Alyson Harrold

Alyson is Co-CEO and Chief Storyteller. Prior to forming the agency, her career spanned media (NBC-TV affiliates and city magazine, international ad agency) and positions like C-Suite financial services marketer and digital marketing consultant. Alyson learned how the right medium with the right message can attract the right audience. With her team, Alyson helps brands have meaningful customer interactions. Now she teaches those lessons—among others—as a UC Berkeley Extension instructor in her SEO and Digital Marketing courses since 2014. Alyson shares her knowledge as a speaker at preeminent digital marketing conferences around the country like Digital Growth Unleashed and more.

Do You Want an Online Marketing Agency? Or is it Time to Bring Marketing in House?

February 15, 2019 // by Alyson Harrold// Leave a Comment

In the August 2018 CMO Survey by Deloitte, the biggest weakness is the ability to measure the success of digital marketing activities and working with external partners. Yet another study, this one from Bannerflow, shows that 91% of brands are bringing their digital marketing in-house. Hmmm… there seems to be a gap in what CMOs need (measurement) and what they have (lack of internal talent with analytics acumen). Let’s explore when it makes sense to outsource your digital marketing and when it’s time to bring select capability in-house.

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How To Create a Content Calendar

January 9, 2019 // by Alyson Harrold// Leave a Comment

Do you need a content calendar? In short, yes. We think so. If you want to blog, even semi-regularly, you should have some sort of plan to ensure that your content keeps on track, you keep your sanity and that your writing fits with what the rest of the business is doing. So how do you build a content calendar?

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How To Improve Your Blog (Without Better Writing)

January 4, 2019 // by Alyson Harrold// 1 Comment

Getting more out of your blog can be a difficult ask. Often blogging regularly is enough of a strain on resources that you don’t have time to take a step back and look at how your blog is doing, and if it is really engaging your readers. Well, here are some simple tips on how to get more from your blog without discussing the content itself.

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Are There Website Design Best Practices?

January 3, 2019 // by Alyson Harrold// Leave a Comment

In the world of content marketing ‘best practices’ are king. We’re as guilty of it as anyone. 7 Top Tips, 13 Best Kept Secrets. And on and on. There are lots of ways to write a best practices article because there’s an almost limitless list of best practices for anything, nothing more than website design. But are they really best practices?

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Homepage Not Ranking – Could it be Over-Optimizied?

November 22, 2018 // by Alyson Harrold// Leave a Comment

As if you needed another thing to worry about when it came to SEO… But, in a recent Google Webmaster’s Hangout, Google’s John Mueller mentioned an aspect of search engine optimization that can often be forgotten, over-optimization.

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Comments on the SERP

November 20, 2018 // by Alyson Harrold// Leave a Comment

Google’s Tweaks The search engine results page is constantly evolving and improving, with Google often AB testing new features and tools. For example, recently we’ve seen changes to meta descriptions and title tags stretch and then shrink back to normal size. The latest addition to Google’s SERP seem to be reviews for listings. The Naughty …

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Google’s 5 Pillars of Success

November 1, 2018 // by Alyson Harrold// Leave a Comment

The Fifth Column Building consistent content is tough. Sometimes it’s good to get a refresher on what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, so when we saw that Google has outlined the 5 pillars of success needed to make a good app we were interested. But how can these pillars be applied to making …

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