Types of post content:

Featured Food Photo

Food porn pics are always a hit, but be careful if it doesn’t look appetizing it could be disastrous. This post came after our pickled veggies post and continues to tell a story.

Featured Drink Photo

Drinks typically have the best margins in a bar. Promoting existing drinks as well as new specials can lead in to other types of revenue.

Special Event Promotions

Getting the word out on an event is easier than ever with a quick share, friends of friends can be made aware at an instant.

Weekly Special

Weekly specials are important for a restaurant to offer new things and to gauge how customers feel about it. This is just a simple text menu with the weekly offerings.

Relevant Facts about the restaurant or food

Telling a story about your restaurant is important. Explaining the logic and rationale behind certain ingredients or just telling a story helps make a connection with your customers.

Highlight Employees

Making a personal connection with the customer is an important part of social media and can be the most difficult. Meeting the staff online can be a great way to bridge that gap.

Highlight Fans and Customers

Content for promoting fans can be pulled from one of the many social media platforms. Instagram is a great example and you can search through all the photos people have tagged in your location.

Food or Cooking Pro Tips

Sharing a few pro tips is always a big winner for social media. Anytime that you can share and demonstrate your expertise, you are positioning yourself as an authority in your industry.

Facebook

Slender Man

Boat Crash Harlem Shake Edition

Atlas Edition

Army Edition

Swim Team Edition

Firefighter Edition

Gamer Office Version

Atlantic Version

Bad Parenting Edition

Lose Your Shirt College Edition

The Chive

Old Man College Party Edition

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhKw0tRTUn8

Official Airsoft Edition

COLLEGE HUMOR VERSION

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlRzE4Souh0

Call of Duty Black Ops 2 Version!

Charlie Brown Edition

Bouns Extension

Wish you could have more fun with the Harlem Shake phenomena? Try out this awesome bookmarklet for your browser that will make any website do the Harlem Shake!

Step 1 – Go To Google Analytics

Go to google.com/analytics and click the “Sign In” link at the top right of the page. You will always be asked to sign into Google Analytics, even if you are already signed in to your Google Account.

Step 2 – Log Into Your Google Account

You will now be taken to the Google log in page. Fill in your account name and your password to log into Google Analytics.

Step 3 – Choose Your Account

Choose your account by first selecting the group you want (indicated by a folder icon on the left side) which will drop down a list of specific sites, from here choose the appropriate one.

Step 4 – Get To The Admin Settings

You should now see the default analytics page with stats for the site you selected. Click on the “Admn” button in the upper right hand corner.

Step 5 – Choose Your Profile

You will now see a list of your grouped sites, select the one you want again.

Step 6 – Go To The User Settings

There should now be a tab named “Users,” go ahead and click on that tab.

Step 7 – Add A New User

Just underneath where you clicked the “Users” tab, you should now see a button that says “+New User,” click that button.

Step 8 – Fill Out Their Information

You should now be on the page where you get to actually add your new user. Type in their email address, choose whether you want them to be an Admin or just a User, then click the “notify this user by email” checkbox to make sure that they get notified that they have been added. Simply click that “Add User” button at the bottom and you are good to go!

Are you ready for the next challenge? Find out more information about 6 Surprising Ways SEO Research Can Help You Run Your Business Better or Local SEO Tips To Get You Ahead In 2013.

This article was created by Chris Steurer, the Marketing Director at Blueprint Design Studio.

Step 1: Log Into Your Personal Facebook Account

Log into your Facebook account and then log into your Facebook Page by clicking on the gear icon in top right corner and then selecting the page you want.

Step 2: Find The Admin Roles Page

Now you should be on your Page’s profile view, if not, go to the profile view for your Facebook Page. Once you are here, go to the top of the page and look for the “Edit Page” button and click it to reveal the drop down menu, then select “Admin Roles” from the menu.

Step 3: Add Your Facebook Page Manager

You will now be on the page that show you all of the Facebook Page Managers. At the bottom of the list there will be a box where you can enter in an email address. Add the email address of the person you want to manage your Facebook Page and then select the type of access that they can have. You can choose from Manager, Content Creator, Moderator, Advertiser, or Insight Analyst. Managers have full access to everything while the other accounts are limited to certain areas of your Facebook Page.

That’s it, you’re all done! Now you can learn How To Set Up Facebook Ads For Someone Else To Manage

This article was created by Chris Steurer, the Marketing Director at Blueprint Design Studio.

Step 1: Log In

Log into your Facebook Account and look in the left-hand sidebar for the “Pages” section, hover over this area and you will see a link pop up that says “more,” click that link.

Step 2: Create A New Page

You are now on a page that shows all of the pages that you manage (if any), on the top of the page there is a button that says “Create a Page,” go ahead and click that button.

Step 3: Choose Your Type Of Page

You are now at the screen that shows you the types of pages that you can make. Select the one that is most relevant to you and your business. Most companies will use one of the top 3 options on this page. Local business pages are for smaller businesses with only one location. If you work at a company that has multiple locations, the second option is likely the best for you, unless you plan to run a separate page for each location in which case you should choose the first option again. If your page is for a brand or a specific product, you will want to choose the third option.

Step 4: Set Up Your Page

For example’s sake, we are going to create a Company Page for this tutorial. Simply click on the tile labeled “Company, Organization or Institution.” The tile will then animate and show you a few new options. Choose your business category from the drop down menu, fill in the name of your business, agree to Facebook’s terms of service, and then click the “Get Started” button.

Step 5: Upload Your Facebook Page Profile Image

You are now setting your Facebook Page! The first step is to upload a profile photo for your page. Either upload the image that you want to use from your computer or select the website URL that you would like to take the image from. Save the photo and you are ready to move on.

Step 6: Fill Out Your Facebook Page About Section

This next steps asks you to fill out your about section a little bit. Go ahead and add a good description of your company and then include any links to your website and social profiles. Save the information and you are good to go.

Step 7: Choose Your Facebook Page URL

This is where you will choose the URL for your Facebook Page. Try to keep it simple, clean, and clear. This usually means using just your business name so that your URL will be Facebook.com/yourbusinessname. Sometimes your name is already taken, don’t freak out, you just need to be a little more creative with your URL. If you aren’t sure what to do, you can always contact us and ask for our opinion!

Step 8: Set Up Facebook Ads

This section asks if you want to go ahead and set up your ads account for your Facebook Page. If you plan on advertising, you can set this up now. If not, you can always set this up later when you and your Page are ready.

Step 9: Finalize Your Profile

You have now completed the basics for creating a new Facebook Page for your business, congratulations! Now it is time to finish filling out your profile information and optimizing it for search and usability. For more information on optimizing your Facebook Page for search and for people, check out How To Optimize Your Facebook Page Information For Humans And Search Engines.

This article was created by Chris Steurer, the Marketing Director at Blueprint Design Studio.

Utilizing Current Blog Posts As An Inbound Marketing Content Source

If you are reading this, you probably already have a decent selection of content already created on your blog. Once this is published it doesn’t mean that you can’t continue to use this content as a source for creating new content. We have two simple methods of how you can use your current content as a source to generate more marketing content for your website.

Create a Series Of Blog Posts

Go through your analytics and see which pages are either gaining you the most traffic or that have the best conversion rates for your company. Take this top performing content and analyze it for ways that you can expand this content. You are essentially looking for ways that you can take this already good content and make it more in depth or more useful for your readers and customers. You can then publish these additional posts to further demonstrate and prove your expertise in the industry or niche.

Convert Posts Into Lead Generation Content

Think that writing ebooks or whitepapers is beyond your capabilities? Think again! If you can create a few blog posts, you can certainly create an ebook, white paper, presentation, or other forms of great lead generation content. Take the same concept as before (expand upon your current blog posts, but this time do it with more privileged information) and create some great content that you can convert into lead generation content. Set up a new landing page, create a signup form to download your free content, and start building your list of leads!

Understanding The Consumer Purchasing Cycle For An Inbound Marketing Content Source

Knowing how to target customers in the purchasing cycle can be invaluable for your company’s marketing. You can use this information to create custom posts targeted specifically at people who are in the buying cycle for your product. For instance, you can target people who are in the research phase of the purchasing cycle by creating articles that show off the benefits and limitations of your product or service. They in turn will use your site’s information for the research phase and will likely look for more content from you that assists them through their purchasing cycle.

Using Your Sales Team As An Inbound Marketing Content Source

Your sales team is probably one of the best content generation resources that most companies fail to tap into. Your sales team is at the forefront of your business and they get to constantly interact with customers who are in the buying cycle. They have invaluable insights into what customers actually want. One simple trick that we use is to ask our sales team to give us any questions that they hear customers frequently ask. We can then take these questions that customers are asking, understand why they are asking, and then we create content that answers these specific questions for our clients. If one person is asking it, there are probably 100 more that are thinking the same thing. We capitalize on this and so can you.

Using Industry Trends As An Inbound Marketing Content Source

If you are paying attention to changes in your industry or if you are the one making changes in your industry, this content is low lying fruit on the tree and is easy to grab. Take this information and inform your readers and customers about the latest and greatest. You will attract not only customers, but you will also attract a lot of other people from your industry, helping you create more authority and attract business partners.

Instructing Your Clients Or Customers As An Inbound Marketing Content Source

If you know how to do something and you can teach others how to do the same, you can create a phenomenal resource for your customers or for others in the industry (depending on what your marketing goals and approaches are). Creating how to posts or videos can drive some serious traffic to your site, especially if you have instructional content that no one else is currently providing. Think about the simple things that you do every day and teach others how to perform these tasks. Find ways to optimize the process of doing something and share a how to article with your readers and customers.

Using Q&A Sites As An Inbound Marketing Content Source

There are tons of variations of question and answer sites all over the web. Some of the more popular options being Quora, Twitter, LinkedIn Groups, niche forums, and many more. These sites can be amazing source of leads because you get to hear what real people are asking about your industry. It is refreshing (and sometimes very frustrating) to see questions that industry noobs will ask, but they can be a great way for you to find questions that you can answer with blog posts. This content will help attract customers in the buying cycle, which should be part of every company’s blogging strategy to attract leads. Answer the questions how you see fit, create the article and possibly reference it (if its not spamming) on the original question(s) from the Q&A sites to generate some targeted traffic.

Conducting Interviews As An Inbound Marketing Content Source

Interviews may sound like something that you don’t have time for, but honestly, they can be a lot quicker than writing your own blog post. Either think about a handful of people that you can (realistically) interview or think about the type of people that you want to interview. If you know the specific people you want to interview, reach and see if you can get an interview before you worry about finalizing your question list. This will save you time when you inevitably have to go back and customize the questions for the person you are interviewing.

Attract Guest Bloggers As An Inbound Marketing Content Source

Who says you have to make all the content yourself? You could set up a simple page on your site informing people that you are looking for and accepting guest posts. You will need to make sure that you have an author plugin set up or that you have a system for crediting the author on your blog posts. You can then optimize this page for search so that guest bloggers can more easily find you. It is also probably recommended that you features links on your site pointing to this page.

Creating And Sharing Templates As An Inbound Marketing Content Source

Creating and sharing templates probably sounds like a daunting task to most people, truth is, its probably a lot easier then you think. If you have ever had to do something at work (let’s hope you have), you have gone through a process to do it. You can take this process and convert it into a template for others to follow. The template could be as simple as a checklist for doing something, or it could be something more complicated like a spreadsheet with charts and custom equations. Creating resources like this are a great way to create some solid link bait to attract links from other blogs and websites.

This article was created by Chris Steurer, the Marketing Director at Blueprint Design Studio.

Add Credit Card Information

Step 1

Go to your Facebook news feed, click on the link on the left that says “Ads manager.”

Step 2

Click on the “Billing” link in the left hand sidebar.

Step 3

After the page refreshes, there will be a new link underneath “Billing” called “Funding Source,” click on that link.

Step 4

On the top right of this page there is a link that says “Add New Funding Source.” Click on that link to continue.

Step 5

Confirm your account by typing in your password.

Step 6

Add your credit card information and you are good to go!

Add Someone Else As A Facebook Ads Admin

Step 1

Go to facebook and get to your news feed, click on the link on the left that says “Ads manager.”

Step 2

Click on the “Settings” link in the left hand sidebar.

Step 3

Fill out your business information on the top of the page until you get to the permissions section (you should see your profile picture). Click on the “+ Add a User” button on the right hand side and add anyone that you want to by email.

If you followed these simple steps, whoever you set up to manage your Facebook advertising account should have received a few email notifications by now and should be ready to go. Congratulations, you did it!

This article was created by Chris Steurer, the Marketing Director at Blueprint Design Studio.

As always when it comes to search engine optimization, you want to focus on the customer first and the search engines second. However, there are still things that you can do on the backend that will help you see a small jump in the rankings, the following tips will help boost your local SEO:

Schema

Schema is a new markup language that can be utilized for search engine optimization. Essentially, it is a collection of new standard HTML tags that you can use to help search engines discover important information about your business. This is especially helpful for getting your local listings fully optimized. The following three tags are the most important Schema tags that you will need for local optimization:

Name

The name tag helps search engines to find the actual and appropriate name for your business. The “brand” tag also can help do about the same thing. Depending on the size of your organization, you may have to use a few other alternatives, but for most businesses, this name tag will work fine.

Address

This let’s the search engines know that this is for sure your address. This helps them localize your business on your end so they know what locations to show your results for.

Map

This gives the search engines access to maps and more location data that you have for your business. Adding this in with the address tag will help dramatically for search engines to properly localize your business.

Unique Content For Locations

Google has an insatiable love for unique content. This is no different when it comes to optimizing pages for your different locations on your site. You shouldn’t simply copy and paste the content from one location into another and only change the name. You should really be striving to create unique content for each of your locations in order to please the search engines and make your readers feel like you care.

So how do you easily and consistently create unique content for each your location’s pages? Here are a few tips from Nifty Marketing:

Directions

Give travel directions to your location. There are almost an infinite number of ways that you give directions to a place, so there is no excuse to not have unique content for your . This makes sure that you have unique content for each of your location pages.

Reviews

Reviews are becoming one of the most important factors for customer conversion, especially in the B2C arena. This form of social proof can be very powerful, so it is important to monitor and use this to your advantage. Post your customers reviews of the specific location to get more unique content on your location’s page.

Company Bio’s

The third easy way to generate unique content for your business’ location pages is to include information about your staff at that location. Every location is likely going to have different workers, this allows you to highlight them on your page to create unique content. Along with being unique content, this gives you the opportunity to establish your authority in the industry.

Optimize For Reviews

As we mentioned above, reviews are becoming one of the most important factors for local search results. Not necessarily from a search engine’s point of view, but from a user’s point of view this especially true. Reviews add reassurance to a potential buyer who is looking, so getting some positive reviews for yourself can drastically improve your conversion rate by letting other users know that the product/service is up to par. So, how do you optimize your business to get more positive reviews online?

Tell Your Staff

Tell your staff to ask for or remind customers to leave reviews online. This is seriously one of the easiest ways to start getting more reviews today, unfortunately, most business overlook this simple method. Generally, the only people that want to leave reviews are the people who had a bad experience and want you or the world to know about. By asking the customers who are having a great experience to leave a review, you give these people who are more inclined to leave a positive review a reason to leave a review.

Add Review Links To Your Site

Do people who visit your website know where to leave a review for your business? Most likely not, that is why it is important that you include links to sites that have reviews for your business on them. These links will not only help remind the user that they can leave a review, but it gives them easy, one-click access to review sites they can use now, removing a lot of friction for the user.

Create A Feedback Userflow On Your Website

Setting up a “feedback userflow” you can help create more positive reviews for your company while reducing the amount of negative reviews online. The template that we use for most of our client’s site goes like this:

The user gets two options on a page or email, the options let the user choose what type of experience they had, “good” or “bad.” If they click on good, they get taken to a page that encourages the user to leave the company a review and it also explains how to leave reviews and gives links to review sites. If they choose the “bad” option, then they get taken to a page with a form on it that gets sent to the business owner or whoever is best at taking care of customer satisfaction issues. This helps encourage more positive reviews while minimalising the bad ones from being posted for the public to see.

This article was created by Chris Steurer, the Marketing Director at Blueprint Design Studio.

Tactics To Increase Facebook Reach & Engagement

Earned Media (#smx #11A)

23% higher interaction on Facebook posts with 80 characters or less. #smx #11A /via @teedubya

— Stephanie Wonderlin (@swonderlin) December 5, 2012

“@aknecht: @annabelleblue Facebook is personal its where I talk to my grandma not your brand – keep that in mind #SMX #11A“

— Jenneil Peters (@JenneilPeters) December 5, 2012

Schedule posts on the weekends on your Facebook pages, as that is where the best interaction occurs. #smx #11A

— Travis Wright (@teedubya) December 5, 2012

Emoticons in #fb posts have 52% higher interaction rate. Interesting #smx #11A

— Becca Broaddus (@BecBroaddus) December 5, 2012

Maximizing Your Impact With Twitter Ads

Paid Media Track (#smx #11B)

Here’s my presentation for my panel session: Maximizing Your Impact With Twitter Ads (#smx #11B) slidesha.re/UnUzqc

— Jennifer (@JenerationY) December 5, 2012

Test different promoted tweet campaigns – what works best, fastest – see quick success! @jenerationy at #SMX#11B

— Total Social Sln (@TotalSocialSln) December 5, 2012

Traffic Boosting Twitter Tactics

Earned Media Track (#smx #12A)

If you need a Twitter formula: 5 posts that make people smarter, 3 that show the role you play and 2 that show personality. #SMX #12A #digit

— Mark W. Smith (@markdubya) December 5, 2012

Be real, provide value. Humanize your brand and reap the rewards via @moniquethegeek #smx #12A go beyond

— Alane Jewel (@alanejewel) December 5, 2012

Host your own chat to demonstrate expertise, gain influence, and build trust to drive authority – @socialmicheller at #smx #12a

— Annalise Kaylor (@annabelleblue) December 5, 2012

Take keywords from analytics & use them to target on twitter. Understand what long tail queries are driving people to your site #smx #12a

— Akvile Harlow (@AkvileHarlow) December 5, 2012

Don’t complicate posts. 5 posts about your space, 3 about your product, 2 personal. – @aaronfriedman #smx #12a

— Akvile Harlow (@AkvileHarlow) December 5, 2012

If you have the #socialmedia share icons on your site, your content is 7x more likely to be shared! – via @aaronfriedman #smx #12a

— Travis Wright (@teedubya) December 5, 2012

Make sure you’re tweeting when your followers are online! Use tools like Follwerwonk or Tweriod. via @moniquethegeek #smx #12A

— Kelly Clay (@kellyhclay) December 5, 2012

Decoding Facebook Ads: Strategies & Tactics For The New Ad Environment

Paid Media Track (#smx #12B)

Facebook will choose the ad in your campaign they feel works the best. So manually rotate your ads. @merrymorud RT @amyvernon: #SMX #12b

— Akvile Harlow (@AkvileHarlow) December 5, 2012

When measuring success – be patient when you begin Facebook ad campaigns & have realistic ROI expectations.@ripcityrhapsody #SMX #12B

— Total Social Sln (@TotalSocialSln) December 5, 2012

RT @amyvernon: #SMX #12b Retargeting on FB is different, as you can’t yet use data from FB. @parkiediem

— Bev (@EditorEtc) December 5, 2012

Love this! RT @amyvernon: #SMX #12b Start six months out when trailer launches. Use FB as a massive focus group. @socialcodeinc

— Alison J. Herzog (@alisonjherzog) December 5, 2012

Social Sites You Shouldn’t Overlook

Earned Media Track (#smx #13A)

Social sites you shouldn’t overlook: 1) @reddit, 2) @tumblr and 3) @pinterest #smx #13A

— Sarah Evans(@prsarahevans) December 5, 2012

TIL Reddit’s algorithm is as complicated as Google’s – and you can’t game either of them. #IGiveUp #SMX #13A

— Kelly Clay (@kellyhclay) December 5, 2012

On Reddit, be accurate, grammatical, & contain established Reddit formats (x-post /r/TIL and TIL) #smx #13a

— Akvile Harlow (@AkvileHarlow) December 5, 2012

Customer Acquisition Through Social Media

Customer Track (#smx #13B)

A 2 pixel border on a Facebook ad created a 10% clickthrough rate increase says @memarin1 of @plinkdotcom #smx #13b

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) December 5, 2012

Twitter is better for testing and fine tuning ad copy. Then post that optimized link/ad on facebook. #smx #13b

— Jennifer (@JenerationY) December 5, 2012

Using twitter to prove to vendors that there is a demand for a product. <==== great idea/resource for salesmen. Thx @marodcar #smx #13b

— Matthew Zaffina (@MattZaffina) December 5, 2012

Increase social with email: adding a like box on a landing page, created 30k new likes in 10 days. #smx #13b

— Travis Wright (@teedubya) December 5, 2012

Blow Me Away Blogging>/h2>

Earned Media Track (#smx #14A)

Great writing isn’t the goal.Content that solves readers’ problems, should be the goal. @drewconrad #14A #SMX

— Michelle StinsonRoss (@SocialMichelleR) December 6, 2012

#smx #14A Twitter: The Rule of 60 – ideal # of characters to encourage retweeting. @prsarahevans

— Amy Vernon (@AmyVernon) December 6, 2012

Content + Keywords + Timing + Link + Rule of 60 = Perfect Tweet @prsarahevans #smx #14a

— McNelley Media (@McNelleyMedia) December 5, 2012

#smx #14A List out social tactics, who’s responsible. Include a draft socially shareable message. Include potential hashtags. @prsarahevans

— Amy Vernon (@AmyVernon) December 5, 2012

Incentivize your team. Use a content calendar and a nice bonus per cost. Become a blog advocate at your organization. #smx #14a

— Akvile Harlow (@AkvileHarlow) December 5, 2012

Set up a schedule for reiterating your content – some stuff doesn’t get old and needs to be shared again! @prsarahevans #smx #14a

— Claire McNelley (@clairemcnelley) December 5, 2012

Want a higher email CTR? @drewconrad of @zaggdaily says to share ur best blog posts via email. Their CTR skyrocketted as a result! #smx #14a

— Akvile Harlow (@AkvileHarlow) December 6, 2012

#smx #14A People want to read something they’re intesrested in & is unique. Doesn’t have to be absolutely pristine. @drewconrad

— Amy Vernon (@AmyVernon) December 6, 2012

Good list RT @amyvernon: #smx #14A Sharing plugins preferred by panelists – @buffer (incl Digg Digg) @sharethis @addthis

— Alan K’necht (@aknecht) December 6, 2012

Let your audience do the work for you when looking for creative blog topics. Find out what people want to know. Answer questions! #smx #14a

— Akvile Harlow (@AkvileHarlow) December 5, 2012

Customer Service Through Social Media

Customer Track (#smx #14B)

Great tip RT @schachin: @lulugrimm screenshot everything < I use SnagIt from @techsmith Awesome Tool! Does Scrolling Window too #smx #14b

— Alan K’necht (@aknecht) December 6, 2012

Make your statements as human as possible. @lulugrimm #SMX #14B

— wurdsurf (@wurdsurf) December 6, 2012

Criteria for a social brand advocate: Love the brand + good communicator #smx #14b

— Jennifer (@JenerationY) December 5, 2012

If you’re at #smx: Here’s our study that @dannysullivan is talking about. #14B bit.ly/TQl6eu

— Simply Measured (@simplymeasured) December 6, 2012

Hootsuite has some of the same functionality of Radian6 for very little $ – good for smaller accounts #smx #14b

— Kristine Schachinger (@schachin) December 5, 2012

8 Keys to Successful Blogging: 5. Leverage Google Authorship – set up here: bit.ly/SW47Hs @mike_arnesen #smx #14a

— Claire McNelley (@clairemcnelley) December 5, 2012

Did we miss anything? Let us know your favorite tips that you learned from the conference!

This article was created by Chris Steurer, the Marketing Director at Blueprint Design Studio.

1. Are You In An Oversaturated Market?

Google Analytics is one of the easiest places to tell if you are operating in a completely oversaturated market. When you go to do your keyword research and notice that all of the keywords have extremely high competition, you may be operating in an oversaturated market. This means one of three things, you either need to exploit a niche market, create an insane marketing plan to push yourself to the front of the market, or you need to reconsider your business.

Even in an oversaturated market, there are almost always still ways to exploit niche markets to drive up your company’s success. Creating an insane marketing plan to push your company to the top of your industry isn’t easy, isn’t guaranteed, and isn’t going to be cheap, but it can still be done with a little planning, hard work, and luck. If you can’t afford the marketing campaign and you can’t seem to find a niche that you can operate in, then you may need to reconsider your business as a whole.

2. Who Is Your Actual Competition?

You may think you know who your competition is, but you won’t really know until you do your SEO research. When you do your research you will discover not only the people or companies who are competing for your top level keywords, but also all of your niches as well. This will open up your eyes to see the spread and depth of your competition, not just the surface.

3. What Other Companies Can You Partner With To Increase Your Value?

Along with finding out who your competitors are, SEO research can help you discover what other sites may be great options to partner with. When looking for companies to partner with, keep in mind that you want to find other service or partners who offer services that compliment your current offerings and also have minimal crossover between services. Making sure that you don’t have many overlapping services/products will help ensure that you avoid conflicts of interest when working with other businesses.

4. Who Are Your Real Customers And What Are They Like?

Sure, basic analytics tell you where people are coming from, what pages they are visiting, and how long they are staying on the site, but what does all of this actually tell you about your customers? Not much on its own. You have to cross compile your data in order to really find out who your customers are and what they are like. For instance, try tracking your U.S. based customers who are coming to your site for a specific keyword. You can then track how many of these people coming to your site are converting into sales leads. From there you can track what pages these people are landing on and what pages are working best for conversions. When you get a clearer idea of how people are flowing through your site, you can paint a better picture of who they are and what they are thinking about.

5. What Services Do Your Customers Actually Want?

SEO research can reveal a lot about what keywords drive traffic to your site and create conversions, but are you looking for what customers actually want? When doing your keyword research, make sure you pay attention to not only what keyword searches match your services, but also pay attention to what people are searching for that are related to your business. This can give you a lot of insight into what customers actually want. This can help you find new services to offer to your clients and customers, making your company even more valuable in the market.

6. How Should You Position Your Company?

Once you discover the broad scope of the market that you are competing in, you can start to gain some insights into where you fit in the market. You need to asses this as a business, as the way you position yourself in a market has to be integrated into your entire company, from the culture to the marketing. Think about your current brand, your capabilities, what you are comfortable with, and where you want your company to be in the future. Repositioning your company can drastically change your company’s performance depending on how drastic the changes are.

These are just a few examples of information that you can discover through analytics to improve the way you run your business. What other tips or tricks do you have for analyzing your analytics to improve your business?

This article was created by Chris Steurer, the Marketing Director at Blueprint Design Studio.