I had the absolute pleasure this morning to present to the Greater New York Chamber of Commerce about all things search, including SEO, Google Ads, GMB, and more. We had a nice group of around 50 pack into the networking room on 44th street in midtown Manhattan to walk through the important aspects of search. With representatives of a wide variety of businesses, we were able to roll up our sleeves and dig into specific issues members have had and get a better understanding of what the Google algorithm is trying to do, what it rewards, and what it tends to punish.

Below are some highlights of the discussion this morning with the chamber:

  • NY Chamber of Commerce LogoThorough content and meta-tags to aim your content at the right search concepts.
  • Feeding Google as much information as possible in your Google My Business (GMB) page, including videos, images, Q&A, descriptions, and more.
  • Making sure your site pages load quickly
  • Converting relationships into links that will improve your ranking strength
  • Creating pages for all of the concepts you want to rank for (Provide the best answer for the search query and be specific)
  • Tagging pictures at a local farm to table restaurant
  • Speeding up a video site to improve SEO
  • Discussing breaking up long content pages into separate, individual pages by topic
  • Keyword match types when working with Google Ads. (Avoid wasting money on broad matches)
  • Asking for detailed reviews and baking that into your business process.
  • Is it OK to open your ads to Google search partners?
  • How do you claim your Google My Business page?
  • How hard it is to rank in the real estate market?
  • What is a good or bad bounce rate?

We dove into all of this info and more and had some great discussions during and after the talk. I had a great time meeting so many interesting people and look forward to doing a follow-up talk later in the year where we can dive into more detail on one of the topics we discussed at a higher level today. If you would like me to come talk to your business group, please give me a call.  I look forward to meeting and working with more members the rest of 2019.