Google My Business Support Telling Businesses To Submit Reconsideration Requests?

This is a weird one - according to Tim Capper in the Local Business Forums, official support representatives from the Google My Business team are telling those who had their businesses suspended on Google My Business to submit reconsideration requests in the Google Search Console...

Google Machine Learning Sentence Compression Algorithms Powers Features Snippets

The other day, I covered at Search Engine Land a Wired article named Google's hand-fed AI now gives answers...

Google Docs Explore: Search Engine Optimization Is Related To Weasels

This is a fun one, maybe... If you go to Google Docs, type "search engine optimization" and click on the "Explore" feature - you will see that Google thinks the term "search engine optimization" is related to the animal, weasel...

Google Tel Aviv's Mega Bite Restaurant's Rabanut Kosher Certificate

Mapping a #GivingTuesday Follow-up Plan

Giving Tuesday is one of the biggest donation days of the year. Once it's over, don't let its impact fade away. Sure, you've seen a boost in donations off your Giving Tuesday campaign, but you've also gotten so much more value you can use to advance your organization's mission.

Once the Giving Tuesday campaign itself is over, have a follow-up plan that keeps the value growing throughout the next year. Here are four pieces to a successful post-Giving Tuesday plan.

1) Run An Engagement Campaign For People Who Donated On Giving Tuesday

Donating is a strong expression of interest. Run a targeted campaign for the Giving Tuesday donors to get them further engaged with your organization. This is not a campaign asking for more money. Too soon.

A Giving Tuesday donor campaign can start with a special thank you for making the day so special. Share some details about what was achieved that day: how much was donated, where that money is going and whom it will help.

Create some image or emoji-laden social content that announces what a rock star they are for having given to your organization on Giving Tuesday. Then encourage them to share the pre-fabbed social content via their own social media profiles. Instead of "I voted" stickers we get on election day, these are the "I donated…" or "I gave to…" social media updates.

If you have events or volunteer opportunities, you might center your campaign around getting them involved in them. Frame it as not just an opportunity for them to be involved, but for your organization to be able to meet its great donors in person and thank them personally.

2) Build Content About How The Donations Will Be Used, Showing Maximum Impact

Some of this content can be used in your Giving Tuesday donor campaign, as well as other targeted campaigns or general social media content.

Start with an eye-catching infographic that shares interesting tidbits about what you raised on Giving Tuesday and how that translates to the good your nonprofit does. Does your program run a program providing after-school tutoring to students in need? How many more students and tutoring hours will the donations support? Let people see what the money will do.

Will the money be used for building improvements or at a physical location? Take a video and give a tour of where and how the money will create more or enhanced resources for the community. As the improvements get made, post update videos they can share too.

3) Plan How To Re-Engage This Year's Donors For Other Giving Occasions

Just because you're not asking your Giving Tuesday donors for another donation right now, doesn't mean you won't in the future. You'd be silly not to prep them for a future ask. 

When you think about a donation campaign for this group, it might be worthwhile to segment them further. For example, new donors and repeat donors, by amount of donation, whether they engaged with your engagement campaign, or got involved in other ways with your organization since their Giving Tuesday donation. It makes sense that these different groups would get different messaging.

What you know they all have in common is that they're motivated by group action and social media events. You might think about building a donation campaign around another meaningful event or even otherwise ordinary social media meme (#WednesdayWisdom, anyone?). An animal rescue group might build something around National Puppy Day (it's coming up in March). There's day for everything. Find one that's relevant to your group.

If you have an annual event that attracts higher dollar donors, put together a prep email campaign for the Giving Tuesday donors that were on the high end. The email campaign can start with content from previous years' events and build up to the save the date and ask. 

4) Report On Your Giving Tuesday Results So You Know Which Marketing Efforts Worked Best

Run. Analyze. Refine. That's the mantra for every marketing campaign and it's no different for Giving Tuesday. Hopefully, you set some campaign goals and identified important metrics pre-campaign. Regardless of outcome, look at each piece of content and point of outreach to see how well it performed. Or who it performed well with and who it didn't.

What devices did most of your converted traffic come from? Which social media channels were most responsive? Did videos perform better than blog posts? How did the conversion rates on different Giving Tuesday emails vary? 

What can you learn about the new donors each campaign tactic attracted? What are the common demographic or psychographic denominators you can find? 

Do a post-mortem that ends with actionable takeaways you can implement right now and to execute an even better Giving Tuesday campaign next year.

You Don't Have To Wait 'Til Next Year

We're not just talking to you Cubs fans out there. Giving Tuesday might just be an annual campaign, but you can incorporate it into marketing campaigns all year long. From content you can build around its impact on your mission to leveraging the new donor data gathered – Giving Tuesday is truly a gift that keeps on giving.

5 Reasons Why HTTPS Should Be Enabled on Your Website

If you’re anything like me, there’s been a time in your life when you’ve asked, “What the heck is https?”

What’s that extra “s” for? Well, it turns out that the “s” stands for “SSL,” which stands for Secure Sockets Layer -- the technology that encrypts your connection to a website, so that hackers can't intercept any of your data.

The whole concept of https is a pretty interesting topic on its own, and my colleague, Jeffrey Vocell, talks more about it here. But in addition to what it actually means, why is it so important? And why do you need it on your website?

Well, there are many reasons, but with the help of my aforementioned colleague, we identified five of the more important ones. (Spoiler alert: A lot of them have to do with your search performance, so have a good look at what they mean for you.)

HubSpot Marketing customers: SSL is included free of charge with the Website Add-On, and the number of domains on which you can enable SSL depends on your subscription type. Learn more here.

5 Reasons Why HTTPS Should Be Enabled on Your Website

1) It’s good for search.

Every minute -- no, second -- Google’s algorithm requires sites to essentially battle it for top search rankings. I love that visual: two websites that could both rank for a user’s query, essentially running toward the finish line of top results. But what happens if there’s a tie? Do the sites battle it out in a “sudden death” round?

Kind of -- there is a tiebreaker involved, and it’s https. The way Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes explains it, “If all quality signals are equal for two results, then the one that is on HTTPS would get … or may get … the extra boost that is needed to trump the other result.”

It all goes back to the idea that Google is constantly solving for the user, and makes frequent changes to its algorithm that create a better experience. Which is why our next point makes sense.

2) It’s better for users.

I couldn’t tell you the last time I heard about a hacking incident in which thousands of records were stolen -- because they seem to happen so frequently. In fact, such data breaches jumped 29.5% between 2014 and 2015.

But SSL helps to prevent these “man-in-the-middle” attacks -- “a form of eavesdropping where communication between two users is monitored and modified by an unauthorized party” -- and keeps user information secure.

That makes https especially important if your website accepts credit cards or has a login functionality. With so many of these hacking incidents making headlines, users want to know that your brand is making an effort to protect them from their private information being stolen or compromised.

We could also get into a debate about the ethics of protecting your users from that kind of privacy breach, but you get the point:

• user privacy = important
• https = good for privacy

3) SSL is required for AMP.

A few pieces of vocabulary to break down here:

“AMP” stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. It’s the technology that makes certain pages load almost instantaneously on mobile. So, when you search for something on your mobile device through Google, you might notice that some results have a lightning bolt icon next to it, that means that it’s AMP-ready.

Look at what happens when I search for Doomtree, my favorite hip hop group, on my phone. On the first page of results, one has the lightning bolt icon next to it. And when I click on that result:

... it loads instantaneously.

AMP is going to play a major role in SEO in the coming months -- Google is making it a priority for 2017, which implies that AMP-ready pages will have better rankings. But in order for something to be labeled as AMP, it requires SSL.

We’ve covered the importance of optimizing for mobile quite a bit, and preparing for the special attention that will be paid to AMP is now part of that optimization. But in order for webmasters to be as web-friendly as possible, all of the requirements behind AMP must be closely examined -- including its https criteria.

4) Google is indexing mobile.

So, that thing we just said about the importance of mobile? It turns out, Google is actually going to start indexing mobile, which means that its “algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site.”

But in order for a mobile site to be indexable, Google recommends several best practices, one of which is to “start by migrating to a secure site,” especially “if [you] don’t support HTTPS yet.”

And bottom line, says HubSpot SEO Senior Marketing Manager Victor Pan, “HTTPS is preferred over HTTP in the index, with all other things being equal.” So get secure -- you’ll be glad you did.

5) “Not secure.”

To elaborate -- In January 2017, Chrome 56 will start displaying “not secure” in the browser bar for any http (notice it’s missing the “s”) sites that ask users for login or credit card information.

I don’t know about you, but when I’m about to make an online purchase and see that the site isn’t secure -- for example, that the padlock icon in the browser bar is broken -- I navigate my business elsewhere. And I’m not alone. In fact, only 3% of online shoppers say they would enter their credit card information on a site without the green padlock.

Imagine if Google starts doing that work for users before they can even get to checkout. If the number is as low as 3% now, before search engines start doing the legwork to label sites as “not secure” before anyone even visits them, you can see how traffic to those sites will suffer a huge blow -- as well as its digital sales revenue.

Create a Safe Space

There you have it. If you want your SEO to stay strong -- on both desktop and mobile -- and you don’t want to lose digital sales revenue, it’s easy to see why https should be enabled on your website.

These are just a few reasons why https is so important. What are yours? Let us know in the comments.

>

How to Fix Your Agency's Low Morale Problem

As an agency leader, do you have a plan for what you’d do if 30-50% of your employees quit?

You might be at risk right now, according to the latest Campaign US survey on agency employee morale.

To summarize from this recent HubSpot article on the growing agency morale problem:

• Nearly half of all agency employees report having "low" or "dangerously low" morale in 2016 -- up from one-third in 2015.
• Roughly 30% of agency employees are actively looking for new jobs. (I venture that even more would leave if approached with a strong opportunity.)
• The top three causes of low morale were company leadership (73%), lack of advancement (45%), and dissatisfaction with work (38%).

Now that we know there’s a problem, how do we solve it?

The good news is that the top causes of low morale are primarily within your control -- so you can fix them at your agency.

How to Fix Your Agency's Low Morale Problem

1) Assess your own management and leadership skills.

As Manager Tools notes: "The definition of an Effective Manager is to achieve results while retaining your team members."

Be honest with yourself -- are you getting results and retaining your team? If you’re seeing only one of those (or neither), you probably have gaps as a leader and manager.

According to Glassdoor, a former agency owner spent most of his time at the race track instead of leading his agency. That’s not a good message for employee morale.

You may need to get perspective from someone outside your agency -- we often lack perspective on ourselves. You can reach out to a business partner, your romantic partner, a business coach, or a "frenemy" at another agency. But you have to make it safe for them to share honest feedback, or else you’re defeating the purpose.

Be aware that their perspective may hurt at first. In my first 360 review as a manager, current and past colleagues said I was good at getting things done… but not at making it fun for everyone else. That wasn’t fun to hear, but taking it to heart meant I could start improving.

2) Hire people to fill in your gaps as a leader.

Improving your weaknesses only goes so far. I believe managers should focus on maximizing their strengths, and then recruit others to balance out their weaknesses.

If you're great at sales and big-picture thinking, but you struggle with operations, you'll probably never become great at operations. And you’re also unlikely to enjoy operations anyway. Instead, hire a great operations person -- someone who excels at the things you don't enjoy.

If you're great at operations but struggle at people-related nuances, get help. At the very least, seek out insights from someone with better people skills before you roll-out an agency-wide initiative that might make people unhappy.

Reflect for a moment: What are your gaps as an agency leader? How might you ask current and future team members to help you fill those gaps?

3) Help your middle managers upgrade their management skills.

When I speak with front-line employees at agencies, I see a pattern of problems around middle management. Often, the executive leadership team is good at managing people -- but the middle managers aren't always as competent.

Part of the issue is usually the agency's fault. If you promote people who aren't ready to manage others, it's not surprising that your new managers will struggle. Give your middle managers the tools they need to succeed, and be ready to coach them on coaching their employees.

Don't assume they know what you’ve learned over the years. I share 31 tips for managers in my book Made to Lead, but knowing is only the beginning -- people still need to practice management every day.

Find ways to observe your middle managers as they manage. Management is a "learn by doing" profession. You want to provide spot feedback (privately) to help people improve while situations are fresh.

4) Show employees how they fit into your agency's future.

When I do anonymous Employee Culture Surveys at agencies, I often get feedback that employees feel confident about their agency's future… but they're unclear how they fit into that future.

Alleviating employee stress around the future depends on your agency’s headcount and your growth plans. When an agency has 10 people, there’s not much room for promotions -- everyone’s doing a bit of everything, and it doesn’t make sense to have a large layer of middle managers. In contrast, a 50-person agency typically has plenty of room for employee advancement.

If you’re currently small and likely will be for the immediate future, be honest about your plans. Some people will choose to leave, but you can turn it into a controlled departure instead of a sudden departure.

If you’re growing, map out the future org chart and team structure. Identify where you’re going, and what the transition roles might look like. Then, speak with employees about the agency’s future, along with each person’s individual professional goals.

5) Commit to improving work/life balance.

Work/life balance was the key factor among high-morale employees in the Campaign US survey. Improving work/life balance won’t fix morale if you’re also a terrible manager, but it’s the next place to look once you’ve started to improve yourself.

How many hours are your employees working? According to my research on agency workloads via Inbound.org, most agency people are working less than 50 hours a week. A significant minority (23%) are working more than 60 hours a week, but that’s not the norm.

Apart from occasional spikes, long workweeks may be a sign that you’re understaffed, that people aren’t billing enough, or that you’re doing a bad job at project management.

Work/life balance is about flexibility, too. Are you focused on results… or expecting butts-in-seats facetime? The workweek can feel longer when employees feel unnecessarily chained to their desk.

6) Send (and act on) employee satisfaction surveys.

If you don’t know how your team is doing, it’s harder to improve. Keep in mind that perception is reality -- employee morale is about what employees think and feel, not what you think and feel as an agency leader.

Because I want my team to be happy, I regularly check-in to ask how things are going by sending a "satisfaction check-in." I ask team members the following five questions to find out how happy they are with their work, and what I can do better as a leader.

1. What's working?
2. What's not working?
3. What should I do differently?
4. Do you see any opportunities or gaps in the business that I am (or might be) missing?
5. Anything else you'd like to share?

Based on their answers, I can improve my leadership and management, as well as improve the business overall.

You can conduct simple employee surveys yourself, or you can use an employee engagement tool.

7) Invest in professional development.

Spending cash and time on professional development pays off in two ways. First, it helps employees improve their skills -- which means they’re better at helping your agency’s clients. Second, it shows employees you’re investing in their future -- whether they stay or go.

The right budget and time allocation will depend on your agency’s lifecycle. But regardless of the amount, I typically see a strong payoff for agencies.

Don’t forget to include management and leadership coaching. Once you equip your team with more skills and experience, it also makes it easier to promote from within -- which helps solve the "lack of advancement" morale problem.

8) Conduct (and act on) exit interviews.

Your best efforts won’t keep everyone -- and that's okay. It’s normal to have at least some employee turnover. (You might expect 10-25% annual employee turnover, depending on the size of your agency.)

When someone says they’re leaving, don’t try to convince them to stay -- they’ve already made up their mind. But you can use their experience to prevent other good team members from leaving.

Use exit interviews to find what you're doing wrong, and fix whatever the problem is as well as you can.

It’s important that you act on what you learn. If you tend to take things personally, you should delegate the exit interview process to another member of your leadership team.

Applying These Tactics at Your Agency

If you’ve observed an employee morale problem -- or suspect one is festering -- you can solve it.

To do this, you need to identify the underlying cause(s) and then take action. The solutions are often free or inexpensive, but they require you to commit to improving as a leader and a manager.

Don’t underestimate the time it will take to fix things -- some changes can happen immediately, but others can take months of consistent action, especially when it involves regaining employees’ trust.

Leadership development can feel painful at first, but it pays off with better employee retention and results. Ultimately, you’ll enjoy work more -- and you can see a higher payday if you ultimately choose to sell your agency.

What will you change first at your agency to boost employee morale? Let us know in the comments.