This guest post is by Chris Gregory, managing partner and director of SEO at DAGMAR Marketing in Jacksonville, Florida.

Disclaimer: Chris is one of our customers but we did not ask for this guest post, it was offered to us. It’s the first time we have published a guest post and I would like to sincerely thank Chris for taking the time to contribute it. Take it away, Chris…

Our digital marketing agency has SEO clients across the board, from family-owned local service businesses to an international tech-staffing enterprise. Although their budgets are just as diverse as their lines of business, we strongly recommend to most of our clients that they maintain a blog.

Just having a blog in place isn’t enough though — it has to be kept updated with some kind of regularity in order to be of any SEO value. For our small business clients who don’t have the budget for us to write their blog content for them, blogging is DIY. If that process is overly complicated, one of two things will happen: they’ll call on us for help, which means using billable hours that were earmarked for other activities, or their blogs will sit idle.

Giving our clients user-friendly tools that make it easier for them to keep their blogs fresh helps prevent both of the above scenarios. We’ve seen this first-hand by installing the Video User Manuals WordPress plugin on several of our clients’ blogs.

How (and why) we use the WordPress Manual Plugin.

A blog is a powerful SEO tool that lets us target lower-traffic keywords while those with higher traffic are used on the client’s main site. We may include a brief mention of such keywords on the site’s home page, but we can really maximize their performance in a blog post. That’s why blogging has become such a central part of a solid SEO plan, particularly for small business clients — without the funds for a more complex SEO strategy, they can get a great return on the dollars they do have and, with the WordPress Manual Plugin, keep it going.

Here’s a real-world example: We have a small business client whose services range from stone refinishing and tile cleaning to water damage restoration. His company doesn’t have a lot to spend on SEO, but he understands the importance of it and the value of maintaining a blog. This is the kind of client that the WordPress User Manual Plugin is perfect for.

With the plugin installed, the client was able to teach himself how to blog. And with the Yoast SEO plugin videos, he can also optimize the posts himself. We provide some occasional guidance, but the client does almost all of the work on the blog.

Best of all, he’s getting great results. His business is based in Jacksonville, which is adjacent to several other towns that his company also serves. He wrote a post that targeted one of those towns, using the keywords “marble polishing Ponte Vedra.” As I write this, that post is in the number-two slot on Google. With the Yoast SEO plugin video, our client was able to make this happen on his own.

Not only does this make blogging much easier and faster for clients, it also lets us make the most of their constrained budgets. We’re free to focus on the marketing tasks that our clients aren’t able to do for themselves and provide a much better service to those smaller clients.

We pointed our clients to Video User Manuals before the Yoast SEO plugin was available, but having Yoast instruction handy makes this especially useful for our clients. We make sure a copy of the manuals are part of the dashboard, then just refer clients to the appropriate video there. Also in the plus column is that we’re able to brand it in the dashboard, and that it’s kept updated with new content.

Something for everyone.

In addition to helping digital marketing agencies like ours make the most of clients’ budgets, I think these videos are a great way for web development shops meet some of the basic needs of their clients who are asking for SEO services.

While tools like these aren’t a replacement for an SEO consultant, it does relieve us of one of the more time-intensive SEO tasks and lets clients be hands-on without creating harmful content by trying to do too much with keywords. Since no one’s better at writing about their businesses than they are, clients get to do what they do best, and so do we.

Chris Gregory founded DAGMAR Marketing in 2011. The agency works with business owners to help them take advantage of all of their digital marketing opportunities. The DAGMAR team also partners with web developers and designers to provide their clients experts SEO, SEM and inbound marketing services.

Please leave us your feedback and comments below. How do you use plugins to help your clients? Not just ours – but any plugins?

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Flattery will get you… nowhere.

This German company have blatantly ripped off our homepage video and ripped off the design of our good friend Shawn Hesketh at wp101.com until he sent them a DMCA take down notice and they changed their theme.

I have already issued DMCA notices with Vimeo (who have acted) and WPEngine (who we love – but haven’t acted as yet – they have asked me to follow the UK/EU take down process as the site is on their EU servers – more bloody hoops to jump through) and I have asked the owner of the site to remove the video as well as the screenshot of our plugin form this page:

http://lernpress.de

Seriously, ripping other people’s IP off is stupid, lazy and foolish. And at the end of the day it makes you look inferior. Start adding value or go play elsewhere.

By the way, we are the original and best white-label solution to training your clients how to use WordPress in English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian and we include videos for WooCommerce and WP SEO by Yoast.

Shawn Hesketh at WP101 also has a good offering and is a good guy.

The post Flattery or Theft? appeared first on Video User Manuals.

About George Gill (https://www.udemy.com/google-analytics-mastery/)

The founder of GILL Media, and GILL Solutions Management Group of Companies, George over the last 20 years has developed multiple companies into successful businesses always focusing on the utilisation of technology, the best people and marketing to spearhead growth.

George’s greatest passion is understanding businesses, challenges and the needs required to be successful. Through this passion over the last two decades with his hands on approach, application of technology and love for helping people succeed, George has applied what he has learned into helping thousands grow and develop their own successful businesses.

The post George Gill Interview appeared first on Video User Manuals.

I’m very excited to share with you a new feature in the Video User Manuals plugin that will be released in version 2.2.2 which by the time you are watching this video, will be out and ready for you to download and start using.  There are some bug fixes in this version, but more importantly there is a very cool new feature that you have all been asking for.

So the situation is a client calls you up or emails you and says “hey I have forgotten how to do that paste from word thing” or “forgotten how to upload an image”.  So you say “What you need to do is go to the manual, and then scroll down and watch the video in the fourth row, second one from the left.”  Well, wouldn’t it be a lot easier if you could just give the client a link to that video? That is what we have built for you.

So, there are two ways that you can do this; if you are logged in to your client’s website, you can simply right click on the video and copy the link address and then email it to your client and when they paste it in, as long as they are logged in to their WordPress dashboard, the plugin will automatically take them to the video and put a nice yellow glow around it.  So you say, “here’s a link, click on this and we’ll highlight the video you need to watch to solve that problem.” Pretty cool huh? Great!  Okay but what if you are not logged in to your client’s website? Well as long as you know your client’s domain, you can use our little easy link tool.

Just go to www.videousermanuals.com/link, and type in the client’s domain, you select the video that you want them to watch “paste from word” and this is a list of all the videos available in the plugin, including WooCommerce and SEO by Yoast, you just choose the video and then click on the link that says “create me the link so I can get back to work” and then you just grab that link, copy that to the clipboard, send it to your client and again, as long as they are logged in to the dashboard, the plugin will load up and will take them to the right video and put a nice yellow glow around it, pretty cool huh?

Okay, one final little thing is if whatever reason WordPress isn’t installed in the root directory, let’s say it is installed in “blog” for example.  There is an option to tick advance and include the full path to the video page.  So, the video page is just the domain and then wp-admin/admin.php?page=video-user-manuals/plugin.php

So this might be good if you’re using multi-site or there is some quirk that means WordPress isn’t installed where it should be, you can use the advanced option.

Of course, if it’s installed in a subfolder or subdomain, you can simply type in the subfolder there, and choose the video and then generate the link.

So we hope you find that really useful and we hope it saves you time when clients are asking you which video to watch if you are logged in, you can just right click on the video, copy the link address and paste it to them.  If you’re not logged in, you can just type your client’s domain name into the link tool, choose the video and click on the blue button, copy the link to the clipboard and send it to your clients.

Awesome, enjoy using version 2.2.2!

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We are going to use the In-Page Analytics which can be found in the content section of Google Analytics:

You will then see your homepage with lots of bubbles showing you the clicks each of the links have recieved.

Beautiful – Yes, Useful – Not really.

As you can see from this screenshot, the data can be a bit confusing. How is it possible my search button, home link, and logo all got 75% of the clicks on the page.

Click to enlarge

Well the answer is quite simple, what you are seeing is clicks by URL, not actual clicks on the page. In our eBook, we focus on finding actionable data, and unfortuntatly this is not really actionable data. However, there is a simple solution.

Enhanced Link Attribution

Now you can actually see where people are clicking on your web page. This is what the same page looks like after Enhanced Link Attribution was turned on (this for the day after):

Click to enlarge

Now it starts to get interesting, and I can see from this that I get a large number of people going straight to the search button. I set this up recently for a client, and he was shocked to find the most popular link on his homepage was near the bottom of the page, and was his Features List. The homepage was clearly not giving them all the answers to their questions, so we started to think about a homepage redesign.

Setting up Enhanced Link Attribution with Google Analyticator

In Google Analytics click on Admin and then Property Settings:

Scroll down to In-Page Analytics and check the box to use Enhanced Link Attribution.  My own personal preference is to use it in full view mode. I find it a bit less cramped.

Google Analytics will then send you here page and will ask you to copy this line:

var pluginUrl =
‘//www.google-analytics.com/plugins/ga/inpage_linkid.js’;
_gaq.push(['_require', 'inpage_linkid', pluginUrl]);

Now all you need to do is open up Google Analyticator and scroll down to the section called Additional Tracking Code and paste this line into the before tracker initalization box:

Hit save in Google Analyitcator and you are done. It’s as simple as that. Come back in a couple of days time, and see how your customers are really using your website.

By default it opens on the homepage, but to visit other pages, just click through on the website, and the data will then load in for that page.

Troubleshooting:
Make sure your Default URL in your Property Settings in Google Analytics is correct. If your website redirects from http://www. to http:// this will cause problems. Checkout the Google troubleshooting page for more details.

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