MONOLOGUES

This week Google announced and rolled out version 5 of their PageSpeed tool. You can read the official post from Google, but the major change to note is that Google now uses its Lighthouse tool to measure and score website performance.

From Chicago to Dubrovnik to Thailand to San Francisco and everywhere in between, the fall 2018 has been a busy conference season for the Mono team. Now back at the daily grind, we’re feeling inspired, and want to share some of our key takeaways and highlights.

Recently at the Yext ONWARD18 conference our CTO, David Højelsen, and Yext’s Design Director, Erin Pfiffner, guided attendees through 10 lessons that they’ve learned from working with enterprise and small business websites.

The market for cloud-based marketing software is growing, and the service delivery model around SMB software is evolving. In cooperation with the Local Search Association (LSA) and the Tech Adoption Index (TAI), we’ve commissioned the custom research to create the report, “Meet The New Small Business SaaS Customer.” 

This week, I had the pleasure of attending the SIINDA Local Search Summit in beautiful Dubrovnik with the Mono team. All good weather aside, the conference was packed with great content and takeaways.

The Local Search Association (LSA) recently released a report: Scoring The Digital Marketing Stack, in cooperation with Boostability, focused on defining the value of different elements of the digital stack for SMBs. After surveying more than 100 digital service providers, the results showed clearly which services and technologies are the stickiest and which give the best margins.

The holiday season is fast approaching and whether you’re Amazon or a local florist - it’s time to start planning online holiday campaigns. How do you plan on helping your small business clients find their customers, or perhaps more importantly, how do you plan on ensuring potential customers find them?

From smartphones to tablets, mobile devices are increasingly dominating the time consumers spend consuming digital media. And it’s really no surprise – we all know it was already in 2015 that mobile search surpassed desktop searches. 

Websites are key to building a strong digital foundation for small businesses, still they struggle to understand the value of an online presence. According to a recent study by Visa, more than 50% of SMBs still aren’t online, but with digital presence playing a more important role than ever, SMB service providers must refine their sales tactics to position themselves as the SMBs’ trusted digital advisor.

Last month, the Local Search Association featured an article that highlighted that 74% of digital media time is now spent on mobile. An even more telling statistic from the recent presentation by Comscore and PlaceIQ is that 59% of that time was spent in mobile apps. 

Voice search is one of the latest and greatest tech trends to take consumers by storm. In fact, comScore predicts half of all searches will be voice searches by 2020. But what does it mean for SMBs and the digital service providers who serve them? What investments do SMBs need to make? And how difficult and time consuming is it?

Voice-driven interaction with businesses is on the rise, and for many consumers, it will replace traditional search in many scenarios. Consumers are increasingly using voice search to interact with businesses and a recent study by BrightLocal (2018) showed that 82% of surveyed consumers were willing to use voice search locally. 

What web design strategy do you prefer; a content-driven or a design-driven approach? These design silos are often opposites you have to choose from when deciding on your business strategy, but what if you could have both? Small Business (SMB) service providers need design solutions that make it fast, easy and affordable to build websites at great scale, while keeping the SMB’s website content at heart.

Last week, Mono hosted a webinar with CEO and Founder of Local SEO Guide, Andrew Shotland. The webinar focused on how search engine optimization (SEO) has been changing in the past couple of years, and Shotland also outlined his best practices for digital service providers on ensuring that small business customers’ websites are appearing in local search results. We’ve put together a quick recap:

There is no alternative to a small business (SMB) website, though some marketers may argue this is the case. While Google My Business and Facebook are critical to any digital presence, new tech, features and capabilities are allowing for more dynamic, customer-focused websites, central to the marketing stack.

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect on May 25, 2018. And while we’ve already seen that big companies, like Google and Facebook, are under fire from data privacy advocacy groups - many small businesses are still struggling to understand how to ensure compliance.

As the digital landscape of SMBs continues to build complexity and consumer behavior drives more change to traditional engagement, it's important to evaluate the importance and role of the company website.  Mono commissioned a report by the Local Search Association (LSA) to understand the future of SMB websites, and how websites can function as local data hubs for small businesses.

Powered by machine learning and big data, the rise of mobile- and voice search is not only changing the way consumers search, but also impacting the technology that ensures websites are optimized for these new types of online search.

With the recent launch of iOS 11.3, we think it’s a great opportunity to discuss Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) which will be supported as part of the New Mono Experience we are bringing to our partners this year.

Earlier this month, the world celebrated International Women’s Day - a day dedicated to celebrating the achievements of women. At Mono Solutions, we’re all about empowering small businesses to work on their passion and last week our CEO and Co-Founder - Louise Lachmann, had the honor of hosting a group of highly-talented, young women from the Superheroes program in Estonia.

Originally posted on LSA Insider: Digital marketing is most often based on data-driven decisions. From online behavior (clicks, dwell time, etc.) to complex search algorithms, marketers view almost every online interaction as a piece or source of data. 

Originally posted on LSA Insider: Last year a survey from Capital One found that 61% of SMBs were utilizing social media for their business while only 56% had a company website.

Using personalization to drive customer engagement is a top priority for many businesses, and according to an eMarketer report, 56% of marketers believe personalized content drives higher engagement.

Last week, the Mono Team joined the SIINDA Media Tech Conference in Valencia. In this blog post, we've gathered some valuable takeaways for our industry.

SMBs are faced with an overwhelming number of choices when it comes to marketing their business in the online world and according to a recent article by Search Engine Land only 56% of SMBs surveyed had a proprietary website. 

At Mono, we believe in the hard work and passion of small businesses. That is why our business is dedicated to helping them succeed in the modern digital landscape.

Last week we attended the Street Fight Summit in New York City, and it was a hot one. 

This year, Mono Solutions celebrates ten years in business. It has been an amazing journey fueled by the vision of helping small businesses get a professional and affordable online presence.

In this post, Mono Solutions has invited the CEO & Founder of Local SEO Guide - Andrew Shotland, to discuss how "near me" search is affecting the Google rankings of small businesses and highlight what you can do to help your SMB customers succeed in optimizing their online presence for "near me" searches.

Let’s address something that is always on everyone's mind - what will the future bring for SMBs? 

How do small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) connect with their customers? How do they best manage their time?

Demands for website design and responsiveness are greater than ever. SMB service providers who have been producing websites at scale for a long time, will often experience that they cannot keep pace with design and technology trends due to the limitations of their old platform.