Five Under Five - Online Marketing Tips: Recent Episodes

Five Under Five Marketing Tips

A podcast determined to give you the most useful marketing information in five minutes or less.

As a marketing expert with over 16 years in digital marketing I’ll share my experience, case studies and advanced tips to help you get the most out of your sites marketing efforts. I’ll cover SEO, PPC, analytics, website conversions and more.

What's the rush? Why just five minutes?

Because you’re busy running a business and who has time for a long drawn out podcasts that never really get to the point? Not you! So what are you waiting for, subscribe!

This podcast covers 5 tips for your Shopify or E-commerce Store... but the book covers...

Do you own an eCommerce site?

Are you struggling with getting well-qualified traffic to your website?

Are you only getting visitors to your home page and not your product pages?

Are you blogging, but aren't sure how to write your content or how to do keyword research?

This book will provide you with a simple but effective plan for driving traffic to your site. If you're running an Ecommerce website, thinking about starting one and want to learn what is required to run a successful business online, you need to pick up this book.

Some of the topics you will learn are...

• How to structure your website for maximum SEO benefit

• How to optimize your product and category pages to drive organic search

• Why most businesses fail at Ecommerce and how to avoid their mistakes

• How to manage Google Shopping Ads for maximum profit

• How to rank key phrases without doing any link building

• How to set up Google Analytics and Search Console

• How to create reports that will help you discover new opportunities• How to use blogging to generate traffic that will translate into sales

This book is great for a Shopify site, Woocommerce or any other eCommerce platform. The book references real examples that were created specifically for the book.

Grab my book on Amazon.

Looking to hire an SEO expert? Not sure if they know their stuff? Need some insight from a expert? Check out this latest episode and learn wha important things you should ask. Click to listen...

Read the full article on how to choose an SEO expert or agency.

Did you just go through a rediesgn? Has the traffic dropped? Is it a real issue or an illusion?

Did you move over analytics to the new design?
Did you map out old pages to new?
Did you unblock Google from crawling your site?
Did you minimize your site's navigation?
Do you have an increase in 404 pages?

Read my article on "Why Did Your Traffic Drop After A Redesign?"

No calls to action…. 7 out of every 10 law firm sites I review have zero calls to action. Do you think it’s easier for someone to search your site to contact you or hit the back button and find another site?
Optimizing pages for law related terms and not lawyer / law firm terms. People are looking for a lawyer not information about the law.
Content not solving a problem for clients - What are typical concerns or questions clients have? Place them on your page.
Not using video - lets face it the law is boring to regular folks… the easier you can explain it the more likely you are to land a client.
Not optimizing for research type terms. People will research before looking for a lawyer. Will you show up when they are researching?

There is one very important factor you must have in order to have a successful paid search campaign. That one thing is...money and enough of it to run a a campaign for at least 30 days 24/7.

Why? Tune in and find out.

Read more about this topic here.

5 reasons your news stories aren’t showing in Google news

You haven’t applied to be in Google news? If not, apply here.
You don’t have a Google news specific sitemap
You news stories aren’t really news - Press releases from other sources or editorial pieces for example
Your news stories don’t comply with Google requirements
Your publication name doesn’t match what’s in Google published and your sitemap

To read some case studies on Google news visit my site.

Redesigning your site without and seo expert on board
Not keeping track of web site changes in your site
Not mapping your old pages
Blocking robots.txt file
Poor title tags and meta

In order to comply with Google Grant accounts you must....

Maintain a 5% CTR
Avoid bidding on brand keywords – unless it’s your brand
Avoid using single word keywords in ad groups
Geo target campaigns
Have a keyword QS no less than 3
Have two site link extensions must be active

To learn more read this article.

The most common mistakes I see are....

Not doing keyword research
Not creating the right content
Not planning out the site structure
Not planning and researching the right blog content
Assuming you don’t need marketing dollars

Use keywords in your titles - Witty and fun titles don’t drive SEO traffic. Use clickbait titles on social media to get more clicks.
Use images, videos and Audi to make your content more engaging
Be sure to block search engines from indexing blog posts that are tagged. Articles that are tag will create a new url for the same article. Wordpress plugins such as SEO toast will allow you to do this.
If a blog post receives a lot of incoming links and social shares, be sure to add a link or two to important interior pages of your site if it’s relevant. To boost SEO rankings.
Create category pages and be sure to make use of breadcrumbs and schema.

In today’s internet world it is easy for one wrong tweet, photos or comment to blemish an otherwise positive personal brand. You don’t need to be famous to be concerned with your brand.

This is something everyone should do. Here are 5 tips to help protect and control your own personal brand ...

Create social media channels in your name. At the very least claim all the major social media networks. Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, youtube, Instagram and so on.
Create a website with your name. Create a free site like wix and add your resume… photos whatever you want people to know. Just don’t share too much information about yourself. Beside to link to and from all of your social media accounts to your personal site for an added boost.
If you can build a site with your your name in the domain name that will be even better.
Author an article or two on websites to get a by line. This is a good way to own more search results.
Create an IFTT recipe and push content from sites that interest you to tour social media accounts. Accounts with content rank better than accounts that are empty.

If you want to read more about why you should protect your personal brand check out this article.

If you need professional help with your personal brand contact me.

A sitemap is a file that lists all of the urls you want search engines to crawl on your website. Below are my five tips...

Most platforms create sitemaps for you such as Shopify and WordPress plugins like yoast.
Submit only pages you want to index. Do not submit broken, blocked or redirected pages.
You should have sitemaps for video, news, video etc. This make it easier for you to identify issues.
Place sitemaps in your robot.txt file. Update your sitemap as often as you update your content add the sitemaps to search console. Google will make you aware of any issues it has with your sitemaps
Submitting urls through a sitemap does not guarantee that the pages will be indexed or rank for keywords within search engines.

Questions? Visit JoeBalestrino.com

Web directories? Are they worth it? Should you pay to be in directories? When should you not list your site in a directory? Will listing your site in directories increase leads and sales? Get everything you need to know in 5 minutes. Tune in now!

Getting traffic, but not leads from organic search?

Dated design - is your site dated? When was the last time you redesigned your site? How does it compare to your competitors?
Missing CTA. Do you have calls to actions on your site? Is it easy for people to contact you on every page?
Keywords. Where are you ranking for your keywords? Are you on page one or page five? Are you tracking their position?
Are you optimized for the right keywords? Do your competitors show up for the terms you’re trying to target? Or does wikipedia pages show up instead?
Is your site indexed? How many of your site pages are in Google? All, most or some? It could be your blocking Google from indexing some of the pages on your site.

Soft 404 is a redirect of a page that was originally a broken (404 ) and is now behaving in a way that the search engines don't approve of.

My five tips are...

Do not redirect all broken pages to the home page
Redirect users to irrelevant pages
Be sure that 404 pages return a status code of 200 and not 404. Use this chrome plugin to easily find the status of a page as well as redirects.
Avoid having broken urls automatically redirect to the home page. It’s ok to have a broken pages on your site.
Can soft 404 page hurt your rankings? In large enough quantities it certainly can.

What me to cover a topic in my next podcast? Contact me with your questions. joe[at]JoeBalestrino.com

In under five minutes I will tell you exactly what you need to know to improve your paid search campaigns. Are you focusing on the wrong metrics? What’s more important to you? CPC or CPA? What should you be worried about? If Your CPC goes up is that bad? Get this tip and for others in less than five minutes.