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Source: Gartner’s 2019-2020 CMO Spend Survey

Small ranking changes consistently happen when your re-run ranking reports in competitive industries.

like many of the Google My Business features, we found that the services menu has no impact on ranking.  Wondering which fields do have an impact?  See our articles on categories, the business name, reviews, & the website field.

It’s not just about content volume or hyper-optimized content. It’s also about what people do when they land on that content and if you want them to come back and interact with it, you need to differentiate.

For agencies, this is not just about recruiting and attracting T-shaped individuals covering a range of related disciplines, but building processes and assets that support collaboration between them. For individuals and in-house folks without a lot of internal support, it's about cultivating a network of specialists you can turn to when a project fits.

if brand interest goes up organic will probably get credit for more conversions, and we will look good. If it goes down we will look bad. If we’re not paying attention, if we’re not involved in brand activity, these changes will be out of our control and we’ll be blind to the causes.

There are also some stories filtering through the SEO industry, by way of pub chats, DMs and private groups, of people influencing rankings by driving up specific branded searches. The theory could be summed up with this example;Google already knows lego.com is a good result for the search “Lego toys”Google’s algorithms start to relate the concept “Lego” closely to the concept “toys”Because the concepts are closely related Google starts to believe that lego.com is also a good result for the broader “toys” search.

We have a couple of ways to track overall brand performance, you can use these to help benchmark efforts over time.Direct traffic to the homepage

the company says this is not an enhanced version of Google support – although many may be tempted to see it that way. Support, Google says, is intended for troubleshooting around discrete problems, such as reinstatement or merger of duplicate listings.

The program cannot be used for real-time GMB verification.

anywhere from between 60% to 70% of SMBs don’t work with marketing agencies and are trying to manage digital marketing in house.

In 2019 alone, 60% of all CMS applications were found to be out of date at the point of infection, making outdated components and core CMS files the leading causes of today’s website hacks.

Each and every recommendation will not be applicable to every server; therefore the system administrator should exercise their own judgment in conjunction with their department's own requirements and business needs. Deviations from the recommended guidelines should be documented

if a department is required to comply with PCI (Payment Card Industry) regulations, the specific recommendation has been labeled with "PCI/DSS"

All local and domain accounts with privileges above normal user level should have a minimum 15 character passphrase and must be changed at least once every quarter.

think and possibly even test what page on your website to link your Google My Business listing to. Often people link to the homepage, which is fine. But we have also found with multi-location businesses sometimes it is better to link to a location page.

If you're a business that has lots of different listings — like you have departments or you have practitioner listings — you also want to try and make sure that you link those to different pages on your site, to kind of maximize your exposure and make sure that you're just not trying to rank all the listings for the same thing, because that won't happen. They'll just get filtered. So that is a section that I would definitely suggest doing some testing on and see what works best for you and your industry.

The more deeply you understand your personas and the more detailed your insights, the more comprehensive and accurate your list of seed keywords will be.” All of your target keywords in the research process stem from these personas.

basic persona questions you need to answer include what their industry is, how big their department within their company is and what tools they need to do their jobs.

You can also group keywords by theme (as opposed to persona) and sum up how much search volume you’re targeting for each theme.

List posts and how-to posts are the two “most evergreen” content formats.

Posts that include “2020” or “2021” in their title tend to be highly evergreen. This shows that content with recent information is more likely to receive shares.

Content types with the highest proportion of evergreen content include “best of” lists, guides, data-driven research and industry reports.