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When it comes time to make those holiday sales, capturing holiday traffic is important. That means focusing your efforts on using holiday-appropriate keywords, making appropriate blog posts, and updating your website copy and content to reflect the oncoming holiday season. Blogging is an important part of your marketing strategy to bring in new customers, and if you don’t want to modify page content or create a bunch of new landing pages, blogging is where it’s at.

Want to share with the world that you exercised your American right and voted this election? Looking to help other people get out and vote? We’ve got just the thing for you!

If you have a G Suite account, chances are you’ve received this email from G Suite: There is some confusion over what this means. Essentially, Google is removing a publicly available URL that shows contact information for your G Suite organization. Some people may use this internally in wikis or documents, so Google is giving you a heads up that the link will not work after August 31st, 2020. If you have never seen a link like that before or used one, then you have no reason to look for it or make any changes.

Important information for all small businesses in NH and other areas: The Small Business Administration now has “disaster loan” opportunities for small businesses, including Economic Injury Disaster Loans and Payroll Protection Program loans. Both of these programs can in fact be grants (“forgivable loans”) if used for the intended purposes, and have low rates for any money you must pay back. Our accountant, Joe Orabono at Vector Tax & Accounting, sent us a note to tell us he’s recommending that ALL his small business clients apply for these programs, especially given the potential for grants from them. Here at hasOptimization, we are absolutely NOT financial professionals, so you should consult with your accountant for information specific to your needs. If you’re a small business owner and are looking for more information on these programs, some details are available on SBA.gov. While we can’t help with financial advice, we wanted to share this important information with those who might need it. We CAN help you with other aspects of managing your business during the coronavirus pandemic, however, including ecommerce setups, social media marketing, advertising, and advice on how to take your business online, even if it’s your first time. Stay home, stay healthy. We’re all in this together.

Getting stir crazy? Not sure how your business will fare during this time of uncertainty? Don’t forget about all things internet that can help you continue growing your business even when people can’t come through the door!

Hiring an SEO company or marketer can be a big step for your business. All you have to do is pay a bit of money, and then you can rake in the benefits of increased business, right? The too long, didn’t read is that it’s not that simple. Any SEO company’s job is incredibly complex, and though we understand the complexities of things like search engines, algorithms, and more so you don’t have to, there are a few things you should know before hiring an SEO company.

One helpful marketing tool we constantly try to get our clients to leverage is building marketing mailing lists. Building an email marketing list is a great way to get in direct contact with your customers — and potential customers — and can help you when you’re suffering from poor reach on social media platforms. It’s also a better way to make big announcements that go directly to people’s email. I’m sure you know the benefits of an email marketing list, but building one can be a challenge. Typically, clients import their current customers and stop there. There’s a big opportunity for clients to continue building their email marketing lists with lots of potential customers; adding a signup form to the end of a blog post is one way, assuming you are publishing posts people may want to see more of.

You may have heard of this phenomenon. It can happen anywhere, to anyone at all with a reviewable presence, whether it’s on Facebook, Yelp, Google, Bing, Steam, Amazon, or even somewhere else. A review bomb, or review bombing, is when the internet turns against you.

One very interesting thing about SEO is the science that happens behind it. Whether it’s psychologically crafting content in a way that makes people click (i.e. clickbait), or it’s understanding how people navigate a page, understanding usability and the flow of any web page is important to crafting your perfect optimization approach. We were excited to read about this study by Nielsen Norman Group which tracked user eye movement on the search engine results page (SERP). A few years back, it was common to have ten blue-link results in a list. That required customers to read and examine what they were clicking. Now, especially on Google, the SERP can have all kinds of more visually appealing bits of information, such as business listings to the right, rich snippets highlighted at the top — sometimes even with pictures, or even accordion answers to questions. How can we know where a user’s eye travels, and what listing is most important to optimize for? The Pinball Pattern NNG compares the way they found a user’s eye to move about the SERP to be similar to a pinball inside of a pinball machine. That means that they found users aren’t consuming information on the SERP in a linear fashion — instead the eye can be moving left, to right, to left again, causing a “pinball pattern” effect. What’s it look like? Let’s get into the nitty gritty about what a typical SERP looks like and what the pinball pattern suggests. You will see in…

If you communicate with a hasOptimization staff member regularly, you may have noticed that we recently added pronouns to all of our email signatures. You may be wondering why that is…and don’t worry, I’ll get there. First, though, I’d like to give you some background. What IS a pronoun, anyways? A pronoun is a word which stands in for a noun. It would be a little odd if you used someone’s name every single time you referred to them: “Jennifer has gone to Jennifer’s car to get Jennifer’s jacket because Jennifer is cold”. Strange, huh? “Jennifer has gone to her car to get her jacket because she is cold” seems much more natural to the average English speaker. “She” and “her” are pronouns, standing in for Jennifer in that second example sentence. They (a word which here is standing in for the noun “pronouns”!) make our language flow more smoothly and be less repetitious. Why are pronouns important and why are some people so upset about them? Here’s the deal. Calling someone by a pronoun that is not theirs is just as bad as calling them by a name that is not theirs. It’s careless, and repeated it becomes rude. It makes the person you’re speaking about feel not-known, not-seen. If that happens to someone constantly, every day, it wears them down. It’s tiring. It’s painful. Don’t do that to people! So why’d hasOptimization put pronouns in our email signatures? Well, half of the hasOptimization core team uses an uncommon…