Blog | Page 4 of 13 | Dijon Marketing

Confirm Nonprofit Status on PayPal

September 3, 2022

PayPal can be an easy and low cost way to power donations on your nonprofit’s website. Their layouts contain specific options for donation buttons. You can define set donation amounts, optionally include a custom amount, and have a checkbox for recurring monthly donations. They take care of the transaction, the cybersecurity (which is the biggest deal), and connect to your bank account, all for 2.9%+$0.30 per transaction.

But wait … you can get all of those same great features but at a reduced rate of 2.2%+$0.30 if you confirm your nonprofit status with PayPal.

Steps to confirm nonprofit status

First, make sure you have an active PayPal account. It will need to be a business account set up as a Charity.
Visit https://www.paypal.com/charities
Click on “Get Started”
Log in to your nonprofit’s PayPal account
You’ll be asked to provide identifying information like your charity’s EIN number, a recent bank statement, and account holder identity.

Once you are confirmed, you’ll enjoy lower fees on every transaction allowing each donation to have an even greater impact.

Search Engines

What influences personalized Google search results?

August 8, 2022

Google search results pages are always changing. You might get different results than a coworker for the same search query. You might even see different results for yourself on two different occasions. What all goes into personalizing Google search results just for you?

Search Result Influences

Search History – This one can be especially confusing if you search specific terms related to your organization often. Google will start to remember what you clicked on the last time you searched and may artificially bubble your preferred results to the top. If you are evaluating your current performance for a set of keywords, using a different browser or an Incognito tab can help avoid this bias.
Geographic Location – This one is sometimes obvious. If you search for “pizza near me” naturally you want your results to be restricted to within a certain radius of your current position. But it isn’t always so hyper local. What country you’re in, for example, can factor heavily into the results.
Time of Day – You might rightfully expect different results for a certain search at noon versus midnight. Certain ads may have “day parsing” activated that would only show them during potentially peak search times for related keywords.
Device – This was a big push recently towards “mobile first” indexation. Doing so allowed mobile-friendly designs to rank better for mobile searches. When you’re on a smart phone with the smaller screen, having content tailor suited for legible display is an obvious advantage. With the push toward more mobile searches every day it makes sense you might see different results than when you’re on your desktop computer.

Hopefully all of these enhancements (and there are certainly many more) provide a richer, faster, and more convenient searching experience for most users. But it’s important to keep it in mind especially if you are trying to demonstrate a search ad or organic ranking performance.

Best Practices

What is Cross Browser Testing?

July 15, 2022

Cross Browser Testing is a way of making sure your website is going to look great for all of your users. Just because everything is aligned and beautiful on your development PC, doesn’t guarantee that anyone who visits your website will see the same thing. Users will be on:

Different Browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Safari
Different OS like Windows, Android or iOS
Different versions of each browser (some really old)
Different devices like PCs, laptops, tablets and mobile phones

If you neglect to test your website on any of those platforms, you run the risk of a sub-par experience for an entire subset of users. It can be a lot of extra work, especially when you find unsupported functions in a particular environment. But it is the hallmark of a well designed and robust website.

Several testing tools exist. My favorite one recently changed from a free tool to a paid subscription. So you may not get out of it for free. But you can definitely at least have a few different browsers installed on your personal PC and do some high level compatibility checks before deploying to production.

Or you could always go the lazy route and put a banner at the top that says, “This website is best experienced in Google Chrome.” (Don’t do that.)

Google Ads

AWQL is now GAQL

June 2, 2022

AWQL is now GAQL. What does that mean? Let’s start with an acronym check:

AWQL = AdWords Query Language
GAQL = Google Ads Query Language

This is a somewhat overdue rebranding of a proprietary scripting language available inside of Google Ads. Since they renamed AdWords to Google Ads in mid-2018, this has been off brand for quite some time. Regardless of the name, the embedded query language is a JavaScript-based SQL query-like language that allows for the automation of certain tasks within a Google Ads account.

To learn some ways I use this to automate Google Grants accounts check out AWQL Example: Pause One-Word Keywords and Using AdWords Query Language (AWQL) for Google Grants Compliance.

But there is just a little bit more to the upgrade than a simple renaming. The language itself has gotten an overhaul and some of the API calls and functions have been upgraded to be more user friendly and efficient. Each individual script must be migrated to the new platform – and in doing so you may find some code not working. The first thing to try is to copy and paste your code into a brand new object instead of upgrading an existing one. Almost all functionality should be backwards compatible and not require any rewrites, but if you find yourself in that situation, this Query Migration Tool from Google may be needed to update your data call requests.

Search Engines

How to remove a Google Business listing

April 11, 2022

If your business or organization has permanently ceased operation, you’ll want to remove it from Google Business. Your Google Business listing will return results in both Google Maps and Google searches. Customers may try to find your website and reach a 404. They may try to call you and get an out of service phone number. Even though you’re not looking for conversions anymore, this is still a poor user experience.

To close a business listing, you’ll have to be an administrator of the business account. Assuming that’s in place, just head over to business.google.com and choose “Info” from the menu on the left. That will lead you to a page where you’ll see these options:

The tricky part here is that you may be tempted to choose “Remove listing” hoping to immediately remove all traces that your business ever existed. That’s not what this button does. “Remove listing” will remove this business from your account so you can no longer manage it. It will not stop it from appearing in searches or remove it from public view.

The best option is “Mark as permanently closed.” This will cause it to be returned less often in searches. Certainly for generic searches like “pizza near me” or “best massage parlor” it won’t be returned because it is not a relevant result. It might still come up and show “permanently closed” for very specific branded searches.

Best Practices

Integrating Google Forms into your website

March 20, 2022

If you’ve ever tried to create your own web forms for data collection, you know that it can sometimes be a little arduous. Not only do you need to create the form, but you’ll also need an SMTP email server to relay the information from your site to your inbox. And once you’ve gotten the data, you need some way to transfer it to a database to make good use! That can be a tall order for a web newbie!

That’s where Google Forms can be a great solution to do the heavy lifting for you. Google Forms are easy to build, easy to edit, easy to integrate, and easy to collect and review data.

To start, just head to https://docs.google.com/forms/ and log in using the account that will own the form.
You can choose from some pre-built templates or start from scratch to build your own.
Use the artists palette icon at the top to set some theme items – a logo of your organization at the top and your branded colors hex codes for the background and colors.
Populate your questions. Be conscious of the fact that every piece of data you request is adding a little bit of friction to the users completing the form. Be thorough but not exhausting. If you’ve asked for data of birth, for example, there’s no need to ask for age also. Consider whether the questions should be multiple choice or multi-select and always consider adding an “Other” option.
Preview and test the form yourself a few times to be sure the sequence and wording of the questions makes sense.
Click the “Send” button at the top and choose the Embed option. Copy and paste the iframe code into your website’s HTML code.

Lastly, head to the “Responses” tab, click the three dots in the upper right and click on “Get email notifications for new responses” to be notified any time someone fills out your form.

By letting Google Forms do all the work, you can focus on using the data instead of spending too much time figuring out how to collect it.

Analytics

URL Shorteners and a free alternative

February 22, 2022

URL shorteners like Bitly are useful for a couple of reasons. The first is the most obvious. You can take a very long URL, and replace it with a much shorter one. You might need to do this in order to fit better into something like a tweet.

Another good thing about shortened URLs is that you can embed your tracking in a “wrapped” URL that might otherwise look ugly, but is hidden within the shortened URL right along with the destination URL. This can help you track which of your links or social networks are driving the most traffic to your site, and ultimately the most conversions to see which tactics are working the best.

If you swing for a custom URL shortener, then you don’t sacrifice being able to brand your shortened URLS. The downside is that those cost money. If you don’t have a branded shortener, you could also create your own shorter URLs using 301 redirects on your side. This allows you to have attractive, easy-to-remember URLs that are good for print ads or posters for people to remember later. Think something like

dijonmarketing.com/urls

that redirects the user to

https://www.dijonmarketing.com/blog/url-shorteners-and-a-free-alternative/?utm_source=dijon-marketing&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=url-shortener-blog&utm_id=url-shortners

Client Profile

Flip the Brain

February 5, 2022

I normally limit my clients to registered 501(c)(3) nonprofits. When Flip the Brain approached me to help them with SEO on their site, I had to make a small exception. This business is for profit, but they design their products to help educators, therapists, and the medical community understand brain function. They in turn can use this product to explain things better to their patients.

So what is “Flip the Brain?”

Flip the Brain produces actual 3D, tactile models of the human brain. They are all stitched into felted “pages” that are labeled and show different physical or functional sections of the brain. In addition, they have bolt-on extras that you can affix to the base brain for specific issues or topics. Things like overcoming trauma, grounding through the senses, and self regulation.

Flip the Brain – Left Brain modeled

In addition to the felted 3D brain models, they also have educational materials and host conferences. At these conferences you can meet with other professionals and share knowledge around brain function and therapeutic best practices. If you are in the field, or could use an educational brain model, check them out today: FlipTheBrain.com

Best Practices

SEO trend in 2022

January 1, 2022

Happy New Year! And welcome to the year 2022! As usual, a new year brings up question – what’s the latest trend in SEO this year? And as with most years, I balk at the use of the word “trend” as SEO isn’t trendy. It’s the long game. A set of tried and true principles that while they do change, should be more building upon the knowledge of the past, not swinging between the latest hip recommendation.

Google has a great way of summing up their foundational approach to search rankings: EAT. EAT is an acronym that stands for:

Expertise – Write about what you know. Be the expert such that people would likely want to hear what you have to say on your chose topic.
Authority – This is the traditional off-page SEO practice of building up your website reputation in the way of backlinks from other reputable sites related to your target keywords.
Trustworthiness – Any accolades you’ve received from third party organizations help with trustworthiness, although just being transparent with who the author is and what credentials they have can be a great starting point.

Looking at these three pillars of ranking credentials you can see how they needn’t change from year to year based on the latest technology or evolving ranking patterns. They remain true from year to year and any minor nuanced change to your technical implementation of your site is really aside from trying to make sure you tick these three boxes.

Sorry to disappoint, but my top SEO trend for 2022 is the same as every year prior – there are no trends. Keep creating great content people want to read and the rest are just details!