Here’s the latest instalment of Digital Marketing Reads, a roundup of some of the more interesting articles we’ve read lately in the digital marketing world.
Businesses Can Now Sign Up To Add Booking Buttons To Their Google Local Results
As of July of this year, businesses now have the ability to add a booking button to their Google My Business profiles to make it even easier for customers to book a service online. Rather than someone searching for a business, having to browse through its website, and then either email or call the business to inquire, now all they have to do is click the booking button on the Google Local Search listing.
At the moment, Google has partnered with 15 booking providers which businesses can opt to integrate into their Google My Business profile, with more on the way.
Source: Genbook
The Best SEO Conferences To Attend
If you’re looking to up your digital marketing and SEO game, it’s well worth attending one of these conferences in the coming year. True, you could just hire a Melbourne SEO agency to take care of your search marketing needs… but investing in some training and keeping your marketing in-house is also an option, and that’s where conferences like these can prove quite useful.
In Australia, the main event is the Search Marketing Summit in Sydney on 28-31 May.
The Ridiculously Smart Guide To Buying Twitter Followers
A slightly tongue-in-cheek guide to building a Twitter following without buying heaps of fake accounts that inflate your follower count.
The bottom line? Buy real followers through paid ad campaigns.
Black Friday SEO: Last-Minute Tips For The Holiday Season
An interesting article on how to use SEO to improve your Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and holiday shopping sales. A few minor SEO tweaks can be enough to land your site on the first page of Google when shoppers are searching for holiday sales. Consider using keyword phrases that include the word deals, sales, gift, or cheap.
What’s more, they recommend not creating a new page on your website specifically for holiday deals. It typically takes time for Google to pick up and rank a web page, and unless you create this new page several months in advance of the holiday season… it’s probably not going to land on Page 1. Instead, work on optimising an existing page of your site that’s already ranking well and receiving traffic.
Image Optimisation 101: How To Rank Higher In Image Search
According to this piece, “optimising your images gives your website an additional chance to be found via Google image search”. And it’s not just about adding keywords to image alt tags: you should also be concerned with image size and filename, as these also affect how a site ranks for keywords.
Top tip: keep your images small and compressed in order to increase page loading speed, and name your files so that they include keywords whenever possible (e.g. melbourne-seo-services-1, melbourne-seo-services-2…).