This is a guest post by Michelle Strassburg, head of Sales and Marketing at Wood and Beyond.
The most important online marketing goal for any small business is to build its channel of organic web traffic. Organic web traffic relates to users finding your business when searching online through the natural search results. So why is it so important you ask? There are many reasons why higher search engine ranking matters, none more important than the fact that it’s free web traffic and users who found your site through the natural search results are more likely to buy a product or order a service. Before we dig deeper into the specifics of how to improve your organic ranking, know this: Unfortunately there are no shortcuts and the process of optimizing your site is a long process which along the way will work at times and won’t at other times.
Somehow it’s already the week of December 7th – hope you have your holiday preparations well in hand. This week we discuss the differences in social media strategies for national vs. local businesses (thanks to Deborah Richmond 
You’ve worked really hard to provide a service that people depend on – they use it every day for a key personal or business task. They’ve built some sort of value on your service so now you’re part of their value chain. One day you have some sort of technical problems and your service goes down for a few hours. All those people who depend on your service are out in the cold. They’ve built something using your service, so now they’re putting their own customers out in the cold too. What happens?
We’ve all received them – automated DMs (direct messages) on Twitter for all sorts of things – to say hi, to sell a product, to get you to join their mafia family, whatever. They’re all spam. I tend to use DMs to send personal messages to people – to say hi, or send a thank you – things that are nicer to send personally than publicly. Recently I’ve received quite a few messages from people telling me that they don’t check their DMs, so they missed my messages. Are all these automated messages/spam ruining the ability to personally connect with people?
Digital Marketing & Strategy
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