In July, I wrote an article that was published in Dealer magazine titled “Beam Me Up! How Service May Look In The Future.” In that article, I discussed how the trend of increasing…

If you're like many who use Google+, you may not check your pages very often. With posting and monitoring tools out there, you might not log into your actual account very often. You should. Custom URLs are now available.

For individual users, you should be getting an email if you meet the minimum requirements. These "requirements" are very…

For the last 7 years, I've been watching Google very closely. Sure, they are in the news all the time so it's not something that's exactly hard. What has been more challenging is keeping up with their long-standing obsession with social media and understanding why it's so.

They have some big wins (YouTube, Google+) as well as dozens of…

There have been valid business reasons to use hashtags for years. Twitter started it off. Pinterest added to it. Google+ mastered it in many ways. Instagram, Tumblr… the list of social sites on which hashtags are relevant is long. Facebook was the last major holdout. Now that they’ve joined the bandwagon, it’s go time.…

 Google has been testing what they call their "Local Carousel" for the past couple months, and today it is officially going live. It's the same top of page scroller you've been seeing on tablets for the past year, but now it's on your browser for your local related searches. Lets take a look at what it is and what it means for your local …

When I was asked last year to develop a social media marketing service, the first question they asked was whether I already had software in mind or if it needed to be built. I told them that the software had already been developed and it was free. This didn’t go over well at first; they’d always used premium social media…

There are those who think that Facebook and Twitter are the only relevant social networks when it comes to business. There are those who go so far as saying that Facebook is all that you need. In truth, both may be right, but that’s strictly from a social perspective. Once you throw search into the equation, Google+, Pinterest,…

You could actually communicate on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Google+ and Twitter if you just had an app that creates images with HUGE text. Well, now, you can.-- …

I revisited the Dataium study that was commissioned by Cars.com:

"Despite an average of 55 percent of dealerships’ online advertising budgets being devoted to paid search engine marketing, just 6 percent of dealership website traffic on average is referred by paid search keywords. Furthermore, less than 1 percent of this traffic resulted in email form leads submitted on dealership websites."

Add all of a dealerships internet related expenses:…

Advertisers Must Pay Attention to Hispanic Consumers as Rising Trendsetters in 2013…

Dangerous Adwords Marketing Advertising SEM Strategies and Stats…

Some may try to call me out on the title of this post. “Don’t you mean ‘strategies’ plural?”

No. Search and social strategy. One thing. Different processes. Slightly different goals. Same strategy.

As we move forward through the second quarter of 2013, it’s important to understand how the dynamic between…

Every time a social network makes a change to their layout, design firms around the world groan about how they now have to redo a ton of different artwork. Social media is big business and companies will pay big bucks to look just right on their pages and profiles.

Google had a change of their own recently on Google+, including one major change to profile and page layouts that made the…

I just put an article up on the site.  That talks about the 5 Key Web Properties Dealers keep losing control of that they can't afford to lose control of.  

 …

Let’s call it what it really is, shall we? Despite efforts by Bing/Yahoo to stay relevant as well as efforts by Facebook and Twitter to enter the search game, there really is only one. For years, I’ve always had to add the caveat when discussing search marketing that “When I say Google, I mean Bing and Yahoo as well.”

I won’t be saying…

There are still many in the search engine optimization industry that are fighting the concept that Google (and Bing) is taking social signals into account at a high level when determining search rankings.

These people fall into three categories:

1. Those who haven’t…

Everyone knows you shouldn't have a spammy site, but just what the heck does "spammy" even mean? We know Google doesn't like it, but it's not as though the word has a hard and fast definition (at least not one pertaining to SEO). Google realizes this, and they have recently put up a new page that illustrates …

Are you familiar with Google snippets? Basically, they are the chunk of information you see under the title of search results. They usually include the URL, a date, history, and most important, a description. In the past, you've been able to define your own description in the metadata of your site, so you had control over what was displayed under your page in results. Now though,…