The statistics are in, and they confirm that we’ve moved past the Information Age, and entered the glorious Age of Content: 

In the last few years, content marketing has evolved more than anything else on the online and inbound marketing landscape. That means the rules have changed as well – rewarding businesses that know what works, and punishing those that don’t.

Influencer marketing involves partnering with individuals/websites that are well-known and respected trend-setters and thought-leaders in their niche, and having them discuss your brand (or its products/services) with their community of fans and followers. 

One of the most important questions that you should answer before you spend a cent on SEO is: How long does SEO take to work? This is because if you’re not in it for the long-haul, then much like getting healthy, it’s not going to give you the ROI you expect or need. We’ll get to that in a moment.

Being unable to find your website on Google is a bit like coming across your own obituary in the newspaper. You may feel the need to verify that you’re still alive, because it’s such an alarming and incomprehensible experience. You KNOW that your website exists – and it’s probably open in a browser tab as you read this – and yet, you’re forced to ask the internet world’s most soul-searching question: “Why doesn’t my website show up in Google search?”.

As Forbes contributor Nicole Leinbach-Reyhle correctly points out, the simple reason that all businesses need to use online marketing is because their customers are online. If you're customers are online, then your business must be too!

However, just because a business has an online marketing presence doesn’t mean that they’re exploiting it to their full advantage. In fact, in our experience – and we’ve evaluated tens of thousands of websites in our travels across the web – most businesses aren’t firing on all cylinders when it comes to online marketing. 

If your business isn’t focusing on how to increase organic traffic to your site, then you need to do two things immediately: 

Structured data is based on a standardized collection of shared vocabularies (schema.org) and formats (Microdata, RDFa, or JSON-LD). Essentially, when structured data is added to a web page HTML code (this is referred to as “structured data markup”), the information helps search engines quickly and accurately understand what web pages are about, and the elements they contain – such a reviews, news articles, recipes, videos, and so on. 

If one of your key marketing goals is to increase organic traffic, then you’re definitely headed in the right direction. As noted by Forbes, even after all these years investing in SEO is a smart strategy because it’s cost effective, your competitors are doing it, and most importantly: it works!

Before we share our Google Places optimization checklist, let’s take a few seconds to highlight why this is such an important topic for EVERY business, from enormous enterprises to shoestring startups.