Learning from Search Tools - Monthly Ticket - October 2024
Hello,
The rules for good website SEO evolve with technology and the algorithms of search tools. It’s normal to understand how these research tools work to satisfy your requests and adjust.
The month of October offers a summary of the web search tools and referencing techniques to adapt our websites. To understand search tools, and to use them better.
We studied the most popular and used tool: Google. This will ensure our site is up to date for the holiday season and end-of-year opportunities.
Also, the webmaster column, Office News, presents the study of the virtual sales path and tips for entertaining the visitor enthusiasm.
Of course, the voting for the musical themes of the 2025 Monthlies continues with the opening of the ballots for Q2!
MusicScore: in honour of the colour of the branding of this early autumn edition, here for our reading a classic by Tom Jones - Little Green Apples.
Get the complete list of Project 12 musical topics on the YouTube channel - The Fruit List Score.
Understanding how search tools work is important to attract visitors on any internet site. Let’s learn about it to program our web pages efficiently.
Back to School Vote! 2025 #MusicScores
Yes! Vote for your favoured music score of every 2025 edition of the Monthly Ticket!
Until the end of October, choose your favourite song for the first quarter!
April - May - June
Yes, there is music in the 2025 Media Kit presentation. We can also vote for the featured song of the month! Votes for the first quarter are already open!
Listen to the songs and vote in the Subscription Page!
Enjoy the #musicSpirit!
A Search tool found me!
A fact story about search tools 2016-2024
It was in 2016 I released my first professional website. My portfolio on a Squarespace web platform. I had worked in web publishing for a long time and knew what to do to get a website seen. No problem ! 8,000 visitors in the first three months with a $50 promotion on Facebook and a muted music video of my compositions.
The mistake! I was not at all ready for such attention and communication to write, production to carry and above all, to have the time to think about good and bad deals and opportunities.
Yes, the tool had found me and promoted me much more than I thought. I had to close my beautiful website and disappear for a few months, virtually, while I fixed the situation. Now I learned to start it slower before the big announcement. We announce and promote when the administration and regular bases of the service is operating, tested with guarantee, not before Jeff!
SEO according to standards
The tool: Google. However, I was not richer than anyone else. I did not have a professional reputation for posting on social media and an exceptional promotional campaign. I only created a website and program with attention all the technical SEO details on the website. I didn't share any blog posts or used backlink from tierce services, used references from so-called popular blogs to multiply my content for nothing, or send out mass communications to the media.
I only produced a website for my customers and prospects of 10 pages (5 French-speaking and 5 English-speaking) by referencing each item on each page.
It was in 2016. This is the website www.jeffmaheux.com. Yes, it was brought back online in 2017 and has several looks ever since! I also had a training in business launching. I was able to turn around my disastrous entrepreneurial start by setting achievable goals and applying myself to every neglected administrative task of a business.
Pushing SEO techniques further with W+M
Working since to coordinate marketing and publishing in the media sector, the creation of a blog and virtual monthly e magazine is an immediate response to the boycott of our information by Google's search tool since the fall of 2023. Having noticed the views and rising statistics for articles over 1200 characters from domains not listed as media by Google. Yes, my personal site, my portfolio, with barely 100 reads per year since 2019, had 8,000 reads lasting more than 3 minutes on average, in November and December 2023. We now needed a signed digital marketing domain for this content.
And this is how you have been reading the Monthly Ticket from Services W+M since January 2024. The e-Mag and the website have gradually emerged and the editorial work is planned for a long time.
I invite you to read the rest of this presentation introducing SEO and website search via the W+M story in the article of the month!
SEO for local commerce
A word about customer proximity. When we take ourselves as an example, there are many needs met by companies around where we live or our office. The choice and appointment of professional services, gym memberships and lunches are decided based on our lifestyle, family availability and traffic times.
Although supermarkets and the ease of virtual shopping have a significant place in the distribution of our products and services, it is important to always keep a place in our strategies and promotions for our local customers. The one who travels three additional street corners to enter our business, because we accept, without reservation, well-trained dogs, for example.
Developing a local and proximity market is a new reason to use the business display service of a search tool to increase visits to a website.
Understanding Google and Other Website Search Tools
This report deepen our knowledge of the search tools. Let’s focus on the most popular and most used engine by Internet users: Google. SEO and SEA tips!
One thing is certain, SEO is now part of the administrative tasks on the schedules of successful businesses on the web. Such as legal adjustment to a new law, there must be a person in each company who checks and adjusts the technical aspects of our websites and even the settings and descriptions of social media and clip channels.
Look at articles related to search tools via the seo and sea
Monthly Partner Advertising
The chronicle of different and low-cost marketing for startups, businesses and entrepreneurs. It’s a marketing story is told every month in the Monthly Ticket of the Marketing Blog.
Chronicle 10: the Google Business Page
The Telephone Directory Is Replaced
Just as we look for a word definition in the dictionary, there was a time when we consulted the directory to find a local service. Displaying our business there was commonplace.
Today, we can consider web search tools as such. Google is the most popular. Displaying our business is also commonplace.
Google offers free display for companies and the possibility of receiving consultation notifications, an appointment booking option, visitor search statistics and more. These are lucrative information for positioning a company in its market. Knowing our visitors better.
For a couple months, W+M Services manage the Google Business account as a social media top page. The content is updated monthly, with the website and social branding.
Creating the Business Page on the Google Business Platform
Creating an account for managing your business profile is way easy. Filling out the contact details form, indicating opening hours, adding images and a logo; this can be done in 20 minutes. Let’s move on to another topic.
Creating this free profile will allow our business to appear in searches and especially on the map (Google Maps).
This is where we can manage special opening hours on holidays.
When coordinating the branding of your business account with the hosting website and socials, it has a global impact that secures new visitors. Isn’t that a luxury ad in the directory?
Of course, the management of the business Google page is now included in W+M social media planning.
Add products in the Merchant Centre
And attention, website store publishers, the Merchant Center allows displaying products from our catalogues of our online store!
The product management tool, from the Business management page, is easy to use and gives access to inventory management linked to our online and live website, avoiding two separate inventories. A question and answer section allows us to detail the service and option.
Finally, if you have a domain with a personalized email, it’s possible to link your business page to your email management tool with the Google WorkSpace platform. I recommend it, especially if you’re publishing your first site on a platform like WordPress and you have no idea how to organize and manage your first email. The service will do everything for you and you will only have to click on the links the system sends you to confirm access rights. Also, often the first month is free or only costs less than $10, so a nice time saver for entrepreneurs, right, because manually opening an email from the Google system takes slightly more than WorkSpace’s time.
Budget: $0. Google Business page programming time isn’t long when we have all the texts, business and product and service descriptions and business images.
Tips: I read at the beginning of the year that adding visuals to the business sections on Google, but also to all search tools, was beneficial. I then adjusted the presentations on the business accounts I manage. I confirm this since I have seen a strong increase from visitor traffic coming from the accounts business page after adding visuals. Then I added more promotional images and the product from the Merchant Centre.
Tools: Create a free account on the Google Business page. Everything is done even using a phone. The system is user-friendly and the explanations are precise. I also enjoy working in Google management. I can easily find additional information there if needed. This isn’t the case for several platforms when you have to search for additional information for 10 minutes.
Read the rest of the paper and the section about local commerce
Office News. The chronicle of the daily digital activities on virtual sales tools published in the Monthly Tickets of the Marketing Blog.
No 10: The virtual sales path and visitor enthusiasm.
Have you browsed your website and put yourself in the shoes of a stranger? I suggest you do the exercise twice.
The first time in the shoes of a professional who knows your field and who would need to prospect or make the purchase in a few minutes with his cell for his or her superior.
Next time, in the shoes of a journalist who knows nothing about your profession, responding to an end-of-month mandate, and having to write a complete article on your company and your products and services, by visiting your website.
If these two people couldn’t carry out their mission without having to contact you, adjusting your tool would perhaps bring you even more prospects and give a good boost to your virtual notoriety.
Another tip is to ask a person to make a purchase on the site we manage and study their reactions by noting down the questions.
Understand your sales path
Once we understand the excitement to be created and what to program and improve on our website, it’s likely possible our communications and promotional or media writing will come into their sense.
I like to take advantage of the first years of companies to do this study. When managers are still on the floor talking directly with customers and the public, which we don’t always take the time. It’s important to ask questions about improving web processes. We all know our days only have 24 hours.
However, we must take the time to understand how prospects and customers use our services, how they find us and what made the difference with our competitors. By understanding the way our company is viewed by the outside, the enthusiasm that our customers have when choosing us, because this is what must be highlighted on our digital and social tools. So this enthusiasm continues on our websites, our social networks, our communities, and will build the virtual identity of the company.
The sale path, more technical than we think
The virtual design of this sales path must include all the aspects and formalities of a virtual legal sale, without necessarily taking up all the space.
Let’s take the example of a product description page, the ending of most sales path of company promotions. Throughout the visitors’ journey, from the moment they see the advertisement in a magazine and follow the QR code to land on the website. Perhaps the ideal programming would be as follows:
QR code or landing promo location: An image of the same promotion on the home page, also showing the same branding and logo, putting the visitor at ease, besides being able to move up or down the page to get to know you better by visiting other menus. The promo image, and a button under the image take the visitor to a second dedicated web page or the product page.
The dedicated promotion web page will be the place to display product texts and links to purchasing, delivery, refund and other instructions. This page usually includes a link to see other special offers and important announcements from the company. (Note that many webmasters prefer to take their visitors directly to a dedicated page, reserving a more general and static layout for their home page. My opinion: it doesn’t matter! The important thing is that the visitor’s landing page must be downloaded in less than half a second. If your home page includes a clip that takes more than two seconds to download before opening, remove your promo direction link from there and create a dedicated page that opens quickly. Your stats of viewing will double, that’s quite a guarantee. Also, interested people will click on your home page link anyways with a good end-of-page redirection.)
This dedicated page may also end up with ideas of related blog articles on a complementary subject or products, serving to extend the reading time of the pages of our websites. The internal viewing of content is also good for SEO of the website on search tools. Of course, our blog posts must be written correctly, run through a proofreading tool and read annually to correct and update the veracity of the articles.
At the end of all these pages, or in the footer of our website, the subscription links and member services are great for recurring readership visits.
Then, the links to follow the company’s social networks, if the goal is to keep readers on the website. If you’re monetizing via your social networks, the social links will be highlighted before your web subscription. We also put the social icons in the header when social media are more important than web visits.
Precision in the Chosen Terms of the Sales Path
In terms of the precision of technical terms in communications, it’s important to be regular and to use the same expressions throughout communications. If our promotions mention a product purchase with a slogan or a purchase function, for example, the text must be the same everywhere and often with our branding.
The same goes for our internal communications and procedures. If in the explanation of a function you have to press the execute button, you must always use the same term when talking about that function. Avoid, using expressions like saving, think about saving, press enter, or other expressions if the text of the button is Execute. Use the word Execute all the time. This will avoid confusions of any kind and extra communications. It’s important to be precise in the wording of technicalities.
Finally, choose which communications to entrust to a professional service if you aren’t an expert. Writing techniques aren’t the same depending on the distribution channel chosen. Thus, the text of a blog will be more detailed, entertaining and enhanced with personal experiences. The text on a website page must be much more direct, precise and universal. The same applies to social media, administrative and legal documents, media communications and invitations to an event or launch, etc.
Service in French and English?
Even in Quebec, knowledge of French and English languages in the communications, commerce and digital marketing sectors is important to remain competitive; not only in the Montréal area.
You only have to compare Google ads in both languages to see the number of monolingual merchants missing display opportunities, forgetting to duplicate ads for each language.
Whether you write a text in one language or in several languages, the principle of composition is always the same: the statements of your text, the content and the characteristics of your products are the same; which means that once the text is composed in one language, it isn’t difficult to transpose it into another language when you know the popular vocabulary of your market or field.
Also, with translation tools on the web that can help us, and text correction programs, it’s increasingly easier to translate your communications and thus reach more people. Depending on your level of language knowledge, you may be able to hire a professional, or ask someone you know to do the checks.
Think about it, is a new language on your site would be beneficial for the expansion of your business or opening to new markets?
Read more
I invite you to read the full column to discover digital marketing tips that will improve the performance of your new website and visibility in search tools.
Read the complete Webmaster Column here
November 2024 - Statistics and analyzing
Although it is good to check the statistics of digital tools daily, it is also important to take the time to analyze annual data to have a clear idea of the upcoming direction based on the data collected.
Learning from the past for a better future, you will say, well, the study of statistics is exactly that, predicting the days to come of your company.
We will study everything together in November.
So, do you like fall? W+M loves it! As I write this conclusion, the nights are getting cooler and the baby ducks in the field outside the office have learned to fly and feed themselves. They are ready for new projects; like real startups!
Thank you and see you on the Blog.
Jeff
Sources:
Create a Business Profile on Google resources: https://www.google.com/intl/fr_ca/business/
(French article Why France locals use more and more near businesses. (Pourquoi les Français soutiennent de plus en plus leurs petits commerces) from Petitscommerces.fr.
Cr Images: W+M Services
Monthly Ticket and Editorial Theme: Under the Clouds by JM Musique
Production: W+M Services
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