Lee Procida @ Mountwell Marketing

There is one thing no one can deny that SEOs have been incredibly successful at: convincing non-marketers that EVERYTHING revolves around SEO. 😅

Best time to post on social media: Q1 2025 update The overall best time to post on social media in 2025 is 12 PM on Fridays. Dig in for recommendations for specific networks and industries.

Can anyone explain why this is still a thing when social platforms don't even display content chronologically? These articles always gloss over why the time at which you post would even matter.

blog.hootsuite.com/best-time-to...

AI phone calls are coming for small businesses. Here’s what to know and how to prepare. > Mountwell Marketing Testing Google’s new “Ask for me” feature, and how small businesses can prepare themselves for more AI agent interactions in the future.

I just got access to Google's new "Ask for me" feature and gave it a whirl. Here was my experience, and my perspective on what it means for small businesses.

www.mountwell.marketing/well-said/ai...

After a brief reprieve, I’ve received 5 calls today from spammers claiming I need to verify my Google Business Profile, all from different local-looking numbers.

Google updated this faster than it takes many small business owners to claim and update their own Google Business Profile. 🙃

Wow, just found an internet time capsule. Website I'm working on had blocks of invisible text stuffed with hundreds of keywords. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Haha that would be awesome thanks!

One red flag I'd add to your list is the phrase "Google likes or doesn't like XYZ," stated as a matter of fact without further explanation. It comes across like they have some sort of insider knowledge, when really they're just spouting hearsay and don't really understand the underlying systems.

YES. YES. YES. Completely agree, except in my experience a lot of this obfuscation is less due to strategy and more incompetence - agencies just repeating things they read in shallow blog posts that they don't truly understand, but they know clients will pay for it because it sounds technical.

Why is no one talking about Canva's Dream Lab AI image maker? I consistently find it creates exactly what I'm imagining on the first try, while Midjourney, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and others often do all kinds of things I didn't ask for. Just deleted my Midjourney subscription.

Oh man, I wish that was true. One of my clients was working with an SEO agency until recently that was creating reams of this keyword-stuffed, mostly duplicative content on product category listing pages, not to mention adding completely unnecessary H2s that duplicated the keywords from the H1s.

Like, sure, cool photos, but why in the world is this half my feed?!?

I really want to believe in Bluesky, but the Discover feed algo is the worst I've seen in any social media app. I pretty much only follow marketers and sports journalists, but my feed is currently a strange mix of political crap I specifically came here to avoid and ... lots of mushroom photos?

Content that's unreadable is one thing, but what annoys me the most is content that no one's even INTENDED to read, e.g. paragraphs of keyword-dense text at bottom of an ecommerce product listing page. The average user probably never even notices it, but some SEO said it was critical to rank better.

People have been saying "the cobbler's kids have no shoes" since ... there were cobblers 🤷‍♂️😁

A wise Founding Father once said, "When Britain taxed our tea we got frisky. Imagine what gon happen when you try to tax our whiskey."

Google’s ‘Ask for Me’ uses AI to call local businesses for you Will you let AI book your next oil change?

Very interesting test Google's rolling out here small business owners should definitely be aware of. Suspect many will hang up immediately if not aware of this new service, thinking these calls are spam. Auto repair is a curious vertical to choose as a pilot, too.

www.theverge.com/news/603501/...

Feeling pretty normal today as someone who mainly watched TikToks when they got recycled on Instagram like a good Millennial

Have a couple profiles Google wouldn’t verify, so I started updating them with my unconnected personal account (changing website URL, adding photos, etc.), and it’s crazy how those updates take effect so much faster and easier. Clearly a backward system.

TikTok employees pitched a brand and PR campaign in 2023 to prevent a ban, but leadership didn’t approve it. (From @sapna.bsky.social et al. in @nytimes.com)

One thing I hope AI search tools encourage is more transparent pricing from SaaS tools. I have no idea if this pricing is correct from Perplexity (probably not 100%) but as more people use AI for comparisons you would think providers would realize they can't hide behind "Contact Sales" buttons.

Interesting that a monopoly is attempting to crowd-source advocacy

I would honestly be a little pissed if I invested a ton of time and energy into SEO over the past decade, only for SEOs to suddenly turn around and start saying that brand-building is the key to ranking higher in search results. 🙃

Can we all learn from this and agree marketing should be holistic?

New policy: only conduct SEO that makes sense for humans.

So much SEO that’s done purely because “Google likes it” winds up being bullshit.

Hacks may or may not accomplish anything. Improving a site for users will definitely accomplish something, which is likely to be rewarded by machines.

Wow, we’re really just gonna seriously cover every nonsense thing that gets said for another four years, huh? No change in editorial strategy from the first go-round?

2024 reading list:
- Elon Musk
- 1776
- Creativity Inc.
- Lost & Founder
- The Lean Startup
- 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
- Hidden Potential
- The Customer-Base Audit
- Slow Productivity
- When We Cease to Understand the World
- Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
- George Washington: A Life

I’m running a Dry January Special Promotion! I’m not drinking this month so think about how much more productive I’ll be for your business!!!

a man in a hooded jacket is standing in front of a group of people . ALT: a man in a hooded jacket is standing in front of a group of people .

“Your soul is an appalling dump heap overflowing with the most disgraceful assortment of deplorable rubbish imaginable, mangled up in tangled up knots,” remains the hardest line of all time.

You really gotta love it when Google support says "Please give us 8-10 minutes to investigate," or "We'll need to look into this for 3-5 hours," but if you need to double-check what they're saying for 3 minutes they close the chat and ticket.

Yup, rings true to me. I mainly use Google reviews to filter. If picking a restaurant, I find the highest rated ones, then look at their menu. Differs by platform, too. On Amazon, if I'm comparison shopping, I read several reviews, because they're also more specific than reviews of a whole business.