Local SEO, Designing for Engagement and Bruce Clay Unplugged – SEO Newsletter

We’ve got an action-packed newsletter coming to you, set to hit inboxes in the morning! In our August newsletter, you’ll find essential advice on optimizing your site for local searches, an exclusive interview with Internet marketing pioneer Bruce Clay, and a guide to creating infographics that will grab your visitors’ attention.

Local Internet Marketing: Drive Traffic Online and Offline

Local searches are a relatively new and growing aspect of Internet marketing. And in order to succeed today, every business with a brick-and-mortar location needs to take advantage of it. Around 20 percent of all searches have a local intent, and that number is sure to increase in the next few years – after all, kids turning 18 this year were born in 1993, and the newest generation of consumers have never known a world without the Internet. So it’s no surprise that they only look online for local products and services.

Our back-to-basics article shows how optimizing your site for local searches requires changes to your marketing strategies. For example, all small businesses – even down to the smallest mom-and-pop operation – can compete for keywords in local searches that are highly competitive in general searches. Local search synergizes with social media, as well; users are more and more looking to reviews by others in their social networks when researching products and services.

Bruce Clay: The Story Behind the Scenes

Internet marketing has gone through some major changes since it began in the mid-1990s. In fact, the field seems to completely change every few years. In order to tell the story of Bruce Clay, Inc. and Internet marketing, Virginia Nussey sat down for an extensive, brain-picking interview with Bruce Clay. One of the pioneers of search engine optimization (and possibly the first to refer to it as such), Bruce has been neck-deep in Internet marketing since 1996, back when Google was just an obscure mathematical term spelled “googol” and signifying 10^100.

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Bruce recalls Infoseek, the first search engine he optimized for, and how his home-based consulting business eventually grew into a bustling commercial operation. At the same time, search engine optimization, once considered a complete solution in itself, became just one part of search engine marketing, which in turn came to be considered just one part of Internet marketing. And what does the future hold? No one knows for sure, but one of the industry’s key players has some theories.

Principles of Design: The Art and Science of Great Infographics

What if there was something you could put on your site’s landing pages that would boost the click-through rate, bounce rate, and conversion rate all at once? In her article, Kate Gamble from Bruce Clay Australia explains all about infographics: why you need them and how you can use them to ensnare your visitors’ attention.

Whether your site is academic, research-focused or an e-commerce site, you probably already have access to a mountain of data with which you can create visually engaging content. That’s not all: this article also contains ideas for gathering new info from your users and soliciting their suggestions. If done correctly, surveys, questionnaires and other interactive user-engagement objects can be highly effective at increasing traffic – as well as a convenient way to bring in new data.

So head over to August’s SEO Newsletter to read all the month’s happenings in shuffles, shindigs and rumors, along with special content you don’t want to miss.

Bob Meinke is an associate SEO analyst, formerly part of the Bruce Clay team. He graduated from UC Berkeley with a bachelor’s in English and a minor in creative writing. Aside from his beautiful wife, Katie, Bob’s favorite things are unintentional irony and purposeful ambiguity.

See Bob's author page for links to connect on social media.