally, the advice I was able to offer back then was limited by the scope of my work. But then came Moz Local, and the opportunity to learn more about the more complex needs of valued enterprise customers like Crate & Barrel with more than 170 locations, PAPYRUS with 400, or Bridgestone Corporation with 2000+.
Now, when I’m thumbing through industry tips and tactics, I’m better able to identify when a recommended practice is stemming from an SMB mindset and falling short of enterprise realities, or is truly applicable to all business models. My goal for this post is to offer:
Examples of commonly encountered advice that isn’t really best for big brands
An Enterprise Local SEO Checklist to help you shape strategy for present campaigns, or ready your agency to pursue relationships with bigger dream clients
A state-to-enterprise wireframe for initial hyperlocal marketing research
Not everything you read is for enterprises
When a brand is small, like a single location, family-owned retail shop, it’s likely that a single person at the company can manage the business’ Local SEO, with some free education and a few helpful tools. Large, multi-location brands, just by dint of organizational complexities, are different. Before they even get down to the nitty gritty of building citations, enterprises have to solve for:
Standardizing data across hundreds or thousands of locations
Franchise relationships that can muddy who controls which data and assets
Designating staff to actually manage data and execute initiatives, and building bridges between teams that must work in concert to meet goals
Scaling everything from listings management, to site architecture, to content dev
Dealing with a hierarchy of reports of bad data from the retail location level up to corporate
I am barely scratching the surface here. In a nutshell, the scale of the organization and the scope of the multi-location brand can turn a task that would be simple for Mom-and-Pop into a major, company-wide challenge. And I think it adds to the challenge when published advice for SMBs isn’t labeled as such. Over the years, three common tips I’ve encountered with questionable or no applicability to enterprises include:
Not-for-enterprises #1: Link all your local business listings to your homepage
This is sometimes offered as a suggestion to boost local rankings, because website home pages typically have more authority than location landing pages do. But in the enterprise scenario, sending a consumer from a listing for his chosen location, to a homepage, and then expecting him to fool around with a menu or a store locator widget to finally reach a landing page for the location he’s already designated that he wanted is not respecting his user experience. It’s wasting his time. I consider this an unnecessary risk of conversions.
Simultaneously, failure to fully utilize location landing pages means that very little can be done to customize the website experience for each community and customer. Directly-linked-to landing pages can provide instant, persuasive proofs of local-ness, in the form of real local reviews, news about local sponsorships and events, special offers, regional product highlights, imagery and so much more that no corporate homepage can ever provide. Consider these statistics:
“According to a new study, when both brand and location-specific pages exist, 85% of all consumer engagement takes place on the local pages (e.g., Facebook Local Pages, local landing pages). A minority of impressions and engagement (15%) happen on national or brand pages.” - Local Search Association
In the large, multi-location scenario, it just isn’t putting the customer first to swap out a hoped-for ranking increase for a considerate, well-planned user experience.
Not-for-enterprises #2: Local business listings are a one-and-done deal
I find this advice particularly concerning. I don’t consider it true even for SMBs, and at the enterprise level, it’s simply false. It’s my guess that this suggestion stems from imagining a single local business. They create their Google My Business listing and build out perhaps 20–50 structured citations with good data. What could go wrong?
For starters, they may have forgotten that their business name was different 10 years ago. Oh, and they did move across town 5 years ago. And this old data is sitting somewhere in a major aggregator like Acxiom, and somehow due to the infamous vagaries of data flow, it ends up on Bing, and a Bing user gets confused and reports to Google that the new address is wrong on the GMB listing … and so on and so on. Between data flow and crowdsourced editing, a set-and-forget approach to local business listings is trouble waiting to happen.
Now multiply this by 1,000 business locations. And throw in that the enterprise opened two new stores yesterday and closed one. And that they just acquired a new chain and have to rebrand all its assets. And there seems to be something the matter with the phone number on 25 listings, because they’re getting agitated complaints at corporate. And they received 500 reviews last week on Google alone that have to be managed, and it seems one of their competitors is leaving them negative reviews. Whoa – there are 700 duplicate listings being reported by Moz Local! And the brand has 250 Google Questions & Answers queries to respond to this week. And someone just uploaded an image of a dumpster to their GMB listing in Santa Fe…
Not only do listings have to be built, they have to be monitored for data degradation, and managed for inevitable business events, responsiveness to consumers, and spam. It’s hard enough for SMBs to pull all of this off, but enterprises ignore this at their peril!
Not-for-enterprises #3: Just do X
Every time a new local search feature or best practice emerges, you’ll find publications saying “just do X” to implement. What I’ve learned from enterprises is that there is no “just” about it.
Case in point: in 2017, Google rolled out Google Posts, and as Joel Headley of healthcare practice growth platform PatientPop explained to me in a recent interview, his company had to quickly develop a solution that would enable thousands of customers to utilize this influential feature across hundreds of thousands of listings. PatientPop managed implementation in an astonishingly short time, but typically, at the enterprise level, each new rollout requires countless steps up and down the ladder. These could include achieving recognition of the new opportunity, approval to pursue it, designation of teams to work on it, possible acquisition of new assets to accomplish goals, implementation at scale, and the groundwork of tracking outcomes so that they can be reported to prove/disprove ROI from the effort.
Where small businesses can be relatively agile if they can find time to man-up to new features and strategies, enterprises can become dangerously bogged down by infrastructure and communications gaps. Even something as simple as hyperlocalizing content to the needs of a given community represents a significant undertaking.
The family-owned local hardware store already knows that the county fair is the biggest annual event in their area, and they’ve already got everything necessary to participate with a booth, run a contest, take photos, sponsor the tractor pull, earn links, and blog about it. For the hardware franchise with 3,000 stores, branch-to-corporate communication of the mere existence of the county fair, let alone gaining permission to market around it, will require multiple touches from the location to C-suites, and back again.
Checklist for enterprise local SEO preparedness
If you’re on the marketing team for an enterprise, or you run an agency and want to begin working with these larger, rewarding clients, you’ll be striving to put a checkmark in every box on the following checklist:
☑ Definition of success
We’ve determined which actions = success for our brand, whether this is increases for in-store traffic, sales, phone calls, bookings, or some other metric. When we see growth in these KPIs, it will affirm for us that our efforts are creating real success.
☑ Designation of roles
We’ve defined who will be responsible for all tasks relating to the local search marketing of our business. We’ve equipped these team members with all necessary permissions, granted access to key documentation, have organized workflows, and have created an environment for documentation of work.
☑ Canonical data
We’ve created a spreadsheet, approved and agreed upon by all major departments, that lists the standardized name, address, phone number, website URL, and hours of operation for each location of the company. Any variant information has been resolved into a single, agreed-upon data set for each location. This sheet has been shared with all stakeholders managing our local business listings, marketing, website and social outreach.
☑ Website optimization
Our keyword research findings are reflected in the tags and text of our website, including image optimization. Complete contact information for each of our locations is easily accessible on the site and is accurate. We’ve implemented proper markup, such as Schema or JSON-LD, to ensure that our data is as clear as possible to search engines.
☑ Website quality
Our website is easy to navigate and provides a good, usable experience for desktop, mobile and tablet users. We understand that the omni-channel search environment includes ambient search in cars, in homes, via voice. Our website doesn’t rely on technologies that exclude search engines or consumers. We’re putting our customer first.
☑ Tracking and analysis
We’ve implemented maximum controls for tracking and analyzing traffic to our website. We’re also ready to track and analyze other forms of marketing, such as clicks stemming from our Google My Business listings traffic being driven to our website by articles on third party sources, and content we’re sharing via social media.
☑ Publishing strategy
Our website features strong basic pages (Home, Contact, About, Testimonials/Reviews, Policy), we’ve built an excellent, optimized page for each of our core products/services and a quality, unique page for each of our locations. We have a clear strategy as to ongoing content publication, in the form of blog posts, white papers, case studies, social outreach, and other forms of content. We have plans for hyperlocalizing content to match regional culture and needs.
☑ Store locator
We’ve implemented a store locator widget to connect our website’s users to the set of location landing pages we’ve built to thoughtfully meet the needs of specific communities. We’ve also created an HTML version of a menu linking to all of these landing pages to ensure search engines can discover and index them.
☑ Local link building
We’re building the authority of our brand via the links we earn from the most authoritative sources. We’re actively seeking intelligent link building opportunities for each of our locations, reflective of our industry, but also of each branch’s unique geography.
☑ Guideline compliance
We’ve assessed that each of the locations our business plans to build local listings for complies with the Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google. Each location is a genuine physical location (not a virtual office or PO box) and conducts face-to-face business with consumers, either at our locations or at customers’ locations. We’re compliant with Google’s rules for the naming of each location, and, if appropriate, we understand how to handle listing multi-department and multi-practitioner businesses. None of our Google My Business listings is at risk for suspension due to basic guideline violations. We’ve learned how to avoid every possible local SEO pitfall.
☑ Full Google My Business engagement
We’re making maximum use of all available Google My Business features that can assist us in achieving our goals. This could include Google Posts, Questions & Answers, Reviews, Photos, Messaging, Booking, Local Service Ads, and other emerging features.
☑ Local listing development
We’re using software like Moz Local to scale creation of our local listings on the major aggregators (Infogroup, Acxiom, Localeze and Factual) as well as key directories like Superpages and Citysearch. We’re confident that our accurate, consistent data is being distributed to these most important platforms.
☑ Local listing monitoring
We know that local listings aren’t a set-and-forget asset and are taking advantage of the ongoing monitoring SaaS provides, increasing our confidence in the continued accuracy of our data. We’re aware that, if left unmanaged, local business listing data can degrade over time, due to inputs from various, non-authoritative third parties as well as normal data flow across platforms.
☑ In-store strategy
All public-facing staff are equipped with the necessary training to implement our brand’s customer service policy, answer FAQs or escalate them via a clear hierarchy, resolving complaints before they become negative online reviews. We have installed in-store signage or other materials to actively invite consumer complaints in-person, via an after-hours helpline or text message to ensure we are making maximum effort to build and defend our strong reputation.
☑ Review acquisition
We’ve developed a clear strategy for acquiring reviews on an ongoing basis on the review sites we’ve deemed to be most important to our brand. We’re compliant with the guidelines of each platform on which we’re earning reviews. We’re building website-based reviews and testimonials, too.
☑ Review monitoring & response
We’re monitoring all incoming reviews to identify both positive and negative emerging sentiment trends at specific locations and we’re conversant with Net Promoter Score. We’ve created a process for responding with gratitude to positive reviews. We’re defending our reputation and revenue by responding to negative reviews in ways that keep customers who complain instead of losing them, to avoid needless drain of new customer acquisition spend. Our responses are building a positive impression of our brand. We’ve built or acquired solutions to manage reviews at scale.
☑ Local PR
Each location of our brand has been empowered to build a local footprint in the community it serves, customizing outreach to match community culture. We’re exploring sponsorships, scholarships, workshops, conferences, news opportunities, and other forms of participation that will build our brand via online links and social mentions as well as offline WOM marketing. We’re continuously developing cohesive online/offline outreach for maximum impact on brand recognition, rankings, reputation, and revenue.
☑ Social media
We’ve identified the social platforms that are most popular with our consumer base and a best fit for our brand. We’re practicing ongoing social listening to catch and address positive and negative sentiment trends as they arise. We’ve committed to a social mindset based on sharing rather than the hard sell.
☑ Spam-ready
We’re aware that our brand, our listings, and our reviews may be subject to spam, and we know what options are available for reporting it. We’re also prepared to detect when the spammy behaviors of competitors (such as fake addresses, fake negative/positive reviews, or keyword stuffing of listings) are giving them an unfair advantage in our markets, and have a methodology for escalating reports of guideline violations.
☑ Paid media
We’re investing wisely in both on-and-offline paid media and carefully tracking and analyzing the outcomes of online pay-per-click, radio, TV, billboards, and phone sales strategy. We’re exploring new opportunities, as appropriate and as they emerge, like Google Local Service Ads.
☑ Build/buy
When any new functionality (like Google Posts or Google Q&A) needs to be managed at scale, we have a process for determining whether we need to build or acquire new technology. We know we have to weigh the pros/cons of developing in-house or buying ready-made solutions.
☑ Competitive difference-maker
Once you’ve checked off all of the above elements, you’re ready to move forward towards identifying a USP for your brand that no one else in your market has explored. Be it a tool, widget, app, video marketing campaign, newsworthy acquisition, new partnership, or some other asset, this venture will require deep competitive and market research to discover a need that has yet to be filled well by your competitors. If your business can serve this need, it can set your brand apart for years to come.
Free advice, specifically for local enterprises
It’s asserted that customers may forget what you say, but they’ll never forget how you make them feel.
Call me a Californian, but I continue to be amazed by automotive TV spots that show large trucks driving through beautiful creeks (thanks for tearing up precious riparian habitat during our state-wide drought) and across pristine arctic snowfields (instantly reminding me of climate change). Meanwhile, my family have become Tesla-spotters, seeing that “zero emissions” messaging on the tail of every luxury eco-vehicle that passes us by. As consumers, we know how we feel.
Technical and organizational considerations aside, this is where I see one of the greatest risks posed to the local enterprise structure. Insensitivity at a regional or hyperlocal level -- the failure to research customer needs with the intention of meeting them — has been responsible for some of the most startling bad news for enterprises in recent recall. From ignored negative reviews across fast food franchises, to the downsizing of multiple apparel retailers who have been unable to stake a clear claim in the shifting shopping environment, brands that aren’t successful at generating positive consumer “feelings” may need to reevaluate not just their local search marketing mindset, but their basic identity.
If this sounds uncomfortable or risky, consider that we are seeing a rising trend in CEOs taking stands on issues of national import in America. This is about feelings. Consumers are coming to expect this, and it feeds down to the local level.
Hyperlocalized market research
If your brand is considering opening a new branch in a new state or city, you’ll be creating profiles as part of your research. These could be based on everything from reading local news to conducting formal surveys. If I were to do something like this for my part of California, these are the factors I’d be highlighting about the region:
California
Enterprises
We’ve been blasted by drought and wildfire. In 2017, alone, we went through 9,133 fires. On a positive note, Indigenous thought-leadership is beginning to be re-implemented in some areas to solve our worst ecological problems (water scarcity, salmon loss, absence of traditional forestry practices).
Can your brand help conserve water, re-house thousands of homeless residents, fund mental health services despite budget cuts, make legal services affordable, provide solutions for increased future safety? What are your green practices? Are you helping to forward ecological recovery efforts at a tribal, city or state level?
We’re grumbling more loudly about tech gentrification. If you live in Mississippi, sit down for this. The average home price in your state is $199,028. In my part of California, it’s $825,000. In San Francisco, specifically, you’ll need $1.2 million dollars to buy a tiny studio apartment... if you can find one. While causes are complex, people I talk with generally blame Silicon Valley.
Can your brand be part of this conversation? If not, you’re not really addressing what is on statewide consumers’ minds. Particularly if you’re marketing a tech-oriented company, taking the housing crisis seriously and coming up with solutions for even a modest amount of relief would certainly be positive and newsworthy.
We’ve turned to online shopping for an interesting variety of reasons. And it’s not just because we’re techie hipsters. The retail inventory in big cities (San Francisco) can be overwhelming to sort through, and in small towns (Cloverdale), the shopping options are too few to meet our..
https://ift.tt/2qEb7Ti
0 notes