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If you own a local brick and mortar business, then you may want to consider investing a little time into local SEO (also known as Google Maps SEO).

Sometimes when you do a Google search for a local business, Google will display a map with potential locations that match your query.

For example, here’s a screenshot of what shows up when I search for “frozen yogurt”:

According to a study conducted by Juris Digital, around 31% of searchers clicked on the Google maps result and the remaining clicks went to paid ads and other organic search results. Showing up on Google maps can greatly increase the number of targeted visitors coming to your website.

So how do you show up on Google maps?

Basically, you will have to get links to your website from other websites, citations in online business directories and reviews on review sites. Here are 5 simple steps you can follow so that your business will show up on Google maps when someone searches in Google.

[Read more…] about Local SEO: 5 Steps to Rank Your Local Business on Google Maps

Trust Flow is a metric created by Majestic SEO in 2017 that measures how many authority links a site has, i.e., the more links you have from authority sites, then higher your Trust Flow. Getting links from lower authority sites don’t help your Trust Flow as much.

In this article, I’ll describe what trust flow is, how it compares to domain authority and how you can use this metric to improve your SEO rankings.

[Read more…] about Trust Flow vs Domain Authority: Is Trust Flow a Good Predictor of SEO Success?

When I first started blogging, getting traffic and subscribers was a big challenge. One tactic that worked really well for me early on was doing an expert roundup.

My first expert roundup got shared over 3,000 times in a week and continued to get shared on social media and is currently sitting at over 7,000 social shares. I’ve done several expert roundups and all of them have gotten hundreds or even thousands of shares.

However, I’ve seen a lot of people attempt expert roundups and some fail to get even 50 shares. Why do some roundups do well while others fail?

Expert roundups still work really well if done correctly, even today. But if you’ve done an expert roundup and it didn’t do well, then you probably made one or all of the following mistakes…

[Read more…] about 13 Common Mistakes I See When Doing Expert Roundups (Plus Checklist)

Through the years, several digital marketing blogs have published studies that show that long form content performs better than short content in terms of getting more links and social shares. As a result, many businesses that want to get into content marketing are requiring long content with high minimum word counts per article.

I frequently see job posting stating that their articles need to be a minimum of 2,000 words or some other large number. But if long form content is so effective, then why are major publications still publishing short form content?

For example, Marketing Profs is an industry leader in the marketing niche with over 600,000 followers. Their publishing guidelines insist that articles should be no longer than 1,200 words.

Entrepreneur is another well known publication and they also don’t want articles longer than 1,200 words.

Even Neil Patel recommended keeping articles under 1,500 words in this Quora post.

What’s going on here? Do these successful publications not know that long form content is better with all the research out there? Or is the necessity of long form content just another content marketing myth?

The purpose of this article is to take a closer look at the “data” and examine why many top publications continue to insist on shorter content, why short content might actually be better in some cases and why you may want to consider incorporating short form content into your own content strategy.

[Read more…] about The Long Form Content Myth: Why Top Blogs Still Use Short Form Content