The company has introduced its new “Search to Sale” module. The module was developed in partnership with Verve, known for its skills in location-based mobile advertising.

“Search to Sale is a new component within Rio SEO’s Open Local Platform, a hub for local business information, offers, and content distribution across various channels,” the company tells us. “The module links the online consumer experience with in-store visits and offers brick-and-mortar businesses a scalable, automated way to reach consumers with real-time, location-based contextual offers.”

Rio SEO solutions are based on an open architecture approach. The new Search to Sale works with the leading location-based targeting and ad technologies including Bluetooth beacons, geo-fencing, mobile couponing, Apple Passbook, and other emerging POS technologies.

The firm has designed it to be effortlessly pressed into service by many industry sectors, including retail, hospitality, restaurants, and financial institutions.

“Today’s connected consumer has heightened expectations for immediacy and relevance, so it’s imperative for brands to understand and measure the digital opportunities and micro-moments that can close the online-to-offline loop,” said Dema Zlotin, Chief Executive Officer of Rio SEO.

Relevance is the key goal.

“Without a broader conversion strategy, a beacon is just a piece of plastic,” Zlotin added. “Verve’s platform allows our enterprise customers to engage consumers in mobile moments by utilizing geo-fencing, mobile couponing, Apple Passbook, iBeacon technology and more. We are thrilled about this new partnership to further drive contextually relevant customer experiences.”

The post Rio SEO Announces ‘Search to Sale’ — Because Without a Strategy, a Beacon is ‘Just a Piece of Plastic’ appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

To help you prepare for the shift ahead, the team at Nine Hertz has put together a new advice-rich infographic that aims to answer every question you may have right now about mobile SEO and preparing for the Google-centered changes ahead.

To learn more, check out the visual shared below courtesy of Search Engine Land.

The post Infographic: Mobile SEO and Surviving the Google Update appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Yet, nothing seems to work like SEO.

Want proof? It’s often in the raw numbers.

According to a new infographic created by the SEO experts and digital marketing gurus at Salt Lake City, Utah-based Fusion 360 and recently shared with MMW, the numbers are pretty amazing.

For instance, 93 percent of the traffic for businesses still emanates from SEO. The search industry is now estimated to be worth $16 billion. And unluckily for staffers tasked with improving results on search powerhouses like Google, to this day 73 percent of seekers never scroll past the first page of results.

Here’s the infographic that says it all.

The post SEO Still King of the Hill: 93% of Traffic for Businesses Starts Here appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

In 2014 there were a number of changes to SEO that, while not earth-shaking, did prove to marketers what it’s still good for, what works now and what changes to the tool should be embraced.

Recently, MMW caught up with the digital marketing and SEO experts at Fusion 360, a digital marketing firm in Salt Lake City, Utah recognized for their world class expertise in all forms of digital and social media marketing.

Take Social Media for example. While it used to be a platform for practically anything, from posting pictures of your breakfast cereal to “tweeting” about nearly any inane subject one could think of, today’s social media is almost exclusively about entertainment. It’s the smart SEO marketer, Fusion 360 says, who knows this and creates interesting, entertaining content that users will not only enjoy but also share profusely.

SEO also showed us that, when it comes to what’s important about online content, quality trumps just about everything else. Sure, word count is still slightly important but, for example, if a blog is nothing but gibberish with a few SEO keywords and key phrases thrown in, it won’t be long before it’s discovered as being, well, crap. Any links to it will be labeled as crap as well, meaning that quality should be your only goal when creating or linking to content.

Lastly, we found out in 2014 that online headlines aren’t nearly as important as we thought they were. Just like low quality content, titles that are misleading or completely false will only serve to hurt or damage a website, brand or publisher. Thus, using a false or misleading headline is definitely not in any company’s best interest, SEO-wise.

The post What Are The SEO Lessons Learned for 2014? appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Check out these facts and more (courtesy of mobile payments giant PayAnywhere) in a new infographic from Visualistan, which delves into everything a marketer could want to know about Google search and SEO in 2014.

To get informed and make smart decisions about your business, take a gander at the visual shared below.

The post Infographic: Understanding Google Search and SEO in 2014 appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

In an effort to find out, LocalVox has published a new local marketing “report card.” And the findings are quite riveting.

“When it comes to using local marketing to attract and retain customers and beat out the competition, many of the top 150 U.S. retailers are falling behind on local search, mobile, social media and content marketing efforts,” explains the report summary from LocalVox, an integrated local, social and mobile marketing platform.

This indicates that companies either don’t understand local marketing or are choosing not to invest in it, even though the magnitude of online interaction creates a mandate for retailers to invest in local Internet marketing. The industry is growing 13.8 percent year-over-year, from $26.5 billion in 2013 to over $44.5 billion in 2017, and half of in-store sales are influenced online, according to Forrester.

“On average,” the company reveals, “businesses earned a failing grade of 3.58 out of 10 for comprehensive local marketing efforts: only 11 of the companies scored above a 5, and 12 companies scored less than a 2. Despite the fact that no company is engaging with local marketing correctly, a handful of them are at least starting to make an effort.”

So which companies are at the top of the local marketing heap? Here are the top ten:

1. Whole Foods Market
2. Walmart
3. Verizon Wireless
4. Best Buy
5. Michaels Stores
6. Brinker International
7. Hy-Vee
8. Barnes and Noble
9. Sears Holdings
10. Gap

To review the full report and review other rankings across a host of marketing categories, click here.

The post Which Companies Are Getting Local Marketing Right? appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

In short, the program identifies and repairs inconsistent listings of advisors’ company contact information, otherwise known as citations.

LocalMotion works to ensure an advisor’s online search results are consistent and visible across more than 150 different local search portals and navigation tools such as Siri and TomTom.  This advisor-focused program also includes custom review cards for an advisor’s business as well as instructions for how to obtain and promote reviews hosted on third-party sites, per the SEC’s new IM Guidance Update No. 2014-4.

According to the SEC’s IM Guidance Update No. 2014-4 released in March, Guidance on the Testimonial Rule and Social Media, advisors are now permitted to have and share some third-party reviews with their clients, prospects and community. As a result of this update, LocalMotion is consulting advisors on how to obtain, manage and leverage independent online reviews made by consumers.

“Search marketing needs to be an integral part of every company’s marketing plan, no matter its size,” explains Amy Romero, SVP of Marketing & Product Solutions for RME360. “In order to create credibility online and within your community, a business needs to have consistent and accurate visibility across search engines, citations and reviews.  We created an affordable solution for small businesses to address this growing and critical need.”

The post RME360 Launches Web-Based SEO Program appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is a guest contributed post from Eric Covino, President and Founder of Creative Signals.

While rankings are an important part of an SEO campaign, there is a lot more to it than that. Here are a few other areas you should be paying attention to:

Tip 1

Google provides free tools for website marketers to use to help understand how visitors are finding your site and interacting with it. You should sign up for Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools (Bing also offers a Webmaster Tools product that you should utilize as well). Google Analytics and webmaster tools will help you understand how your traffic is getting to you and what it is doing once it arrives.

These products can help you tailor content, products, and services for your target market. The insights given to you by Google help you create a great user experience which can lead to more and more people talking about your site, sharing your content, and linking to you (all of which help with your search engine rankings).

The Webmaster Tool products give you insight into how a search engine interacts with your site. The data from this piece will help you identify and fix key techincal issues which also helps your SEO.

You can learn more about each free product via these links:

http://www.google.com/analytics/

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home

http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster

Tip 2

Forget “link building” and start “relationships” with your market and key influencers in your market. Search on Google, Bing, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Google+ to find key influencers in your market and start building relationships with them.

Treat it like a typical networking scenario. Talk about how you can help each other and each other’s customers rather than emailing hundreds of strangers per day and asking them to link to your website. Much like the offline world, networking is one of the biggest keys to success in SEO today.

Good, honest, relevant recommendations of products, services, and information to your potential customers from influencers in your marketplace are better than any “link” you might acquire.

Tip 3

Make it easy for your customers to leave reviews on various business platforms like Google+ for Business (http://www.google.com/+/business/) and Bing Places for Business (https://www.bingplaces.com). As search engines continue to pull in data from multiple sources to present to searchers, you should do the same for major review sites across the web (like Yelp).

This will help you with getting the attention of searchers when you show up in a search result amongst your competition.

Tip 4

Avoid trying to game Google. Google has a tough job to do in policing its search engine. The quality and user experience of Google’s search engine is something they (rightly) take very seriously.

Taking shortcuts will only hurt you in the long term. Stick to doing high quality, ethical marketing practices online and you will be more likely to succeed in the long run than those who are constantly looking for shortcuts.

Tip 5

Fix your mobile experience. Google expects mobile searches to outnumber desktop searches by next year! It is super important to make sure your site functions correctly on mobile devices and does not rely on outdated technology like Flash.

The world is going mobile. In a short period of time desktop searches are going to become the minority. You will need to be sure that all parts of your website function correctly and elegantly on a mobile device to ensure a great user experience. Keeping up with delivering a great user experience across all online devices is perhaps one of the more important tips in this article. Having a “mobile friendly” site is not simply a nice thing to have at this point, it is a requirement.

Good SEO is a sum of many parts. Start incorporating these tips in your SEO campaign and you are likely to earn quality, sustainable traffic from search engines.

The post MMW Op-Ed: 5 Tips to Boost Your SEO in a Competitive Online Environment appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Statistics show that SEO only accounts for 13% of organic search results on mobile devices, illustrating that SEO does not play the same role in mobile marketing as it does from a desktop or laptop. As a result of these findings, many advertisers are turning to emerging channels to gain the coveted space they desire on mobile devices.

Social Networks And Mobile Marketing

Currently the most successful new channels for marketers are social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and Vine, just to name a few. The combination of their built-in design for easy sharing, as well as being a primary source of information for mobile users make these platforms the ideal places to purchase ad space.

Mobile marketing is growing at a rate of 61% per year and it’s expected to be an $18 billion industry by 2015. Pair this with the massive growth that social media networks are experiencing from their native ad formats and it is clear that these emerging channels are the next big thing.

Even small businesses with lesser-known products are achieving extreme success by purchasing mobile native add space, or sharing captivating infographics that spread like wildfire within a matter of hours—or just a number of days. Some businesses who understand how to capture their audience’s attention via mobile marketing across new outlets can gain success with nominal marketing budgets, and without any effort other than social media marketing.

What This Means For SEO

The great success of emerging channels is not only creating more engaging marketing campaigns, but it’s also capturing marketing dollars that would traditionally be spent on SEO or SEM campaigns.

While it may not be the end of SEO as a whole, its role in online marketing is clearly being redefined. For business owners and advertisers who have not yet considered emerging channels, it is definitely time to take a good hard look at the advantages they afford when it comes to mobile marketing.

The post Does Mobile Marketing Mean The End Of SEO Driven Campaigns? appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Pure Oxygen Labs’ new mobile SEO assessment reveals that most Fortune 100 companies are not Google-compliant.

The mobile consulting and technology company used its proprietary diagnostic tools to evaluate the current state of mobile optimization for the Fortune 100.

Disney, GE and JP Morgan are among a handful of companies that are well-positioned for Google’s impending mobile SEO changes, the report shows. However, others may not be so fortunate.

Two-thirds of Fortune 100 companies are at risk of seeing ranking downgrades as a result of failing to serve mobile versions of indexed pages.

Only 56% of these companies serve any mobile formatted content to smartphone searchers, Pure Oxygen Labs reports.

“It’s unclear how just how strict Google will be with regard to compliance,” explains Brian Klais, Founder and CEO of Pure Oxygen Labs. “For merchants preparing for the holiday season, the urgency to act is right now as a non-trivial amount of revenue could be at stake. Google effectively put everyone on notice to take mobile seriously.”

The post Report: Majority of Fortune 100 Companies Are Not Google Compliant appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.