Google Business Profile

How to Leverage Google Business Profile

Google dominates the search engine landscape, controlling a staggering 92% of the market. To better tap into the potential of Google Search and Maps for attracting new clientele, it’s imperative to set up a Google Business Profile (GBP), previously recognized as Google My Business (GMB).

Google My business screen for Bobby's BBQ

Understanding GBP 

Google Business Profile is a complimentary business listing service provided by Google. It’s a platform where businesses can share detailed information and visuals about their offerings, including their location, range of services, and products. By establishing this free profile, businesses can significantly amplify their visibility across various Google platforms. The information from your Google Business Profile can seamlessly integrate and appear in Google Search, Google Maps, and even Google Shopping.

However, it’s essential to understand that Google Business Profile is tailored for businesses that have direct interactions with customers. This encompasses entities with a physical presence, like restaurants or retail stores, and service providers who engage face-to-face with clients, such as consultants or plumbers. If your business operates solely online, you’d benefit more from other Google utilities like Google Ads and Google Analytics.

The Significance of Having a GMB Account

      • Boost Visibility on Google and Google Maps: Google stands unrivaled as the premier search referrer, directing both online and foot traffic. A well-optimized Google Business Profile ensures that when potential customers search for services or products akin to yours, your business emerges prominently. Especially on Google Maps, a local business listing significantly enhances the chances of discovery.
      • Command Your Online Business Narrative: With GMB, you’re in the driver’s seat. Update contact details, operational hours, and other pivotal data as and when required. If there are changes in your service offerings, temporary halts, or resumptions, you can promptly communicate this to your audience. Given the potent local SEO capabilities of Google Business Profiles, the information you provide takes precedence, overshadowing outdated data on other websites.
      • Foster Trust Through Authentic Reviews: Reviews are the bedrock of credibility in today’s digital age. Google’s review system, which amalgamates star ratings with room for detailed feedback, offers customers a platform to share their genuine experiences. This transparency aids potential customers in making informed decisions about which businesses to patronize and which products to invest in.

While the prospect of public reviews might seem daunting, especially given the inability to filter which ones appear, there’s a silver lining. Google asserts that a blend of positive and negative feedback appears more authentic and trustworthy than a barrage of exclusively glowing reviews.

Harness the power of Google My Business and watch your business thrive in the digital landscape.

Dream Warrior Group, a Los Angeles Based web design and digital marketing Company, providing solutions for your online marketing needs. Our expertise includes Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media Posts & Marketing & Google PPC campaigns.  Call us now at 818.610.3316 or click here.

E-E-A-T

Improving SEO with E-E-A-T

In the world of SEO, the concept of E-A-T (Experience, Authority, Trust), now expanded to E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust), plays a crucial role in determining website rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs). E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. 

In this article, we will delve into the significance of E-E-A-T, how Google evaluates websites based on these factors, and practical strategies to improve your website’s E-E-A-T for better SEO performance.

Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility explains how to boost your web site’s credibility:

  1. Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site.
  2. Show that there’s a real organization behind your site.
  3. Highlight the expertise in your organization and in the content and services you provide.
  4. Show that honest and trustworthy people stand behind your site.
  5. Make it easy to contact you.
  6. Design your site so it looks professional (or is appropriate for your purpose).
  7. Make your site easy to use — and useful.
  8. Update your site’s content often (at least show it’s been reviewed recently).
  9. Use restraint with any promotional content (e.g., ads, offers).
  10. Avoid errors of all types, no matter how small they seem.

The ultimate goal of these 10 actions can have an enormous effect in demonstrating your experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.

First E in E-E-A-T: Demonstrating Real-World Knowledge

Google introduced the “E” for Experience in E-A-T to emphasize the importance of content creators who have firsthand experience and expertise related to the topic they cover. For example, content about hiking in Scotland should ideally come from someone with actual experience in hiking in that region.

Sharing Personal Experiences

Content creators can boost the “Experience” aspect of EEAT by incorporating personal experiences, anecdotes, tips, and observations related to the subject matter. This adds authenticity and credibility to the content.

Utilizing Technical Language and Keywords

Using technical language and industry-specific keywords relevant to your content further demonstrates expertise and firsthand knowledge in the field.

Second E in E-E-A-T: Establishing Credibility

The Importance of Expertise

Google evaluates the credibility of content creators when assessing expertise. Established professionals or recognized authorities in their respective fields are more likely to rank higher.

Supporting Claims with Credible Sources

Content should be backed by credible sources, such as research papers, studies, and authoritative websites, to support claims and provide valuable information. This always helps in creating an expert image.

Meeting User Intent

Understanding user intent through keyword research and providing valuable content that addresses users’ needs can further strengthen your website’s expertise.

A in E-E-A-T: Building Site Authority

The Significance of Authority

Building site authority is crucial for EEAT. It is determined, in part, by the number of relevant and authoritative websites that link back to your content, signaling to search engines that your website is a trusted resource.

The Power of Backlinks

Acquiring quality backlinks from reputable sources can significantly impact your website’s authority and, in turn, its search engine rankings.

Leveraging Social Media

Audience engagement on social media platforms and sharing valuable content can enhance your brand’s authority and attract more traffic to your site.

T in E-E-A-T: Gaining User Confidence

The Role of Trustworthiness

A secure and trustworthy website is vital for user confidence. Websites with HTTPS protocol and positive customer reviews are considered more trustworthy by search engines.

Encouraging Customer Reviews

Providing encouragement for satisfied customers to leave positive reviews can contribute to building trustworthiness and validating your EEAT.

Addressing Negative Reviews

Formulating and implementing a response policy for negative reviews promptly and resolving customer issues is a positive step toward displaying a commitment to customer service and can mitigate the impact of negative feedback on trustworthiness.

Understanding and optimizing your website’s EEAT is essential for SEO success. By incorporating 

  • real-world experiences
  • establishing expertise through credible sources
  • building site authority with backlinks
  • gaining user trust through positive reviews and secure practices

You can enhance your website’s overall performance and visibility on search engine results pages. Investing in your EEAT will not only improve your website’s rankings but also build user confidence and credibility in your brand.

Dream Warrior Group, a Los Angeles Based web design and digital marketing Company, providing solutions for your online marketing needs. Our expertise includes Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media Posts & Marketing & Google PPC campaigns.  Call us now at 818.610.3316 or click here.

AI in Marketing Automation

Artificial intelligence (AI), which has already impacted several disciplines, including technology, is permeating every aspect of our life. It is transforming how we do business, boosting engineering productivity, improving customer service with customized chatbots, helping product managers with customer interview questions, and even assessing the clarity of marketing messages. Although the speed at which AI realizes its promise can be intimidating, it also forces a radical rethinking of issues and how firms might develop more quickly.

The Role of AI in Marketing Automation

Leading manufacturers of marketing automation software have acknowledged the revolutionary potential of AI. Automation, marketing, and sales are three areas of our business where AI has the potential to have a significant influence. The marketing environment has already seen substantial changes as a result of AI. It supports the creation of content, research, customer support, and personalization.

For example, you may utilize AI technologies like ChatGPT to improve the clarity of your email newsletters, come up with ideas for a blog or social media piece, or even make product recommendations more enticing. AI can be programmed to comprehend typical consumer inquiries and offer support via chatbots or tickets.

By summarizing information from calls or notes and tailoring communications, AI can help sales representatives. AI can detect future customers or provide pertinent recommendations and content when given customer data. However, incorporating AI into your marketing tools can take time and effort. For example, you may need to export data to get insights before acting or frequently upload a great deal of data for your system to pick up any knowledge.

AI Efficiencies

Through detailed segmentation, automated branching, and personalized content, marketing automation uses AI to power 1:1 encounters. Many marketing automation services have created tools that assist sales representatives in determining a prospect’s mood based on received messages and estimating the likelihood that a deal will be closed based on prospect interaction and deal activity.

At Dream Warrior, we want to ensure that our clients are using their time in ways that will positively affect their businesses. We are constantly looking for methods to make the crucial daily chores that our clients must complete more effective and efficient.

How can you quickly produce ideas and iterate while producing content without disrupting your flow? We’re identifying needs and combining tools that will enable you to simplify your process. For example, you can create text content using straightforward prompts, receive comments on the prompt’s tone, length, or improvements, translate content into other languages, and create effective SMS content.

Most Marketing Automation services are investigating the possibility of building full campaigns from a single prompt, complete with a subject line, preheader, template, content, and call-to-action (CTA). These capabilities go beyond marketing and into sales, where AI may support salespeople in time-consuming chores like reviewing notes and determining the next steps. AI can also assist in creating compelling sales messaging.

Editing is usually simpler than beginning fresh. Those customers utilizing Marketing Automation customize a beginning framework daily using automation recipes while we work on improving our automation recipes with AI to provide our customers with the best place to start with whatever they need to automate.

The Future of AI in Marketing Automation

At Dream Warrior, we have always prioritized opening sophisticated capabilities to all of our clients. AI accelerates our goal of democratizing marketing automation. AI can swiftly build brand-new consumer experiences across channels, audiences, and messages from a single directive or objective. What motivates us is the possibility for our customers to quickly discover targeted segments, build outbound sequences and drip campaigns, add complicated branching, and add personalized content. We are thrilled to be a part of this adventure with our Marketing Automation partners since the future of AI and automation is promising.

Dream Warrior Group, a Los Angeles Based web design and digital marketing Company, providing solutions for your online marketing needs. Our expertise includes Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media Posts & Marketing & Google PPC campaigns.  Call us now at 818.610.3316 or click here.

Sitemaps

News about Sitemaps Ping Endpoint Deprecation

On Monday, June 26th, Google made a significant announcement regarding the Sitemaps Protocol, a tool that has been assisting search engines in discovering new URLs and scheduling crawls of already known URLs since 2005. The announcement revealed that the sitemaps “ping” endpoint, a feature of this widely utilized protocol, will be deprecated within the next six months.

What are Sitemaps

To repeat some of our previous posts, Google defines a sitemap as “a file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, as well as the relationships between them.” (Google: Find out more about sitemaps.)

When you submit a sitemap, search engines may crawl your site more efficiently.

A sitemap will offer search engines crucial information such as:

When was a URL last updated?
How frequently are modifications made to a page?
The importance of a page in relation to other pages on your website.

This data assists search engines in finding, crawling, and indexing the web pages on your site. Sitemaps can be generated in an XML file, the most often used method. Some content management systems have capabilities that make it simple to create sitemaps.

Below is an example of a simple sitemap with all possible elements sourced from Dream Warrior Group‘s site.

<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<url>
       <loc>https://dreamwarrior.com/</loc>
          <lastmod>2023-06-28T00:00:00-07:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
                       <priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

Understanding the Sitemap Ping

The sitemap protocol provides an unauthenticated REST method for sending sitemaps to search engines. However, subsequent internal Google and other search engine research have revealed that these unauthenticated sitemap submissions are no longer helpful. In the instance of Google Search, most of these submissions have been detected as spam. As a result, Google has chosen to remove sitemaps ping support. The deprecated REST API will stop working in six months, and any pings to it will result in a 404 error, and using the endpoint will no longer be useful.

The end of the sitemap pinging doesn’t mean that your sitemaps are useless; if you are utilizing robots.txt or regularly pushing your sitemap to the Google search console, you should experience no issues.

The Role of the Lastmod Element

The utility of the last mod feature, which indicates the latest modification date of a webpage, has fluctuated throughout time. However, it has recently become more impactful in a variety of situations, and Google now uses it as a signal for scheduling crawls to previously identified URLs.

To serve its purpose, the last mod element must be in a supported date format, as stated on sitemaps.org. Once you upload your sitemap, Google’s Search Console will alert you if it is not. Furthermore, it should accurately reflect the actual modification dates: if a page was last amended seven years ago, but the last mod element indicates that it was modified yesterday, Google will eventually discard the last mod dates provided.

You can apply the last mod element to all or just a subset of the pages in your sitemap. Because these sites frequently aggregate content from other pages on the site, some site software may need help to detect the last modification date of the homepage or a category page. In such circumstances, omitting the last model for these pages is appropriate.

It is critical to understand that “last modification” refers to “last significant modification.” Minor changes, such as changing the text in the sidebar or footer, do not warrant an update to the last mod value. Only if there are significant modifications to the primary text, structured data, or links you should change the  last mod value.

Changefreq and Priority Elements

Google does not utilize the change freq or priority elements. The change freq element overlaps conceptually with last mod, while the priority element, a highly subjective field, often fails to accurately represent the actual priority of a page relative to other pages on a site based on Google’s internal studies. For further information on sitemaps, please review  SITEMAP.ORG.

Dream Warrior Group, a Los Angeles Based web design and digital marketing Company, providing solutions for your online marketing needs. Our expertise includes Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media Posts & Marketing & Google PPC campaigns.  Call us now at 818.610.3316 or click here.

GA4 Audiences

Part 5 of many about GA4  and what is coming after UA

We will pick up this installment of the Analytics after UA here at the end of this article GA4 Segments and Audiences by focusing on building audiences in GA4. 

Creating custom and remarketing audiences in Google Analytics 4 is one of the strategies to progress your analytics setup, per the GA4 checklist. You may need clarification on GA4’s comparable audiences, segments, filters, and comparative options. 

Who are the GA4 audiences?

Let’s begin by defining the target audience. Users can be grouped or segmented into audiences based on one or more demographic, geographic, or user behavior characteristics. 

This segmentation of users means you can use the whole amount of data in Google Analytics 4 to build audiences. For instance, you can create the following audience:

      1. Facebook Ads Traffic from the USA
      2. Google Organic Search Mobile Traffic 
      3. Google Ads Desktop Traffic Paris, France
      4. Users who started their first session visiting the specific landing page and scrolled more than 50% of the page 

Users that arrived at the targeted landing page for the first time during their first session and scrolled more than halfway down the page 

These are all illustrations of audiences in GA4. So the question “What’s the difference between them” is excellent if you use segments in GA4 Explore. 

How To Create Audiences in GA4

The audience creation process in Google Analytics 4 is comparable to that in Universal Analytics. Therefore, you should launch GA4 and take the next step to do that: Click the “New Audience” button under GA4 -> Admin -> Audiences. 

creating Audiences in GA4
Creating audiences in GA4

Let’s review the interface at this point. For this article, I decided to split the audiences into two types:

      1. Predefined audiences – the ones we can create using GA4 Templates
      2. Custom audiences – any audience we create using GA4 “Create a custom audience” button 
Audience types
GA4 – Building new audiences

We can create the first type of audience using Google’s templates. Then, selecting the appropriate selection and entering the value are the only things we need to change. Next, Google offers us some ideas on how we may create them.

For instance, choosing “US” as the “country id” in the demographics template makes it simple to establish an audience that includes all users from the USA.

GA4 Audiences including US citizens
Audiences including US citizens

We can create remarketing audiences for Google Ads using customized or suggested audiences.

Predictive audiences is another intriguing Google Analytics 4 feature that allows you to run paid advertising campaigns, for example, for users more likely to churn. Send by ecommerce_purchase or in_app_purchase events to activate these audiences.

Audiences – Metric

Definition

          • Purchase Probability
            The probability that a user who was active in the last 28 days will complete a specific conversion event within the next seven days.
          • Churn probability
            The probability that a user who was active on your app or site within the last seven days will not be active within the next seven days.
          • Predicted revenue
            The revenue expected from all purchase conversions in the next 28 days from an active user in the last 28 days.

Unfortunately, you will see a “Not eligible to use” label if you don’t send these events. 

Not eligible to use
GA4 Audiences – Not eligible to use

Let’s create a custom audience and enable it in Google Ads. This way, it will become a remarketing audience. 

Creating a custom audience in GA4

We want to target users who landed on the Show page during the last 30 days. We want to show them an ad detailing purchase ticket options and deals.

GA4 Custom Audience Users with page visit Jeffrey Kahane Show
Custom Audience – page visit Jeffrey Kahane Show

How to edit, delete or archive an audience in GA4?

As I previously stated, Google Analytics 4 allows you to build up to 100 audiences. So, you may find yourself in a position where you must remove, alter, or archive one.  

Once more, editing an existing audience does not need resetting any users. This audience has no users before you provide and save modifications, but it immediately begins to get new traffic. 

The audience can be archived in Google Analytics 4. The same as delete, it is. Go to the GA4 Audiences page, click the three dots next to the audience you want to delete, and then select “archive.” 

Edit, Duplicate, Archive, or Delete GA4 Audience
Audiences – Editing

In the next and final installment you will read about Reporting with GA4.

Dream Warrior Group, a Los Angeles Based web design and digital marketing Company, providing solutions for your online marketing needs. Our expertise includes Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media Posts & Marketing & Google PPC campaigns.  Call us now at 818.610.3316 or click here.