Not long ago I visited Tahoe, and while I was there I thought to myself “hey, Tahoe is not far from Folsom, maybe I should try to market myself here more.” There are a lot of businesses in Tahoe and not a lot of marketing (a few searches yielded some pretty poor websites) and so I thought it would be worthwhile to create a page and maybe start a conversation with some Tahoe businesses. So…
read moreEvery year it seems as though the terminology for online marketing changes. It was SEO, then SEM, then content marketing, and now inbound marketing. Every time the terminology changes, businesses look for experts to help them with their online marketing needs, and the new marketer does whatever it is they do to help your business grow. What’s interesting though is that, in reality, the terminology still refers to the same thing – helping your website…
read moreIn early September, Google implemented their biggest algorithm overhaul in more than 10 years with Hummingbird and no one knew about it for nearly 30 days. Why? What was so subtle about Hummingbird that we couldn’t even tell it was happening? Unlike Panda and Penguin which acted as corrections to existing algorithm data, Hummingbird was a rebuild of the system. They took the engine apart, replaced important components and put it all back together. In…
read moreWe started work with a new client in July who had been getting about 80% of his traffic from paid sources like Google AdWords for more than two years. They were doing well – their site had grown substantially and they were pulling a solid profit month after month – but it cost them a pretty penny to do so, and the second they stopped spending on AdWords, their traffic would dry up. If they…
read moreWhen evaluating a client’s site for the first time, there are a few things I’ve trained myself to look for – those high return actions that can have the biggest impact in the shortest amount of time and with the smallest investment. Here are five of those things and how we can take advantage of them quickly to get results for your site. Unique Content – Step one is to ensure that the site has…
read moreLast month, Google released a completely revamped algorithm, replacing the existing one for the first time in more than 10 years. That’s a big deal. Even Panda and Penguin, which affected millions of sites, were revisions not complete overhauls. So this new release – dubbed Hummingbird by Google – is huge. But it’s not quite the sledgehammer that Panda and Penguin were. In fact, most of us didn’t realize it had been released until Google…
read moreQuick question – how did you find this page? You probably searched for something like “window cleaner marketing” or “SEO services window cleaner” in Google. And this post showed up, if not first, near the top and you clicked on it, because it matched almost exactly what you were looking for, right? Content marketing and SEO, when done properly create exactly this kind of channel between a question and an answer. When you ask a…
read moreUnderstand What These Numbers Mean (photo by IvanWalsh.com) Google Analytics is an immensely powerful tool. It allows you to see almost exactly who is visiting your website, how they got there, what they are looking at when they are there, and what triggers certain actions – from signing up for an email list to buying your product. But Google, as they are wont to do, doesn’t offer a lot of assistance in managing their most…
read moreGreat Leap Studios handles high volumes of SEO work. But we consider ourselves a “content marketing” company. For those that have only recently heard about search engine optimization, this can be confusing. So we thought we’d develop this handy little explanation about the difference between content marketing and SEO. People like buzzwords, so for the past several years, the term “SEO” has been used to describe the methodologies involved in improving website search engine ranks.…
read moreNot long ago we had a post on the idea of marketing a city. Specifically the city of Merced, which has a great deal of promise as a potentially enjoyable city in which to live, but is struggling as a result of its location and the housing crisis. But perhaps Merced’s biggest problem is that it has developed a fairly terrible reputation despite otherwise not being that bad a place to live or work, and…
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