An article was posted today on the ABC News website out of ABC Southern Queensland by David Chen and Ellie Grounds with the headline…

Toowoomba restauranteur urges consumers to ditch “food delivery services” and support struggling restaurants and businesses…

The article points out that some businesses in southern Queensland have reported losses as high as 90% due to the recent lockdown. 

Consequently, restaurants are urging locals to order meals locally, directly from local restaurants, as opposed to using food delivery platforms that take a “huge percentage” from the restaurant owner.

Daniel Farquhar, a Toowoomba restauranteur has said that while the region avoided the lockdown itself, local businesses have been brought to their knees due to the Queensland government placing restrictions on Brisbane resident’s movements and travel.

Daniel has been making a point of going around and chatting to other businesses and restaurants in the local area to find out how they fared during and now after the recent Brisbane lockdown.

He described the business owners demeanour as “very emotional” with some “barely hanging on”. “You can see it in their eyes,” he said.

He then went on to say:

“Some of them were down 30% some of them were down a lot more. There’s one who’s down 80 or 90%.” And that “businesses were relying on locals to keep them afloat”.

The main message from Daniel the restauranteur is:

The best thing locals can do is to support their local restaurants and cafes and avoid the big delivery service apps.

He is also suggesting locals return to face to face trade, which is fine while there’s no lockdown but as we’re all learning there are definitely no guarantees of that in the foreseeable future.

Daniel’s call to action for lovers of restaurant and cafe food…

Daniel’s specific call-to-action to locals in the ABC article was:

“Do not use the meal delivery services because they take such a huge percentage of that fee that you pay.”

The challenge…

The problem and challenge for restaurants and cafes are that consumers are getting hooked in by the food delivery platforms as they roll out huge advertising campaigns Nationwide, and especially during lockdowns.

Meanwhile, the Toowoomba Chamber of Commerce has said that the lockdown has hit the tourism and hospitality sectors the hardest.

Todd Ruhl, chief executive of the Toowoomba Chamber of Commerce is quoted as saying “…there’s been an enormous impact… there was a 50% loss in some areas last week.”

Although the government has offered a 70 million dollar support package to affected businesses which include payroll tax referrals, the waiving of liquor licensing fees and covid-19 cleaning rebates, some believe that these types of measures are ultimately unsustainable and will only increase government rather than increase small businesses cafe’s and restaurant’s bottom lines.

A real solution…

Here at SEO Noosa, we believe we have a real solution.

The call to action is twofold. One to restaurants, cafes and business owners, and one to consumers which I’ll outline at the end of this post.

A way for restaurants, cafes and small business owners to flourish, independent of government handouts and the big food delivery platforms…

…freeing them (i.e. restaurant, cafe owners) from the need for, or addiction to government handouts which more often only invite more government requirements, meddling and paperwork…

…into a scenario whereby business owners are able to tap into and call directly on their own local customer base (through SEO) to procure their own takeaway orders, directly.

What this does is completely eliminate the hefty charges imposed on restaurants and cafes by the big food delivery platforms.

It also helps make cafes and restaurants to be profitable in the current climate of lockdowns, as opposed to having a need to lean on government assistance just to merely exist. 

A win for lovers of restaurant food in lockdown…

In the above scenario, restaurant food lovers get to enjoy a simple online ordering system (that the restaurant or cafe own, not the big food delivery platforms).

In doing so they’re 100% supporting the restaurant or cafe owner as they order their takeaway directly from that restaurant or cafe.

This is as opposed to burdening the restaurant owner with the hefty and relentless fees the big food delivery platforms constantly extract from their revenue.  

Now for our calls to action.

To restaurant and cafe owners…

Please take a look at our Takeaway Dominator© solution for restaurants and cafes who are wanting to avoid the struggles of using the big food delivery platforms.

To lovers of restaurant food who are being restricted to takeaway…

Before you subconsciously follow the perfectly timed ad campaigns urging you to open that app…

…why not search “best seafood (example) takeaway (location)” and hit the restaurant owners website directly to order your takeaway, that’s if they have their own online ordering system set up.

And if they don’t, and you know you and many others love their food, why not direct them to this post or to Takeaway Dominator©.

The post South Queensland beats the Eats combining people power and SEO appeared first on SEO Noosa.

Comstock claims to know exactly why people are driven to spread rumours of this sort: “This has been happening for years because someone always wants to drive traffic to a blog post or an article by claiming something similar.”

He continues: “It’s funny because, six years later, SEOs are still optimising website content for search engines and there seems to be no shortage of people who want our help.”

Read the full article…

You guessed it…

You guessed it. 2021, and still no shortage of people wanting to get more traffic from search.

The post An interesting SEO article from Clickthrough-Marketing… appeared first on SEO Noosa.

SEO industry insiders have been trying to understand the relationship between social sharing and SEO for some time now.

In early 2011, Rand Fishkin, CEO and co-founder of SEOmoz, tested the relationship between Twitter and Facebook shares and search results in Google.

He found a positive correlation between the number of retweets and shares a link received and its search ranking.

He found that the more the link was passed around on Twitter and Facebook, the higher the search rank of the page.

Read the full article from 2012…

Google’s Social Search Impacts SEO in 2021…

Here’s the thing…

1. Content gets seen more because it’s being shared.
2. Content that is seen more has a higher chance of being linked to from other websites.
3. Those backlinks help your rankings.
4. Improved rankings also lead to increased social media activity.

So…

It’s the results of social media activity that matters… not the activity itself. | Source – Like Mind Media

Bottom line:

Keep sharing your best content on social media like it’s 2012.

The post How Google’s Social Search Impacts SEO appeared first on SEO Noosa.

Marketing and Advertising on the web are becoming more and more Social.

Each week we are getting further away from the old empty, hype-based advertising and marketing, and moving more toward social PROOF (truth).

More and more, we and the markets we target are making their buying decisions with consideration given to what our friends are saying or have said about a brand or product (online).

Of course, before the days of Facebook, word of mouth marketing was always the most powerful kind of marketing – all Facebook is doing is progressively weaving word of mouth marketing into their whole platform.

Here is the article that prompted this Post…

Facebook’s New, Entirely Social Ads Will Recreate Marketing by E.B. Boyd

Today Leaked documents show Facebook making a radical departure from traditional online display advertising into a world where ads are conversations and brands automatically tell you which of your friends are already on their side.

Facebook appears ready to launch a new set of premium ad units, and, based on a review of documents that purport to describe them, the social network would seem to be doubling down on two core principles that mark fundamental departures from traditional advertising.

First, Facebook is making the new ads social by default, meaning they will automatically show users when their friends have already Liked the advertiser.

And the new formats will draw their content exclusively from posts to brands’ Facebook Pages, rather from advertising copy written independently.

Combined, these features make two statements about where Facebook believes the future of online advertising lies–at least in its particular universe.

It is saying that ads based on content, rather than messaging, have a better chance of hitting home, and that ads involving tacit endorsements from the people you know have a better chance of capturing your attention.

“When people hear about you from friends, they listen,” the Facebook materials say. “We’ll expand your ad with stories from friends who have already connected.”

(“Stories” is Facebook’s shorthand for a wide variety of interactions on the site. In the case of ads, it seems to refer to the fact that the ads will display which of a viewer’s friends have Liked the brand.)

Facebook has not commented publicly on the new ads (presumably they will discuss them at a marketing launch event in New York next week).

But the materials describing the new units were posted to Scribd earlier this week. The news was first reported on GigaOm. The documents are below.

In the documents, Facebook says it is scrapping most of the display ad units it has offered until now, replacing them with the new formats.

The previous ad units incorporated some of the social and interactive elements, but the new ones are implementing those features in a more comprehensive way.

Read the full article here…

How far we’ve come…

Advertising is so much more sophisticated today – because of what was initiated back in 2012.

Yes, targeting audiences is so much easier – but creating a successful and profitable campaign, well, that’s still just as tricky. If not even trickier.

The post Facebook Social Ads Leaked Document appeared first on SEO Noosa.

The following SEO trends to watch out for were published by SEM Rush in December 2020. It’s July 2021, and they hold true:

1. Artificial Intelligence Will Play a Larger Role in SEO
2. Voice Search Will Impact Search Queries
3. Mobile-Friendliness Will Impact Search Rankings
4. Content That Fulfills the Google EAT Principle Will Rank Higher
5. Long-Form Content Will Help Improve SERPs
6. Featured Snippets Will Become More Prominent
7. Predictive Search Is Set to Improve
8. An Effective SEO Strategy Will Need to Include Video
9. Image Optimization Will Play a Larger Role in Search
10. There Will Be More Importance Placed on Semantically Related Keywords
11. Local Search Listings Will Play a Larger Role in SEO Strategies
12. Data and Analytics Should Become Your Priority If You Want to Remain Ahead in Rankings

by SEM Rush (affiliate link). Full post here.

This from 2012…

The excerpt I’ve included in this post is the third of four predicted SEO trends listed in the article highlighting the importance of social in search from here on in – something we too agree is important here at SEO Noosa.

Of course, the ‘underground’ Internet marketing gurus have been preaching on this for over 12 months now. It’s interesting to see the mainstream, corporate take on it all though…

It’s all about social…

No discussion of social in 2012 will be complete without Google+. You need a strategy there. Google is forcing that need upon you! And while it appears the Google+ dial has been turned down slightly in SERPs over the last few weeks, there’s no reason to think it’s going away.

There’s a troubling subcurrent to this whole polemic. When Google announced that search queries for logged-in users would not be passed to analytics (but would be passed to AdWords advertisers), it assured the web community that only a small percentage of queries would be affected.

However, as Google+ adoption increases, and more users with accounts perform searches while logged in, that number will continue to rise. Could there be a time when 50 percent or more of search queries are “not provided”? Absolutely.

While changes like this absolutely make SEO more difficult, they also push the door ever slightly wider to new competitors. Look for Bing to continue to creep upwards in market share, although it won’t be through the partnership with Yahoo.

If anything, all that partnership has done is marginalize Yahoo search. Bing will have to grab market share on the merits of its search experience, and even more importantly, through marketing.

Since you can’t fight the importance of Google+ to SEO, you might as well embrace it. The good news is there are already cool things you can do to integrate Google+ with your search campaigns, such as implementing “social extensions” to connect your AdWords accounts with a Google+ brand page.

SEOs without a Google+ strategy will be left behind. Get after it.

This excerpt from: http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2152206/enterprise-seo-trends-watch-2012

The post SEO Trends You Should Know About appeared first on SEO Noosa.

It’s sad but when SEO is explained properly, people’s eyes generally begin glazing over like a pair of Krispy Kremes…

But SEO is just too important to businesses for us to give up trying to explain.

Here is the SEO Noosa explanation of SEO…

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is about your business slowly collecting prominent listings in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS), organically (so not Paid/Sponsored Links/Positions) for specific keywords (that’s words/phrases your potential customers type into Google) that we-together per-determine to be of commercial value to your business.

The amount of business owners that are still relying on a website that’s about as effective as a business card that’s been sitting in their wallet for six months is staggering.

Online business card websites don’t work anymore. In fact, they never really did. And the amount of money that is being ‘left on the table’ by local businesses due to them not having their website designed properly or search engine optimised is still staggering.

Because…

‘Search Engine Real Estate’ is still the cheapest real estate in the world…

If you have an existing business, a sales process that’s working you want to grow steadily (at a ‘sensible’ pace) SEO is the answer.

Get involved…

The post What is SEO? appeared first on SEO Noosa.

Here they are:

1. Choose if your Site is “Long Tail” or “Head”

2. Organize Your Content Using Bread Crumb Navigation

3. Optimize Your Page Titles

4. Build Original Content

5. Get Inbound Links

You can dig into the details at the article source

Excerpt:

I recently asked a few start-ups why they avoid thinking about SEO.

The most common reason I heard was some variant on the theme “SEO seems like this big huge thing that requires a lot of knowledge.”

There’s a perception out there that SEO is complex—and so many companies choose to ignore it.

But while this perception is somewhat deserved, the building blocks of search engine optimization are actually pretty straightforward.

Plus, if you ignore SEO, you’re essentially turning your back on the largest source of free customers on the web – Google.

View the entire article…

The post 3 Things To Know About SEO appeared first on SEO Noosa.