The modern internet can be a strange place, and its inner workings have gotten pretty complicated. From a business perspective, the sun now rises and sets on search engines. As lead-seeking businesses have moved from the phone book to Google and friends, a new field has proven itself essential to effective online marketing: search engine optimization (SEO).

If you want your business to thrive in the SEO era, you should understand how these new technologies work, and how recent changes in search engine dynamics affect your visibility. At TalkLocal, buying “Snow-Removal” from Google Adwords actually jump-started our business in a matter of hours and won us our first slew of consumers and business clients during a 2011 snowstorm. In fact, the fact that you’re reading these words right now is all thanks to SEO magic. So, here’s a short primer to teach you the tricks of the trade.

The Page-Crawling Robot Herd

Yes, that’s a real thing. Search engines index the internet by sending autonomous programs (sometimes called “spiders,” “crawlers,” or just “bots”) across the web to collect information. These bots crawl from page to page through links, storing what they see in databases that will one day become search results. If your site has plenty of healthy links, the bots will notice it more and your rank among search results will go up.

It’s important to remember that bots can’t do everything that people can. They can’t understand rich content (images, videos, Flash, etc.) and don’t know how to fill out forms (even one as simple as a search bar). Thus, information hidden within any of these elements is hidden from a search engine.

Keywords

The bots play an important part in search engines, but so do the things that people actually search for. Using keywords taken from high-traffic queries (entertainingly, one of the highest is “ why my google not working ”) can boost your page ranking and land more search engine users on your website.

It’s also important to keep the keywords you use relevant to your content. Keyword stuffing, or nonsensically filling a page with random high-value keywords to attract traffic, can be detected by bots, and may result in a penalty to your search result ranking.

Penguin 3.0

In October of 2014, Google installed an update to its Penguin filter, an anti-spam measure. This update makes it more important for you or your webmaster to get rid of “bad links” leading back to your site, such as those from spam sources and other sites of questionable authority.

The update discounts the ranking credit earned from such links. Thus, if spammers have been linking to your site, even without your knowledge or consent, your search results rank may have taken a big hit – and that why your google not working.

All of this may sound like a lot to keep track of, but the key to SEO success as a small business is just good website maintenance. Make sure your site has a simple layout with quality content, beware of low-authority link sources, and don’t try to spam or cheat the search engine system. Follow these basic guidelines and you’ll be on your way to a high rank – and the high returns that come with it.

By Manpreet Singh

One of the hardest things to figure out as a small business owner is how to improve work performance in your office. Whether you have a 15 or 40 person office, it can be hard to get everyone to perform at maximum efficiency. At TalkLocal, we understand how serious this problem can be, especially for an up-and-coming business. Here are some tips that helped us improve work performance in our office.

Cut down on miscommunication

The lifeline of a productive office is communication. The problem is major breakdowns have a potential to occur between workers over issues such as roles, tasks, positions, and responsibilities. If someone doesn’t know what their job is or how to complete it, they’re not going to be productive. If you don’t want to have an office full of people blankly staring at a screen, you need to define roles and establish a chain of command. Make sure everyone knows who to report to, who they can go to if they have questions about a task, etc.

It’s a good idea for all employees to have an idea of what everyone’s job or department entails in the office so they can go to someone if they need help in that given area. If everyone is aware of what’s going on in the office as far as the location of resources, who their boss is, or what department handles what, you’ll find your employees will work at a much more productive pace than an office plagued with miscommunication. Without an idea of how important a given task is, the employee will have no idea how to balance his workload and will become less efficient in how quickly he can complete his tasks.

Delegate effectively

Another thing that can slow down productivity in the office is an ineffective delegation of tasks. The usual model of work delegation involves the manager or department head assigning tasks to those below them within their department. Problems can arise when you assign tasks to a person who lacks the skills to complete it, or whose skills would be better used at completing another task. Don’t give the marketing guy the task of creating the graphic for the holiday newsletter. Another problem which can occur in the delegation process is failing to communicate the priority level of the task.

Challenge your employees

Monotony can cause any employee to become bored with his job; this leads to large amounts of unproductivity. The tasks that used to get your employees full attention begin to get less and less of it because they become easy and almost second nature for them to complete. The solution to this is to constantly challenge your employees. If you see them finishing their tasks at a quicker pace or just sitting around idly, give them a new responsibility or assign them to complete a task you need done.

What keeps people focused on the job is the challenge it gives them; the success they will feel when they complete a new task; the satisfaction of completing a hard day’s work. If you keep challenging your employees they will stay focused, remain productive, and grow into more valuable assets to your business.

At TalkLocal, we know the importance of keeping our employees productive. We strive to have 5-star office communication, management that understands appropriate delegation of tasks, and employees who are constantly challenged with new responsibilities.

Millions of people across America are putting away their winter coats and unpacking their shorts and T-shirts. For small business owners, the coming of summer isn’t just a moral pick-me-up; it presents an opportunity to cash in on the change of season with contextual marketing. Below are four small business-friendly summer promotion ideas that could give your business a seasonal boost.

Outdoor Signage

One cheap and easy way to increase your visibility in the summer is to take advantage of increased pedestrian activity with outdoor signs advertising your business. Make sure your signage is well-placed (near a high-traffic area) and attention-grabbing (with a pleasing design or a short joke). Even a chalkboard on the sidewalk can prove lucrative to your business while also adding a homey, inviting aesthetic.

Giveaways

For a small business owner, “giveaway” is a misnomer. The money you spend hosting one is more of a marketing investment. Find vacation-friendly luxury products, such as a pair of designer sunglasses or a tablet, and sell tickets – or just exchange them for “likes” on social media. The buzz and customers you’ll attract will easily pay for the cost of the prizes.

Branded Summer Promotional Items

If you can put your logo on something cheap and useful during the summer months to sell or distribute, you can strengthen your brand and promote customer loyalty. Good examples of promotional knick-knacks for summer include hats, towels, and bumper stickers.

“Staycation” Campaign

This one can work with any of the above three strategies, or any other marketing medium. Amid the economic turbulence of the past decade, taking an inexpensive summer pseudo-vacation in one’s own town has become extremely popular. Small businesses can take advantage by running seasonal specials or advertising to target “vacationers” who live nearby.

Summer is sometimes associated with a slump for small business sales, but it doesn’t have to be. With some seasonally smart marketing, you can capitalize on people’s summer consumer habits, and thus turn the rising temperatures into rising profits for your business.

We’ve all done it before: you click on a page, stare at a loading screen for a few seconds, get impatient, and then leave. In business website design, speed is king, and reducing your loading time is the key to boosting your conversion rate. Here’s a crash course in the basics of website speed optimization, listed for your convenience in order of complexity.

Easy Solutions

To optimize your website’s loading speed, you need a clear picture of the things that take up loading time. Fortunately, you don’t need a computer science degree to evaluate what needs fixing; this thing does nicely.

Another simple improvement suggested by business website experts is to turn off any plugins you aren’t using. That doesn’t mean all of your plugins; as we’ll see later, some can boost your loading speed. If you don’t handle the technical side of your website, ask your webmaster about trimming the fat.

Images take up a substantial chunk of loading time. Bigger = takes longer to load, so use the smallest images that fit the aesthetic of your site. Also, take advantage of the different kinds of image files. Low-detail images load faster as a .gif, while a slower-loading .jpeg or .png is better for more visually complex displays.

Intermediate Solutions

One plugin you do want to use is one that caches your webpages. Unless you make significant updates to your site several times a day, you can save a lot of loading time by showing visitors cached (quickly saved) versions of your pages rather than making their devices load them from scratch every time.

Redirects eat up loading time. While they’re useful for making changes while conserving search engine ranking, you must gauge whether doing so is worth the extra milliseconds that could bounce some traffic away.

Advanced Solutions

In many cases, HTTP requests take up the lion’s share of loading seconds. Compressing your data (i.e. storing more data in fewer files that must be requested) is a good move; if you use a web host you may need to talk to them about implementing this fix.

One mistake that slows down loading is putting JavaScript and CSS code right in your HTML document. To reduce file size, take full advantage of caching, and generally speed up your loading, save them externally.

It’s amazing how much of a difference a couple of seconds can make for your business site. Amazon found that every tenth of a second eliminated from loading time boosted their revenue by 1%.  From common-sense fixes to more sophisticated web developer hacks, hopefully a few of these ideas will subtract from your business site’s loading time— and add to your bottom line.

By Manpreet Singh

Integrity is crucial to a successful business, and nowadays too many companies show little integrity in their marketing approach. From lost revenue to legal action, there are a multitude of reasons why dishonest marketing isn’t worth its hidden costs and risks. Below are four easy ways to ensure that your sales approach stays truthful.

Say/Don’t Say Sheets

The simplest way to promote sales ethics is to print something out about it. At TalkLocal, we ensure our sales team’s honesty by issuing them lists of possibly misleading statements they shouldn’t use, and more clearly-worded alternatives that won’t misinform customers. For example, our sheets warn against saying “We have so many requests in this area for your business to serve!” and instead suggest saying “We are expanding in your area and getting more requests.”

Oversight

Employee monitoring is a surefire way to catch marketing dishonesty early, but too much of it can create bitterness and distrust. On a surveillance scale from 1 to the NSA, your goal is no more than a 5. If recording calls is too heavy-handed (or expensive) for your sales team, keeping a supervisor within earshot generally suffices; we’ve implemented this easy solution without any problems.

Meetings

Your salespeople are more likely to stick to the truth if you talk to them about it. Spending a few minutes of a meeting discussing sales ethics can make a real difference in preventing deceptive practices. What’s more, promoting a culture of morality in your business can boost employee pride and, therefore, performance.There’s a one-letter difference between “morale” and “moral.”

Accepting the Negatives

No matter your industry, your customers value honesty; they can also usually tell when they’re being given a run-around. Encouraging your salespeople not to verbally dodge the downsides of your business or market builds trust with those customers. If done right, it can also keep the conversation going. As I drafted this article, I overheard one of our team members commiserating with a customer about the weak demand for landscapers during DC’s snowy winter. Within a few seconds, he’d shifted the conversation to the customer’s side job as a home contractor. He ended up making the sale.

Fighting dishonesty in your marketing and sales process doesn’t have to be difficult. A few simple safeguards can keep your approach truthful while providing your business with side benefits like happier employees and better quality control. Do for your business what you do in life – just keep it real.