Common sense is a useful asset, and as it turns out, it’s a fairly reliable guide when it comes to navigating the big world of online local business reputation. However, for the very first time, thanks to the recent report, The Impact of Local Business Reviews on Consumer Behavior, I was able to test my intuition against original, hard data revealing the habits of real review readers, review writers, and successful owner responses. I highly recommend reading the full survey analysis, but today, I want to distill that mass of data down into three simple descriptions that emerged through the […]

If the subject line of an email is the attention getter, then the signature is the lasting impression you make on the reader.  Email signature fonts play an important role in shaping your tone as a professional and showcasing your personality. With so many other components in an email, both in terms of content and design, it can be easy to overlook the sendoff. Fonts matter. As you take a look at this blog post on your screen, are you thinking about the font used? If this blog post were written in Papyrus, that might make for a distracting read. […]

These days, Google algorithm updates seem to come in two main flavors. There’s very specific updates — like the Page Experience Update or Mobile-Friendly Update — which tend to be announced well in advance, provide very specific information on how the ranking factor will work, and finally arrive as a slight anti-climax. I’ve spoken before about the dynamic with these updates. They are obviously intended to manipulate the industry, and I think there is also a degree to which they are a bluff. This post is not about those updates, though, it is about the other flavor. The other flavor […]