Is your SEO (search engine optimization) service making you money or costing you money? Are you having any success at all with your SEO efforts? A lot of small businesses go with the cheapest options, and pay for the most basic of SEO services. This type of approach may not be worth it for your business, and you may end up shelling out money and getting no results. To get an idea if your cost effective SEO is worth it you need to know the features and benefits that they offer compared to a full service SEO firm.

You hear a lot about content marketing these days. The internet has changed, including what customers expect and what the search engines like Google expect from your site.

Maybe you've been considering hiring content services to boost your internet marketing efforts, but you aren’t sure what to think.

To help you out, here are a few common myths you sometimes hear about content marketing services and the truth about them.

If you read our blog regularly, you have probably noticed we love inbound marketing, or better known from HubSpot as “Marketing People Love.” An Inbound Marketing philosophy is all about attracting potential customers by offering relevant and remarkable content that they are looking for, instead of interrupting them with annoying ads, cold calls, or spammy emails they aren’t asking for.

Social media is big, and here to stay. If your business isn’t doing social media marketing, you may want to consider the following statistics. In a pew research study published in January of this year, it was found that 58% of all adults in the U.S. use Facebook. In other words, over half of all Americans are using the site. If you look only at internet users, it’s a whopping 71% that use Facebook. Of course other social media sites such as Twitter and Pinterest don’t have quite that amount of traffic, but are still significant.

If you're a business owner or marketing manager, you may want to consider hiring a social media consultant to help you reach your target audience.

Here are a few benefits you will get from this type of service:

Do you have an email marketing consultant that you work with as part of your marketing? Do you have a healthy relationship with them? While most people are aware of the dynamics of an unhealthy relationship in their personal lives, when it comes to business relationships it can be a little harder to know what is to be expected. You may be getting the short end of the stick and it may be time to move on.

Here are a few signs that it may be time to break up with your email marketing consultant:

You may have heard already, but recently Google was re-organized to become one division of a new “parent” company called Alphabet. The newly formed parent company will also include other businesses in addition to Google. If you are a business that advertises on Google or relies on an SEO strategy to rank in Google search results, you won’t really be affected by this change.

You may be wondering what this has to do with your business. In this transition, there are a few principles that can apply to any business or entrepreneurial endeavor. Read on to find out some of the things Google is getting right that you should also be doing with your business.

Understanding your customer base is important. Here at Half a Bubble Out, we provide inbound marketing services and talk a lot about them. If you’re unfamiliar, the quick description is that we think it is best to attract your audience naturally, and this is primarily done through helpful content. If you want a more in depth description, check out this blog on inbound marketing.

When running a local business, one of the most important ways to get exposure is through local internet marketing. But how exactly do you do this? What if you don’t want to only pay for ads, how do you optimize your site to show up locally when the right people search for your business? Check out an excerpt from the article below:

Meet Linda, A Small Business Owner…

Linda owns a small business. She outsources a lot of the marketing to companies that do things she can’t, and she trusts that they are doing their jobs correctly. The problem is that she only has so much money in her budget for marketing, and is almost maxed out. She’s paying someone when she needs improvements to her website, an agency to manage social media marketing, a content writer to write for her site and blog - and she knows that she could get a lot of free traffic and more leads if she could only rank higher on Google. Linda has been looking into cost effective SEO services and wonders that even if she can afford them in her budget, will they be worth it? Should she add SEO (search engine optimization) services to her current marketing mix? Will they really be cost effective?