Wonderstruck Event Design Reaches The Front Page of Google

Overview

Katie Aweida, founder of Wonderstruck Event Design has spent the last four years helping hundreds of couples with one of the most memorable, important, and stressful day of their lives, their wedding day. After relying primarily on word of mouth referrals, Katie turned to Logic Inbound to get Wonderstruck Event Design to the first page of Google, driving huge amounts of inbound inquiries from potential clients and taking her business to the next level.

Challenge

After years of throwing money away at paid advertising, nothing had delivered better results than word of mouth referrals, but word of mouth takes a long time to build and Katie was having trouble creating the business she had envisioned when she left her corporate job.

“When I first started out I had to learn everything on my own, I didn’t know marketing strategies and I used my website mainly as a portfolio, I didn’t think it was something that could get me business.”

“I was living off my savings from my previous career and throwing money into things that didn’t work was super stressful. I tried print ads, web ads on online wedding marketplaces, going to open houses and even doing free design work. I wasn’t seeing any meaningful ROI.”

“Funny story, a few years ago I hired a different SEO company that promised everything and delivered nothing. I was so mad when I ended the relationship. ”

“I knew SEO was working for my competition but I didn’t know how to make it work for me. I couldn’t afford to choose the wrong vendor again, but I didn’t know how to pick the right one.”

Solution

“After listening to all the research you guys did into my business, my customers and my competition I thought, finally some guys that know what they’re talking about. I was so happy when I found Logic Inbound because you didn’t try to sell me on things I didn’t need. You just got to work on the backend of my website and got me the results I had hoped for.”

“The key to executing a successful SEO campaign with small business owners is simple”, explains Logic Inbound Marketing Specialist, Tylor Bennett. “It’s all about being good at what you do and communicating honestly.”

“We looked at the search terms potential clients are most likely to search for when looking to hire a wedding planner in the Seattle area, we looked at how many searches these keywords were getting, and then we took a look at her competition to see how hard it was going to be to hit the front page. I sent Katie a video walking her through my research and she decided to move forward.”

Results

“Today a majority of the clients I work with find me online.”

“I’ve been able to hire on another wedding planner.”

“I’ve moved up into a different bracket of clients who are willing to pay more money to work with us, doubling my average deal size.”

“When clients see me on the front page of Google for Seattle Wedding Planner they don’t think, Wonderstruck must have SEO’d the heck out of their website, they think, wow, Wonderstruck is on page one – they must be worth talking to!”

“Getting our website on the front page of Google has helped more than anything.”

About Logic Inbound

Logic Inbound is responsible for driving the online marketing presence of hundreds of small and medium sized businesses around the United States. We help our clients increase revenue by helping them hit the front page of Google and optimize their website to convert more of their visitors into paid customers. 

If you are a small or medium sized business and know reaching the front page of Google will impact your business? Fill out our customer discovery form to receive a free SEO analysis of your website, customers and competition.

Are you a web designer, IT consultant, managed service provider or web host? Find out how partnering with Logic Inbound can significantly increase the value of each of your client relationships.

About Wonderstruck Event Design

Guided by a strong passion for design and a love for people, Wonderstruck Event Design endeavors to make each event or design we touch beautiful, original, stress free, unforgettable, and most importantly – FUN. Our entire purpose is to make our clients look and feel amazing – and that’s exactly what we love to do. We strive to exceed expectations, and always practice professionalism. We take care of all the details so you can enjoy your life before, during, and after your special event. By being fully aware of your vision, listening to your ideas, and employing a rigorous design documentation and communication process, we create events and designs that will leave clients and their guests Wonderstruck.

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Wonderstruck Event Design Reaches The Front Page of Google

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“Reviews from the Web” — Google now shows reviews from facebook and other websites in search results

When searching Google have you ever noticed a box with information show up in the results? That’s called a Knowledge Panel, and it contains all kinds of useful information.

Google added a new section to this panel called “Reviews from the web” last week. That makes it even easier for users to find relevant reviews from multiple sources.

Ronnie Falcon a product manager at Google explains “Reviews from the web” on Google’s webmaster blog:

Google’s official explanation of the new feature.

Available globally on mobile and desktop, Reviews from the web brings aggregated user ratings of up to three review sites to Knowledge Panels for local places across many verticals including shops, restaurants, parks and more.

Read entire article here…

The Google article does a good job explaining what the new feature is, but doesn’t go into specifics. How does Google determine which review sites to display to the user?

We don’t know much yet, but according to Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land. Google has stated that the order of reviews is determined by relevance.

Order of “Reviews of the web” determined by relevance.

The order will be determined by “relevance” Google told me. Reviews from the web will appear across numerous local verticals, according to Google.

Read entire article here…

Even though we don’t know for sure how review sites are chosen. We’re assuming they use an algorithm like the one used for normal search engine results.

The panels, for the most part, remain the same appearance wise. The only difference being the “Reviews of the web” section. We outlined the new section in the image below.

google reviews from the web example car dealership

Of course the mobile version has some minor differences, but is mostly the same.

google reviews from the web mobile example

Image courtesy of Google

As you can see, this is prime real estate for third party review websites. If you manage to become one of the three shown it would surely mean a boost in organic visits.

Want your website to be eligible for this prime real estate? You need to start by using review snippet markup on your site, and be following the review snippet guidelines. It’s also recommended you use local business markup to help Google match reviews.

Google pushed a similar update last month called “Critic reviews.”

“Critic reviews” adds snippets of, well, critic reviews to the panel. This update was met with criticism by review giants like Yelp, and Tripadvisor.

The CEO of Yelp, Jeremy Stoppelman Tweeted:

Google monopolist not satisfied with above the fold they’ve now claimed “page 2” cc @kaufer #byeorganic pic.twitter.com/qGXmt2Z5K5

— Jeremy Stoppelman (@jeremys) August 5, 2016

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Jeremy Stoppelman believes Google is using these updates to push down competitors review websites. In favor for its own review website “Zagat.”

From our understanding websites like Yelp were not specifically excluded from “Critic reviews.” They just didn’t have the required markup mentioned earlier. Any review website can ask for inclusion as long as they follow the markup and guideline rules.

That pretty much covers Google’s newest Knowledge Panel update. Keep your eyes open, Google may have something else in the works.

Follow Logic Inbound on Twitter to stay up to date with all major Google changes, we’ll be writing about more soon.

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featured image credit: http://searchengineland.com/

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Native Ads are Taking Over, and Every Publisher Wants More

While traditional newspapers are becoming a dying breed, online news publications are growing their revenue quickly thanks to native advertising. Over the last few years, startup companies like Taboola and Outbrain grew rapidly with the help of large publishers like CNN, Fox News and other household names.

Now that the industry has matured, these same publishers are taking stronger control of their native inventory in order to monetize it even better. They want to grab a larger percentage of the media sold on their websites, while also deploying native ads in more customized formats that these ‘established’ native networks don’t support.

CNN and Sharethrough recently formed a partnership to expand native ads on all of CNN’s various properties. James Robinson explains on the sharethrough blog.

CNN International Commercial Takes Digital Advertising To The Next Level With New Sharethrough Partnership

New ad formats on CNN Digital platforms include instant play native video, graphic text over video, infographics, long-form video, articles and galleries to increase engagement across all digital platforms, focused on mobile. All native content is labelled as “Sponsor content” and includes clear disclosures to ensure transparency with the user.

Read more here…

Many other publishers are also taking steps to better control their native inventory. The New York Times is taking it even further. Recently the NY Times published a 360 degree native video ad for GE. They’re going places that traditional native ad networks simply don’t support. In fact, they even went as far as to acquire a marketing agency to bolster their native and VR efforts. Sara Guaglione wrote an article on MediaPost where explains how The New York Times intends to grow their native ads offerings.

New York Times Acquires ‘Fake Love,’ Ups Native Ad Services

Sebastian Tomich, senior vice president of advertising and innovation, stated that NYTCO has previously worked with Fake Love and it was “impressed with their experiential and creative skills.” The two companies partnered on a VR video ad to promote the Weinstein Company movie “Carol: Dearest…”. Tomich said the company will “pair [Fake Love’s] capabilities with our ad products on The Times with T Brand Studio as we expand into producing campaigns off of The Times and into the fast-growing worlds of VR and AR.”

Click Here to Read the full details

Traditional news channels and newspapers are not the only veterans jumping on native advertising. In the last 2 years, Yahoo grew their own native advertising platform named “Gemini”. Keep in mind that although Yahoo still provides search engine advertising services, Yahoo actually gets more engagement in their news service.

Yahoo actually one of the largest and most popular online publications in the United States. Alexa.com ranks Yahoo.com as the 5 biggest website in the USA — above any news website in America. Large websites like Yahoo attract lots of page views, and therefore offer many opportunities to monetize with native advertising. Those page views go to news articles covering every popular topic that you would see on any news website. With that in mind, Gemini makes perfect sense when considered with this context.

To see the impact of Gemini on Yahoo’s otherwise failing organization, you only need to look at the numbers. Recently, Yahoo published an infographic on their tumblr page showing the rapid growth of their native ad service.

The State of Native Advertising

With Yahoo’s 1B+ monthly visitors and an average of 375B+ monthly native ad requests, we have a ton of insight on the state of native advertising. Looking at our first half of 2016, the global native ad data from third-party publishers across web and app properties speaks for itself. Our partners benefit from this insight to increase ROI and so can you!
click to read the full PDF infographic

Clearly native advertising is a mature and highly valuable ad format. CNN, The New York Times, Yahoo, and many other publishers are all trying to grab their piece of this very lucrative advertising market.

With this new and expanding ad inventory, advertisers could expect advertising prices for native to flat line or even fall. However, due to the demand for native outpacing the available supply of quality ad space you should expect native to only get more pricey over time.

Pay attention to the new and up coming trends. If you’re an agile agency, then you should leverage the newest formats while prices are low. Large traditional advertisers tend to level the market and inflate ad rates with their branding plays. Native is still under valued, but that might not last very long.

Image Credit: Yahoo Tumblr

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Native Ads are Taking Over, and Every Publisher Wants More

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Why Did Facebook Start a War on Ad Blockers?

Facebook recently implemented changes to circumvent how ad blockers hide advertising on facebook.com. This change is specific to the desktop version of Facebook ads. They’ve joined the ‘cat and mouse’ game of ad blocker vs publisher. Publications like the New York times are well known for going to great lengths to try and make sure everyone sees their ads.

Why is this only coming now, and how is that relevant to the future of Facebook? Keep in mind, Facebook now earns the vast majority of it’s ad revenue from mobile devices.

Barbara Ortutay for the Associated Press covers the full story in her article aggregated to ATT.net

Facebook Hates Ad Blockers So Much It Now Blocks Them

In the most recent quarter , Facebook made $6.24 billion in advertising revenue, an increase of 63 percent from a year earlier. Mobile advertising (which is not affected by the changes) accounted for 84 percent of this.
Read more here…

With that in mind, it’s obvious that looking at the percentages is misleading. To put it into dollars and cents: 80% of $6 billion is $4.8 billion and 20% is $1.2 billion.

Now, increasing that 1.2 billion by even 1 percent means 12 million dollars per year. However, it’s easy to predict that the projected ‘boost’ to yearly revenue is actually much more than 12 million dollars.

AdWeek recently reported on the statistics surrounding desktop ad blocker usage. Lauren Johnson discusses a study by IAB which revealed some key facts.

IAB Study Says 26% of Desktop Users Turn On Ad Blockers Report digs into why people tune out digital promos

According to a new IAB report, 26 percent of desktop users and 15 percent of mobile consumers use blockers to remove ads from publishers’ websites. Roughly 32 percent of ad blockers across both groups are males between 18 and 34, and 22 percent are women of the same age.

IAB adblock statistics

Click Here to Read the full details

With that in mind, it’s easy to understand why any Facebook executive could conclude that 26% of desktop users are essentially ‘freeloading’ on Facebook.

Take the figure I mentioned earlier, 1.2 billion dollars. That represents about 3 of the 4 pieces of the desktop ad revenue ‘pie’. Now if you had all 4 pieces of the pie, what would their revenue be, all else equal?

400 million dollars is the ‘value’ at stake in Facebook’s “ad block war”.

Adam Levy explains, on The Motley Fool, why this “tiny” fraction is so important to Facebook.

Facebook’s Block on Ad Blockers Is Important for Investors

Not only do desktop ad impressions typically convert better than similar ads on mobile, thus costing more, but Facebook also benefits from the addition of right-hand column ads on desktop. It’s those right-hand column ads that drive down average ad prices on desktop compared with mobile, but they’re incremental to Facebook’s regular news-feed ads. That makes a minute spent on Facebook’s desktop site more valuable than a minute spent on its mobile app.

That’s assuming Facebook’s visitors aren’t using ad blockers.

click to read full article

Put all the pieces together, and now you’ll see what this really means: Facebook is desperately fighting for their most valuable audience.

The past few years have brought Facebook to a great peak thanks to the growth of mobile devices. Millions of new people are signing up for Facebook for the first time ever thanks to their mobile phone.

At the same time, advertising on Facebook is more sophisticated than ever. Digital experts like Gary Vaynerchuck are correctly proclaiming Facebook Ads as the best value in advertising right now.

However, after mobile device adoption plateaus, Facebook won’t be able to ride that growth any further. It’s clear they see it coming because they know their data better than anyone else.

When they’re relying on desperate moves to boost their quarterly earnings for shareholders, that’s a clear sign that the future isn’t bright for Facebook. Instead of innovating and giving people reasons to spend more time on their platform, and bring back their friends to Facebook (thus viewing more ads) they’re relying on the same moves that newspapers have resorted to in order to fund their existence online.

Facebook is following, they’re not leading any more.

Image Credit: Data from IAB, Published on AdWeek

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How to Make Impressive Blog Thumbnails in 2 Minutes

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How to Make Beautiful Blog Thumbnails Easily in Less Than 2 Minutes

Images are an effective way to generate interest in your content marketing efforts. Thumbnails are the first thing that someone sees when they’re scrolling through their twitter or their facebook feed. That’s why it’s critical to spend just 1 or 2 minutes to create a simple but attractive thumbnail image for your blog posts.

That’s not just hand-wavy speculation by the way, it’s real science. Jeff Bullas showed some statistics about that in his blog post on May 28th 2012.

6 Powerful Reasons Why you Should include Images in your Marketing

• Articles with images get 94% more total views
• Including a Photo and a video in a press release increases views by over 45%
• 60% of consumers are more likely to consider or contact a business when an image shows up in local search results
• In an ecommerce site, 67% of consumers say the quality of a product image is “very important” in selecting and purchasing a product
• In an online store, customers think that the quality of a products image is more important than product-specific information (63%), a long description (54%) and ratings and reviews (53%)
• Engagement rate on Facebook for photos averages 0.37% where text only is 0.27% (this translates to a 37% higher level of engagement for photos over text)
• read the full list…

Clearly it’s important and valuable to add images to your blog posts. But if you’re really trying to scale your content marketing, how can you constantly produce high quality images at the same time?

In this short tutorial video, Hayk explains how to make impressive thumbnails in just under two minutes.

How to Make Impressive Blog Thumbnails in Less Than 2 Minutes

6 Steps To Make Quick Blog Thumbnails

Blog thumbnails are the first impression you make as readers pour into your site. It is essential to put your best foot forward, and it has, to begin with, a good understanding of these thumbnails and how to create them.

Let’s go through the steps:

1) Type “pablo.buffer.com” into the address bar.
2) Sift through the images (on left). Pick an image and double click to edit text.
3) Insert text as desired with the font you prefer. Tweak the sizing and placement.
4) You can add logos and other details as required.
5) Once happy with the thumbnail, click “Share and Download” on the side. This will give you a set of options as to where you can save the file. You will click “Download” and it should save on your computer.
6) That’s all. You will now have a thumbnail that can be uploaded as you wish.

These are the primary steps of creating quick blog thumbnails. They should take less than two minutes as long as you have a vision in mind of what is required. Some can do it even faster!

How To Sign Up For Buffer Account

All you need in order to do this yourself is a free tool called Pablo from Buffer. Just click that link to go to their website.

Go to “Get Started With Buffer” At the top right-hand corner. You will follow all of the instructions given on this page and fill out everything.

This should give you access to all of the features this excellent thumbnail tool has to offer. All you do after you’re logged in is just go to pablo.buffer.com to access the graphics tool.

Now that you’ve watched the video and signed up for buffer, you’re well on your way to beautiful blog thumbnails every time.

Benefits Of Good Blog Thumbnails

What are the advantages of good blog thumbnails? Why should you spend time doing this when you could leave it as is and hope for the best?

The first thing is the impression you make. An excellent blog thumbnail is going to show a sense of professionalism and attention to detail. Sub-consciously, readers are attracted to these thumbnails.

Want a good example of how that is the case? Go to YouTube and look at videos with professional thumbnails and those wish wing it. Which one is better? It is always the professional one.

Look at these thumbnails. I just searched “content marketing” on youtube and think about which video you would watch.

content marketing thumbnails searching “content marketing” on YouTube

Making nice thumbnails is very quick, so you are not wasting a lot of time. It is beneficial because it increases the volume of conversions (i.e. readers coming in) and that is what matters.

Make your blog thumbnails and notice how it bolsters your results in seconds.

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How to Make Beautiful Blog Thumbnails Easily in Less Than 2 Minutes

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Evergreen Topics to Write About – Guide to find them for ANY Industry

Content marketing has taken the world by storm. In order to constantly publish valuable content that will bring more people to your website you need to know what to write about.

It’s more than just having a general idea and a catchy title. You need to know exactly what people are searching for in order to rank your content more quickly on Google.

Ahrefs.com is a great tool for quickly finding new evergreen topics to write about. It’s a paid tool, but it’s well worth it for any content marketing or SEO company.

Evergreen Content Ideas

Hayk from Logic Inbound shows how you can find lots of quality evergreen content ideas in only a few minutes.

Evergreen Keywords

To quickly filter out your list and only narrow down to informational evergreen keywords, there are a few terms you can search with:

• how
• what
• when
• where
• why
• who
• guide
• tips
• tutorial

You’ll build your own list over time, as you do more and more of this kind of research

Evergreen Writing Guide

This tutorial is just a quick guide on finding topics to write about. You should also learn about how to actually rank the content on Google. What kind of links should you have to your articles? We’ll cover links for content in a future article.

If your website is already very powerful, then the internal links within your site will be enough to get it indexed on Google. At that point you might already rank for the exact title of your post.

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Evergreen Topics to Write About – Guide to find them for ANY Industry

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How to Quickly find Evergreen Topics to Write About for SEO

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SEO Penalty Recovery Service by Logic Inbound

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Geofencing Guide: The Wave is Coming — How to Ride it to Success

Geofencing advertising is booming in recent years thanks to improving technology. Mobile phones have much more accurate tracking hardware than they used to just a few years ago.

In the distant past, advertisers on television or radio would target large areas like Counties or DMAs.In recent decades, ZIP code targeting and city based targeting became more common.

With today’s technology it is possible to advertise to people within a 10 meter radius.

For example, in the past you might advertise in a specific city, on a radio station popular among people over 50, now you can advertise to specific retirement homes, and funnel your advertising spend directly to your target demographic.

It helps to provide some context and explain just how geofencing works. If you understand it already, feel free to skip past this video. Ryan M. explains the technology that poweres today’s geofencing ads.

What is a Geo-Fence?

If you were scratching your head after watching that video, you’re not alone. Most marketers are still playing ‘catch up’ to the times. David Card reports on this in Street Fight Magazine:

Survey Report: Some National-to-Local Marketers Still Need Convincing on Digital Effectiveness

To help suppliers of hyperlocal marketing technologies and services better meet the needs of these national-to-local marketers, Street Fight surveyed over 200 managers and decision makers at big companies in retail, financial services, and other industries. We asked them about spending patterns, perceived effectiveness, pain points, etc., around their local marketing and advertising efforts. The full report is available for download here.

Nearly half of them said they spend $1 in $3 of their digital dollars on local marketing, and 40% of them expect that mix to increase. Their favorite technologies targeted for growth this year include social media and mobile marketing. Many expressed interest in mobile push offerings (41%) and real-time location data (32%). Read full article…

It’s clear that many marketers want to take advantage of all the new advertising technology surrounding geo targeting.
The big challenge is gaining experience and education to conduct geofencing campaigns effectively.

Sarah Din of Placecast covers the most important key points in using location based mobile advertising. These kinds of examples will drive home the point that geofencing is a completely new way to advertise better.

Using Location Data for Mobile Advertising

…Proximity targeting is another valuable use case for location data. Advertisers can geofence their retail locations and deliver ads to people nearby. Geofence sizes can be adjusted, depending on how urban/suburban/rural an area is, or advertisers can use polygons.

Additionally, advertisers can use location data for “conquesting,” meaning they geofence competitors’ stores and deliver ads with promotions or nearby locations to draw users away from competitors, and towards them. And, advertisers can geofence complimentary locations where their users are found and serve ads to them. For example, Nike could serve ads around sports fields, sports bars, or to a stadium during a specific sporting event. Read the full article here…

Given recent advances in technology, the power of geofencing marketing is growing every year. When most forms of advertising are newly invented or early in their development, they tend to be the cheapest and the best opportunities.

Early adopters who properly leverage the unique ability of hyperlocal advertising will get the most of this “gold rush”. Expect cost per click bids to rise quickly after digital advertisers get savvy to geofencing. Consider subscribing to our blog; soon we will cover: how to run your own geofencing ads.

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Geofencing Guide — The Wave is Coming — How to Ride it to Success

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