Blog Articles from Fawkes Digital Marketing

If you're like us, you've known you've received a Google review, and it has yet to show up. One client has had this issue and just signed one with missing reviews. How many more are there? With the techniques and information below, you will be able to fix your missing reviews.

You will hear from people that doing search engine optimization or SEO is hard. It's not. Okay, now that I've put myself out of a job and shut down the company because of it, why do SEO companies even exist? The simple answer is time, education, and knowledge.

Dreams come in many ways for each of us. We started over nine years ago with a desire to help businesses achieve their dream domain name. As of today, a dream we have now done is to help companies to gain their desired domain name four times. Let's look at all four as each was unique. We'll then explore how we announce it to each client and how you can work on getting your desired domain name if someone else owns it.

Recently I had to go back to organic search engine optimization or organic SEO learning and school/research. I always find it good to go back to your fundamentals to re-evaluate if you're missing something. I was told to rank a site for three keyword phrases. Out of the nine words (three words in each keyword phrase), only one of those words existed on the site. That word existed once out of around one million words on the site. Was I wrong in my logic? Had I become 'complacent' in the daily SEO tasks that I missed this capability? Was I truly not as knowledgeable as I thought? This is the journey of my research.

We love coffee (and beer), but this article will be all about the coffee and checking on organic SEO results for our clients. We have some great software and team members who know SEO's ins and outs. Our software allows us to sit anywhere globally and get our clients ranked in the towns they want without ever setting foot in those cities and towns. For me, that is in Valparaiso. I always do real-world validation checks for quality control by physically driving to locations to test their organic SEO.

Valparaiso, Indiana, March 20, 2022 -- One of the most important things that contributes to people being successful and well-adjusted in life is ensuring that they have a home. One local web and graphic design and development company is making it their mission to help with those efforts. Each year, Fawkes Digital Marketing (FDM) donates to ValpoShelter.org to facilitate in the education of homelessness and provide resources for men, women, and families in need of assistance. This assistance goes deeper than just finding a home. Valpo Shelter helps with food, health, and religious support in the local communities of Indiana. Valpo Shelter is the largest and most complete shelter directory in the State of Indiana.

Another abbreviation from the land of SEO or Search Engine Optimization. The first place ot start is what does TF-IDF stand for. TF-IDF stands for 'Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency'. This is a technique that came out from Hans Peter Luhn in 1957 came up with the Term Frequency part. In 1972, Karen Spärck Jones, conceived the Inverse Document Frequency (IDF) portion. So, this is nothing new in regard to existence. What is new is how the search engines use this information to help in the calculation and rating of your website pages.

There are three ways to reply to reviews. We're going to cover the worst to the best way. I encourage you to read all as I explain why the bad ones are awful and hurting your business growth.

We started our series of organic search engine optimization or organic SEO techniques we're starting with when we wrote about 'FREE Press Releases.' That was indeed the start of what we're doing for each one of our social media management clients. I will discuss what we're doing for over 100 of our clients and over 1,500 pages of content, how it benefits you, and why the search engines will see a considerable boost with this change to help you grow your business.

We are bringing back a feature that we once had but was not taken advantage of by clients, so we killed it off. The original version required the business owner or those they designated to be involved. We thought this was the best approach, but in hindsight, it wasn't. Articles went months without being distributed. They didn't produce the results we wanted them to.

Yes, a name change. Let's start there. I (we) have grown in the last nine years and learned a lot. We started knowing nothing about running a business but a ton about marketing and technology. I now fully understand the basics of business and still learn daily. With the change noted below, nothing for your business changes. Your still price locked into the plan you are on.

As soon as I say, 'organic SEO' or 'organic search engine optimization,' I always get a 'deer in the headlights look.' Many are aware of what paid advertising is or PPC, but what is this 'organic' stuff. Let's look at what organic is and why it should be the foundational element of what you need for your online marketing strategy, even if you use paid advertising.

We have a client that was using HomeAdvisor and CraftJack. Both of these are owned by Angie's List (now Angi). The deal our client had was that they would get leads from both companies. That is where things got interesting for our client and we're going to tell the story from what they've told us. This aligned with what we had heard from other service-based companies that we felt we need to educate service-based businesses as a good portion of our work comes from them.

Microsoft Exchange is a great system that indeed requires IT support to manage it well. During 2021 we've pushed, tested, and built a system with the same core features as Microsoft Exchange but made specifically for small-to-mid-size businesses. With the latest build of our SmaterMail Exchange compatible email system, we can now match the core features of Microsoft Exchange, be faster, and charge less. Sounds good, but what do you get?

Building a business directory isn't anything new to us. Over the years, we've made several, including the largest local directory in Northwest Indiana, Region Adventures (www.regionadventures.com). Making one for men, women, and families that is 1/100th the size you would think would not only be a slam dunk but super easy. Well, this directory has pushed us to the limits and have opened new opportunities for us as a business. I will be writing as we continue to grow, but I thought covering the first hurdles would be a great place to start.

Let's start by saying no web host is perfect. GoDaddy was missing the security basics of encrypting passwords and user information. This is something that should ever happen. That is what happened with the last security breach at GoDaddy 18 months ago (May 5, 2020).

Imagine getting a call from a potential new client panicking that they are to launch on BLACK FRIDAY, and it's a week before that day. Well, that just happened. Let's cover how we are handling this type of phone call.

The history of Google My Business started as Google Places for Business back in 2010 and continues to be a virtual online directory for anyone using the Internet. Google, on November 4, 2021, chose to change the name to Google Business Profiles. We're going to look at the history of Google's business directory page and how the changes will help your business grow.

Imagine a low-cost showroom giving every customer and potential customer 24x7 access that educates and provides a consistent message generating revenue for you. That is what a well-designed business website will do for you.

As a web design company owner, I am biased toward career information being on the website. I feel that having your career page helps qualify your employees more than any other channel. If you are hiring for a critical position (e.g., CEO/CFO/Sales), I believe using an assessment test to qualify those positions further is key to long-term success.

This past labor day weekend, I searched the internet for a specific niche industry and came across a site with malware on it, as noted by the blog image. I started thinking of all the small businesses that aren't updated and could run into this and present the worst possible first impression. So we came up with a solution.

Website hosting only is just asking for your business to fail and not grow. As business owners, we all want our businesses to grow, thrive, and reach our expectations. Website hosting alone is a 'Field of Dreams' where you build it and 'Hope they come.'

We hope you would never hire an employee, show them the ropes, and leave them all independently without continually mentoring and training them. Your website is an employee and often the first thing a new customer will see. Continual maintenance, or website employee training, allows you to keep everything humming along as efficiently as possible. Since WordPress has come out, it is averaging more than 27 updates per year and over 60 in the past five years. Plugins or add-ons are not even in this total and produce higher updates, often daily.

UTM codes stand for Urchin Tracking Monitor. The name comes from Urchin Tracker which was a web analytics software that served as the base for Google Analytics. These are often used with Google Ads (formally Google AdWords). Marketing in the old days you spent hundreds, even thousands, of dollars on newspaper ads. These ads you often didn’t know the results. Either due to you or your employees not asking how you heard of us or truly thinking the newspaper was making results (e.g. you guessed). Today with technology you often will spend less but demand to know whether the results are working for you. First, you should’ve been asking that question under old school methods but there really was no 100% way of knowing. With UTM codes you can have some pretty accurate methods of how people are reaching you. They also can be used beyond just paid ads if used correctly. We’re going to not only dig into what UTM codes are but how you can use them and how to create them (easily).